Employers are increasingly using technology to monitor the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers
NEW YORK — College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.
Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic. A vast array of digital tools still are being used to track locations, collect data on task completion rates, and access work-issued smartphone and laptop cameras, raising concerns about how much privacy employees have relinquished, even in their own homes.
Employers have always monitored workers, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science enable them to create extensive data sets or “dossiers” that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior, said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions.
“Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,” Negrón said.
Some of the most common workplace monitoring programs have shared names, email addresses and other personal worker data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice, according to an investigation by Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University and the University of California at Berkeley.
Data privacy experts and workers who say they've been closely monitored spoke with The Associated Press about what they see as the risks of employer surveillance and the steps employees can take to protect their personal information.
Pharmacist Lannie Duong's job at a medical clinic involved meeting with patients who had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. She reviewed their medical histories, blood work and symptoms, and adjusted their medications. She frequently enlisted interpreters to help her communicate with patients who had limited English language skills.
Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments, and in performance evaluations questioned why she took so long with each patient.
“Everything was counted. How many minutes you’re on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,” Duong said. “We’re just tasked to do what feels like the impossible.”
Under what she described as unrelenting pressure, Duong felt “not trusted, not appreciated, almost completely hopeless. It was so depressing.” She eventually went on medical leave and began volunteering with other pharmacists to organize a union.
“I spoke up, hoping others would voice their concerns as well, but that didn’t really pan out,” Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after the medical leave.
Many of the employers using surveillance tools do so transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how the tools are used, Negrón said. But there are also employers tracking, ranking and scoring employees in ways that are not transparent to workers, she said.
“Workers are going to have to come together because the forces of centralizing this kind of tracking and monitoring are moving too fast,” Negrón said.
As awareness about surveillance tools grows, some workers are pushing back on tools that track how long it takes to fulfill tasks, saying such monitoring contributes to injuries, and questioning what personal information is being collected and how it’s being used, said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.
