LPE Blog

To protect low-wage workers from invasive digital surveillance that follows them home, Congress needs to adopt a comprehensive framework that protects both worker and consumer data. In the absence of such Congressional action, regulatory action such as the FTC’s advanced notice of proposed rulemaking and the National Labor Relations Board’s recent focus. . .

By generating huge data sets to feed increasingly sophisticated algorithms, workplace surveillance allows employers to extract even more value from their employees. Greater data protection rights provide one possible avenue to change these power dynamics. But if employees truly want to participate in the management of their data and tap into it as a. . .

Electronic surveillance and automated management should not be understood as merely imposing some new, discrete set of harms on workers. Rather, pervasive employee monitoring should be seen as fundamentally altering the employment context in a way that threatens a wide range of employment and labor law protections. From worker safety, compensation, and. . .

Platforms differ markedly in how they use technology to mediate and oversee the labor process. By comparing Amazon’s e-commerce platform, where workers are gathered in warehouses, with MTurk, it’s distributed digital labor platform, we can see how both the nature of the platform and nature of the work give rise to distinct modes of surveillance, as. . .

In 2017, the United States government required that all long-haul truck drivers install electronic logging devices. While this mandate had only limited success in making the roads safer and reducing trucker fatigue, it provided a foundation for additional surveillance by employers and other profit-seeking companies. This layering of government, employer, and. . .

Employers increasingly track what workers do during their shifts, during breaks, and at home. Over the next few weeks, this symposium will consider how workplace surveillance threatens workers individually and collectively, as well as how legal and non-legal strategies can combat invasive employer monitoring.