Worker advocates, journalists, and policymakers have, in recent years, drawn attention to the rise of continuous electronic surveillance in American workplaces. From AI-powered cameras tracking truckers’ attentiveness to handheld scanners monitoring Amazon warehouse workers’ speed of packing and sorting packages to videoconferencing software keeping tabs on workers’ conversations while in meetings, businesses across a variety of sectors are increasingly using automated tools to collect data on workers—and then using that data to make automated decisions about worker tasks and schedules, pay, promotions, discipline, and even firings.
To date, however, nearly all coverage of this issue has been restricted to specific industries or firms, or based on anecdotal first-hand accounts, which has given little sense of the prevalence of these practices in our economy. No longer. Last month, I released the first nationally representative survey data on worker experiences with automated management and surveillance. The findings are striking. Beyond documenting the broad reach of these tools—more than two-thirds of U.S. workers report experiencing at least one form of electronic monitoring—the survey also sheds light on the impact of such monitoring on workers’ health and safety.
These findings not only underscore the need for protections from local, state, and federal policymakers, but also suggest that such protections are likely to find a broad base of political support, as the use of surveillance technologies cuts across class, occupational, and industrial lines. They also show that protections should be tailored to the specific design and deployment of monitoring technologies, and that workers need to be given some say over how these technologies are used.
The Need for Better Data
While automated management and surveillance tools can have benefits for workers and businesses alike—such as by closely monitoring the use of hazardous tools or workers’ physical strains to prevent injuries—workers have brought to light serious concerns about how automated management and surveillance technologies have eroded rights to collective action and labor organizing; forced workers to speed up their work to unsafe paces; discriminated against pregnant workers and workers with disabilities; and made it harder for workers to serve customers or clients. (A previous LPE symposium nicely summarized the risks of these technologies and new worker organizing against such risks.)
Serving in the Biden-Harris Administration at the Department of Labor and the White House Office of Management and Budget, I had the privilege of helping to lead a cross-government effort to explore how federal agencies could respond to the threats that automated management and surveillance technologies posed to workers. Already, many federal agencies have taken important steps as part of this effort—including collecting firsthand accounts from workers and businesses; ensuring that electronic surveillance does not violate workers’ federal rights to form and join unions through a new interpretation of labor law from the National Labor Relations Board General Counsel; ensuring that electronic surveillance using third-party technologies gives workers appropriate transparency about the tools and a right to correct their data through new guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and ensuring that workers are paid for the time they are working, regardless of what electronic monitoring systems might report, through new guidance from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.
One obstacle that we faced, however, was a lack of systematic data on just how many workers were subject to these technologies and the impact that these tools have across the workforce as a whole. We had very compelling—and worrisome—accounts from workers in specific sectors, such as call centers, warehouses, trucking, and home health care. But facing competing priorities, our colleagues in enforcement agencies wanted to know just how many workers were at risk. Since leaving the administration and returning to academia, I’ve been working to assemble that empirical picture.
The 2024 National Survey of Workplace Technology
In summer 2024, I designed and fielded a nationally representative survey of nearly 1,300 workers, intended to provide a better nationwide picture of workers’ experience with automated management and surveillance. The National Survey of Workplace Technology probed workers’ perceptions of the extent to which the organizations with which they work—employers in the case of employees and clients or mediating businesses in the case of independent contractors and consultants—used a variety of electronic surveillance tools (including cameras, productivity tracking, and location tracking), as well as automated methods of task or schedule assignments. In addition, the survey asked workers who reported experiences with at least some form of electronic monitoring how they perceived that monitoring was being used—for instance, for health and safety purposes, to improve their work products, or for discipline—and how monitoring impacted their health, safety, and well-being.
The survey revealed three important findings relevant for policy discussions around regulating automated management and surveillance technologies. (You can read the whole report here.)
First, as noted above, most U.S. workers report some form of electronic monitoring on the job, with more than two-thirds (68 percent) of U.S. workers reporting at least one form of electronic monitoring. Overall rates of electronic worker surveillance cut across occupational and industry lines, and were just as common among blue collar workers as among white collar workers—though the specific types of surveillance varied by the kind of work. One of the strongest predictors of the adoption of electronic surveillance was employer size: workers in larger organizations were substantially more likely to report all forms of surveillance than were workers in small organizations.
Second, I found very strong relationships between certain forms of electronic monitoring and worker health and safety. In particular, I found that workers who reported more intensive electronic productivity monitoring at their jobs were substantially more likely to report anxiety at work; needing to work at unsafe speeds; and experiencing work-related injuries in the past year, especially serious injuries. These differences persist even after accounting for a range of workers’ own demographic characteristics, as well as characteristics of their jobs and workplaces. The association between electronic monitoring and negative health and safety outcomes for workers across all sectors of the economy—not just those receiving attention in the past, such as warehousing—strongly calls for policy attention and action.
Last, the survey revealed the importance of the design and deployment of electronic monitoring technologies. Workers who reported that electronic monitoring was used to discipline workers or suppress worker voice saw the largest negative health and well-being effects of monitoring. Indeed, when employers deployed electronic monitoring to promote workers’ health and safety or improve workers’ performance, there was no increase in worker reports of needing to work too fast and workplace injuries. By comparison, I found a strong relationship between the use of monitoring to either discipline workers or suppress workers from raising issues or problems on the job and workplace issues and injuries. These findings suggest that electronic monitoring, in itself, need not be problematic for workers; rather it is the intersection of the technology and specific management practices that poses a threat to worker well-being.
Protecting Workers
These findings call out for immediate policy interventions—across levels of government—that provide much-needed protection for workers. These interventions would also help rebalance the scales of power in the workplace, pushing back against the longstanding presumption that employers in the United States have the right to unfettered control over workers’ bodies.
Within the executive branch, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration should step up enforcement activities. The Department of Labor should also immediately begin work drafting a health or safety standard that would set clear rules for employers on how to deploy automated management and surveillance tools in ways that do not threaten workers’ wellbeing. Pursuing such a measure would provide the Trump-Vance Administration an early opportunity to make good on their promises that the Republican party is now a pro-worker party. Even assuming they will not—as we have good reason to believe—beginning work now in the Biden-Harris Administration could lay the foundation for a future Administration that is more favorable to workers to hit the ground running on the proposal and carry it to completion.
While the executive branch can take action now under current laws, Congress should establish stronger and clearer guardrails for the use of automated management and surveillance tools alongside other AI-based technologies in the workplace. Those laws should ensure that workers have clear opportunities to exercise their own voice over how these technologies are used, building on the successful examples of unions that have bargained over such tools in recent years. Senator Casey’s recent legislative proposals offer excellent starting points. Republican control of Congress makes pro-worker legislation much less likely—though it is worth appealing to the invasion of privacy that workers face under continuous surveillance, a threat that conservatives have long abhorred, along with the fact that there is strong bipartisan support for action, as I find in my survey.
In light of unified GOP control of the federal government, the best place for sustained action over the coming years will be states and localities. Several states have already proposed or passed laws aimed at protecting warehousing workers—providing greater transparency to those workers about the use of electronic productivity monitoring and quotas. Based on the results presented above, these laws should be extended beyond the warehouse, to protect workers across all sectors affected by these tools.
The broad impact of automated management and surveillance technologies documented in my research is sobering—but also a potential source of political strength. Unlike other labor issues, the reach of automated management and surveillance tools cuts across class, occupational, and industrial lines, creating the potential for a broad political movement in support of stronger protections. With the explosion of remote work during the pandemic, many white collar workers now have experience with the unchecked surveillance of their work activities on and off the clock. Worker leaders and organizers should seize this opportunity to enact new protections before the risk these technologies pose spread further.
