Our Bosses Are Spying On Us: Here’s How We Can Fight Back Against Bossware
Lydia X. Z. Brown, Policy Counsel - Privacy and Data Project | Matt Scherer, Senior Policy Counsel for Worker Privacy | Center for Democracy & Technology
In June, Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries issued a citation to Amazon for an alleged occupational safety and health violation at its DuPont, Washington warehouse. The citation accused Amazon of subjecting its workers to “hazardous exposures” to workplace injury. The hazards mentioned in the citation did not, as one might guess, involve heavy equipment or a physical feature of the DuPont warehouse. Rather, the Department cited Amazon for its practice of requiring workers to perform physical labor at “a very high pace of work” and pressuring them “to maintain that pace without adequate recovery time.” The citation broke new ground by drawing “a direct connection between Amazon’s employee monitoring and discipline systems” and the risk of injury.
This is, as far as we can tell, the first time any regulator has explicitly linked a company’s use of surveillance and monitoring systems with a risk of injury. It will not be the last. As discussed in our recent report for the Center for Democracy and Technology, Warning: Bossware May Be Hazardous to Your Health, companies are increasingly turning to automated systems to monitor and manage their workforces--often at the expense of workers’ health and safety.
Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries’ citation drew “a direct connection between Amazon’s employee monitoring and discipline systems” and the risk of injury.
Many companies use “bossware” systems to force workers to maintain a grueling pace of work. This significantly increases risk of physical injuries, particularly those stemming from repetitive motion, which can lead to long-term disability. Intrusive use of bossware also increases job strain, a form of compounded physiological and mental health pressure that occurs when workers face intensive job demands but have little control over how they do their work. Decades of research shows that job strain increases the risk of depression, anxiety, ulcers, cardiovascular disease, and other serious illnesses and conditions.
All workers subjected to intrusive bossware monitoring may experience these threats to their health and safety, but the risks are particularly great for the millions of U.S. workers with disabilities. Employers who use bossware to maintain rigid productivity standards, eliminate breaks (that many disabled workers need to attend to their bodies’ and minds’ needs), and delegate worker supervision to automated systems that fail to account for disabled workers’ legal right to accommodation, threaten to further erode disabled workers’ rights and dignity. And the heightened risk of physical injuries and mental health stressors that bossware causes and exacerbates illustrate clearly what we have always known -- labor justice and disability justice are deeply intertwined.
Advocates must remain vigilant to ensure that bossware’s spread does not further erode workers’ rights.
Two key federal laws protecting workers’ health and safety--the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)--provide some avenues for advocates to fight back. As our report argues, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should adopt new standards that directly address the threats that bossware poses to workers, particularly those relating to job strain, repetitive motion, and fatigue. OSHA should also enforce its standards more rigorously, particularly in home offices, where more employers are using bossware, but where OSHA currently does not conduct inspections or investigations. Enforcement agencies should also aggressively enforce the ADA to curtail uses of bossware systems that target or inherently penalize disabled workers.
These measures will provide workers with at least some protection against harmful uses of bossware. But the OSH Act (which has weak enforcement mechanisms) and the ADA (which does not protect the majority of workers who do not have a qualifying disability, and insufficiently protects some of the most marginalized disabled people) are not, by themselves, enough to fully protect all workers. Labor and disability rights advocates instead must engage in a multi-pronged effort that targets not only the dangerous health and safety consequences of bossware, but also the exploitative economic practices and technologies that engender them. Ultimately, we may need comprehensive worker privacy legislation that creates a general right and expectation of privacy for all workers to ensure that workers have the autonomy necessary to protect themselves from the full scope of threats that bossware poses to their well-being.
Until then, workers’ advocates should ensure that workers understand their rights under applicable laws and encourage them to document and report uses of bossware that threaten their health and safety. Advocates should also share information with each other about harmful employer practices and technologies so that they are better-positioned both to protect workers and push for systemic policy changes. Employers will not slow their adoption of bossware systems, nor lessen other exploitative practices. Advocates must remain vigilant to ensure that bossware’s spread does not further erode workers’ rights to just labor conditions, continued well-being, and inherent dignity.