US corporate behemoths are using every means available, including spying on their own staff to prevent them from unionising, leaked internal documents show as quoted by Newsweek.
The best-known examples of how employers use surveillance technology – from keycard tagging and email monitoring to social media tracking and worker profiling – against employees are Amazon and Walmart.
Already widespread in the United States, workplace surveillance has become even more prevalent during the COVID pandemic as part of the employers’ efforts to monitor remote workers or to enforce public health measures.
Market research firm Gartner research showed that 60% – twice the pre-pandemic level- of large companies use workplace monitoring tools while the labor research nonprofit Coworker.org outlined in a study the potential harms, noting at the same time the general lack of regulation in the industry.
Gartner’s compiled database listed over 550 of these commercially available surveillance products, dubbed “little tech.”
According to twice-weekly Human Resources newsletter, HR Brew, Amazon’s Whole Foods tracked store locations considered a high risk of union activity by using heat maps; Google learns about internal meetings attended by 100 or more employees and unionising efforts by using a system which alerts managers, while one of the largest meal-kit providers in the US, HelloFresh has been using a marketing tool called Falcon to track social media posts about union activity posted by its employees.
This news would additionally tarnish the already damaged image of companies accused in recent years by lawmakers and labor unions of mistreatment of workers, violations of privacy as well as failing to provide adequate protection against Covid-19.
Noting that surveillance has a “creeping” effect on individuals, Daniel Hanley, a senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute, big companies like Amazon will continue to invent new ways to keep a tab on their workers which find it very difficult to prove the surveillance since the management can justify it as a safety measure to prevent harassment and emergency situations and keep its employees safe.
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