Abstract
While working from home is not a new concept, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has, for many in the workforce, rendered it the ‘new normal’, concomitant with enhanced use of workplace surveillance technologies to monitor and track staff working from home. Even prior to the global pandemic, organisations were increasingly using a variety of electronic surveillance methods to monitor their employees and the places where they work, whether it be in an office building or remotely. This technology traverses various facets of the work environment, including email communications, web browsing, the use of active badges for locating and tracking employees, and the gathering of personal information by employers. The application of these technologies, nevertheless, raises privacy concerns, which are exacerbated when work is undertaken in employees’ own homes, a phenomenon that has become more prevalent due to Covid-19. This article addresses the issue of electronic workplace monitoring, its implications for employees’ privacy and the role of collective bargaining in addressing this emergent practice, which has also been given new impetus during the pandemic.
Highlights
While working from home is not a new concept, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has, for many in the workforce, rendered it the ‘new normal’, concomitant with enhanced use of workplace surveillance technologies to monitor and track staff working from home
According to a recent report of the Trade Unions Congress (2020), the largest federation of trade unions in England and Wales, 15 per cent of those workers it surveyed contend that monitoring and surveillance at work has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic
In addition to leading to employees feeling mistrusted, use of electronic surveillance and monitoring software to track employee activity and productivity is often seen as an intrusion upon their privacy, a concern writ large when employees are working remotely and especially when they are working from home
Summary
Digital technologies lend themselves to employer control strategies (Jeske & Santuzzi, 2015; Kidwell & Sprague, 2009). By adding further distractions not found in the confined workplace environment, thereby reducing time devoted to work without a commensurate reduction in workload, remote working can result in the intensification of work (Kelliher & Anderson, 2009). In this sense, technology is harnessed to affect deskilling and the division of labour, and work is redesigned to accommodate demands for greater efficiency, with little or no concern for the impact that such tight control may have on intrinsic job quality (Gallie, 2013). The tight control and monitoring of work, where it is feasible for that work to be undertaken at home, is likely to have been exacerbated in the current context, in which many employers have reluctantly acquiesced to accepting such work arrangements, more or less out of necessity (Hodder, 2020)
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