Abstract
People Analytics is a powerful tool with immense promise for enhancing organizational insights. However, this Note argues that employers’ unfettered use of opaque predictive algorithms, which are trained on behavioral data to profile workers and guide employment outcomes, represents a significant threat to individual autonomy. Part II explores the emergence of People Analytics as a continuation and merger of historical approaches to scientific management in the American workplace. Part III contrasts the organizational benefits of predictive analytics against the uniquely intrusive, non-transparent, and sometimes arbitrary manner in which they are currently deployed against workers. Part IV discusses how People Analytics may hasten the erosion of employees’ normative rights in the workplace. It then discusses the insufficiency of existing regulatory and common law mechanisms to protect workers from arbitrary or discriminatory decisionmaking based on algorithmic profiling. Finally, Part V reviews some proposed solutions, emphasizing the importance of employee voice and the need for proactive regulations to enforce algorithmic transparency and protect individuals’ rights to privacy and autonomy.
Highlights
Every day, big data analytics play a powerful and often decisive role in determining the choices and opportunities available to individuals
Part III contrasts the organizational benefits of predictive analytics against the uniquely intrusive, non-transparent, and sometimes arbitrary manner in which they are currently deployed against workers
Despite the huge impact that experts predict big data analytics will have on society in the future,[7] many individuals remain unaware of the full extent to which pervasive algorithmic profiling already guides or constrains their actions.[8]
Summary
Big data analytics play a powerful and often decisive role in determining the choices and opportunities available to individuals. Data aggregation practices and predictive algorithms pose a clear threat to employee privacy and autonomy.[21] There is substantial evidence that the outputs of these methods can be arbitrary and insidiously discriminatory: People Analytics algorithms may reproduce existing structural inequalities in the workplace,[22] make decisions based on seemingly neutral factor, which function as proxies for protected characteristics,[23] and infer sensitive health-related information about employees.[24] The lack of transparency in the construction and application of People Analytics algorithms may undermine employee and public confidence, resulting in tensions which could skew data and mischaracterized individuals. To preserve individuals’ normative rights to autonomy, privacy, and due process, we must regulate the use of personal and behavioral data to develop tools that may arbitrarily and discriminatorily reshape workers’ lives This Note argues that employers’ unfettered use of predictive algorithms trained on behavioral data to make inferences about individual employees represents a significant threat to employee autonomy. Part V reviews some proposed solutions, emphasizing the importance of employee voice and the need for proactive regulations to enforce transparency and preserve individuals’ dignity and autonomy in the workplace
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