Senate Democrats Challenge Workplace Surveillance with New Bill

Over the last few years, the issue of workplace surveillance has remained relevant, maybe especially with the rise of remote work during the pandemic. As a counter to these pressures, Senate Democrats led by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) put forth a new bill that guarantees the workers against lack of privacy within their employment. This is the Stop Spying Bosses Act, a new law that intends to combat the increasing tendency of use of monitoring cameras concerning employees, during work and also after work.

The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

Although workplace monitoring is not new in businesses, it increased substantially during the pandemic period as a number of companies adopted technology to monitor their remote staff. Monitoring tools such as keylogger software, geolocation, and even webcams gained popularity. Biometric monitoring software that was able to track the worker's skeletal movement and facial features was also reportedly in use by some employers as a way of tracking absenteeism and disengagement. Although tools like Controlio are completely safe to monitor employees.

It has been reported that around more than 60% percent large corporations today monitor their workers through some form of digital means which is a sizable increase from pre-pandemic figures. Such tools can record the number of keystrokes, emails sent, or the whereabouts of employees during the business day without their knowledge or agreement.

What the Stop Spying Bosses Act Would Do?

The Stop Spying Bosses Act intends to tackle such issues by empowering employees with more tools and mechanisms for understanding what data is harvested about them. Some features of the bill are highlighted below:

Notification Rules: This bill will impose an obligation to inform employees about the type and scope of data that companies are collecting and when data collection is being conducted.

Scope of surveillance: It would also bar including practices that hinder union organization drives or may monitor employees when they are not on duty.

Establishment of Department of Labor Divisions: A new division would be formed in the Department of Labor responsible for policy and strategy on the glow excesses of workplace monitoring.

Sen. Bob Casey with some co-sponsors, which include Sen Cory Booker, Sen Elizabeth Warren, and others all attribute such rules to protection of the privacy and rights of workers. Labor groups have become supportive of the bill as well, noting the even deeper issues of labour workers and how surveillance is abused as a means of control or oppression.

Lack of Federal Protections

At this point, it is relevant to note that no federal law protects the employees from workplace surveillance as such, federal law has very weak protection against surveillance. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 does have certain provisions that tend to protect the privacy interests of employees, but they provide numerous exceptions for employers to justify monitoring for “legitimate business purposes.”

There some states too that also moved to limit other forms of monitoring by introducing bills that would limit some has to do with banning the use of facial recognition or emotion-detecting software in workplace conditions, But for the most part however, he said, federal laws have been absent, and there are very few stipulations on what employers may do with data obtained about their employees.

Impact on Labor and Union Organizing

 The topic of workplace monitoring has emerged as especially debatable in industries that are experiencing unionisation, or the formation of unions. Several workers have expressed the suspicion that employers may be directing surveillance against union activities or seeking to punish workers who they feel are forward arguing over workplace conditions.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has also taken some measures to deal with this concern. In 2022, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo circulated a memo...indicating that aggressive surveillance may infringe workers’ rights to organize themselves. She put forth the idea that employers should be mandated to disclose to workers the surveillance systems that they are using and the extent to which the information is being used.

For instance, at Amazon, unionization is said to have been partially caused by the cultures of surveillance that exist within the companies. At times, these efforts have resulted in more extreme monitoring such as Amazon's use of heat maps which assisted in locating stores which would likely succumb to union pressure. These strategies have raised concerns regarding the power structures within workplaces and the function and place of surveillance in the governance of order.

While the Stop Spying Bosses Act represents a significant step toward regulating workplace surveillance, it’s unlikely to pass in the current, divided Congress. Even so, the bill is a clear signal that the issue of workplace surveillance is gaining more attention. As Senator Casey put it, the bill is “a first step to level the playing field for workers by holding their bosses accountable.”