Today in Parliament, Abigail delivered an adjournment debate on the lack of laws protecting workers from intrusive and unreasonable workplace surveillance, causing significant harm and contributing to worker burnout and toxic cultures.
Abigail said:
Australian laws are failing to protect workers from intrusive and unreasonable surveillance. The resulting harm to workers cannot be overstated. With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine‑learning capabilities, workplace surveillance has accelerated. It is being used by management to exert greater control over workers, driving work intensification without any corresponding improvement in pay and conditions. The result is a shift of business risk to workers: With workers' every movement being closely monitored and quantified, paid work time can be minimised. Unsurprisingly, the use of workplace surveillance is creating worker burnout and toxic organisational cultures. This creeping stranglehold of workplace surveillance is intrusive and dehumanising and demeans the autonomy and the rights of workers.
Workplace surveillance is prevalent across our society, and it does not discriminate by industry or jurisdiction. Its examples range from the arbitrary punishment of gig workers kicked off platforms due to metrics beyond their control, to biometric scanning, eye‑tracking, digital wearables that track location, speech patterns and the content of conversations, sentiment and mood analysis, workplace competition and leaderboards displaying workers outputs, and the omnipotent surveillance tracking of browsing history, email contents and phone call contents. Workers are being filmed taking industrial action as an attempt to intimidate them. Interpersonal relationships between workers are monitored, and surveillance is used to engineer divisions between workers. These practices are experienced by workers as demeaning. They create anxiety and stress and pose a risk to workers' mental and physical health.
Advanced technologically facilitated workplace surveillance ranges from annoying to invasive to pernicious and outright dystopian. Commercially available technology, used by employers, includes a facial recognition technology that assesses concentration, tracks micro‑expressions and small changes in muscle movements in a person's facial expression—for example, their mouth tension or the intensity of a person's gaze—to determine whether they are concentrating sufficiently. There are monitored instances of employee webcams being used by employers to monitor whether a worker has been at their desk for the requisite time. Bosses are even scanning workers' brains to make sure they are concentrating enough. It has become common practice across Australian mining companies to require workers to wear an electroencephalogram device, or an EEG, while they work to take measurements of workers' brainwaves. This is a good example of the creepy and dangerous influence of workplace surveillance and overreach.
Often, surveillance will be touted as a workplace safety upgrade, and these mining companies will no doubt claim that the purpose of scanning workers' brains with EEG tests as they work is to identify when a worker is at risk of a microsleep. But when this claim is interrogated for even a moment, it becomes clear that this is just perpetuating an employment relationship where workers, rather than being provided adequate breaks and appropriate shift lengths, are instead driven to continue working right to their algorithmically determined physical limit. This is a deeply dystopian prospect, but it is all too common and indicative of the employment dynamic that is permitted through advanced technological workplace surveillance. Unions have also identified instances in which Amazon has deployed surveillance to directly intimidate and threaten union officials in the course of their representative responsibilities. Amazon of course is a notorious offender when it comes to dangerous levels of work intensification driven by onerous and algorithmically driven workplace surveillance. In Australia, Amazon's Melbourne warehouse has been described as being built on a culture of fear, with dehumanising conditions where warehouse staff are constantly timed and monitored as they pack goods under instruction from an algorithm.
In America, the intense and unrealistic expectations placed on workers in their fulfilment centres have seen pregnant employees go into labour on the shop floor and even deaths as a result of dehydration and overwork. But Amazon is no outlier. Woolworths staff in Australia face the same dehumanising pressures, under what Woolworths describe as engineered standards. In early 2024, without consultation with workers, or their union, Woolworths introduced a worker performance management program referred to as the Framework, to be rolled out across all Woolworths distribution centres in Australia. Under the Framework, should a worker fail to meet the designated speed of work at 100 per cent capacity of every measured minute of their shift, they are placed on a 12‑week coaching program referred to as the Glidepath. Disciplinary processes are commenced against those deemed not at standard.
The United Workers Union has described Woolworths engineered standards as a form of neo-Taylorism exemplifying an authoritarian, low‑trust model of management in which employee non-compliance is threatened with dismissal. Like inventory, workers also become a point of data which is monitored in terms of speed and movement, forming the basis of pick rates and other performance metrics that are then subject to enforcement by management. More than 1,500 workers at four Woolworths supermarkets and liquor warehouses, including one in New South Wales, will commence indefinite strike action from tomorrow. Part of their log of claims includes an end to this punitive performance management Framework. I express my solidarity with these workers in their struggle. I also express my support with workers in Amazon distribution warehouses in Australia and around the world as we approach Black Friday—a period of extreme intensity and demand on workers.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
20 November 2024