Workplace Surveillance and Remote Work: Exploring the Impacts and Implications Amidst Covid-19 in Canada

Executive Summary

As the global Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world, digital technologies played a critical role in connecting employers with employees beyond the physical workplace and into employees’ homes. Not only have such advancements in technology allowed employees to work remotely, but they have also enabled employers to track, monitor and analyze workers in new and innovative ways. Emerging technologies provide employers with new forms of data about workers and, as a consequence, new opportunities for worker surveillance, management and even performance evaluation.

Such developments have accelerated pre-existing trends such as the increasing quantification of activities or personal qualities of workers, expanding in breadth and depth. Workplace surveillance, enabled by digital technologies, has been further intensified through the global health crisis, both at home and on-site. Indeed, crises are often used to justify the expansion of surveillance. These latest developments in workplace surveillance are fraught with potential privacy and security concerns and raise questions regarding data protection, rights, power, and inequities. With estimates that up to one quarter of work hours could be performed remotely even after the pandemic ends, the tension between the rights of workers and concerns of employers in ensuring a safe and productive workforce are only set to grow.

Key messages

1. Workplace surveillance is not new, but has accelerated and expanded through new data-gathering practices enabled by digital technologies, due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic.
2. New and emerging workplace surveillance technologies, particularly those using automated decision-making, are challenging what is considered appropriate, as protected by Canada’s current privacy legislation.
3. Employers need guidance to develop clear and transparent policies on the deployment and use of new and emerging digital technologies for employee surveillance, both in-person and remotely. These policies should be supported by best practices that enable the protection of employee rights, data security, equitable treatment and trust.
4. Greater enforcement measures may improve employer compliance with legal protections for employees, including the need to obtain meaningful and informed consent, and have reasonable limits on surveillance.
5. There are significant research gaps on the electronic surveillance of workers in Canada. In particular, there is a lack of literature concerning:

• The impacts of surveillance on vulnerable and marginalized communities in Canada; and
• The cybersecurity risks posed by digital surveillance and data collection, including risks posed to individual workers’ personal and sensitive information.