When “Bossware” Manages Workers: A Policy Agenda to Stop Digital Surveillance and Automated-Decision-System Abuses

tags

Automation Labour

Notes

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focus on two kinds of tools: (1) workplace digital surveillance technologies that businesses use to collect data on workers’ activities, and (2) workplace automated decision systems that businesses use to assist in managing their existing workforce. We refer to these two types of tools collectively as “bossware.”

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scheduling, task allocation, wage-setting, performance evaluation, and discipline.

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workers reporting increased injuries, more precarity, coercive work environments, routine wage theft, and other harms related to their employers’ use of digital management tools.

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venture capital firms are actively incentivizing the development of “control without accountability” bossware technologies that expand employer and corporate power while externalizing costs to workers and society.

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Section I: Digital Surveillance and Automated Decision Systems Intensify Existing Workplace Problems

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A. Harmful Disciplinary Practices and Job Insecurity

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B. Loss of Autonomy and Deskilling of Jobs

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C. Unhealthy or Dangerous Conditions

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Amazon, the second-largest employer in the U.S., which has pioneered the use of intensive digital monitoring and automated decision systems in its warehouses and for drivers who handle its deliveries. The high rates of worker injuries at the company’s warehouses have been shown to be directly attributed to those practices, and this connection has also been recognized by regulators.

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D. Work Fissuring and Independent Contractor Misclassification

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facilitating independent contractor misclassification and making it easier to control frontline workers hired through fissured, subcontracting, and franchising arrangements.

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outsourcing or fissuring is a goal of many new digital technologies, not just an incidental side effect. A growing number of tech tools supported by venture capital are designed to help companies evade labor law, reduce labor costs, and outsource risk; they are actively marketed as ways to minimize liability and extract more from workers.

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E. Exploitative Pay and Scheduling Practices

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app-based nursing company ShiftKey, which uses an online staffing assignment system that requires workers to effectively bid against each other by indicating their lowest hourly wage for a shift.

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Businesses also use information obtained through digital worker surveillance as inputs for wage-setting algorithms,

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such automated timekeeping systems sometimes do not comport with federal wage and hour laws’ legal standards for identifying compensable and non-compensable worker activity. In this way, bossware-powered worker time-tracking and payment systems can result in systematic “time- shaving” and the theft of workers’ earned wages.

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F. Barriers to Accessing Social Insurance and Work-Related Benefits

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G. Discrimination and Systemic Inequities

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H. Suppression of Worker Collective Action and Bargaining

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Section 2: The Current Policy Landscape

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A. Recent State Policymaking Efforts

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Section 3: Lessons and Takeaways for Future Policy Development

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A. Update and Expand Foundational Workplace Protections to Account for Bossware’s Harms

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B. Ensure Broad Worker Access to Labor and Employment Rights

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C. Directly Regulate a Wide Range of Bossware Uses

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D. Adopt Additional Protections for Bossware’s Use in Discipline and Pay

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E. Support and Strengthen Countervailing Forces to Corporate and Financial Actors Promoting Bossware

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Appendix 1: Increased Employer Powers with Bossware

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Appendix 2: Examples of Policy Models that Address Bossware’s Degradation of Job Quality

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