TOTAL SURVEILLANCE IS THREATENING YOUR HEALTH

Ashley Benigno

Institute of Employment Rights Report links stress and illness to the increasing use of intrusive surveillance in workplaces.

A report published by the Institute of Employment Rights on the issue of surveillance and privacy at work claims that the increasingly widespread use of intrusive technologies of surveillance in workplaces is negatively affecting both the mental and physical health of workers. Intensive telephone monitoring, CCTV, E-mail and internet interception, constantly updated performance records can all lead from simple discontent to stress and depression via a series of physical conditions, such as repetitive strain injuries and headaches.

"The workers were constantly visible and continuously monitored by a combination of hierarchical human observation, modern computerised technology and internal office design, all backed by pay incentives, a degree of self-motivation and a rhetoric of paternalism to ensure sustained high levels of work. The Victorian overseer seems positively lax in comparison".

Michael Ford, the author of the report, is describing workers who belong to one of British Telecom's data processing workplaces. The typists, known as DPOs (Data Processing Officers), sit in long rows at the end of which sit the supervisors (SDPO) monitoring their work, themselves monitored by the HCO, who reports to the HEO...in what seems like an overt tribute to Kafka. Within this densely hierarchical system the DPOs are expected to reach during their first year of employment a typing speed of a minimum standard rate of 10,000 key depressions an hour, following which faster speeds are encouraged and rewarded with higher pay brackets. For example, a DPO with a consistent key depression rate of 11,500 an hour is classified as Grade II, while those that go over the 13,000 mark are Grade I. The DPO's performance is constantly recorded and can be accessed at any time by the DPO herself or by the supervisor. Weekly checks are carried out and if the performance recorded is under the pay level, an interview and a written report will follow investigating the causes. Furthermore, each DPO is allocated, in addition to mandatory breaks, a 'lost time' allowance of 2.5 hours per week. During this time DPOs may visit the lavatory, smoke, socialise. Beyond this allowance any other 'lost time' will count as lost key depressions and negatively affect the hourly average. Taking these working conditions into consideration it may not come as a surprise to find out that many DPOs suffer from repetitive strain injuries, a loss of trust and a sense of insecurity.

A History of Surveillance

Surveillance at work is nothing new. Since the times of slavery, when supervisors carried whips, whatever form the division of labour has taken, mechanisms of control have always been imposed on the workforce. Throughout this century we have seen how the introduction of Taylorism [Taylor drew up the theory which led to introduction of the factory production line] and of the cult of efficiency have broken many jobs down into simple tasks to ensure the workforce followed the exact company requirements. In our current post-Taylorist era, however, some quarters argue that contemporary management practices favour workforce motivation and participation, marking an improvement on past conditions. But is this really occurring or is the reverse the general trend, with workers losing what they had gained in terms of both individual and collective autonomy?

According to the author of the report, surveillance of workers is now "more wide-spread, more continuous, more intense and - here the position is less clear - more secretive than ever before. The lower costs of the relevant techniques, especially through the use of computers, have removed many of the economic obstacles to constant surveillance". In the case of low skilled jobs, computers can and are used to monitor individual key strokes, time spent away from the keyboard, the quality of the work done and the speed at which it is carried out. Among more highly-skilled workers, where network systems are in use, employers can secretly gain access to staff E-mails, while there have been cases of people dismissed from their jobs for downloading unsuitable material from the Internet.

Surveillance, however, is not limited only to call centres or other IT-driven sectors, but has extended to all fields in a variety of guises. Screening for particular physical, psychological or cultural characteristics is becoming increasingly commonplace, while alcohol and drug testing has spread from the armed forces to many sectors of industry. Psychometric tests, often of dubious quality, are becoming the norm, as is the use of CCTV. It is obvious that there are cases in which the above measures are necessary and indeed desirable, as when they are concerned with health and safety. Those working at close contact with the public (transportation staff, for example) will most probably welcome CCTV if it decreases the chances of physical assault. The same cannot be said by those nurses who were spied upon by CCTV operators as they changed their clothes in the hospital locker-room each day.

Current Protection and Future Prospects

Beyond the single example, what is at stake here is the right to privacy and the right to autonomy. If we think of phone-tapping, secret dossiers, the recording of movements and patterns of behaviour, our mental archives release references to the CIA, or the good old KGB, who, in theory, were at least bound to seek authorisation to implement such activities. And yet this code of (mis)conduct is all around us every day, and is carried out without any form of permission or prior consent. At present, the law offers little protection against the infringement of most aspects of privacy in the workplace. Furthermore, many forms of surveillance are not bound by any effective legal regulation. In the opinion of Michael Ford, the UK's Data Protection Act of 1998 and, more importantly, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights - and the right to privacy contained in Article 8 in particular - through the Human Rights Act of 1998 could help build new legal tools to counteract this upsurge in surveillance, but he believes legislation alone cannot contain this trend and so proposes collective bargaining and joint forms of regulation as additional measures.

If we consider that since the introduction of clock and time sheets in factories we have now reached the use of 'active badges', containing infra-red transmitters which enable the constant tracking of workers' movements, if we take into account recent uses of hand and retinal patterns to control employee access to different areas, if we include genetic testing looming on the horizon (which could lead to individuals being excluded from employment because of perceived future health or other problems), and if we consider the health problems caused by such techniques of control, then maybe the time has come to force the issue of privacy and surveillance at work higher up the social and political agenda to avoid a totalitarian world of employment taking root.