LRD guides and handbook February 2012

Social media, monitoring and surveillance at work - a practical guide for trade unionists

1. The extent of monitoring and surveillance at work

“I feel that George Orwell would spin in his grave to see 1984 enthusiastically used as a template for my employers instead of the warning it was meant to be” (Local government rep, LRD survey 2011).

In September 2011, Professor Michael Blakemore published a new report, From workplace watch to social spy, commissioned by general union the GMB, updating research produced for the union in 2005. The report charts the expansion of workplace monitoring and surveillance in the UK, particularly since the events of 9/11, and makes bleak, sobering reading.

Blakemore identifies the key contributory factors to the exponential growth of workplace monitoring. Organisational boundaries have become more fluid. There have always been random bag searches at the factory gate, but in a modern workplace, the virtual “factory gate” is far more diffuse and the scope for theft or accidental loss of commercially sensitive data (or the accidental circulation of potentially embarrassing information to a mass audience) at the click of a mouse is infinitely greater. This creates fearful employers and provides a ready market for an industry anxious to sell the latest devices.

Other profound changes in the way we work include the steady blurring of the work/home boundary, with many “non-work” activities (such as shopping, booking holidays, communicating with friends) having the potential to be conducted at the workplace. There is also an expanding home-based workforce.

Rapid technological innovation results in “function creep”, where employers find their HR practices running to keep pace with their software capability, so that a technological feature adopted for a benign purpose, such as protecting driver safety or controlling product flow, takes on a wider and more intrusive function — for example, individual performance monitoring or regulating break start and finish times — until every aspect of the worker’s day is monitored because “the software lets us do this”. As a CWU member commented in 2009: “Our cabs are fitted with a tracker device. It’s a spy in the cab to see where we are, when we’re on the move and when we’re not. They won’t trust us to get on and do a job we’ve done well for years”.

In many workplaces, such as supermarkets, warehouses and call centres, technological change has had a deeply corrosive impact on the nature of the job itself, with ever higher levels of task automation, linked to deskilling and casualisation, as workers become increasingly replaceable and the need for complex training or job progression is eliminated. In some cases, whole jobs are removed. One rep in LRD’s survey noted, for example, how a main aim of CCTV at his workplace is to cut the number of security guards.

“Citizen journalism”, such as blogging, is another relatively recent development and a double-edged sword which can have problematic consequences in the workplace. It is widely viewed as a positive phenomenon but blogging about work can have extremely negative repercussions for the blogger (see Chapter 4).

A related development is the small but growing number of tribunal cases where workers have lost their jobs for posting negative comments about their work on Facebook, forgetting who their Friends are and finding themselves reported to management. (See the latest cases in Chapter 4).

A surveillance society

There is much discomfort about the explosion of surveillance. A 2007 survey by human rights watchdog Privacy International found that the UK had the lowest privacy ranking in the EU, placing it in the “endemic surveillance” category with Russia and Singapore, and the situation is getting worse not better. A 2010 report by Big Brother Watch found local authorities using their powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to launch over 8,500 covert surveillance operations, including operations to monitor their own staff.

There has been an exponential increase in the number of CCTV cameras in the UK in the last 10 years. Nobody is sure how many there are, but worst estimates are as high as one camera for every 14 people, whilst the National Policing Improvements Agency guesstimates the figure at somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. These trends have contributed to a new government Bill — the Protection of Freedoms Bill — sponsored by the Home Office, which aims to curtail some of the most draconian surveillance powers of police and local authorities.

Excessive monitoring erodes trust

One of the biggest dangers of excessive monitoring, especially where changes are introduced without proper consultation, is that it erodes trust. This came through strongly in the union reps’ responses to a recent LRD survey examining the impact of workplace monitoring. Blakemore quotes a useful reminder, taken from The Economist (2009): “Although workforce monitoring may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers.”

Employers who genuinely want to improve productivity would be much better off involving the staff who do the job, as opposed to monitoring, testing and measuring their every move.

Around half of reps who responded to LRD’s recent survey felt levels of monitoring and surveillance had increased, or substantially increased, over the last three years, and many comments reflected a gnawing suspicion that their employers say one thing in relation to monitoring — for example, that cameras on production lines are intended only to monitor product flow and not individual performance — but mean another. “There is a fear that despite a reasonable policy, it would be easy to monitor activities without anyone being the wiser” (local government rep, LRD survey 2011).

This generalised sense of mistrust and unease came through particularly strongly in relation to emails on union business, where several reps identified a “lingering” sense that emails were monitored, although few could provide concrete examples to back up their suspicions. This mistrust is reflected in the unusually small number of reps who were prepared for their employer to be identified by LRD when publishing the survey results.

The link to work-related stress

High levels of employer control and monitoring, work intensification and task monotony are a recipe for work-related stress, especially when combined with target setting, job insecurity and, in customer-facing roles, a requirement to stay positive and “on-message”. So it is no surprise that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) annual survey (CIPD/Simply Health Absence Management Survey 2011) has confirmed that stress is, for the first time, the most common cause of long-term sickness absence in the UK for both manual and non-manual workers.

Against a backdrop of cuts, unemployment and insecurity, it is tempting to slip into a mindset that “any job is better than no job” and to rein back from arguments about the importance of job quality. However, record numbers of workers in Britain (1.9 million, according to analysis published by the TUC in February 2012) are now engaged in insecure part-time and temporary employment because they are not able to find secure full-time employment. That employment typically involves high levels of control and monitoring of worker activity.

And many of the promised new jobs to be created under the coalition government, for example, 5,000 new jobs at drive-through coffee outlet Starbucks over the next five years, 3,000 new jobs at warehouse giant Amazon in Scotland, or 15,000 part-time jobs in Sainsburys, are in sectors traditionally characterised by high levels of monitoring and surveillance.

As Len McCluskey, general secretary of general union Unite, states in his forward to Unite's 2011 health and safety guide: “Organising to secure ‘good work’...is of fundamental importance to the kind of society we want to achieve.”

Professor Michael Blakemore’s report for the GMB union, From workplace watch to social spy, can be downloaded at: www.gmb.org.uk/PDF/Surveillance%20technologies%20and%20the%20workplace%20-%20September%202011%20v2%20-f.pdf