Employment surveillance is something that happens in the workplace and isn't new. Taylorism was created in the early part of the twentieth century to track and shape how workers work in order to reduce employer costs and increase employee productivity. With the rise of computerized technology, its form is changing. When individuals work they are surveilled by their employers (Figure 14.1).

Relationship to Other Domains

While individuals are doing their work, all the things in the domain of employment transactions, they are potentially being surveilled by their employer. Employers in the process of hiring, which happens within the employment registration domain, may also surveil a prospective employee by researching them. Employers may also surveil employees while they are interacting in their everyday life with governments, the commercial sector, and civil society. Databases developed during the time of employment are vulnerable to theft and sale on the illicit market.

Description

We could think of employment surveillance as beginning when individuals apply for a job and the employer goes to find out more about them. A good term for this is “preenrollment surveillance” or preemployment surveillance practices. A traditional corporation pays thousands of dollars to learn a lot about a prospective employee before it makes a hiring decision.

What is surveillance in the context of the workplace? “Management's ability to monitor, record and track employee performance, behaviors and personal characteristics in real time as part of organizational processes”. Since the existence of organizations, surveillance to track what their employees are doing has been practiced. There was a particular time in the mid-nineteenth century when the expansion of the railways and other industries experienced growing organizational complexity. They used information technologies— paper, index cards, punch cards, and the telegraph—to manage the flow of information within the organization. By internalizing information about customers, pricing, and competitors, this means that firms avoid having to obtain it and they lower transaction costs.

In the contemporary system we live in today, there's a relationship between production, wages, and consumption. Fordism, the paying of wages high enough for workers to be middle-class consumers, impacts the demand side of the economy (the government does surveillance of the labor market), and Taylorism on the production side requires information for worker control.