"It's Always a Losing Game": How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job

TL;DR

This study investigates how workers across sectors experience and respond to increasingly pervasive workplace surveillance technologies (WSTs), especially in the post-COVID era. By combining a Reddit-based content analysis with ten in-depth interviews, the authors map the types of monitoring, their perceived impacts on privacy, health, and performance, and the tactics workers deploy to resist or cope, including commiseration, research, obfuscation, and quitting. The findings reveal a pervasive culture of distrust and anxiety that can erode productivity and morale, while also highlighting a spectrum of worker-driven countermeasures and calls for stronger governmental and organizational protections. The paper argues for emancipatory, worker-centered design and policy approaches within CSCW to support resistance, enable safer data practices, and foster collective action toward more equitable workplace surveillance regimes.

Abstract

With the rise of remote work, a range of surveillance technologies are increasingly being used by business owners to track and monitor employees, raising concerns about worker rights and privacy. Through analysis of Reddit posts and in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to understand how workers across a range of sectors make sense of and respond to layered forms of surveillance. While workers express concern about risks to their health, safety, and privacy, they also face a lack of transparency and autonomy around the use of these systems. In response, workers take up tactics of everyday resistance, such as commiserating with other workers or employing technological hacks. Although these tactics demonstrate workers' ingenuity, they also show the limitations of existing approaches to protect workers against intrusive workplace monitoring. We argue that there is an opportunity for CSCW researchers to support these countermeasures through worker-led design and policy.