In the past decade, employers have been binging on data and the tools to track everything workers do—in and out of work. Anyone who thinks this data grab isn’t going to be used to transform the nature of wages and benefits and the work contract has another think coming. My prediction is that in the next 10 years we will come to accept that each worker’s wages are constantly changing, behaviorally shaped, and different from their coworkers’–unless we stop it. I call this trend “surveillance wages.”
All the elements are there. Farmers have been getting paid different rates for the same work for years, as Chris Leonard reported in his book The Meat Racket. Tyson Foods, the giant meat processor, has changing and individualized terms for chicken farmers—and contractually bars them from comparing what they are paid to other farmers, leading to a state of perpetual paranoia. But Tyson’s tools are limited compared to what big tech companies have learned how to track. Uber tracks millions of metrics every day and assigns individualized tasks to drivers. It not only tracks how quickly drivers brake and how frequently they stop, and where, and for what, but also uses analytics to deliver gamified prompts matched to each driver’s data profile. Instead of a year-end bonus for good work—the old model—drivers are paid through a complex blend of bonuses and demerits, constantly pinged with reminders of goals, pushed and prodded and profiled to tweak how little they make and how much Uber collects.
Corporations are on a worker-data binge akin to the consumer data binge of the prior decade. Companies like Amazon are tracking their employees and contractors as if they were in
— source thenation.com | Zephyr Teachout | Jan 5, 2022