The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of workplace surveillance that will extend well beyond our current crisis. Companies are increasingly monitoring employees who work from home, citing worries about security concerns or the need to boost employee productivity. In Amazon warehouses and UPS delivery trucks, surveillance technologies are being built into workplace infrastructure to monitor workers' every move. In many industries, employers can easily access phone calls, texts, browser histories, emails, and even GPS locations with very little effort. These exploitative surveillance practices are rooted in a historical mistrust of workers, especially low-wage workers, that can arguably be traced back to slavery and the exploitative "scientific management" practices that emerged from it, as bosses became obsessed with tracking workers' every move to maximize productivity and profit. Earlier forms of surveillance, like in the 19th century when companies hired Pinkerton private detectives to spy on workers, required a lot of labor. But modern technological advancements mean that the cost of surveillance today is very low.

BRUSSELS, June 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – From Swedish retailer H&M being fined 35 million euros ($42 million) for recording employees' private data to Britain's Barclays bank accused of spying on its staff, workplace surveillance has come into the spotlight in recent months. On Wednesday, the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the European Trade Union Confederation's research arm, said planned regulation by the European Union (EU) to improve privacy does not do enough to stop companies from snooping on their workers in the name of security and efficiency. As artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes ever more accessible and sophisticated, here's why unions are worried: What kind of surveillance are we talking about? Employee monitoring today can involve software programmes for live monitoring, streaming and recording more than a dozen employees' computer screens at a time. Keystrokes, chat programmes, instant messaging and Skype dialogues may also be monitored and recorded in real time.

FROM Swedish retailer H&M being fined 35 million euros ($42 million) for recording employees' private data to Britain's Barclays bank accused of spying on its staff, workplace surveillance has come into the spotlight in recent months. On Wednesday, the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the European Trade Union Confederation's research arm, said planned regulation by the European Union (EU) to improve privacy does not do enough to stop companies from snooping on their workers in the name of security and efficiency. As artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes ever more accessible and sophisticated, here's why unions are worried: What kind of surveillance are we talking about? Employee monitoring today can involve software programmes for live monitoring, streaming and recording more than a dozen employees' computer screens at a time. Keystrokes, chat programmes, instant messaging and Skype dialogues may also be monitored and recorded in real time.

Workplace surveillance sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but we are having to get used to it. In a sign of the times, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that a supermarket in Barcelona was entitled to fire employees after catching them stealing on CCTV cameras that they didn't know were installed. This overturned a decision by the court's lower chamber that the cameras had breached the employees' human rights. Yet hidden cameras are almost quaint compared to some of the ways in which employers are now monitoring their staff. They are resorting to everything from software that digitally scans workers' emails to smart name badges that track their whereabouts.

I would like a large cheese pizza with an ominous side of surveillance, please. Earlier this year, Domino's, the worldwide purveyor of mediocre pizza, introduced a snazzy tool called the Dom Pizza Checker to its Australia and New Zealand locations. According to its website, in-store cameras "use advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence and sensor technology to identify pizza type, even topping distribution and correct toppings". If your food doesn't match your order, or internal quality standards, workers are ordered to make it again. Basically, Big Brother is watching your pizza.

Is workplace surveillance about improving productivity or simply a way to control staff and weed out poor performers? Courtney Hagen Ford, 34, left her job working as a bank teller because she found the surveillance she was under was "dehumanising". Her employer logged her keystrokes and used software to monitor how many of the customers she helped went on to take out loans and fee-paying accounts. "The sales pressure was relentless," she recalls. She decided selling fast food would be better, but ironically, left the bank to do a doctorate in surveillance technology.