What are Workers Doing about Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace? - An Examination of Trade Union Agreements in Canada

Information and communication technology has deepened the problem of workplace surveillance by expanding the capacity to measure and monitor worker activity. Partly because of inadequate government attention to privacy protection and partly because the government itself has used security concerns to overturn privacy protections, civil society organizations and movements have increasingly taken an active role to secure the right to privacy. This paper assesses the extent to which trade unions in Canada have made privacy a sufficiently serious concern to see that privacy protections are incorporated into collective agreements. It assesses the progress made since Bryant's 1995 study which found practically no reference to electronic privacy protection in Canadian agreements. The paper concludes by identifying best practice language for unions negotiating to incorporate privacy, surveillance, and monitoring language in their collective agreements.