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In March, The Lever reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had hired the infamous software company Palantir to implement its controversial return-to-office directive, warning that the contract could bring surveillance technology — commonly referred to as “Bossware” — to the federal workforce.

Days later, those suspicions were confirmed. A published disclosure reveals that the company will “design, configure, deploy, and manage a secure, user-friendly tool to track USDA employees’ return to the office.”

“AI has supercharged surveillance,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told Truthout. “People can be monitored as they never have in the past and companies are rushing to exploit that.”

AI Has Supercharged Workplace Surveillance

Labor advocates have been warning about the threat of workplace spying for years, as many companies have long-established policies of tracking mouse movement and keystroke frequency to maximize productivity. In some cases, the tactics are much more extreme than computer monitoring. In a 2015 Harper’s Magazine investigation, Esther Kaplan revealed that UPS workers were speeding, leaving the bulkhead doors on their trucks open, and misdelivering packages in an attempt to meet quotas enforced through workplace monitoring.

Worker Surveillance Is on the Rise, and Has Its Roots in Centuries of Racism

Kaplan quotes a consultant who pushed the technology that UPS adopted: “The important thing is where the power lies,” they told attendees at a conference. “Drivers might not be happy being measured, but in the end they will yield.”

That same year, The Atlantic ran a piece by law professor Frank Pasquale on workplace surveillance titled “The Other Big Brother,” in which he called for legislation to prevent the spread of such spying.

“States and the federal government need to step up their monitoring of employer violations of privacy,” he wrote. “Until they start drawing red lines, the push by bosses to monitor every aspect of workers’ lives — online and off, at work or home — will only gather momentum.”

Over the past decade, such surveillance has only increased, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many companies sought to keep tabs on their workers amid office closures. A 2022 investigation by The New York Times found that 8 out of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity of their workers.

“The real question is which companies are going to use it and when, and which companies are going to become irrelevant?” Tommy Weir, CEO of Enaible, a company that uses AI to track worker “productivity scores,” told the paper.

However, the legislative resistance that Pasquale referenced has also materialized, as labor advocates and progressive lawmakers pushed bills regulating electronic workplace monitoring across multiple states.

In a recent interview with Semafor, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler highlighted the importance of state legislatures in the battle to regulate AI. “We think that’s really where the game is, because there’s not much happening at the federal level with the tech bros in charge of the White House,” she explained.

State Legislatures’ Efforts to Regulate AI

This summer, Maine’s LD 61 — “An Act to Regulate Employer Surveillance to Protect Workers” — will kick in. The new law prohibits employers from........

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