Can your boss make you wear a Fitbit?
In some ways, the nine-day West Virginia teachers鈥� strike that ended March 6 echoed the momentous labor actions that have marked the Mountain State鈥檚 history. But the story also contained a plot device straight out of a cyberpunk future.听
A proposed change to West Virginia鈥檚 public worker health plan would have asked teachers to download a mobile fitness app called Go365 and earn points on it by designed to monitor the users's steps taken, heart rate, or other metrics.听Those who declined, or who complied but failed to earn enough points, would face a penalty of $500 each year.听
The state , but it remains a sign of the times: As employers aim to trim costs and boost productivity, workers face increasing encouragement to purchase and use mobile devices, don wearables, and even accept electronic implants, all while being assured that the new tools are serving their best interests. The growing adoption of technology that some see as invasive raises questions of what exactly constitutes voluntary behavior in a wage economy.
鈥淰ery few things in the workplace are voluntary,鈥� says attorney Paula Brantner, a senior advisor at Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit in Silver Spring, Md., that promotes employee rights. 鈥淵ou have an incentive to keep your job, to make your employer happy, to be on track for raises and promotions. There鈥檚 every incentive to cooperate with your employer and there鈥檚 a real disincentive to be viewed as uncooperative.鈥�
Employers have long taken keen interest in the minute details of how workers conduct themselves, both on and off the clock. Beginning with Frederick Taylor at the turn of the 20th century,听management consultants have boosted output by analyzing and standardizing the most minute movements of their workers.听Around the same time, Henry Ford went as far as sending investigators into workers鈥� homes to inspect their health and hygiene habits.听
鈥淭he idea is old, but the technology is new,鈥� says University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, author of the 2017 book 鈥溙鼿ow Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don鈥檛 Talk about It).鈥� 鈥淭hat enables far more intensive and precise monitoring and control than was possible in the pre-computer era.鈥�
Beyond fitness
Currently just听听of employer-sponsored wellness plans provide fitness-tracking bands, but they can be used for more than just ensuring workers stay active. And other potentially intrusive听devices have started to pop up as well.
These trackers contribute data to what human resource managers call 鈥�,鈥� an approach that big data and analytics bring to bear on decisions involving hiring, firing, and productivity.
It鈥檚 this sort of fine-grained analytics that Amazon was pursuing in 2016 when it filed for wristbands that use ultrasonic pulses and radio transmissions to monitor the locations of employees鈥� hands relative to inventory bins, so that employers can 鈥渕onitor performance of assigned tasks.鈥�
Other companies are going deeper with electronic trackers, literally. Last summer, the Wisconsin-based vending-kiosk company Three Square Market announced that it would be offering its workers the opportunity to have radio-frequency identification chips . According to the company, the rice-grain-sized chip would be injected between the thumb and forefinger, where it can be used to unlock doors, log in to computers, run photocopiers, and purchase snacks from break-room vending machines. More than 50 out of 80 workers at the company鈥檚 headquarters initially volunteered.听
But was the choice to accept the implants truly voluntary? 鈥淲hat we really need to do is recognize that the fact that you made a choice within a set of options cannot justify the set of options that is presented to you,鈥� says Dr. Anderson. 鈥淲orkers should have access to a lot of goods without having to cede overwhelming authority to their employers.鈥�
鈥淭here needs to be just a broader acknowledgement of the necessity of these things in people鈥檚 lives, not just as the superficial social technologies but increasingly as the mundane ways that we get stuff done in our everyday lives,鈥� says Julia Ticona, a postdoctoral researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York. 鈥淸We need] to really treat them instead of purely individual consumer devices, to treat them as a part of public infrastructure.鈥�
Dr. Ticona helped draft an to the US Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States, a pending case that will determine whether historical location data gathered by cell towers is protected under the Fourth Amendment. The brief argues that cell phones are no longer 鈥渕eaningfully voluntary鈥� in modern life.听
Ticona鈥檚 research focuses on low-income and contingent workers, who rely on mobile phones to find and schedule work, trade shifts, and access government assistance. 鈥淔or these folks, it鈥檚 where we really see the rubber hitting the road of this question between voluntary and mandatory, because of the economic coercion,鈥� says Ticona.听
Ticona argues that government efforts to extend home broadband internet access to all Americans should more fully take mobile technology into account. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 just sit at home at our desks and do homework on our laptop,鈥� she says 鈥淚t鈥檚 out in the world and it needs to travel with us.鈥澨�
For Dr. Anderson, one big step in curbing employers鈥� invasiveness is to decouple health insurance from employment, thereby removing much of the interest our bosses may have in our heart rates and waistlines. 鈥淲e should recognize that employers have their own business and not try to corral them to be nannies for their employees,鈥� she says.
Ms. Brantner agrees, seeing penalties for refusing fitness trackers as 鈥渁 huge argument for single-payer health care.鈥�
鈥淲hy should your health be the employer鈥檚 business?鈥� she asks. 鈥淲ell, the answer right now is because they鈥檙e footing the bill.鈥�
[Editor's note:听This story has been updated to clarify that several fitness tracking options were named in the state's original proposal.]
