Open Markets Institute Updates 2020 Report Revealing Major Escalations of Amazon’s Invasive Worker Surveillance

WASHINGTON – Open Markets Institute released an update today to a September 2020 report detailing Amazon’s extensive worker monitoring practices, which indicates significant expansion largely aimed at its lowest-paid employees, who are mostly Black, brown and other people of color.

Among the new attempts to amplify and widen its ability to track workers, the new report identifies that over the past 12 months Amazon has:

• Built new smartphone applications that hyper-track driver location and rate worker performance

• Installed mandatory around-the-clock cameras in all third-party delivery vans

• Devised plans to use human spies to union-bust

• Conducted intensive searches of workers’ social media activity

• Taken steps to install aggressive computer tracking software

• Sold surveillance tools to third parties

“Why do we keep letting Amazon pass go? As this monopoly continues to entrench and fortify its market dominance, its workers are the ones paying the highest price,” said Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at Open Markets and author of the report. “Our work shows that Amazon continues to, with the backing of deferential public policy, impose surveillance of all kinds on its workers and rely on it as a critical component to control and exploit them. Amazon’s worker surveillance is worker exploitation. And it’s time for our political leaders to pull the plug on this outrageous behavior.”

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Read the full new research paper here.

Read our September 2020 report here.

Read our full “Eyes Everywhere” report series on Amazon’s worker, competitor, and consumer surveillance here.