Open Markets Institute Releases Blueprint for How to Stop Amazon’s Invasive, Harmful, and Union-Busting Worker Surveillance

New report details the dangers of Amazon’s pervasive worker surveillance and proposes solutions that stop surveillance and increase worker power

WASHINGTON – Today, the Open Markets Institute released a report describing how Amazon uses surveillance to oppress workers and to suppress employee unionization, at a time when surveillance of employees of all kinds is being rapidly deployed across the economy.

The report called, “Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power,” provides a set of proposals and mechanisms for how antitrust enforcers, regulators, and state and federal lawmakers can restrict and prevent increasingly pervasive surveillance practices.

“Amazon’s surveillance practices symbolize one of the signature problems with monopoly power: the ability to exploit consumers, competitors, governments, and workers with impunity. Decreasing the market power of such dominant firms is critical to protect workers’ rights to privacy and to collectively organize,” said Daniel Hanley, policy analyst at the Open Markets Institute and co-author of the paper. 

The report explains in detail how worker surveillance endangers the mental and physical health of Amazon workers, enables Amazon to deter workers from unionizing, increases the precarity of workers who can be terminated at any time for deviating from metrics they don’t even know exist, and leads to other dominant firms adopting similar practices.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to accelerate the surveillance of workers, it’s more important than ever that our leaders step in. It’s time to ban surveillance practices and reduce the market power that facilitates such surveillance, while reversing the decadeslong decline in unionization in the United States, protecting privacy, and restoring worker power in America,” said Hanley.

Read the full report here.

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