Corporate wellness programs surveil workers’ bodies under the guise of well-being.

Evidence

Bodily surveillance. This includes the use of wearable devices and self-tracking technologies (WSTT), which employ Bluetooth, triangulation algorithms, and infrared sensors to measure and track mental and physical manifestations of arousal and performance, allowing for ubiquitous monitoring beyond the workplace and the workday. McDonald’s, for example, has introduced “sociometric badges” that monitor everyday behavior and emotion. Leisure self-tracking devices such as Fitbit are increasingly becoming requirements of employment contracts within the context of “wellness programs.” This sudden focus on well-being stems less from humanitarian concerns than from corporations’ efforts to reduce the influence of stress on productivity: according to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, the number of days lost due to stress, depression, anxiety, and headaches is rising dangerously. The assumption that the constant monitoring and reporting of health statistics will reduce (rather than increase) stress seems counterintuitive to anyone except the designers and enforcers of such programs. Yet by 2015, a total of 580,000 US companies had already implemented wellness programs involving such devices. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the platform/surveillance school’s account of workplace control; also connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and the health-optimization literature on self-tracking. — connects to: Wellness culture shifted from collective self-knowledge to individual self-worth — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 591; Workplace friendliness programs extend social control into private impulses — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Employers co-opt wellness tracking to surveil workers and boost productivity — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 235
• SEED: Angle: ‘wellness’ as the rhetorical alibi for workplace surveillance — how the language of care launders bodily monitoring across wellness programs and sociometric badges.
• QUESTION: Do wellness programs measurably reduce stress, or does any data contradict the counterintuitive claim that monitoring itself adds stress?
• CANDY: 580,000 US companies ran wellness programs by 2015 — a striking, quotable stat for casual conversation.

Broader Connections

• Workplace friendliness programs extend social control into private impulses #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115
• Wellness culture shifted from collective self-knowledge to individual self-worth #expands (0.82) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 591