Employers co-opt wellness tracking to surveil workers and boost productivity

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: Connects to One Square Inch of Silence and the intrusion-of-surveillance thread; also parallels the attention-surveillance school’s treatment of self-tracking as extractive infrastructure. — connects to: Corporate wellness programs surveil workers’ bodies under the guise of well-being. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 235; Monitoring algorithms replace managers in enforcing work intensity — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 117; Routine bodily self-monitoring has become a competitive, profit-generating infrastructure — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 25 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Track the empirical question: does mandatory wellness-device monitoring actually raise or lower measured stress and health costs over time?

Broader Connections

• Corporate wellness programs surveil workers’ bodies under the guise of well-being. #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 235
• Routine bodily self-monitoring has become a competitive, profit-generating infrastructure #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 25
• Mindfulness has been weaponized by employers to extract labor focus #corroborates (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 321
• The boundary between workplace and workforce surveillance is dissolving #corroborates (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 229
• Willing personal tracking normalizes tracking as infrastructure in less voluntary domains #expands (0.74) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 415
• Monitoring algorithms replace managers in enforcing work intensity #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 117
• Corporate benefit dependency converts workers into watchdogs of profitability #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 260
• Fitness-tracked exercise is a contested test case for whether data generation counts as labor #complicates (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 778