Surveillance of workers installs most densely in low-wage work.

Evidence

As we noted in chapter 4, the poor are likely to be particularly disadvantaged. Digital platforms, apps, and sensors provide infrastructures for seamlessly installing data-derived performance monitoring into all aspects of work, but they are being installed most energetically in lower-status and low-wage work. Employees such as truck drivers or warehouse workers already have continuous surveillance installed as a basic feature of their lives. There may soon be no workers left in those sectors who remember what it was for their bodies and their every action to be unmonitored. In higher-status jobs, the intensity and continuity of surveillance may be limited to aspects of the recruitment process in which a candidate’s social media history is now pored over. In today’s “fissured workplace,” those in powerful positions will seek privileged control over who is surveilled (and how much) and who is not surveilled. Social power may come to mean, in part, being a net controller of the benefits and costs of surveillance, just as under industrial capitalism management power meant controlling the flow of knowledge and information that made up work. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Strengthens the Addison/attention-economy frame: surveillance intensity tracks labor status, reframing the ‘attention as the resource’ story as actually a control-of-information story — connects to the reader’s monitoring/employer-surveillance material. — connects to: Continuous bodily surveillance now distinguishes lower-status from higher-status jobs — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 86; Surveillance is outsourced to unwitting casual laborers in exposed jobs — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 173; Lower-status work faces far more surveillance than higher-status work — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 581 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘the fissured workplace as data-colonial frontier’ — how surveillance as control of information recapitulates industrial-era information control, worth an essay comparing the two regimes.

Broader Connections

• Lower-status work faces far more surveillance than higher-status work #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 581
• Surveillance is outsourced to unwitting casual laborers in exposed jobs #corroborates (0.85) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 173
• Submission to workplace surveillance is directly tied to economic benefits for workers. #qualifies (0.78)
• Monitoring algorithms replace managers in enforcing work intensity #qualifies (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 117