Collective Bargaining as an Anti-Surveillance Strategy

-- By MichaelSosnick - 20 Mar 2025

The Collective Action Problem

We scroll Instagram our smart-ass phones. We share Google Photos on our laptops made by the King of the Undead-now-Dead. These are choices—like ordering a Big Mac, bad for our health, and like driving without a seatbelt, bad for our safety. Just like eating the Big Mac, we make these choices out of (perceived) convenience, and implicitly choose to suffer the consequences down the line.

As a Columbia student, using Courseworks is technically a choice, too. If I, as an individual, did not want my information collected by the platform, I would have to personally opt out. This would likely be much more than inconvenient; I would run the risk of being unable to access readings or submit assignments. At best I would be a huge pain in the ass to my professors, but at worst—and more likely—I would fail out. As an individual, the choice appears not to be between privacy and convenience. Rather, it is between privacy and becoming a lawyer. The latter is an easy choice, albeit one that the university forces me into making.

Underlying this is a collective action problem. While the university does not seem at all responsive to collective student pressure at the moment, we can imagine a world in which hundreds of CLS students withdraw their permission to be surveilled. Would the university make us all fail out? Or find another way to teach us? I will never find out during the time I am enrolled, but I believe the student body has neither the appetite nor organizing capacity for such an action. Wachtell would not look kindly on it, after all.

Surveillance in the Workplace

Workplaces also run on surveillance technology. For us desk workers, this will largely consist of Microsoft and Google services. But for many other workers, the intrusion is far more controlling. Amazon warehouse workers are pushed, using surveillance technology, into working at a rate that destroys their bodies. Tesla employees have to forego bathroom breaks to hit their closely-monitored quotas. Wearables go so far as to track employees’ moods, creating the potential for thought crimes, prosecuted by the dictatorship of the firm.

The workplace situation appears to present a lack of choice—or at least a coerced choice—like our use of Courseworks. For workers, the choice appears to be between privacy and being able to feed themselves. Unlike CLS students, though (SWC density at the law school is low), some of these workplaces have a built-in solution to the collective action problem: a union that can engage in collective bargaining.

Of course, private-sector union density is reaching new lows. But traditional workplace organizing channels can be a vanguard for privacy, just as unions have been vanguards of many prior movements. First, they can serve a vital education role. Through unions, workers can disseminate information about the harms of surveillance technology. Naturally, this will start with the context of the workplace. That awareness, however, will naturally begin to extend to an awareness of how people are surveilled off the clock as well. Once the education campaign is underway, employees can begin to act. With their built-in mechanism for collective action, unions can bargain over how intrusive technology is used on them.

Bargaining and Striking

Bargaining over these topics is not a particularly novel idea. In 1997, the NLRB recognized that an employer that unilaterally installed surveillance cameras had a duty to bargain with the union. Yet the surveillance of CCTV is obvious. The surveillance of Google services used by teachers, Microsoft services used by writers, and Adobe services used by video game designers are far less intuitive. Sure, these people are vaguely aware of the sinister capacity of the Outlook window they are constantly refreshing. But without a concerted campaign, they will continue to be forced to use it.

Employers will drag their heels. Even though plenty of free and open source software exists, Google and Microsoft have made themselves the path of least resistance for corporations. Workers must publicly recognize the harm caused by these services and fight back. Indeed, arguing that Google Docs is akin to CCTV may be an uphill battle, particularly to a near-future NLRB. But under a proper interpretation of the law, because of these services’ impact on the terms and conditions of employment, they should be considered mandatory subjects of bargaining.

Workers can engage in a protected strike over these issues, as mandatory subjects. And they should. One of the targets of the recent Writers’ Guild strike was AI encroachment. While these AI issues were not discussed in privacy terms, the strike is evidence that unions have the capacity and potential willingness to hold companies to task over their use of privacy-disrespecting technology. These strikes will serve a further public education purpose, as they can clue the general public—most of whom are, unfortunately, not in a union—about the destructive potential of the same services they use both at work and at home.

Hurdles and Looking Forward

An obvious caveat to this approach is the lack of union density. And surveillance technology presents a vicious cycle, preventing organizing against it. Technology is used to prevent organizing activity, through cameras that monitor employee interactions and quotas that make chat breaks impossible to physical separation of workers. Where workers cannot communicate, they cannot organize; this is organizing 101. Yes, the NLRB should expand its understanding of unfair labor practices to account for the union-busting potential of these algorithmic management systems. But we all know how politically infeasible that is—especially now. I wish I had a better answer for how to escape this death spiral. For now, I would tell union leaders to run significant education campaigns, and militantly hold employers accountable. Fight surveillance tooth and nail. Make surveillance technology widely, wildly unpopular. The revolution seems distant, but organizing and solidarity will get us there. Unions, however weakened and adrift they may be, still have the potential to drive that change.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, MichaelSosnick
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.