For a city that prides itself on diversity, Toronto is still deeply segregated. A recently published Amnesty International stat says that Black people in Toronto are 20 times more likely to be shot dead by the police than their white counterparts. While Canadians have a hard time reconciling the existence of racism in our society with the Canadian politeness that we’re supposed to be known for, this segregation is deeply apparent when it comes to access to jobs and the quality of work that our economy assigns us.

When assessing equity in the labour market, not only should we consider access to work (i.e. employment or unemployment) as a measure of success or failure, but we also need to consider the quality of work being offered. As the workplace increasingly becomes a site of surveillance, we have to consider how constant tracking and monitoring of employees contributes to overall job quality for BIPOC.

Economists usually think of “good” jobs as ones where the worker has a relative amount of agency and control over their work environments. These workers are usually offered high wages, training opportunities, and stable work commitments. In other words if you’re in a good job, you can probably exercise some control over your work life and be pretty sure that your job will be there tomorrow. In contrast, a “bad” job is something clerical or manual, where a worker lacks agency and stability, or experiences high turnover.

After the Great Recession in 2009, we saw record levels of unemployment in BIPOC communities coupled with the eradication of generations of built wealth. But the impacts of the Great Recession went far beyond that as it solidified the boundary between “good” jobs and “bad” jobs in our city — a boundary that is increasingly being drawn on racial lines.

In Canada, Black people and other visible minorities are more likely to be offered a low paying or “bad” job, even when compared to white counterparts with similar levels of education and experience. Now, we are entering a new economic era defined by the coronavirus pandemic, working from home, and the related economic downturn. In its wake, what’s likely to remain is not a lack of work, but a maldistribution of good work.

In the era of increased digitization of work, — like working from home — companies are taking advantage of increased opportunities for surveillance in the workplace. This much can be clearly seen with the work-from-home boom prompted by the pandemic as workplaces require their employees to download tracking software like Hubstaff and TSheets. Even the implementation of platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams allows employers to track an employees online presence around the clock, especially if an employee is being asked to download these platforms onto their personal devices.

Online platforms and the digitization of work can be an enabling function for some jobs — like workplaces using Slack to create virtual spaces for collaboration and community. But surveillance usually operates as a disciplinary function for bad jobs, meaning the increased digitization of work is likely to make bad jobs worse.

Workplace monitoring has always existed on some level in capitalist economies, but today’s technologies have exacerbated the potential for employers to use surveillance to discipline their employees. Most employers are now able to track and monitor employees, gathering highly detailed performance related data. Down to the keystroke, your employer knows what you’re doing, and how long you’re doing it for. This is especially prominent in service jobs like retail or delivery where performance is highly quantified (the number of sales or deliveries made).

In these jobs, employee performance is measured in data, and can often have disciplinary consequences in an employees work life. For example, Amazon delivery workers get more and better shifts depending on how many deliveries they make per hour. More deliveries, means better work and better pay, incentivizing workers to move faster but also to take on riskier work.

So what does this increase in surveillance mean for employees and work quality?

For bad jobs, where employees already lacked agency, it will likely make them worse. Employees working these jobs are now being hyper-surveilled in the digital workplace. On the employer’s end, that access to information and data directly translates to relative power in decision-making. There is an inherent epistemic power given to those who get to watch, but not to those who are watched.

Who gets to decide what technologies are used? Who has access to the data being collected? Who gets to decide how to use this data for decision making? These are all questions that those employed in bad jobs are not empowered to answer. These workers, who are disproportionately BIPOC employees, have less of a say in the technological decisions made in their workplaces than those employed in good jobs. And, it’s not easy to dissent. Under the constant eye of an employer, collective workers’ action and unionizing is almost impossible, further reinforcing the lack of agency caused by constant surveillance.

This is the paradox of surveillance; its hyper-presence is integral to the erasure of BIPOC voices in the workplace. As we begin conceptualizing how we divide work in the post-Covid economy, employee surveillance needs to be an important part of the conversation.