Essentially Expendable

Here I take a look at the essential worker during the Covid crisis. Essential workers and their families faced a much higher risk of infection and death from COVID than remotable white collar workers, creating sustainability issues across social, economic and technological domains. Hailed as heroic but expendable, front-line workers were unjustly surveilled and manipulated. While higher-earning knowledge workers were able to perform their duties from home, the pandemic revealed how labor is unevenly valued, supported and valorized.

Historically, corporations have used specific tactics to gain leverage in labor relations. Tokenisms, Sense of Urgency, and CSR/woke-washing are examples that have been the norm for decades. A report in Data and Society 2023, highlights “Hygiene Theater”, a term coined by Derek Thompson arguing that companies who had essential workers deployed smart technologies to merely appear as thought they were doing their best to mitigate the spread of COVID and protect employees from exposure. In reality, temperature scanners did not function properly, often producing false positive readings, consequently sending workers home to self quarantine, leading to a loss of pay and financial insecurity. In many cases employees who desperately needed this income to house and feed their families gamed the scanners by putting ice on their foreheads prior to entry. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that management did not share the collected data with employees. In some cases, companies instituted an ADA legal loophole that allowed them to suppress disclosure to employees on the number of infections, who was infected, or who had contact with infected staff. This erosion of trust led to community tracing where employees created informal systems to alert each other as to who may have been infected, etc., ultimately transferring the burden of healthcare onto the workers themselves.

In a 2022 article in the International Law Review, Aloisi, & DeStefano discuss “The Pandemic Panopticon”. The term panopticon has its roots in Jeremy Bentham’s prison architecture and Michel Focult’s work in sociology. TPP is a psychological phenomenon where just the thought of being watched elicits a self-compliance of the observed. The observer, who is typically an authority figure, has immense asymmetrical power and the unprecedented and accelerated adoption of smart technologies into the workplace during the COVID crisis led to a recursive, digital panoptic structure. Proximity bracelets, RFID tags, facial recognition and mask detection scanners, and even sub-dermal micro-chip implants allowed management to pull data on nearly every aspect of an employee’s time on task, spacial proximity, activity level, and bio-markers determining fitness for duty. The worker became permanently visible while the company hid behind digital obscurity.

Technologies traditionally have been measured in terms of sustainability on metrics that are based on circular economy, energy efficiency and limited environmental impact. The “Post Pandemic Filter” as presented by Chen, & Chiu in the Journal of Digital Health 2022, allows us to see the “sustainability pillars” that determine which smart technologies for healthcare remain positioned in the workplace, why they were resilient and how the measure of what is or is not deemed sustainable has been re-assessed due to the need for cost effective and irreplaceable solutions. For example, a device that can temperature scan 1,000 people at a time is better than that which can only scan 1. If said device can also interface with other technologies, like determining spacial proximity of workers on the factory floor, then it has more value and is more difficult to remove. If an analog, or “dumb” methods of measuring health markers is more cost efficient than a technical one, then the analog method wins. Global instability of supply chains and inflation play an important role in how these technologies are constructed, scale and remain operational. Global developments such as chip shortages and raised costs have seen the pre-pandemic concerns of “legality and privacy” morph into “easiest to produce and maintain”, as the bell-weather for sustainability.

In conclusion, here we see the intersection of sustainability issues between social, economic, and technological domains. Hygiene Theater, The Pandemic Panopticon, and The Post Pandemic Filter crossover and collide where the vulnerabilities of the worker are the most visible. Ineffective technologies purely for show, undermined social sustainability and shifted responsibility back to the worker. Global market instability favored inexpensive and stable devices that were economically sustainable but failed to protect those at risk. Technical sustainability transformed from a framework of ethics and unobtrusiveness to speed, reliability and return on investment. These technologies still remain in the workplace, long after Covid. Initially deployed to keep the doors open during lockdown, they are now being repurposed as tools for continued surveillance, normalized by the pandemic. They have effectively been retro-fitted to analyze labor metrics instead of fevers, prioritizing productivity over burn-out and dehumanizing workers into mere data points that give off “digital exhaust”, ultimately used as prediction tools for future workplace policies that undermine worker solidarity and security. Covid may have passed, but the lasting harms to the most vulnerable and lowest paid workers in society not only remains, but continues to grow steadily.