Contested Transparency: Digital Monitoring Technologies and Worker Voice

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics have notably expanded employers’ monitoring and surveillance capabilities. While new digital monitoring (DM) technologies facilitate the accurate observability of work effort, their productivity and broader welfare implications remain subject of debate. In this context, many countries confer information, consultation and co-determination rights to employee representation (ER) bodies on matters related to workplace organization and the introduction of new technologies, which could potentially discourage employers from making DM investments. Using a cross-sectional sample of more than 21000 European establishments, we find instead that establishments with ER are more likely to utilize DM technologies than establishments without ER. We also document a positive effect of ER on DM utilization in the context of a localrandomization regression discontinuity analysis that exploits size-contingent policy rules governing the operation of ER bodies in Europe. We rationalize this unexpected finding through the lens of a theoretical model in which shared governance via ER creates organizational safeguards that mitigate workers’ control-averse responses to monitoring.

Keywords: Digital monitoring technologiees, control aversion, worker voice, employee representation