With the advent of technology and the innovations introduced by the Jobs Act, the employer has today increased the power of control in respect of the worker and of his activities. Much of the business processes take place, in fact, right on networks and technological tools that the employer, and his system administrators can easily control. If the first workers’ control was limited to a period of time or to a company area through cameras or bugs, today, instead, control by the electronics is not limited neither by space nor time.
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The control mode evolve, almost naturally, hand in hand with technology. This is also noticeable in the sensitive area of the control carried out by the employer against an employee, both when operating within the premises of the company, both when it carries out its duties outside the company walls.
Evolution rules and procedures for
the theme of the worker control to the right (but also for the technology) is a typically developed theme in the seventies. The Workers’ Statute, among other things, sought to restrict and regulate carefully, in Article 4, for control that had already spread from the Second World War forward and which could undermine the dignity of workers directly.
They were three, then the typical mode control.
The first was the collection of files, filling out cards, the catalog of information that was obtained, usually, by the police or by the parishes. The sensational case of the files of Fiat, revealed in front of the Magistrate of Turin during a trivial labor dispute, made clear that the control of information (in particular political affiliation, religious beliefs, family and non-family habits) could help control the “corporate life” in a period of great immigration in northern businesses and troubling trade union unrest.
The second method of control was more “physical” and structural: think of the placement of the fashion workstations that all employees were visible, or the installation of walls glass that would allow real-time monitoring of employees or even the insertion of “spies” and “controllers” on the staff so referred it to the holder of certain behaviors in violation of company assets or problems arising in the workplace.
the third control mode, which appeared in the late seventies and it was not widespread because they are still very expensive, but that represented the glue between outdated methods of control and idea-art surveillance, was operated through the camera. From cameras that reflected in real time, and not memorized data, it is passed to increasingly sophisticated tools that allowed to keep the information for a long time and to recover them in case of need. The cameras were joined, in the eighties, instruments of control of telephone exchanges or business phones and the mileage of the cars in use granted to employees.
The Workers’ Statute was also thought to regulate similar types of control in order to avoid discrimination in the workplace and damage the dignity of the controlled entity. It not focused on those tools but provided with “open” definitions, even future control methods and technologies that would soon have arisen.
What will change with the advent of technology
the advent of technology, in the nineties, completely changed the view and the type of control. Beside the methods already mentioned, it began to make verification tasks on your computer granted to employees, the first mobile phones and, after two thousand (with the spread of the Internet on a large scale even in Italy), the network traffic.
the difference between the modern surveillance (by the advent of the Internet to date) compared to that of the seventies is essentially two aspects: i) the power invasive and ii) the difficulty of separating the control data related to the work task by the uptake of private data.
the first step is simple to understand: today control can be done about it. On the computer and its use, the e-mails received and sent, on the browsing history of web sites and accessed web sites, on sent and received messages on your smartphone, on the chat conversations, the geographical positioning of the subject if he has activated a GPS, and so on. innovative instruments such as the drones also allow to overcome the physical barriers of control.
The employer then has, today, an enormous power of control that is provided by the technologies and the fact that most of the business activities of employees are conducted on precisely those networks and technologies that he, and his system administrators can easily control.
If the first, then, a camera or a bug or a “physical” controller had a still limited control power (in a period of time, or an area of the company), control today by the ‘e is not limited neither by space nor time. Can be triggered in real-time (while the employee works), may be deferred (when the employee is not present), may be made on the instruments used during the day and then returned.
The second aspect is anch ‘it is very important for the law and for privacy. Before it was easy to separate the control of corporate data from that of the private data. Today information technology, and the use of computers as a daily personal tool often in the company, make this separation difficult one. In a nutshell: the today controls tend to “trawl” every information, and then in the care of those who control separate data related to business duties as clearly personal data. Remember that, for example, browsing web sites can reveal intimate aspects (political, health, sexual) the employee simply viewing the content of the site which you are connected.
Concluding remarks
in a technological framework so changed, the right effort to regulate every aspect, especially when different standards overlap. In the late nineties the advent, in Italy, of a privacy law (leaving untouched the discipline of the Workers ‘Statute) has strengthened employee protection but at the same time created a bit’ of a conflict with a jurisprudence on “defensive controls” that was emerging and that allowed the specific actions of the employer to control to protect the company’s assets.
the recent reforms, then, of the Statute of Workers occurred with jobs Act, have further changed the picture, creating interpreter different coordination problems between the provisions . It therefore seems appropriate to deal in detail, methodically and gradually, both the technical aspects of modern controls both the discipline of the Workers’ Statute, privacy regulations and case-law on the employer’s control power.
Staff Writer reports
This article is part of the file Jobs Act and digital controls created as part of the partnership between Wolters Kluwer and Vodafone.
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