As Kresge observes, unions in the U.S. are currently in the throes of negotiating for limitations on how data can be used by employers and against the unnecessary uses of countless surveillance technologies in the workplace

Productivity scores give the impression that they are objective and impartial and can be trusted because they are technologically derived – but are they? How the proprietary systems arrive at their scores is often as unclear to managers as it is to workers, says Kresge.

Amazon warehouse workers have criticized management’s use of technology to closely monitor their productivity. They could look to past examples of unions addressing similar concerns, says UC Berkeley researcher Lisa Kresge.

“Basically, these are largely untested technologies with virtually no oversight,” said Lisa Kresge, research and policy associate at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, who studies the intersection of technological change and inequality. “That’s unprecedented in the workplace.”

Annette Bernhardt, Lisa Kresge, and Reem Suleiman of the UC Berkeley Labor Center argue that companies should be required to reveal “which activities will be monitored, the method of monitoring, the data that will be gathered, the times and places where the monitoring will occur, and the purpose for monitoring and why it is necessary.”

“The lesson of self-checkout is that all this technology still requires a substantial amount of human labor to back up these systems,” said Lisa Kresge, research and policy associate at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.