Do you spend more time on YouTube than on Teams? Your boss probably knows this better than you. As a result of the massive move towards telework over the past two years, the tools employers use to ensure workers are on the job have become much more refined, to the point that governments are encouraged to take action to regulate this practice. .
There are no official statistics in Quebec on the use of monitoring software at work, but these tools are more widespread than ever, experts fear. “It is logical to believe that spy tools are used more today,” says M.e Andréane Giguère, senior lawyer specializing in employment and labor law at Norton Rose Fulbright.
Statistics from elsewhere confirm the trend. A survey of 2,000 employers around the world last spring by security app maker ExpressVPN found that 78% of them use software to monitor their employees.
The use of such software is so widespread that they have recently been given a name: ” bossware “, a word that will obviously have to be francized given the existence of this software for spying on employees in Quebec as well.
Software that is harmful. According to ExpressVPN, three out of four employers use it to analyze the content of emails, calls or internal company messaging and thus determine the level of productivity of individuals. Almost one out of two employers (46%) uses the information obtained from this monitoring to prevent the formation of a possible union. The same proportion say they draw on these data to justify a dismissal.
However, 83% of companies surveyed agree that this practice raises ethical questions. The first: where does office life end and private life begin when working from home? If the work tools belong to the employer and if everything we do goes through their servers, “there is no room for privacy,” says Ms.e Giguere.
There is also no real recourse for workers, she laments. “Surveillance software evolves much faster than the law. In case law, we have a few cases of breaches of privacy in the workplace, caused for example by security cameras, but these are very specific cases. »
Ontario takes the lead
The Labor Code in Canada is a provincial matter and varies from province to province. For example, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta require companies to disclose what data they collect internally and how they use it. But this remains a requirement imposed in a more general context of the use by companies of digital data.
In mid-October, Ontario became the first Canadian province to directly address the issue of workplace espionage. His government passed a law requiring companies with 25 or more employees to have a clear policy on the electronic surveillance they conduct. Companies that actively monitor their employees have 30 days to inform them of the nature of this monitoring.
It will thus be possible to determine which employers track the movements of their workers thanks to the GPS coordinates of the telephones they provide. We will also know which bosses comb through the content of emails exchanged by their servers to find out which employees are the least productive.
This is a first step towards better supervision of surveillance in the workplace, but it does not provide workers with any recourse. The Ontario law should still inspire Quebec companies to also adopt a public policy on electronic surveillance, says Ms.e Andreane Giguere.
“A policy on the proper use of IT tools would be an excellent thing to adopt,” says Ms.e Guigere. Technology is moving faster than the law, so transparency is important. »
The United States attacks
Spying on employees is something that annoys the US worker advocate, who in early November criticized US companies’ use of such software. “Constant, painstaking management and surveillance using computerized tools threatens the very basis of workers’ rights,” National Labor Relations Committee General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said in writing.
Mme Abruzzo recalled that, according to the US Labor Code, it is “illegal” to monitor employees in this way, because it “violates their rights”. She is particularly concerned about new popular software in the United States that randomly captures screens on employees’ computer workstations, takes a picture of their face or records their conversations.
The American president, Joe Biden, has even been challenged to prohibit the abusive use of this software, at the very least so that it is impossible to use them to prevent the formation of trade unions and other initiatives of grouping of workers. Labor rights advocates cite cases where video conferencing platforms automatically alert companies when virtual meetings have more than 100 participants.