New Digital Infrastructures of Workplace Health and Safety

Executive Summary

This essay, part of the Watching the Watchers series on privacy and surveillance under COVID-19, examines how American employers responded to the pandemic in a regulatory vacuum. With OSHA declining to issue mandatory standards and offering only voluntary guidance, responsibility for workplace safety fell to individual states and employers, producing wildly uneven policies. The result was a rapid spread of the disease in certain workplaces: by July 2020, over 700 healthcare workers had died from the virus and an estimated 38,000 meatpacking workers had been infected. Since March 2020, OSHA had received over 5,000 reports of COVID-related health and safety violations but had found wrongdoing in only one case.

In this vacuum, employers turned to measuring, monitoring, and data collection rather than more effective structural changes, deploying tools such as temperature checks, Amazon's camera-based Distance Assistant, Ford's proximity-sensing wearable, digital contact-tracing apps built on the Apple-Google API, and, in the NBA's return-to-play plan, a biometric ring providing an "illness probability score."

Nguyen argues these tools normalize workplace surveillance in the name of public health while emphasizing individual behavior over safer conditions. Participation is rarely voluntary, especially for low-wage workers, and the tools shift accountability and cost onto employees, function as disciplinary mechanisms (as in a case at an Amazon facility in Shakopee, Minnesota), and disproportionately burden lower-income and minority workers already subject to heightened surveillance. The essay concludes that the integration of these data-centric technologies into the workplace carries significant, largely unaddressed privacy implications that are likely to outlast the pandemic itself.