It was late 2004 when Les Lilley, then a 34-year employee of Canadian National Railway Co., received some troubling information from a co-worker. The man, a maintenance worker, said he had discovered a hidden camera inside a vent at a CN facility in Winnipeg.
"It was a big shock," says Mr. Lilley, who at the time was chairman of the union local. He catalogued other hidden cameras and soon the union filed a grievance. At the time, a CN spokesman said the cameras were installed to track the origin of unexplained equipment breakdowns.
Mr. Lilley and the union saw it differently: "It was about productivity."
In the end, after firing and then reinstating Mr. Lilley, CN agreed to turf the cameras. Yet Mr. Lilley, now a regional vice-president of Canadian Auto Workers Local 100, says distrust remains.
"What's the mood?" he asks. "It's terrible, like Big Brother watching over your shoulder all the time."
Combine the availability of inexpensive monitoring technology with the desire by some employers to know what workers are up to at all times, and the era of the Orwellian office is upon us. Cameras in the hallway, snoopware on the office computer, worker drug testing, GPS in the company car ... the East German Stasi never had it so good.
Employees are increasingly under watch, sometimes without their knowledge, and recent months have delivered troubling examples of new ways companies are seeking to gain insight into workers' lives.
Loblaw Cos. Ltd. announced last month that it has started using criminal-record checks to evaluate job candidates in an effort to reduce employee theft.
In January, the Alberta Court of Appeals ruled that Kellogg Brown & Root had been within its rights to administer a drug test and then fire an oil-patch employee after he tested positive for marijuana. This could open the door to increased workplace drug testing in some industries.
Last year, a government office in Malaysia announced its intention to use security cameras to bust slackers. "We would know if they are adhering to office etiquette or playing truant, and we can also gauge if they are disciplined at work," a government official told a local newspaper.
In Britain, a January survey by the Policy Studies Institute revealed that 50 per cent of the country's workers face some form of monitoring, be it by camera or work computer.
Also in January, the British press reported that Microsoft had filed for a patent on a "unique monitoring system" that would use a computer to capture the blood pressure, heart rate, facial expressions, body temperature and respiration rate of a worker. Microsoft wrote that the system could "automatically detect frustration or stress in the user" and then "offer and provide assistance."
Aside from raising the spectre of a more alarming form of the "blue screen of death," a term used to describe an error that causes a Windows computer to shut down, the filing hints at the next generation of office intrusion: biometrics.
"The next thing will probably be a fingerprint reader to log into computer systems [instead of using a password]," says David Fraser, a privacy lawyer with McInnes Cooper in Halifax. "You can see how a lot of these technologies are really convenient. But a lot of people would say, 'I don't want anybody to have my thumbprint.' "
Elia Zureik, professor emeritus of sociology at Queen's University in Kingston and a researcher with the school's Surveillance Project, says workplace surveillance creates "tension between property rights and human rights and dignity. ...
"Various studies show that employees don't seem to mind [being monitored] as long as they are consulted," he says. "What they really reject is being snooped upon or violated if the employer is surreptitiously collecting data about them."
