By Patrick Wood
Big Tech call centers who require employees to work from home are mandating the installation of AI-equipped cameras in their most private areas to squeeze that last ounce of work out of them. Itâs like a micro-managed Amazon warehouse in your bedroom. â Technocracy News & Trends Editor Patrick Wood
Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nationâs largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found.
Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the worldâs largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workersâ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the workerâs family members, including minors. Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally, including 39,000 workers in Colombia.
The worker said that she signed the contract, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed, because she feared losing her job. She said that she was told by her supervisor that she would be moved off the Apple account if she refused to sign the document. She said the additional surveillance technology has not yet been installed.
The concerns of the workers, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, highlight a pandemic-related trend that has alarmed privacy and labor experts: As many workers have shifted to performing their duties at home, some companies are pushing for increasing levels of digital monitoring of their staff in an effort to recreate the oversight of the office at home.
The issue is not isolated to Teleperformanceâs workers in Colombia. The company states on its website that it offers similar monitoring through its TP Cloud Campus product, the software it uses to enable staff to work remotely in more than 19 markets. An official Teleperformance promotional video for TP Cloud Campus from January 2021 describes how it uses âAI to monitor clean desk policy and fraudâ among its remote workers by analyzing camera feeds. And in its latest earnings statement, released in June, Teleperformance said it has shifted 240,000 of its approximately 380,000 employees to working from home thanks to the TP Cloud Campus product.
âSurveillance at home has really been normalized in the context of the pandemic,â said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings. âCompanies see a lot of benefit in putting in software to do all kinds of monitoring they would have otherwise expected their human managers to do, but the reality is that itâs much more intrusive than surveillance conducted by a boss.â
Teleperformance spokesman Mark Pfeiffer said that the company is âconstantly looking for ways to enhance the Teleperformance Colombia experience for both our employees and our customers, with privacy and respect as key factors in everything we do.â
âWe are committed to fair practices, equality, inclusion, diversity, non-discrimination, labor sustainability, ethics, and transparency,â Pfeiffer said, âand we will continue to do everything we can to uphold these values for both our teams and all our key stakeholders.â