By Stuart Russell
Jittery about the worsening economic situation and threats to its authority, Big Brother is arriving increasingly at our workplaces and homes. Bosses and the state in Australia and other western countries are intensifying their invasive surveillance techniques, in order to collect more information on workers and "enemies of the state".
In NSW, for instance, changes will be put to the state parliament later this year which will legalise a dramatic increase in the use of spy cameras in the workplace.
Employers will then need a magistrate court order to install secret cameras to spy on workers suspected of theft or other crimes. However, the use of visible cameras will not require any court order. A voluntary code of practice might be developed to regulate their use.
The new legislation will supposedly prevent the use of cameras to monitor work performance and would outlaw surveillance in toilets, showers and changing rooms.
These changes have been recommended by a tripartite working party of employer, government and trade union representatives. The NSW Labor Council believed the use of workplace cameras was too widespread and therefore guidelines were necessary.
In the United States, a new American Civil Liberties Union report says that more than 20 million workers are subject to electronic surveillance — up from 8 million in 1990. Workers are monitored by computer terminals, time clocks, telephone keypads and other devices.
Meanwhile in Belgium, for more than a year the police have been using postal workers, taxi drivers and bus drivers as well as other public service workers as informants. A recent issue of the Belgian French-language left weekly Solidaire reports that these workers in a number of Belgian towns are required to report to the police anything "suspicious" they observe.
The police have sold this campaign to public service workers on the spurious grounds that it concerns their own safety, they could help find lost children, they could collect information about illegal migrants and cash-in-hand workers and be part of the "crusade against crime".
This latest initiative is part of a concerted campaign by the Belgian state to collect more information on those it perceives to be threats to its authority. More than 400,000 Turks and their acquaintances have already been targeted by police.
But unlike in NSW, the Belgian union movement is actively resisting such incursions into the right to privacy.
Why is there stepped-up surveillance in the workplace? Workplace theft does indeed occur (largely as a form of revenge against poor working conditions or wages), which does cut into the profit margin. But the Australian Institute of Criminology reports that it is comparatively rarer than thefts by customers.
If employers were sincerely concerned about theft, they would install their cameras in the boardrooms and executive offices, where far more damaging big time white collar crime occurs every day, such as fraud, tax evasion, pollution offences, corruption, crimes against consumers and health and safety violations.
Moreover, spy cameras may not bring about their intended results, since such devices often deflect or displace "criminal" or anti-social activity, rather than reducing or eliminating it.
The increased use of spy cameras on the ground of fighting theft is simply a pretext. The real target is the union and political activity which challenges capitalist control much more profoundly than small-time theft.
As well, a more vigilant eye on workers will force greater productivity. A theft charge is an excellent pretext to sack workers, which facilitates the drive to downsize the work force and increases profits.
It is also much easier to hand over a theft prosecution to the police, rather than fight protracted and costly proceedings before industrial relations commissions against disgruntled sacked workers. Moreover, now that legal aid is no longer available for unfair dismissal matters, workers will be less likely to use such recourse.
Governments and business are aware that their ability to escalate attacks on our living standards depends on preventing a serious fight back. Hence the desire for more surveillance by individual employers, the police, ASIO, private security and other bodies — in order to take repressive measures to counteract it.
In recent years there has been a proliferation in the use of closed circuit cameras in Bankstown, Cabramatta and other "problem areas". There has been little opposition to their introduction, largely because we have learned to accept their presence in the belief that they deter theft and other crime, and due to the refusal of civil libertarians and the trade unions to fight against this invasion of our privacy and violation of the presumption of innocence.
Workers are already under the constant eye of foremen and bosses, which should be more than sufficient to deter theft. A better solution to the "theft problem" in the workplace would be to significantly improve conditions of employment and salaries for all, and launch a serious campaign against the crime committed at the top of the ladder.
We should have the right to be watched as little as possible at work, and therefore all closed-circuit cameras should be banned at work.
That Belgian public service workers are collaborating with their bosses to collect information to the detriment of other workers is a basic violation of union and workers' solidarity. Unions should be fighting and resisting assaults on workplace privacy.
Governments already have a panoply of surveillance techniques at their disposal, including phone and fax tapping, mail and e-mail interception, electronic bugs and human informants, all of which violate our basic human rights. We can expect the police and security services in Australia to seek recourse to the more innovative information-gathering techniques used in Belgium in the future, as they intensify their battle against trade unions, anti-government activity and "anti-social elements".