Watching Care Work: Surveillance Technology, Power, and Equity in Unregistered Care Labour

Unregistered care workers — personal support workers and private companions — occupy one of the most structurally vulnerable positions in Canada's care labour landscape, yet remain largely absent from scholarly and policy debates about workplace surveillance. This study applies Carol Bacchi's "What's the Problem Represented to Be?" (WPR) interpretive framework, informed by Wajcman's feminist technoscience perspective, to examine how surveillance technologies are problematized across residential long-term care, hospital, community/agency, and private home care sectors. Through systematic analysis of policy documents, employment agreements, organizational protocols and (social) media organized we ask whose interests are served by dominant surveillance framings, what is silenced, and how existing gendered and racialized labour inequities are reproduced or deepened through technological governance. Findings will produce a fact sheet on surveillance for PSWs as well as a cross-sector comparative analysis and theoretical framework for responsible, equity-centred surveillance in care labour, laying the groundwork for a future SSHRC Insight Grant application.

Keywords: care work, labour tracking, surveillance technology, structural oppression

Motivation

Post pandemic, there has been an increase in care technology, from electronic visit verification to cameras and app-based monitoring. Yet the implications for workers is poorly understood. Drawing on feminist geography and care labour scholarship, we will examine the social impacts and ethics of surveillance technology on care worker well-being and labour rights in different sectors of person-facing, unregistered care work (i.e., residential LTC, community/agency, private). 

Novelty

This study is novel in four key ways: First, it centers unregistered care workers (i.e., personal support workers, private companions) as primary subjects of labour surveillance. Unregistered care workers are understudied, provincially overseen, and a structurally vulnerable labour workforce. Berridge and Grigorovich (2022) describe that with the racial and gendered dynamics of this workforce (Sloane et al., 2021), such surveillance technologies may reinforce racist and gendered labour inequalities by extending the power of employers to control low-wage BIPOC women workers by undermining their labour rights and protections (van Doorn, 2017; Glaser, 2021;Mateescu, 2021; Williams et al., 2021). Second, it provides a cross-sector comparative analysis of surveillance technologies across residential long-term care, community/agency care, and private care settings, revealing how surveillance operates variedly across distinct organizational and employment contexts. Third, it examines surveillance technologies not only as tools for “risk management” and efficiency, but as mechanisms of labour discipline and governance that shape worker autonomy, movement, and accountability, possibly deepening existing inequities. Work by Berridge and Grigorovich (2022), Bowen et al., (2013), Hall et al. (2019) shows that care workers worry technologies used to monitor residents could also be used to sanction workers if used to monitor their performance. Further, care workers are concerned that this surveillance could undermine care relationships (Berridge et al., 2019). Fourth, our study integrates ethical, social, and health perspectives to develop a theoretical framework for understanding and guiding responsible surveillance practices in care labour contexts; especially where workers may have limited knowledge of or control over how data about their labour is collected and used.

Objectives/goals

1. To articulate and compare several different labour contexts and organizational cultures that employ unregistered care workers.
2. To understand the landscape of technologies used for care worker labour surveillance or work tracking and the stated purpose of their necessity.
3. To describe how care worker surveillance data is used in varying care worker employment or care work organization structures (residential, hospital, community, private home).
4. To develop a theoretical framework for responsible, equity-centred surveillance in care labour considering:
   1. social and health impacts of surveillance technology used in varying care labour settings;
   2. the varied use of surveillance and tracking data collected about care workers; and 
   3. the ethics of surveillance, particularly when those surveilled are not informed about the ways they are surveilled and how data about their labour is used.  
   4. What responsible surveillance in care labour might look like.

This framework will also inform a future SSHRC Insight Grant application.

Methodology

This study employs Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) approach as its primary interpretive methodology, informed by Wajcman’s (2010) feminist technoscience perspective as a complementary theoretical lens. WPR treats policy documents, employment agreements, organizational protocols, surveillance technology frameworks and (social) media not as neutral descriptions of care labour problems, but as representations that actively constitute what counts as a “problem,” for whom, and with what consequences (Bacchi, 2009). Rather than asking whether surveillance technology “works,” WPR directs our analytical attention to how surveillance is problematized across different care sector contexts — what assumptions about care workers, risk, and accountability are embedded in these representations, what goes unquestioned, and whose interests are served by particular problem framings. 

Wajcman’s (2010) feminist technoscience perspective deepens this analysis by insisting that surveillance technologies are not neutral instruments but socially and politically constituted artefacts that encode and reproduce existing gendered and racialized power relations — a dimension that WPR’s document focus alone may not fully surface. Together, these frameworks direct attention to both the textual construction of surveillance as a legitimate governance practice and the material-political conditions that make certain technological arrangements possible and others unthinkable.  

In practice, we will apply Bacchi’s six analytical questions beginning with What is the “problem” of care worker surveillance represented to be? What presuppositions underlie this representation? How has this representation come about? etc. A Wajcman-informed reading will run alongside this, asking how each technology’s design and deployment reflects and reinforces the devaluation of feminized and racialized labour. 

We will draw from four document types across each care sector: publicly available organizational policies and employment agreements, provincial regulatory frameworks, surveillance technology vendor materials, and relevant (social) media coverage. For formal documents, we will target approximately 10–15 sources per sector; social media and media coverage will be collected purposively until thematic saturation is reached.Selection will prioritize documents produced within the last decade to capture the period of most rapid technological change in care labour contexts. 

Sources will be organized and coded in Zotero, using tags that track sector context/location, problem representation type, technology type, and the structural categories — employment relationship, race, gender, citizenship status, etc. — that intersect with each framing. Findings will be contrasted across sectors to map dominant representations of surveillance in care labour and to develop a framework for what responsible, equity-centred surveillance might look like.

We will submit two peer-reviewed articles: the first, a comparative analysis of surveillance problem representations in care labour workplaces, targeted at Gender, Place and Culture (Worth); the second, a theoretical paper examining how surveillance technologies threaten PSW self-determination and well-being, targeted at Leisure Sciences (Lopez). The Research Associate will be invited to co-author one of these papers. The research team also plans to present research at a national conference, possibly the Canadian Association of Work & Labour Studies 2027 meeting (TBC, funding by Worth/Lopez).

Recognizing that PSWs are rarely recipients of research that directly concerns them, we will co-produce a plain-language fact sheet — "Caring in Monitored Spaces: Notes about Surveillance" — designed for PSW workers in residential, hospital, community, and private home settings. Written in accessible language and using infographics, this resource will explain what surveillance technologies employers may use, what data is collected, and what workers have the right to know. Distribution will occur via social media and through sector networks and community partners identified during the project.

A critical approach to care labour recognizes the deeply classed, gendered, and racialized nature of caring. We will employ various EDI considerations to support individuals who experience harm, loss of agency, and oppression associated with caring work. In particular, we will engage intersectional and anti-oppressive theoretical frameworks and concepts (e.g., disablement, anti-racism, sexism, ageism, necropolitics, and migration). We are interested in the ways surveillance technology both bridges and deepens divides of equity. Who is inequitably impacted by surveillance technology? What is the aim of surveillance in care labour and who holds the power in that practice? 
 
We approach EDI with the understanding that labels of identity are limiting and political. This said, we will employ Spivak’s "Strategic Essentialism" (1988) to acknowledge that labels essentialize, yet are needed within the structure of language to operationalize justice-oriented research practices. We intend to recruit a graduate student who identifies as having a financial need, whose research is aligned with the goals of this research to advance their own professional development, and identifies with any/all of the following: as a woman/nonbinary, of colour, first gen. student of higher ed., an international student, or migrant–here we recognize how lived experience productively informs research. Including a range of care organizations/agencies (developed from Lopez’s existing connections), diverse care worker demographics, varied areas/geographies of population and resource density in our analyses also recognizes EDI; considering funding structures across care settings also may create varied experiences of surveillance, agency in caring practices, and resident ratios that affect the conditions of care.

Acknowledgements

This project is funded by the Global Futures Fund (GFF) and supported by the Future of Work Institute.

References

Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What's the problem represented to be? Pearson Australia.

Berridge, C., & Grigorovich, A. (2022). Algorithmic harms and digital ageism in the use of surveillance technologies in nursing homes. Frontiers in Sociology, 7, 957246.

Berridge, C., Halpern, J., & Levy, K. (2019). Cameras on beds: The ethics of surveillance in nursing home rooms. American Journal of Bioethics, 10, 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/23294515.2019.1568320

Bowen, M. E., Wingrave, C. A., Klanchar, A., & Craighead, J. (2013). Tracking technology: lessons learned in two health care sites. Technology and Health Care, 21(3), 191-197.

Glaser, A. L. (2021). Uberized care: Employment status, surveillance, and technological erasure in the home health care sector. Anthropology of Work Review, 42, 24–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12215

Hall, A., Brown Wilson, C., Stanmore, E., & Todd, C. (2019). Moving beyond ‘safety’versus ‘autonomy’: a qualitative exploration of the ethics of using monitoring technologies in long-term dementia care. BMC geriatrics, 19(1), 145.

Mateescu, A. (2021). Electronic visit verification: The weight of surveillance and the fracturing of care. Data & Society. https://datasociety.net/library/electronic-visit-verification-the-weight-of-surveillance-and-the-f…

Sloane, P. D., Yearby, R., Konetzka, R. T., Li, Y., Espinoza, R., & Zimmerman, S. (2021). Addressing systemic racism in nursing homes: A time for action. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 22, 886–892. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2021.02.023

Spivak, G. (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Larry Grossberg and Cary Nelson, (pp. 66–111). Macmillan.

van Doorn, N. (2017). Platform labor: On the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the 'on-demand' economy. Information, Communication & Society, 20, 898–914. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194

Wajcman, J. (2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–154.

Williams, P., McDonald, P., & Mayes, R. (2021). Recruitment in the gig economy: Attraction and selection on digital platforms. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 32, 4136–4162. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2020.1867613