Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am quite happy to hear the reply. I emphasise that this is not meant to be disrespectful because the Minister of State is here. I do not want to be giving out to the person who turned up about the person who did not but I do want it recorded that this is not ideal.

I will start by thanking the Financial Services Union, FSU, for the work it is doing in this area and Dr. Michelle O'Sullivan for her research. We all know that surveillance of workers is not new. We have had punching in and punching out since the start of the industrial revolution. People have been recording their time in and time out on their phones. I used to do it myself when I worked in a union. However, in the post-pandemic world the nature and scale of this technological surveillance has increased massively. It was described by John O'Connell, the general secretary of the FSU, when he appeared before the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment this week, as being akin to social media, which is something that took off very fast and got ahead of us. Now we are scrabbling behind it to try to put in place checks and balances. It moved very rapidly.

This surveillance of workers has moved very rapidly, partly because more workers are working remotely, but even before Covid and the change in work it created, it had been growing at an alarming rate. The surveillance has reached new levels with the development of artificial intelligence, AI, and machine learning technology. There have been reports of the use of AI and machine learning tools to monitor workers' activity and body language through wearable technology and cameras in the workplace to deduce performance, attention, focus and whether they are sad, stressed, happy and so forth. The data provided to managers are beyond terrifying. Several members of the committee referenced George Orwell's work Nineteen Eighty-Fourwhen we were discussing this. There is something somewhat dystopian about the way workers can be monitored.

In 2021, I raised these concerns with the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and I was told that these matters are not covered by employment rights laws or employment terms law. New research from the FSU has shed significant light on the practice of technological surveillance. This research found that a quarter of respondents reported that their employer had increased data collection on their work since they started remote working and over half felt that surveillance work was a violation of privacy. This has to be considered in light of the fact that productivity was not going down. Productivity remained the same. To me, the best way to assess if workers are in fact doing their job is to determine whether the output is still the same. If the output is still the same, why does an employer need to know what their heart rate was at 2 o'clock in the afternoon or if they were excessively blinking or whatever it is? This technology monitors people's eyes and heart rate.

Two thirds of those surveyed felt that surveillance was demoralising and indicated that it increased their stress levels. That is fairly self-explanatory. If people feel they are being watched in that oppressive way, it will increase their stress levels. We cannot adopt a wait-and-see policy. That was done with social media and regulating big technology and look at where we landed. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that in America, the White House is hosting a forum for workers whose employers use automated systems to monitor them. They are planning a broader effort to ask Americans what priorities their government should pursue regarding AI in terms of new regulation on emerging workplace technologies. I would welcome the views of the Minister of State on that.

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