Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Economy and Infrastructure Committee

Inquiry into Workplace Surveillance

John LISTER (Werribee) (10:54): As a newly minted member of a committee, it gives me great pleasure to speak to the committee reports that are before the house. In particular I would like to focus on the report by the Economy and Infrastructure Committee on the inquiry into workplace surveillance. Many people during the pandemic developed a habit of moving their mouse side to side every now and then as they were working from home. That little innocuous action I always found quite strange. Talking to a lot of my friends – because in teaching we were still face to face in many circumstances – in those professions, they said that it was quite a strange feeling being at home and feeling like they were being monitored.

The committee’s inquiry into what the surveillance driving this monitoring means for our workforce is a particularly important thing to explore. Surveillance can take many forms, as the inquiry went into, but of particular interest to my community is the way monitoring and data collection can be done remotely while employees are working from home. That personal and private space has very much become merged in those last few years. It is no secret that work from home is more common and is a feature of the way people work in Wyndham. In the by-election I knocked on a lot of doors, and I found even at lunchtime there were people who were working from home. Despite threats from different political parties around working from home and this arrangement, I think it is particularly important for our community. What concerns me, though, is the boundaries being blurred between accepted workplace practices over the last century and what we are facing now. While data on a local level is hard to glean when it comes to the number of people working from home, ABS data from 2021 shows around 21 per cent of the population work from home, which is up from 4.7 per cent in 2016, so I think it is particularly important to reflect on this inquiry in that context.

I want to particularly reflect on finding 1 and finding 3 of the inquiry, looking at the idea of workplace surveillance having a long history, whether that be your punch cards going in and out of a factory or even having supervisors on the factory floor. This emerged out of the industrial revolution as a way for workplaces to monitor the output and productivity of their workers. There is a lot to be said for the importance of this, but the report does go into a little bit of some of the more modern concerns around this. It was not that long ago that I was teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four, and some of the reflections by the committee around the way that workplace technologies can be used to monitor employees’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours and make that personal data more visible to employers were quite disturbing. The other thing that I think is quite counterproductive, particularly for industry, is how this contributes to something called productivity paranoia, which Microsoft explored in 2022, where leaders in companies said that they had trouble believing workers were productive when working remotely. I think these are important things to reflect on as work from home becomes more of a feature of our economy, so I welcome that finding from the committee.

The other finding, finding 3, which I found particularly interesting in this context, looks at the fact that employers are not particularly transparent about their surveillance practices and employees are unaware of the extent of that surveillance. To be brief on this, I would say it is particularly important for employers to be open about this. I was disappointed to see that they were very few employer groups that contributed to what is quite an important inquiry when it comes to their work and the increasing expectations that that home space becomes part of their business.

Not wanting to pre-empt the government’s response to this inquiry report, I would, however, encourage workers across Victoria and particularly my community to engage with their unions – particularly those people who work in professional services – and ask that question of their employer around privacy and the use of those monitoring systems and how that data is kept. I would like to thank those unions and union bodies that contributed to the inquiry and also those employer groups, particularly the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as I am particularly happy to see that one of our biggest employers contributed as well.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! As it is reconciliation week, I will suspend the house to enable all members to attend the welcome to country in the gardens.

Sitting suspended 10:59 am until 11:28 am.