COVID has accelerated automation of labour and has forced monitoring of workers and their bodies. This excessive collection of data of labour not only brings in the question of violations of their right to privacy but other issues of labour rights and their violations by the platforms. The forceful collection of data from the labour leads to many questions of ownership of the data, the impact of this data on their wages, work and their personal life. The never-ending question of will this data be used to replace the worker with a machine still looms us? In this 3 part series, we have experts Aditi Surie, Urvashi Aneja, Anupam Guha, explaining these issues in detail. These episodes are based on the webinar “Rise of Employee Surveillance post-COVID and Labour Rights Violations” conducted by Suno India on 30 May 2020.

 

In this final episode of the series, the host, Srinivas Kodali speaks with Dr Anupam Guha, an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay. 

Do listen to the previous episodes with Aditi Surie, a social science researcher at Indian Institute of Human Settlements and Urvashi Aneja, Founding Director of Tandem Research.