Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class by Brishen Rogers

The realities faced by many US workers today—from sensor-packed warehouses that surveil workers, enforce punishing working conditions, and squash organizing efforts to apps that algorithmically manage workers, giving them little control or recourse on the job—affront both dignity and democracy. US workers today have weak bargaining power against their employers, leaving workers with little ability to resist technologies that alienate and dehumanize them on the job. How have we gotten here, and what can be done to catalyze us out of today’s unbearable status quo?

These are the kinds of questions that animate Brishen Rogers’s new monograph. Rogers is a law and technology scholar who sets out to chart the difficult history of just what has gone wrong with work in America. The book is equal parts labor law history and critical study of technology’s role in shaping working conditions. Too many analyses of labor and workplace technologies focus simply on their nexus with productivity. Rogers instead takes an explicit prolabor stance, tracing the role that workplace technologies play in reconfiguring class power: “US employers have increasingly used new technologies as tools of class domination, suppressing workers’ efforts to unionize or build other forms of associational power, and therefore keeping a lid on wages” (14).

The book covers remarkable ground, providing the reader with a detailed look at labor law history. This involves a charting of key prolabor gains, from the Depression era New Deal legislation, the reversal of those gains after World War II, and the further weakening of workers’ rights at the hands of the right wing in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. These genealogies are useful both in setting necessary context for the book’s analytical sections and in providing readers with a design material of sorts, showing an example of when workers had better working conditions and what it took to achieve them. These historical conditions are possible and may be strived for again, if conditions can be configured differently. Far from a dry look, Rogers crafts a historical narrative that makes the dense legal landscape accessible to newcomers while also providing a copious deck of endnotes over one hundred pages long for those wanting further details.

The crux of the book’s argument is that through technological development and through the degradation of work, corporations conspire to limit worker power and increase employer power. Finding ample examples from corporations familiar to many, including Amazon, Lyft, McDonald’s, Uber, and Walmart, to name a few, the book shows how data-driven technologies have created workplaces where workers are submitted to profound surveillance and regimes of ruthless productivity. The nature of work has also changed in what Rogers calls the “atomization of work,” where work is broken down into pieces and disintegrated from the traditional full-time job with benefits. Legal and regulatory systems overarch these corporate efforts, which can be maneuvered (or at times changed) to further garner employers’ accumulation of power at the denigration of worker power. The book carefully charts this coevolution of corporate and legal change to show how it has structurally shaped work in the United States. Central to contextualizing these changes is understanding how neoliberalism has created a perverse social reality, where the work relationship is viewed like any other contract: as a bargaining between equals. In reality, both legal history and common sense tell us that workers are vulnerable vis-à-vis employers and therefore require special legal and regulatory protection to ensure democratic workplaces, namely, protections so that they can collectively organize themselves and bargain for better working conditions.

Centered around these needs for collective organizing and action, the book offers two sets of recommendations, one for policy change and another for technological design. These recommendations advocate for change that fosters “economic democracy,” which Rogers introduces as a “political-economic system in which workers and citizens have genuine rights to participate in major decisions that affect their lives” (131). Rogers takes the reader on a speculative journey, imagining a future where unions have become the norm again and where unionization is something we all vote on in our workplaces each year. What if, when employers wished to implement a new piece of technology with surveillance capability, labor law required workers to sign off? What if a new union was able to create a virtual picket line on an employer’s website, notifying customers of workers’ grievances? What if unions in the same sector could merge, such that unified multifranchise unions of chain-store workers could take concerted action to improve the conditions in their entire industry? Rogers reminds us that these goals may seem dreamlike and fictive, but they are all working conditions that have existed before and could be possible again for US workers. They would require strong political will—and strong political organizing—to make the legislative and regulatory changes needed, but Rogers argues that such changes could help to dial back antilabor losses from the last several decades and make our workplaces more democratic again.

The book also proposes subjecting workplace data to more democratic control and oversight, suggesting data cooperatives or trusts, minimal data gathering, and even data abolition, when possible. This may seem far-fetched, but there are existing precedents in other contexts (e.g., the federal ban that prohibits employers and health insurance companies from gathering or using DNA data in decisions about health care coverage). Freedom from workplace data surveillance is essential to workplace democracy: workers must have spaces where they can convene and build what Rogers calls “associational power” if they have any hope of organizing. When there are no places in which to have a private conversation at work—whether you work in an Amazon warehouse or a fully remote workplace, where every word you speak or type can be monitored—the ability to organize is snuffed out before it even begins.

These are ambitious, grand ideas, but they are necessary to save democracy and dignity. They are also difficult, mighty endeavors to undertake. Indeed, where the book leaves the reader is in the gap between a future of what could be and how we might get there. Pairing the book with accounts of those working on the ground, such as case studies of recent strikes by UAW autoworkers or LA hotel housekeepers, or work I have collaborated on about prolabor social computing design, can be instructive in mapping tactical routes toward making good on the book’s liberatory potential.¹

—Christine T. Wolf

1.Christine T. Wolf, Mariam Asad, and Lynn S. Dombrowski, “Designing within Capitalism,” in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22) (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022), 439–53, https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533559; Christine T. Wolf and Lynn S. Dombrowski, “Pro-labor Design under Capitalism,” Interactions 31, no. 2 (March–April 2024): 50–53, https://doi.org/10.1145/3644939.