The Surveillance of Service Labour: Conditions and Possibilities of Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As surveillance continually modernizes its forms, there are deleterious effects on the cultural and material dimensions of workers’ lives within worksites and beyond, including their work cultures, health, wellbeing, subjectivity, and life choices. However, labour historians have long cautioned against technological determinism: political and economic conditions, the specificities of the work, and changing power relations, not technology as a ‘pure’ phenomenon, shape how surveillance is applied, experienced, modified, or jettisoned. Feminist ‘surveillance studies’ scholars echo this caution: technologies are also gendered, shaped within and often reinforcing gender inequalities. The capabilities of employer surveillance are not the same as how and when technologies are applied, how workers respond, or even the basic raison d’etre of surveillance. The monitoring of service labour may be shaped by multiple factors, including the search for solutions to technological problems, new management thinking, changing capitalist organization and competition within business sectors, even the aggressive marketing of new ‘wonder’ technologies, but at its very heart, it involves the organizing of labour and control of workers in order to enhance the pace, production, predictability, and profit of work. Understanding this is central to a materialist and feminist analysis of the conditions of surveillance and resistance to it. After a brief discussion of the history of surveillance at work, this essay looks specifically at private sector service labour, historicizing the work processes, experience, and resistance of two groups of women workers: flight attendants and retail workers in the US and Canada. Both are subject to intense surveillance as the labour process involves face-to-face customer interactions, in which the mode of delivering service is itself part of the product sold. Both occupations were historically dominated by women and remain feminized; aesthetic and emotional labour are also intrinsic to both occupations. Yet, they diverge in their work processes, bargaining power, unionization, and success in resisting unwelcome surveillance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".