A police officer demonstrates recording on a body camera during a news conference, in Surrey, B.C., on Jan. 11, 2024.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Vass Bednar is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and host of the podcast Lately. She is the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy program and co-author of The Big Fix.
At some Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart stores, you may soon see employees strolling about wearing a new accessory: body cameras. Walmart is also piloting this tech in Canada. They’re compact and sometimes colourful devices that hang from a lanyard like a name tag at a conference. Except instead of sweetly introducing you to a clerk, they introduce the tacit threat of being recorded.
This technology is typically associated with law enforcement, not retail clerks. Though the cameras aren’t always storing video or audio, they can be switched on during “escalations.” It’s a surreal update to the kind of “Karen”-esque supermarket-aisle showdowns you sometimes see on social media, but more importantly, it’s a dark sign of what’s being asked of wage workers in today’s surveillance economy.
Adding a camera as an accessory isn’t about investing in worker safety. It’s about a creeping shift in responsibility where firms are asking front-line retail staff to quietly take on the roles of loss prevention, security and even delicate customer de-escalation without commensurate pay, training or legal protections. It’s a policing function, thinly designed as protective “support.” It allows parent companies to spend just a little bit more on a device instead of a wage boost, and the pioneering of big firms piloting this equipment risks quickly setting a new standard.
It’s also hardly subtle. Workers wearing a surveillance device prominently on their chests is a strong signal of mistrust – of shoppers, and even of the camera-wearing staff themselves. Even if the camera does not point at the worker wearing it, it captures everything they see and how customers interact with them. Make no mistake, the worker is under surveillance, too.
It’s a logical next step in a world where human-resources software gamifies performance, ranks employees against one another, flags breaks and even analyzes emotional tone. What was once considered antagonistic workplace behaviour has been quietly rebranded as “optimization” and outsourced to technology.
It’s like a parody version of The Circle, Dave Eggers’s speculative fiction where every social interaction is mined for data and workers must live in public to prove their value. But the novel was a warning, not a product road map.
Back in February, San Francisco-based incubator Y-Combinator hastily scrubbed one of its companies from its website after the firm went viral for its promise of “AI-powered factory surveillance,” which critics immediately parodied as “sweatshops-as-a-service.” But it’s not just poorly conceived startups. Amazon and most major trucking companies have already fitted drivers with AI-monitored cameras, and some hospitals and construction sites also use the tech. The potential for function creep, where employee behaviour and interaction are analyzed at the atomic level, is real.
Ultimately, if Loblaws expects workers to act as security personnel, why aren’t they being paid more? Are their job descriptions changing? You can buy a body camera at Walmart for $26.91, which is $10 more than the hourly base rate for a sales associate, or a third of a police constable’s hourly wage. Surveillance footage also has value beyond policing – the same footage can be mined for business insights including how successfully associates greet customers, where customers encounter issues, and other real-time insights into retail strategy.
We are letting tech firms override decades of progress in workplace protections. We need updated protections that make it illegal to assign new categories of invisible labour such as emotional management, customer de-escalation or safety monitoring without formal acknowledgment or compensation.
You can’t quietly rewrite a job description just because you’ve added a camera. Policy makers should consider this new reality: Tech-enabled surveillance is creating new roles without new rights. We’re normalizing unpaid, unacknowledged labour under the guise of innovation and safety. And instead of seriously addressing the root causes of petty crime such as cost-of-living pressures and underinvestment in mental health, we’re strapping body cams to cashiers. This isn’t a solution. It’s a preview.
Retail work is already precarious. Workers shouldn’t be asked to play cops and robbers. We should be deeply alarmed by how quickly we are normalizing body cams in grocery stores, pharmacies and other retail outlets. They are not neutral tools. They are hostile symbols of corporate cost-cutting. Ultimately, they are a symptom of a society that would rather watch than invest in fixing the structural problems that stimulate more thefts.
Our economic policies have already allowed the line between manager and machine to blur. Let’s use this moment to at least try to preserve the line between retail employees and law enforcement.