Your Boss's Algorithm is Watching. California Wants to Make It Look Away.
From American warehouses to Chinese factory floors, AI is already tracking workers' every move. California lawmakers are working to stop it.
Inside an Amazon fulfillment center in Beaumont, California, a worker named Amari told a reporter that he spends 42 hours a week under surveillance. “It’s kind of demeaning,” he told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “to have someone watching over your shoulder at every second.” He wasn’t being watched by his manager — at least, not directly. He was being watched by a machine — one that logs his movements, flags his errors, and can initiate discipline without a human ever weighing in.
AI is marketed as a time-saver in the office, but in the case of AI-powered workplace surveillance, it takes the watchful work of management off the shoulders of supervisors, and pours it, in tireless, always-on form, onto the shoulders of front-line workers.
Ryan Gerety, director of the Athena Coalition, which organizes to support Amazon workers, puts it plainly: “It’s not just like you’re monitored. It’s like every second counts, and every second you might get fired.”
Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke and author of The Battle for Your Brain, has been documenting where this leads. In a recent conversation with her, she described what is already happening in workplaces around the world. In China, for instance, state factory workers “are required to wear technology embedded in like a hard hat or a helmet or a train conductor hat,” and “their fatigue levels and emotional levels are being tracked throughout the workday.” This is the cutting edge of a world, she says, in which for workers, “discrimination based on their performance, or based on their emotional reaction to something, is being used against them.”
But what she’s describing isn’t a far-off possibility. As Amazon workers have shared with reporters, it’s already here. Wendy Taylor, an Amazon worker, told The Guardian that digital surveillance creates a climate of fear: “Amazon tracks our every move. They know every move you make, when you’re working, when you’re not working.”
And the monitoring doesn’t need to be perfect to be dangerous. As Farahany put it, “there is enough that can be read and that is being read and decoded that it already is a risk.”
That feeling of risk then causes workers to move faster than their bodies can handle. A 2025 report from the National Employment Law Project found that workers experiencing intensive monitoring report not just a higher likelihood of injury, but more serious injuries — not because the machines or the supervisors are malicious, but because people push past physical limits to avoid triggering an automated flag.
Amazon disputes the recent coverage. In an official response to criticism, the company wrote "we do not use the camera technology in our warehouses to monitor employees," describing the systems instead as tools that "help guide the flow of goods through the facilities and ensure security and safety of both employees and inventory." On injury rates, the company points to what it calls a 75% improvement in lost-time incident rates since 2019 and says it invested $750 million in safety programs in 2024 alone.
But a December 2024 report by the Senate HELP Committee, led by Bernie Sanders, accused Amazon of cherry-picking data, and found that its warehouses recorded more than 30% more injuries than the warehouse industry average in 2023. A separate analysis by the Strategic Organizing Center found that in 2024 — four years after Amazon pledged to cut its injury rate in half by 2025 — its total injury rate was still 80% higher than its own target. When France's data protection authority fined Amazon €32 million for second-by-second scanner tracking, the company called the conclusions "factually incorrect" and defended its warehouse management systems as "industry standard." The French agency, however, argued that “it was illegal to set up a system measuring work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.”
California’s labor unions are now trying to get laws passed that would change the rules for companies seeking to use AI for on-the-job surveillance and supervision. The California Federation of Labor Unions announced it would sponsor or support two dozen bills this session to address how AI negatively impacts workers. The most ambitious package targets surveillance, algorithmic discipline, and job displacement simultaneously.
SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act of 2026, would bar employers from relying solely on automated decision-making systems to fire or discipline workers, and would require human oversight and independent verification when those systems assist in termination decisions. It would also prohibit employers from using systems that employ predictive behavior analysis — collecting personal data to profile an employee and potentially take adverse action based on what the AI “predicts” they’ll do. (The bill is a reintroduction of SB 7, which passed both chambers last year before Governor Newsom vetoed it.) Other notable workplace-AI bills put forth include the following:
AB 1883 would prohibit employers from using certain workplace surveillance tools to infer a worker’s protected status under California civil rights law, with penalties up to $500 per employee per violation.
AB 1898 would require employers to notify workers (not just employees, in a nod to the gig economy) in writing whenever AI tools are used to make employment-related decisions or to surveil the workplace.
AB 1331 would limit surveillance in employee-only areas, prohibit monitoring workers in bathrooms and during off-duty hours, and give workers the right to leave wearable surveillance devices behind when entering designated spaces.
AB 2027 would prohibit employers from using worker data to train AI systems designed to replicate, automate, or replace workers’ jobs — and would bar the sale or transfer of that data to third parties for the same purpose. LegiScan
SB 951 would require employers to give 90 days’ written notice to affected workers, local governments, and the state employment agency when AI-related layoffs impact 25 or more workers.
“Right now, there are absolutely no restrictions on how employers can use artificial intelligence to arbitrarily discipline and fire their workers,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, in a statement announcing the No Robo Bosses Act. “Employers are devastating workers’ livelihoods and taking no responsibility for the callous decisions of this unchecked technology.”
Farahany says this is just the beginning, and that there’s a lot to correct for. “We’ve done terribly with protections against personal data in every other context,” she told me. Brain and body data — the kind that wearables, cameras, and behavioral tracking systems already collect — is, she said, “our last frontier of what it means to be human.” The California bills aren’t all we’ll need to keep from becoming surveilled and harassed by unsleeping overseers, but they’re a start.
Governor Newsom has vetoed similar legislation before, and his office has described his approach as striking a balance between curbing AI’s harms and promoting its role in the economy. Labor leaders have made clear they’re willing to play hardball, conditioning their public support for Newsom’s widely expected 2028 presidential run on his willingness to act. As a CalMatters headline puts it, “Union leaders have a message for Newsom: Regulate AI if you want to be president.”
“I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of motivation to walk precincts for somebody who won’t engage working class voters on the very things that are taking away their jobs,” Gonzalez said.
The question isn’t whether AI will be in the workplace. It’s already there, already tracking, already deciding. The only open question is whether new laws can keep the expectations placed on workers from becoming as open-ended as the technology’s ability to surveil them.
Further Reading
SB 947 (No Robo Bosses Act of 2026) — Senator McNerney’s office
AB 1331 — Workplace Surveillance bill text, California Legislature
California Federation of Labor Unions on AI legislation, Feb. 2026
“Amazon Uses Arsenal of AI Weapons Against Workers” — The American Prospect, March 2025
“The Eyes of Amazon” — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The Battle for Your Brain — Nita A. Farahany (St. Martin’s Press, 2023)
The Rip Current Podcast: The Battle for Your Brain (with Nita Farahany)