Basically any kind of employee surveillance is illegal (here in Germany) unless the employee is suspected of serious misconduct or a crime. An employer is only allowed to check whether an employee fulfills the tasks given to them, not how they spend their time at work.
I make software that other companies use and we aren’t allowed to even build any user -> activity metrics, especially not if that users boss could access them. So i.e. for Datasets, we’re only allowed to show “This Dataset was last edited by User x” and not “User x has edited the following Datasets: […]”. Here’s a German article about some specifics. Basically these things are very explicitly illegal: Keyloggers, surveilling browser data, surveilling email or phone call contents (unless explicit consent is given) and recording any part or the employees screen or from their webcam. Surveilling an employee with AI would definitely fall into one of these categories. oh, and the fine is around 300k€ or 1-2 years in prison.
I’m pretty sure other European countries have similar laws 😄
Random side tangent, my favourite coworker got fired last year. The real reason was that she was unhappy (manager has been promising a change to a team that isn’t as dogshit as mine, but not delivering on it) so her output of code was pretty low. It took a year for the company to actually go through with the firing, and since “not delivering enough output” is not a valid reason for firing someone here, they had to give “the company does not have enough money to pay for you” as a reason. They gave her 3 months of paid leave (that’s the agreed duration for notices of termination, anything less would have been illegal) and wanted her to sign something that says she’s okay with being fired. She was smart enough to not do that.
Because she could prove that the company did have enough money to pay her (they re-filled her position almost instantly) she could have sued to be re-hired. Well, she went back to the company and was like “okay, how much severance will I get to not sue you?” and she got another 15k on top of her paid leave. It was a pretty good deal. Oh, and she also got an excellent recommendation letter, because you can also sue a company if they say anything negative about you in their recommendation letters (there are lawyers specialized in finding hidden dog whistles in those letters and suing accordingly).
German worker’s rights really are pretty solid imo. My company isn’t even bound by a union, the protections are much stricter for companies that are. My husband works for a company that voluntarily follows IG Metall guidelines and he got a random 4k/year raise recently just because IG Metall adjusted their pay recommendations. And government jobs are even crazier than that, there are some where you literally cannot be fired whatever you do.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Wait, AI monitoring (that only outputs summary data) is illegal?
EU should get on that!
python@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Basically any kind of employee surveillance is illegal (here in Germany) unless the employee is suspected of serious misconduct or a crime. An employer is only allowed to check whether an employee fulfills the tasks given to them, not how they spend their time at work.
I make software that other companies use and we aren’t allowed to even build any user -> activity metrics, especially not if that users boss could access them. So i.e. for Datasets, we’re only allowed to show “This Dataset was last edited by User x” and not “User x has edited the following Datasets: […]”.
Here’s a German article about some specifics. Basically these things are very explicitly illegal: Keyloggers, surveilling browser data, surveilling email or phone call contents (unless explicit consent is given) and recording any part or the employees screen or from their webcam. Surveilling an employee with AI would definitely fall into one of these categories. oh, and the fine is around 300k€ or 1-2 years in prison.
I’m pretty sure other European countries have similar laws 😄
python@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Random side tangent, my favourite coworker got fired last year. The real reason was that she was unhappy (manager has been promising a change to a team that isn’t as dogshit as mine, but not delivering on it) so her output of code was pretty low. It took a year for the company to actually go through with the firing, and since “not delivering enough output” is not a valid reason for firing someone here, they had to give “the company does not have enough money to pay for you” as a reason. They gave her 3 months of paid leave (that’s the agreed duration for notices of termination, anything less would have been illegal) and wanted her to sign something that says she’s okay with being fired. She was smart enough to not do that.
Because she could prove that the company did have enough money to pay her (they re-filled her position almost instantly) she could have sued to be re-hired. Well, she went back to the company and was like “okay, how much severance will I get to not sue you?” and she got another 15k on top of her paid leave. It was a pretty good deal. Oh, and she also got an excellent recommendation letter, because you can also sue a company if they say anything negative about you in their recommendation letters (there are lawyers specialized in finding hidden dog whistles in those letters and suing accordingly).
German worker’s rights really are pretty solid imo. My company isn’t even bound by a union, the protections are much stricter for companies that are. My husband works for a company that voluntarily follows IG Metall guidelines and he got a random 4k/year raise recently just because IG Metall adjusted their pay recommendations. And government jobs are even crazier than that, there are some where you literally cannot be fired whatever you do.