In order to increase efficiency, measure productivity, decrease risk, and generally maximize profits, many private enterprises monitor their employees. While “workplace surveillance,” a term used interchangeably with “employee monitoring” (Ball, 2010) is an age-old practice, its contemporary methods in the United States have their roots in the transformation of the workforce in the mid-19th to early 21st centuries. When laborers began moving to cities to sell their time for wages, the focus of work and the workplace shifted from subsistence labor on farms to hourly and salaried work in the factories of the industrial revolution. Business in the United States turned into “big business;” at the end of the 19th century, as the railroads expanded
