Coworker.org bossware and worker-surveillance campaign (2021–ongoing)

Coworker.org launched its sustained bossware and worker-surveillance campaign on November 17, 2021 with the public release of the Bossware and Employment Tech Database — a catalogue of over 550 labor-focused technology products covering every phase of employment from hiring and screening to productivity monitoring, performance evaluation, and termination. The campaign named a structural gap in US civil-society coverage of AI and labor: while grassroots advocacy on gig workers, facial recognition, and corporate algorithmic systems was growing, the dense ecosystem of smaller vendors building surveillance and management software specifically for employers had attracted little coordinated scrutiny. Coworker's campaign introduced the "Little Tech" framing to fill that gap — positioning the campaign not against Big Tech's consumer platforms but against a sprawling VC-funded vendor layer operating below civil-society radar. The campaign is the corpus's first US entry focused on bossware and workplace algorithmic management as a distinct site of AI harm, closing a slot separate from gig-worker platform accountability (where the corpus carries campaigns focused on Uber, Lyft, and Amazon delivery), creative-industry labor (the WGA and SAG-AFTRA AI provisions), and content-moderation labor (the ACMU and Sama campaigns).

The Bossware Database and "Little Tech" framing (2021)

The Bossware and Employment Tech Database, launched November 17, 2021, catalogued over 550 products organized by category, type, and founding date, covering AI, location tracking, and biometric tools deployed across the employment lifecycle — frequently without workers' knowledge. Workers can submit their own experiences with bossware to expand the database's evidential base, a participatory research mechanism the campaign uses to build the worker-facing testimony that grounds regulatory submissions.

The companion report, "Little Tech Is Coming for Workers: A Framework for Reclaiming and Building Worker Power", authored by Wilneida Negrón, PhD (Coworker's Director of Policy and Research), identified that over 30 percent of the database's products emerged between 2020 and 2021 alone — a surge attributed to COVID-era remote-work expansion and intensified VC investment in the employment-technology sector. The report documented specific systems: Amazon's automated termination algorithm that generates warnings and firing decisions based on productivity tracking without human review; emotion-detection tools deployed in AI-powered hiring assessments; and risk-modeling platforms sold to employers to flag workers as potential security or performance risks. The "Little Tech" concept is the report's central analytical contribution: these harms were coming not primarily from the largest consumer platforms but from a swarm of lesser-known, poorly regulated startups whose combined reach across the low-wage workforce exceeded anything any single Big Tech platform had deployed.

NLRB regulatory engagement (2022)

The most structurally significant regulatory development within the campaign's time arc was the October 2022 memo from NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo proposing a new legal framework to protect workers from intrusive employer surveillance and automated management under the National Labor Relations Act. Abruzzo's memo proposed that the NLRB adopt a presumptive-violation standard: where an employer's surveillance and management practices, viewed as a whole, would tend to interfere with or prevent a reasonable employee from engaging in Section 7-protected activity — including the right to organize, discuss wages, and engage in concerted action for mutual aid — the employer would be presumptively in violation of the NLRA. The memo also proposed requiring employers to disclose to workers what monitoring technologies they use, the business reasons for deploying them, and how the resulting data is used. The memo represented the first significant federal regulatory guidance directly confronting bossware as a labor-rights harm — reframing the campaign's core problem (surveillance chilling worker organizing) in terms of existing NLRA rights, creating an enforcement pathway that required no new legislation.

White House OSTP engagement (2023)

In May 2023, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published a Request for Information on automated worker surveillance and management technologies, timed to International Workers' Day (May 1, 2023) as part of the Biden administration's AI governance agenda. Coworker submitted independent comments on June 18, 2023, drawing on the Little Tech database to name specific vendors and requesting three specific OSTP interventions: convening vendors to increase transparency about data collection and processing; funding research on how these tools impact federally protected demographic groups, particularly through risk-modeling and AI training; and encouraging algorithmic impact assessments as an industry standard.

Separately, a coalition led by the Center for Democracy and Technology and Governing for Impact assembled 14 organisations — including the ACLU, the Communications Workers of America, Jobs With Justice, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the National Employment Law Project — to submit joint comments on June 29, 2023, recommending agency-level regulatory action across the Department of Labor, the EEOC, the FTC, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and OSHA. The two submissions — Coworker's independent filing and the CDT-led coalition letter — illustrate the campaign's dual dynamic: Coworker producing the empirical worker-facing research that grounds the policy arguments, while coalition partners translate that evidence base into regulatory asks directed at specific agency authorities.

Little Tech Goes Global (2025)

In 2025, Coworker extended the "Little Tech" frame internationally with the "Little Tech Goes Global" report (authored by Fabricio Barilli), mapping algorithmic management proliferation across six Global South countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, and India. The report identified 150+ startups and regional vendors in those markets embedding surveillance and algorithmic control into gig, logistics, sanitation, and domestic work — often in jurisdictions where data protection laws were absent, poorly enforced, or newly enacted without implementation infrastructure. The same VC-funded vendor ecosystem documented in the 2021 US database had globalised its deployment model, frequently retaining worker data indefinitely and in some cases extending surveillance into workers' homes and family lives. The global extension repositions the campaign's long-term frame: "Little Tech" is a vendor class, not a US-specific market, and the structural problem Coworker named in 2021 is compounding fastest in contexts with the least regulatory protection.

Significance in the corpus

The Coworker bossware campaign closes the corpus's primary gap in US workplace-surveillance civil-society coverage. The Athena Coalition's parallel work on Amazon addresses worker surveillance in warehouse and logistics contexts — specifically Amazon's productivity-quota enforcement, automated injury-data suppression, and the Rekognition and Ring surveillance infrastructure — but does not cover the broader VC-funded employment-technology vendor market that Coworker's database names. Neither the WGA and SAG-AFTRA AI provisions (creative-industry labor) nor the Athena Coalition (single-employer accountability) nor the gig-worker platform campaigns address the workforce segment in non-union, non-gig, non-creative employment — retail, care work, food service, logistics outside Amazon — whose exposure to bossware is the corpus's largest undocumented US labor-AI harm. Coworker's campaign is also methodologically distinct: the database-plus-participatory-research model, producing empirical evidence for regulatory submissions rather than organising for unionisation or filing litigation, represents a separate civil-society track from both the strategic-litigation approach (Worker Info Exchange, Foxglove) and the collective-bargaining approach (WGA, SAG-AFTRA). The "Little Tech" framing has become a reference concept in academic and civil-society work on AI and labor, giving the campaign downstream discursive influence beyond its direct regulatory outcomes.