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Employment Bill [HL]

I support the amendment. We are becoming increasingly used to being monitored and surveyed. At stations and elsewhere there are surveillance cameras. People accept it because it is believed to be necessary to protect us from terrorism or street crime. However, recent reports indicate that technology is becoming available—Microsoft has already been mentioned in this connection—that will enable people to be individually monitored without their knowledge or consent at work, in a way that has been described in detail by my noble friend Lord Wedderburn, in moving the amendment. This is not of course for protection at all but simply to enable employers to monitor employees in the interests not of employee safety but for employers’ profitability. This is quite unacceptable. It is an affront to dignity and a breach of human rights. George Orwell’s famous novel was written to oppose what he imagined as a possible development—the emergence of a Stalinist regime, in which everybody was watched all the time. Are we seeing this emerge, instead, in latter-day capitalism? Fortunately, we do not have to accept it, and hence this amendment. I hope that the Government will be prepared to accept it in the terms suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Henley, because it is worthy of fuller discussion than perhaps we may have here.