"How workplace surveillance discriminates against disabled and chronically ill workers,"

Workplace monitoring software is increasingly common across Irish employers...

...They are typically calibrated around the activity patterns of an organisation's highest performers, establishing what productive work looks like from that subset of the workforce, setting it as the benchmark, and flagging anyone who falls consistently below it.

The benchmark reflects the output patterns of workers who are already succeeding in the role, in a workforce from which disabled and chronically ill people are largely absent. People with disabilities experience and express their conditions individually and on a spectrum, and their data is likely to fall outside the statistical patterns these tools are designed to detect...

The reasons are well documented. Employers are often reluctant to hire disabled workers, recruitment processes remain inaccessible, and what most workplaces provide by way of accommodation falls well short of what the law requires. Monitoring software trained on an idealised normative type of worker produces a model of productivity built around people whose health does not vary...

When monitoring software tracks keystrokes and screen time, it records that variation and measures it against a benchmark drawn from workers who do not experience such challenges...