Not all digital monitoring is the same: Job quality outcomes and prevalence across the EU workforce

Alvaro Mariscal De Gante Martin () and Davide Villani ()
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Alvaro Mariscal De Gante Martin: European Commission - JRC, https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/index_en
Davide Villani: European Commission - JRC, https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/index_en

No 2026-07, JRC Working Papers on Labour, Education and Technology from Joint Research Centre

Abstract: Digital monitoring has often been subsumed as a mere data-collection layer of algorithmic management, despite being conceptually distinct and empirically more prevalent in the EU labour market. Moreover, most EU-level data sources provide insufficient coverage of the range of digital monitoring practices, leaving key questions about sectoral and occupational exposure, and job quality implications largely unanswered. Drawing on the AIM-WORK survey, this study examines exposure to ten different forms of worker digital oversight in the EU and estimates their associations with a set of job quality outcomes using ordered logit regression models. This procedure yields two main findings. First, digital monitoring matters in its own right. Physical tracking of workers via CCTV, wearable sensors, and GPS is clearly associated with reduced autonomy, work intensification, limited flexitime, and unsocial working hours. These patterns hold independently of the presence of algorithmic management practices at the workplace. Second, not all digital monitoring is the same. While digital activity monitoring shows modest negative or neutral associations with job quality, physical monitoring is unambiguously and consistently associated with poorer working conditions, particularly when certain practices are combined. Thus, we conclude that subsuming digital monitoring within algorithmic management obscures an important source of worker strain, and that failing to distinguish between the surveillance of workers' cognitive activity and the tracking of their bodies and movements risk misdiagnosis.

Date: 2026-08
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