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Legal Silence, Worker Suffering: Law, Electronic Workplace Surveillance, and Amazon Warehouse Worker Injuries in Ontario
Resource type
Author/contributor
- Del Riccio, Jennifer (Author)
Title
Legal Silence, Worker Suffering: Law, Electronic Workplace Surveillance, and Amazon Warehouse Worker Injuries in Ontario
Abstract
In the American and Canadian warehouses of the e-commerce giant Amazon, electronic workplace surveillance (“EWS”) technologies permit the unprecedented quantification and datafication of worker activity, enabling the setting and enforcing of unsafe productivity ‘quotas’ that lead to serious occupational injuries for warehouse workers. In this paper, I consider the role of Canadian law – namely, the employment, privacy, and occupational health and safety legal regimes in the province of Ontario – in enabling, and in potentially constraining, this phenomenon in Ontario’s Amazon warehouses. In doing so, I identify the ‘legal silence’ that shapes the lived experiences of Amazon warehouse workers in Ontario; contribute to the emerging theorization, particularly from a legal perspective, of EWS as a factor impacting workers’ physical health; and propose legal reforms that would improve the safety and well-being of Amazon warehouse workers – and other similarly-situated workers – across the province.
Type
Master of Laws
University
University of Toronto
Place
Toronto
Date
2025
# of Pages
83 pages
Language
English
Citation
Del Riccio, J. (2025). Legal Silence, Worker Suffering: Law, Electronic Workplace Surveillance, and Amazon Warehouse Worker Injuries in Ontario [Master of Laws, University of Toronto]. https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/323d05d7-d2bf-41ed-a955-23124cbf8dc3
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