Differential Privacy and Collective Bargaining over Workplace Data

Abstract

The datafication of workplaces permits employers an increased information advantage over workers during bargaining. Instrumenting tools (and workers themselves), aggregating data and applying sophisticated analytic techniques can give employers greater insight into what is happening in workplaces. Data privacy laws like GDPR provide protections for individual workers but can make it more difficult for worker representatives to access workplace data for collective bargaining because employers can reasonably argue that releasing such data would put them in breach of their legal responsibilities in relation to data privacy. Aggregate summaries of datasets provided by employers would comply with data privacy laws, but are susceptible to manipulation. I argue that using differential privacy, a technique for processing data that makes it harder to determine who contributed data to a dataset, would remove an obstacle to employers sharing workplace data with worker representatives.