Labour Surveillance Practices in Canada's Oil Sands Region: Ethnographic Accounts from Work Camps in Northern Alberta

Abstract

As monitoring and data collection, surveillance has been a regular feature of workplaces and labour relations since the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on ethnographic data and documentary information, we offer a rare window into employers' surveillance practices that monitor life in oil and gas work camps in northern Alberta, Canada, where tens of thousands of workers stay while working in a fly-in-fly-out commute regime. Our findings demonstrate that firms in the oil sands utilized labour surveillance practices that potentially infringed on people's privacy and ability to consent, mobilizing injustices. Surveillance, we argue, was often coupled with care work, which contributed to workers remaining oblivious to the type and scope of monitoring they were subjected to at work and beyond.