In Touch and On Time: Biometric Fingerprint Scanners as Time Management
M: Did that ever happen to you?
Susanna: Yeah, a lot of times. When I first started working there, I didn’t get paid for, like, weeks of work.
In these examples, the ease and efficiency of biometric scanners almost exclusively operated in employers’ interests. The scanners didn’t feel especially easy or efficient for workers. Instead, they amplified worker anxiety and made us prone to wage theft.
Yet, like almost all technologies, biometric scanners remained vulnerable to worker sabotage. Jesse shared: “It was hard to have someone sign in and out for you. But I know we would definitely [tell each other], just don’t sign in, just say the system was down and just put your time on the paper. We’d do that for each other every now and then. Especially when we were late or things like that.” Another sales associate, Vanessa, told me management at her store had become stricter about where people could clock in “because they don’t want people to steal hours.” When I asked if many people did that, she laughed and said yes: “I was one of them.” While some might categorize Vanessa and her coworkers’ behavior as deviant, she articulated it as a collective response to the stresses of automated flexible scheduling, in which algorithms calculated the optimal staffing needs, rarely with workers’ needs in mind, and often with very short notice (for more on
flexible scheduling, see chapter 1). She said, “They were sending us home early because they didn’t have enough work [for us] to do. . . . So it was like . . . if anything, we just clock in, not clock out for thirty minutes.” Not only would she partake in minor subversion, such as going to the bathroom before clocking out, but she and her coworkers began arriving as much as half an hour early, clocking in and then hanging out in the break room.
Beyond that, in my observations, employees regularly engaged in small attempts to take back time for themselves, for instance, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, by absconding to the fitting room—one of the few spaces free from CCTV’s threatening gaze—to send texts, take selfies, or simply admire themselves in the mirror. Compared to the masculinist interventions that sociologist Karen Levy notes in her study of truck drivers, who would go so far as to smash their in-truck performance monitors,12 I encountered less overt tactics of resistance to digital surveillance. My coworkers didn’t take a hammer to bioscanners or surveillance cameras. They relied not on physical strength but on slyness and cunning to create a repertoire of evasion.
The discussion of time theft as a form of worker resistance goes alongside wage theft, which occurs when employees are not paid for time worked. Demos, a “think and do tank,” found that more money is lost to wage theft than to shoplifting: “By paying less than the legal minimum wage, employers steal an estimated $15 billion every year. This compares to an estimated $14.7 billion lost annually to shoplifting.”13 By 2016, when I worked at Style Queen, New York State had passed an incremental wage hike, which would eventually increase wages to $15 per hour for large employers by 2018.14 Few of my coworkers were even aware of the increase, and it’s quite possible that retailers, especially nonunionized ones, were negligent in enforcing these hikes.
A form of wage theft closer to my coworkers’ minds might have been how Style Queen required workers to clock out and then wait for our bag checks. We regularly waited several minutes. This form of theft isn’t unique to fast fashion. Over the past few years, class-action lawsuits against several major retailers—Ralph Lauren, Gap, Banana Republic, Nike, Big Lots, Ulta, Amazon, and Starbucks—have sought wages lost while waiting for loss prevention inspections.15 The California Supreme Court decided in favor of Apple workers in 2020, after “Apple argued that the searches,
while mandatory, were not required if employees simply did not bring bags to work.”16
Class-action lawsuits against hotel and grocery chains in Illinois—one of the few states with regulation on biometric data collection—question the legality of fingerprint scanners too. The suit claims the employers failed to acquire written consent for the collection of biometric data and did not disclose how long such data would be stored nor how it would be destroyed. “Unlike, say, a stolen company ID, which can be replaced, individuals can’t order up a new body part, raising concerns about what could happen if scans of their fingertips’ arches, loops, and whorls fell into the wrong hands.”17 Despite the growing ubiquity of fingerprint scanning in everyday life—fingerprints commonly unlock personal cell phones, for example—among retail workers, biometric fingerprint scanners reinforced the idea that workers were always already potential criminals. Engaging with biometric systems cues bodily reactions (hearts racing, palms sweating), while their failure exacerbates anxieties of an already hectic environment. These battles over time theft, wage theft, and biometric data raise the question: Who is really stealing from whom?
Like many other worker-monitoring technologies, fingerprint scanning has long-standing connections to military and policing. As feminist surveillance studies scholar Shoshana Magnet explains, rudimentary fingerprint scanning technology first appeared in Wall Street investment firms as a time-clock mechanism.18 These scanners were put on the market by the company Identimation, which was acquired in the 1990s by Wackenhut, now known as G4S, one of the world’s largest private security companies. G4S has been criticized for its involvement in torturing Palestinian prisoners in Israel, operating private prisons in the United States, and working with Dakota Access against protestors in Standing Rock, North Dakota.19 The acquisition of Identimation by Wackenhut/G4S should come as no surprise, as police and prisons have advanced biometric fingerprinting technology perhaps more than any other industry. Magnet writes that “prisoners themselves represented ‘acres of skin’ to a biometric industry in its infancy, and one requiring a broad population upon which to test its products.”20 By finding new uses in retail, fingerprint scanning returns to its workplace origins.