Employment lawyer breaks down Ontario's proposed workplace tracking law

FILE - A two-year-old child draws a picture while his mother works on a laptop in her home office. (Julian Stratenschulte/dpa via AP)

A newly proposed law in Ontario will force companies to notify their employees if and how they are being monitored electronically.

Employment lawyer Daniel Lublin sat down with CTV’s Your Morning about what this proposed law can mean for both workers and companies.

The proposed law would require companies in Ontario with 25 or more employees to have a written contract in place that spells out how company computers, cell phones, GPS systems, and other electronic devices are being tracked.

Here's what Lublin had to say about the proposed law:

Q: What is the purpose of the proposed law?

A: This is a law about disclosure and transparency. Under this proposed law, employees will have a right to know whether their employers are monitoring or surveilling their online activities and how they are doing that, and, most importantly, why are employers doing that and what are they doing with that information.

Q: How do companies monitor their employees?

A: Nowadays, all of the employee monitoring and employee surveillance of online activities is really done for the purposes of addressing productivity concerns, especially with the rise of work-from-home due to the COVID-19 situation.

Some employers have software, very sophisticated software, they purchased, which can be installed in devices that will tell employers whether employees are performing their job or abusing work from home. It can look at things like keystrokes movements of a mouse, how fast you read and respond to emails, and it can even look at instant messaging lines and determine if people are really doing their job or if they're abusing their privileges of working from home.

Q: Will the new law be able to stop companies from monitoring employees?

A: No, it will not be able to do that. Under this law, employees will have the right to know if they're being monitored and how. If the employee does not like it, they can make an informed decision about whether this is a company they want to continue to work for.

Q: Can an employer go too far in monitoring a worker?

A: Yeah, absolutely. I think employers can make legitimate arguments about measuring employee productivity. However, I think if an employer is using that information for commercialized purposes, selling it to companies that use it for data mining or for political purposes, then that goes way too far.