The surveillance fight lands as new state rules around workplace monitoring and artificial intelligence safety begin to tighten.
Workplace surveillance has become a central issue in negotiations for a new enterprise agreement at Commonwealth Bank, which covers about 35,000 employees across its operations. Finance Sector Union officials are treating the dispute as a potential template for how monitoring technology is governed in banking and wider white‑collar workforces.
The argument centres on apps that log staff locations in offices, record when remote workers step away from their computers and capture how actively they participate in Microsoft Teams meetings. Union representatives are pressing to write clear limits on these tools directly into the bank’s industrial agreement.
Union negotiators argue that artificial intelligence dramatically increases how much and how fast employers can watch their people, compared with older monitoring systems. Data from location trackers, activity logs and collaboration platforms can be pooled into detailed profiles, fuelling concern about constant oversight of work patterns and behaviour.
Their proposed solution is that Commonwealth Bank should only use surveillance where it is genuinely necessary to protect staff and the public, not as a default management tool. That demand aims to put hard boundaries around when tracking is allowed and how far it can reach into daily work.
State governments are moving in parallel, adding pressure to corporate policies that rely on digital oversight. New South Wales is rolling out artificial intelligence safety regulations that capture workplace surveillance technologies, while the Victorian government pledged new monitoring laws in announcements last month.
