Bossware and Employment Tech Database
AI governing laborGains and lossesdatabasehistorical
Bossware and Employment Tech Database: a database. Operator: Coworker.org. Its unit: a labor-focused technology product (one table row per product, with its parent company, category, type, targeted workers, investors, and assessments of its data practices against worker-rights criteria). Whose labor: the work of hourly, contract, salaried, non-management and management workers whose hiring, productivity, safety, benefits and pay pass through these products; the report centres low-wage and hourly workers.
Coworker.org’s Bossware and Employment Tech database compiles more than 550 labor-focused technology products that are changing our relationship to work.
In its own words: https://home.coworker.org/?p=770, read 2026-10-29
Who supplies, who directs, who gains
Supplies the laborthe workers each product targets (its 'Targeted Workers' field: hourly, contract, salaried, non-management, management, and in some rows visitors)
Directs itemployers who buy and deploy the products (each row's 'Clients' and 'Industries Product is Marketed Towards'), through the vendors who make them
Receives the gains, bears the coststhe vendors and the investors each row names; the report states that the products are continuing to shift the costs of production onto workers
Each as the resource itself records it. Where it records nothing, the census says so.
What it records
| Intersections | AI governing labor: hiring, surveillance, scheduling, quotas, evaluation and discipline; Distribution of gains and losses: wages, employment, workload, credit, ownership, and who captures productivity gains; Worker power: bargaining, organizing, consent, refusal, contestation and enforceable protections |
| Kind of evidence | product inventoryrating against standards |
| Unit of record | a labor-focused technology product (one table row per product, with its parent company, category, type, targeted workers, investors, and assessments of its data practices against worker-rights criteria) |
| Whose labor | the work of hourly, contract, salaried, non-management and management workers whose hiring, productivity, safety, benefits and pay pass through these products; the report centres low-wage and hourly workers |
| Method | desk research on public sources: product sites, privacy statements, terms of service and public impact assessments; investor data from Crunchbase; app permissions and hardware data from the Google Play store op |
| Coverage | geography: 42 distinct origin-territory values in the saved table, most from the United States (461 of 635 rows); the report states non-U.S. products were omitted or overlooked; period: research November 2020 to May 2021; products developed 2018 to 2021; published 17 November 2021 |
| What it finds | most products touch the whole labor process, from hiring and recruitment to payroll and benefits; 31% of the products listed emerged between 2020 and 2021; only 35% of the products share any information on privacy policy and data sharing arrangements; the report reads the products as eroding labor standards and weakening worker voice and worker power; in the saved table: 242 rows Labor Market Optimization, 178 Workplace Performance/Productivity Monitoring, 176 Workplace Safety, 34 Workplace Benefits, Health, and Well-being, 5 in two categories; status 595 In Use, 25 In Development, 11 Discontinued, 3 Unknown, 1 Beta testing; 206 emerged during Covid-19; in the informed-consent column, 86 rows carry the wording 'Informed consent is not obtained before personal information is collected and processed', 2 say informed consent is not obtained from workers before their data is collected, and 19 say 'No' alone: 108 rows begin 'No', one of them a note that the product has no privacy policy or terms of use |
| Its stated limits | the database is not exhaustive: hundreds more products still emerging or in development, and non-U.S. products, were omitted or overlooked; collection stopped once the researchers felt they had sufficient evidence of pervasiveness; built at the product level, so smaller Big Tech platform companies (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and others) are omitted; privacy assessments rest on publicly accessible statements and documents |
op the resource's own statement · 3p a third-party account · obs our observation · rd our reading. Hover a tag for its quote; each opens below with its source.
What this evidence can settle
Can answer
- which workplace technology products existed in 2020 to 2021, by category, type, targeted workers, origin and investors
- what each product's public documents say about consent, worker access to data, grievance mechanisms, data sharing and law-enforcement access
Cannot answer
- how any product is used at a given workplace, or how often
- what effect a product has on wages, workload or employment
- products launched after May 2021, or the present status of listed products
In the worked questions
Where it meets Labor Vector
rd The database inventories the products through which employers direct work and collect workers' data, product by product; it meets the directionality stack at the layer of who directs labor. It records nothing on whether a system's labor advanced a commissioned task, so DSL and task-origin find no measurement in it.
Entity
| Canonical name | Bossware and Employment Tech Database |
| Also known as | Little Tech database, Bossware and Employment Tech, Little Tech Is Coming for Workers (the accompanying report) |
| Address | https://home.coworker.org/worktech/ |
| Operator | Coworker.org |
| Founded | published 2021-11-17 |
| Kind | database |
| Lifecycle | historical — researched November 2020 to May 2021 and published 17 November 2021; no later update is stated on the saved page |
| Count | more than 550 products (its own statement); 635 product rows in the saved table (as of 2021-11-17 (published); rows counted in the page saved 2026-10-29) obs |
| Data access | a filterable table embedded in the page; the report as a PDF download |
| Licence | report: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International); no licence stated for the database table op |
| Versions and dates | research: 2020-11 to 2021-05; published: 2021-11-17; report: 2021; read: 2026-10-29 |
| Observation | 2026-10-29: read |
Relations
Neighbours
Captures: the composition layer's account
The /non row
Evidenceevery field's quote, its source and the hash of the saved copy29
- self description op
Coworker.org’s Bossware and Employment Tech database compiles more than 550 labor-focused technology products that are changing our relationship to work.
- published op
NOVEMBER 17, 2021 | COWORKER.ORG
- scope op
In the database you’ll find companies — and their products and investors — that touch every part of the labor process, from hiring to productivity monitoring and more.
- scope op
the database covers products that use technology like AI, location tracking, and biometrics to manage employees and collect their data — often without their knowledge.
- fields op
Informed consent obtained Can the worker access and interpret their own data? Can the worker correct incorrect data?
- fields op
Grievance mechanism Forced use of tool Discrimination potential Right to freedom of association
- story invitation op
Click here to share your story with our team .
- count obs
the embedded table parsed from the saved HTML: 635 rows of 54 columns (633 distinct product names); category, status, Covid-19, consent, origin and targeted-worker counts tallied by script; recounted 2026-10-29 in repair: Status column 595 In Use, 25 In Development, 11 Discontinued, 3 Unknown, 1 Beta testing (635); Informed consent obtained column, 86 cells containing 'No Informed consent is not obtained before personal information is collected and processed' (85 exactly, 1 followed by a quotation of the privacy policy), 2 'No Informed consent is not obtained from workers before their data is collected', 19 'No', 1 'No privacy policy or terms of use regarding the data collected from their products.' (108 beginning 'No')
- status discontinued op
Their behavior, intonation, and speech is fed to an algorithm that assigns certain traits and qualities Discontinued
- consent no op
No Informed consent is not obtained before personal information is collected and processed
- consent no op
No Informed consent is not obtained from workers before their data is collected
- research period op
Our research, which ran from November 2020
- research period op
until May 2021, catalogued more than 550
- emerged op
Thirty-one percent of the products listed
- emerged op
emerged between 2020 and 2021; the rest
- privacy share op
Only 35% of the products share any information on privacy policy and data sharing arrangements.
- finding op
1. The current proliferation of tech products has the potential to continue eroding labor standards and weaken worker voice and worker power, while also increasing the potential for discrimination and other harms.
- costs op
ing to shift the costs of production onto
- low wage focus op
report primarily discusses the experience of
- limit op
note that the database is not exhaustive,
- limit op
and we omitted or overlooked hundreds
- limit op
development as well as non-U.S. products.
- limit op
We stopped collecting information once
- limit op
as we developed the database at the product and not company level, and we were looking at products that had emerged in the workplace in the past one to two years.
- method op
Investor information was obtained from Crunchbase. For app permissions and hardware usage data, we have relied on the data available in the Google Play store for Android devices. In assessing the privacy implications of a product, we have relied on publicly accessible privacy statements, terms of service documents, and public impact assessments.
- license op
© 2021 by Coworker.org, is licensed under Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
- database credit op
An extra special shoutout to Ayden Federline for meticulously and graciously researching and creating the database of employment tech products.
- berkeley list op
UC Berkeley Labor Center’s list in their report
- berkeley ack op
Lisa Kresge, UC Berkeley Labor Center
Negative tagswhat it is not5
- NOT a measure of how widely any product is deployed
- NOT worker testimony: the page invites workers to share stories, and the table holds none
- NOT an exhaustive census of workplace technology
- NOT updated since 2021 on the saved page
- NOT a record of the Big Tech gig platforms, which it omits
Sourcesevery source read, with its date and hash2
Not yet checkedwhat remains to read4
- the report read in part: the PDF text is two-column and quotes are held to single-column runs; its percentages for categories (40% workplace safety, 38% labor-market optimisation) are not reproduced by the saved table (176 and 242 of 635 rows)
- the worker stories submitted through the page
- the news, corporate-document and testimonial links in each row
- whether the 635 saved rows include products added after the 2021 report
Cite this record
Lee Sharks, ed. "Bossware and Employment Tech Database." Labor Vector meta-aggregator, laborvector.org, compiled 2026-10-29. https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/coworker-bossware-database
Record https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/coworker-bossware-database · entity https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/coworker-bossware-database#entity · the census as data
@misc{lv-coworkerbosswaredatabase2026,
editor = {Sharks, Lee},
title = {Bossware and Employment Tech Database},
howpublished = {Labor Vector meta-aggregator, laborvector.org},
year = {2026},
note = {Compiled 2026-10-29; every field sourced and dated},
url = {https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/coworker-bossware-database}
}