Josh Fairfield Publishes Article in the Belmont Law Review The article critiques the failure of current privacy frameworks to protect workers from the growing encroachment of employer surveillance at home.
Professor Josh FairfieldWashington and Lee law professor Josh Fairfield has published an article in the Belmont Law Review. The article, “Home—The Final Frontier: Why Privacy Means Protecting Workers’ Rights to Time and Space,” critiques the failure of current privacy frameworks to protect workers—especially teleworkers—from the growing encroachment of employer surveillance into their homes.
The article argues that prevailing privacy regimes, including notice-and-choice models and the GDPR, inadequately address the systemic power asymmetries in the employment relationship, often enabling rather than restricting invasive monitoring. Drawing from labor law traditions, Fairfield and his coauthor Amanda Reilly propose a rights-centered framework that views time and space as essential for human dignity and autonomy. They call for a non-negotiable floor of protections, including surveillance-free periods, bans on data commodification, and the establishment of an enforcement inspectorate.
“By reframing privacy not as a transactional good but as a fundamental labor right, the article advocates for pragmatic legal reforms that counteract the exploitation of home-based workers in a data-driven economy,” write Fairfield and Reilly.
The article is available online at the W&L Law Scholarly Commons.
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