The problem is surveillance. Consent is a meme. People who work in warehouses don't get to shop among a dozen different employers like software engineers in the valley.

>Also bag-searches seem more invasive than video.

Then don't do either. Or only do some random searches or when you're suspecting someone of having stolen something. Treating employees like thieves by default is nuts. We don't accept petty theft as a justification for mass surveillance outside the workplace so we shouldn't accept it inside the workplace either.

Petty theft is absolutely used as the reason for mass surveillance outside the workplace.

The majority of the cameras that I see on a daily basis are for petty theft. So much so that it’s a given in my head that a retail environment will be under video surveillance

Consent is not a meme.

You are choosing to work for a company. If the company wants to record you while you do your job that can very well be part of the contract you accept when starting to work.

Most of the offices I've worked at had surveillance, the supermarket I buy food from has surveillance, the shopping malls I visit have surveillance. Nobody is forcing you to go there and feel free to start your competing series of offices / supermarkets / shopping malls without surveillance; check if the market care instead of assuming this is what people want, before legislating and imposing regulations and fines.

Thought experiment: there are two men standing in a room. One holds a loaded gun aimed at the other’s chest, his finger on the trigger. He tells the other man to bite off all his fingers or die.

The man on the other end of the gun certainly has a choice, and a negotiating position—they just aren’t very good ones, through no fault of his own.

I personally would prefer to live in a society where those with power don’t have moral carte blanche to treat those without power as badly as they like, as long as the unfortunates are technically given choices and/or some articulable market forces can reasonably be said to have been causal contributors to the current configuration of their reality. But I guess a lot of people, particularly people used to having power, may not agree with my preference.

Consent basically doesn't work as a basis in employment situations, because it's almost impossible to argue that an employee is guaranteed to not be disadvantaged if they do not consent.

>Is the problem is the surveillance or the lack of consent?

You've got to look at the context. That type of surveillance happens where there's a massive power imbalance between employer and employee. Is the consent of someone who's at the bottom of the wage ladder and doesn't have an actual choice valid consent ? In Civil Law it certainly isn't.