I'm not an advocate of permanent surveillance, nor am I used to it. As stated in the comment I expect no surveillance in my home, at hotels, etc., and I expect little enough surveillance on the street that I can walk to a FedEx and pay in cash without being facially-recognized all the way. I am, however, used to the norms of my life
at work being different from the rest of my life. When I do browse the web on my work computer, my employer might monitor it (and I have a personal laptop at work for this exact reason). When I develop copyrightable writing/code/etc., my employer owns it, even if it's not totally relevant to my job. I don't tell off-color jokes or flirt with people the way I could outside of work, nor do I have any desire to. Work is different from the rest of your life, because you're doing a task for your employer, and your employer controls the space. If your employer wants to install a camera, that's like
you installing a camera in your own home—totally reasonable in common spaces, creepy in bathrooms. I think analogizing being surveilled at work to being surveilled in general makes as much sense as analogizing losing copyright over your writing at work with losing copyright in general.
(There might be a problem that people are at work too much of their lives, or that people should work for themselves or worker-owned coops instead of for bosses, or something, but those seem like independent problems; trying to solve symptoms of those problems and ignoring the underlying issue doesn't seem productive.)
Precisely because allowing people to do minor personal tasks at work is the norm in the industry, I think there is little risk that cameras will prevent people from doing minor personal tasks. Mine is the same: I feel quite comfortable checking personal email / IM / Hacker News on my personal laptop at work despite having a camera somewhere looking at me and easily being able to tell when I'm not looking at my work screen. Basically, I think that if they wanted to crack down, there are easier ways to do that than cameras, so they don't, and cameras won't make them decide to start cracking down.
And to be clear, I'm much more interested in video evidence to back up harassment claims than to deny them. I'm of the opinion that a lot goes unreported because complainants know there isn't much evidence. But you make a good point about lots of it happening off-site.