Morning Star
It's time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs -- and start worrying that they will decide who gets jobs.
Amazon's system tracks the rates of each individual associate's
productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations
regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors," a law
firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor
Relations Board, as first reported by technology news site The Verge.
Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a
Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which
could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for
failing to meet productivity targets.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software started firing people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, "sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive," says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.
Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers' speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at major discount retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In all these cases, results are shared in real time with the employee, and used to determine who is terminated, says Mr. Larkin.
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It's time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs -- and start worrying that they will decide who gets jobs.
Millions of low-paid workers' lives are increasingly governed by
software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last
week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and
regularly fires those who underperform, with almost no human
intervention."
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software started firing people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, "sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive," says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.
Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers' speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at major discount retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In all these cases, results are shared in real time with the employee, and used to determine who is terminated, says Mr. Larkin.
Read more
