51–60 of 88 posts
I can’t help but notice it’s not on The Washington Post.
Has anyone done an analysis of the post to see if the number of anti-amazon stories they publish went down after Bezos bought it?
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What about people with physical or mental disabilities? Do they deserve to be fired because they're less efficient than an able-bodied worker?
Already these folks have a different metric for success. Why would that be different here?
No they don't. Amazon's metrics are the same for everyone.
The problem with this isn’t the tracking, as many have pointed out this isn’t _that_ much different than human supervisors, but rather the hugely limited scope of the tracking. There’s a lot more to what makes a human a valuable employee than can be tracked by a wristband, and while you can say all you want that this won’t cause humans to be treated like robots, if you entirely disincentivize the things that humans d…
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None of the attacks on your position really answer your question, which I think is a reasonable one. If I'm hiring someone to stack boxes, what's wrong with hiring and keeping the best box stackers? Why should I be limited in the non-discriminatory tools I use to measure such performance? The wristband isn't monitoring an employee's attitude or beliefs. If anything, the tool would make racism or favoritism generally…
I think the measure of anything like this is whether you as "the boss" are willing to wear one too and make that data available to those work for you without restrictions. If you're willing to do that then OK - let's try this thing and see what happens.
Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group? Will this information also be correlated for height, weight, and other physiological parameters?
Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
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My point being even the best workers will need a moment now and then.
But really... will they? If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine. But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescription…
We are already there and have been for years, for getting into elite universities. Perhaps not yet for warehouse or fast food positions.
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My point being even the best workers will need a moment now and then.
But really... will they? If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine. But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescription…
Consider if we have three employees. Person X is the fastest, Person Z is the slowest, and Person Y is somewhere in the middle. Consider how management will treat Person Y. For example, both of these sentiments are likely to be used by management to motivate/control Person Y:
"Person X is performing at a quicker rate than you, what can we do to close the gap"
"Don't be like Person Z or you're at risk of losing your job"
If you think that a company like Amazon will do nothing about mediocre performance, you're almost certainly mistaken.
To be honest, if these wristbands are introduced at Amazon, I will attempt to completely boycott Amazon until they're removed. I don't work at Amazon (nor do I ever intend to), but in my opinion the wristbands would be a step too far in reducing working conditions, and set a damaging precedent.
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So many, many workers are monitored by human supervisors already. Not shown to be significantly different.
What's the difference between having a camera recording you for 1 hour a workday, in 8 blocks of 7-8 minutes, and having a camera recording your entire workday, or even a single hour with no breaks?
I often see debates here about how tech workers should or shouldn’t organize because they’re too highly paid, etc. But what if they organized to protect something more simple, like warehouse workers fundamental humanity? I understand that people have had different experiences working on the tech side of Amazon, some great, some terrible. And yet I would hope that we can all look at this and say “this isn’t something…
That would be a reason to join the Democrats, Greens, Socialists, lefty Libertarians, or Communists, and a reason to avoid the righty Libertarians, Republicans, and Constitutionalists.
They call this dystopian, but I don't get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers? Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
Because people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
In that case, tracking could actually be beneficial by making sure that nobody sacrifices their break time to improve their quotas. It doesn't have to be used for detrimental purposes (although it's probably unrealistic to assume that Amazon will be so benevolent).
Is it just me or does this sound like they're using the wristbands as a way to build up a better dataset to further optimize their warehouse robots? Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won't exist in the very near future, right?