If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html

by Futurebot • 8 years ago

27 82 8 years ago

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

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.

Santosh832• 8 years ago

Are you prepared to wear a bracelet when you work?

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

Millions of people wear a fitbit. I used to wear a watch (to regulate my work day). How many office workers wear a badge? Most of them. Not a problem

wiz21c• 8 years ago

Yeah, one that strangles my wrist when it decides I slack too much or if I go the the WC too often...

Clubber8• 8 years ago

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.

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

So the best workers will be people too. No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.

ballenf2• 8 years ago

If you've ever worked in such an environment, good workers welcome such measurement tools. So often slackers can befriend management and push off work on others without detection. It is very difficult to monitor performance in a fair and equitable manner without taking into account nepotism, racism, etc.

yorwba3• 8 years ago

I get that this might be different in the US, but in Europe, there usually are minimum requirements for break time to ensure that workers aren't overly strained. E.g. screen workers should take regular short breaks to rest their eyes.

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).

xr4ti3• 8 years ago

Because economy exists to sustain and enrich the lives of humans, not the other way around.

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

Yet, capitalism and the free market. This is little different from a McDonalds shift manager watching over workers at the lunch rush.

golergka• 8 years ago

Because, as usual, they're more interested in an emotionally charged image rather than overall effect.

jkldsadfaf• 8 years ago

Because you're monitoring someone constantly.

Imagine if your manager sat behind you breathing on your neck while you coded. He has a pack of tic-tacs so his breath is fine.

He crushes the tic tacs with his teeth everytime he thinks you're not working

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

So many, many workers are monitored by human supervisors already. Not shown to be significantly different.

ahoy• 8 years ago

I really hope you're not in a position of management.

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

Sure I've managed software crews, but programmers need down time. I'm sure these workers have breaks too.

minikites4• 8 years ago

What about people with physical or mental disabilities? Do they deserve to be fired because they're less efficient than an able-bodied worker?

JoeAltmaier11• 8 years ago

Already these folks have a different metric for success. Why would that be different here?

ballenf2• 8 years ago

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 less prevalent. I'd say it's the managers who are affected most by this, not the workers.

harryf• 8 years ago

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.

smacktoward2• 8 years ago

"I'm paying for their health insurance. Why shouldn't I be allowed to jam a device up their rectum that sends me a Slack notification whenever they drink alcohol?"

falcolas5• 8 years ago

If I bring you in to write code, what's wrong with hiring and keeping only people who write a certain amount of code every day?

Are you having a bad day because you're distracted? Too bad, you're receiving a reprimand for not meeting your quota.

Do you need to get up and walk around because your back is sore? Too bad, that's time you should be spending coding.

Are you stuck in the resolution of a problem? Too bad, prepare to be canned for repeatedly missing your quotas.

Time spent refining your tools? Nope, not allocated. Time spent learning? Nope, not allowed. Fixing a security issue unrelated to your code? You missed your quotas. Training the FNG? Sorry, but you didn't meet quota.

I hired you to write code, after all, and if you don't want to do that, I have a few dozen applications on my desk of people who do want to.

On a more meta note - these wristbands and things like them remove all judgement from the equation. Someone recovering from a hurt back is only viewed as unproductive for an extended period of time, and thus someone to fire. No matter what other things they do for the company, or how they performed prior to the injury.

heymijo• 8 years ago

The perverse incentives this instills will be worse than any supposed "efficiency" gains it brings about.

z0r• 8 years ago

A lot of people have trouble with the idea that quantitative technological shifts over time can lead to a phase change. You boil water and it becomes steam, you measure someones work time at a fine enough grain (invading a privacy that some argue never was theirs but in practice has been) and suddenly you're in a dystopia.

dictum2• 8 years ago

As with all things in life, it depends on what you mean by slacking.

(And the malleability of the definition of "slacking" after the practice of measuring it is established.)

biesnecker• 8 years ago

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 do well, then you already _are_ treating them like robots.

sli• 8 years ago

A similar argument is commonly used with red light cameras: they remove the discretion of the officer, and can remove important context. Especially if they only capture a single frame.

yawgmoth• 8 years ago

As companies develop more ways to ensure consistency of behavior and performance of their human assets, humans need to develop more ways to collectively bargain for their welfare against companies.

minikites4• 8 years ago

You can only abuse people so much before they snap and out come the guillotines.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion

simonsarris• 8 years ago

Historically almost all slave rebellions end poorly.

guillotines

I just want to remind everybody that the French revolution was started by the professional class of the third estate: landlords, lawyers, magistrates, and professional tradesmen, who felt they were being taxed too onerously by the gov/king. It was not in any sense started by the peasants.

Peasants are maybe good for harnessing when you need to break stuff, they are not very good at actually organizing or starting successful rebellions.

As far as I know no successful revolution, except Haiti's slave revolution, has occurred without support from an elite class, though sometimes that elite class support is from the outside (like the French support in the American Revolution).

TomK32• 8 years ago

ISO 9001 certifying the human condition.

alphonsegaston• 8 years ago

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 I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.”

Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable

wmeredith• 8 years ago

I'm trying to think of a _less_ simple task than defining the humanity of a subset of people and I'm coming up short.

logfromblammo3• 8 years ago

Organizing to protect someone other than yourselves sounds more like a political party.

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.

gaius2• 8 years ago

That would be a reason to join the Democrats

Silly Valley is staunch Dem, and who do you think makes this kind of tech? It would have been different if they hadn’t stabbed Bernie in the back.

a_bevin• 8 years ago

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?

wozz• 8 years ago

Heard this one second hand from an email directly from bezos. It's nothing that people don't already know. He said something along the lines of we don't have to worry about treating employees well as automation will be replacing most of them.

crdoconnor• 8 years ago

I noticed a flurry of Foxconn propaganda, reported in all the usual western media, that tried to make this argument about 7 years ago. They said that they had robots that would shortly render something like 800,000 factory workers obsolete.

It coincided with a period of worker unrest in their factories.

They didn't though. They now employ something like 400,000 more people than they did.

It was just a ploy to terrify Shenzhen factory workers.

The apparent abysmal failure of their "project" to replace all those people seems to have gone 100% unnoticed in the business press. Foxconn just forgot to issue that press release I guess.

I think back to that story and subsequent non-story every time I read the latest news article about "the robot takeover of our jobs that's just around the corner".

ericthor• 8 years ago

They already have scanners with countdown timers that track and enforce an average time to scan. http://amazonemancipatory.com/time-to-pick-countdown-timer

This tracks pretty well with the beginning bit from the Manna short fiction. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Next up Alexa headsets with an AI to direct and fire workers.

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

According to a quick Google search, this story is being run by The New York Times, The Daily News, The Guardian, Fox, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Cnet, among others.

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?

Clubber8• 8 years ago

I haven't done an analysis, but I noticed they do an Amazon critical article now and then to show they aren't biased.

segmondy• 8 years ago

If Amazon can watch a grocery store with cameras and figure who bought what, I'm sure they can apply the same tech to figure out which worker is working without wristbands.

gaius2• 8 years ago

Fellow engineers, is this really the world we should be building?

falcolas5• 8 years ago

No, but it only takes a few people to create this world. And a lot of people care more about money and their life than a possible future for someone else.

If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know

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