If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won't exist in the very near future, right?
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".
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.
>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).
Beyond that, at least in office work, you'll regularly see folks eating lunch at their desk and working through it even though by law they're supposed to be 'relieved of all duties'. This isn't because some supervisor said so but because they feel obligated to do so.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_mealperiods.htm
Most places I've worked given an hour by default as part of company policy. My point was that a lot of folks will choose to work through their lunch instead of taking a walk outside or relaxing a little.
I recall when one coworker hopped on the Soylent train. They had this whole plan that it would free up their lunch to go do other stuff like go for a bike ride, check out a museum, etc. They essentially ended up chugging the Soylent at their desk and working their entire lunch.
Maybe I'm old school but I don't like giving my labor away for free. Work will always be there.
This is Amazon we're talking about... their warehouse workers are already "judged or measured as robots."
An efficiency metric based on tracking a worker's hand movements within standardized axes of freedom is totally something they would do if they felt there was money to be made.
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 prescriptions for ADHD meds to compete with the top performers. The top performers will then feel pressured to get the same medications in order to maintain their advantage.
This technology could put a lot of pressure on the system. And it could lead to people eliminating small breaks that might be necessary to maintain their mental health. I guess time will tell. I'm hoping companies use the idea responsibly and think about the long term incentives they create. But that doesn't seem likely.
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.
We are already there and have been for years, for getting into elite universities. Perhaps not yet for warehouse or fast food positions.
I find that hard to believe, at least a full time monitoring wrist band. Good workers like metrics, but of course, every metric can be gamed. They aren't as valuable as you might think they are.
If I am ordered to wear a monitoring wristband, I will naturally suspect that my manager is an idiot. The first test would likely to be to pair up with another worker and swap wristbands. Further along, try putting both wristbands on one wrist for short periods of time, such as when someone is using the bathroom.
I'd probably also try bracelets with magnets on them and wrapping the wristband in foil. If they are universally hated by the workers, spraying them all with histamine before the shift starts would result in visible skin irritation under the bands, and a video of said irritation posted to social media might get them withdrawn for a while.
Good workers like to be respected and valued as human beings. Treat them like fungible cogs at your own peril.
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
All this does is push people to fight the system more.
And I have never been more productive than at the job where my weekly payroll timecard consisted of a radio button choice labeled "work week" and "vacation week", with a signature field.
The micromanagement encouraged me to spend all my time gaming the stopwatches and work plan spreadsheets instead of doing anything useful. That whole operation was a budget-padding scam, and I bailed as soon as I could. I have better things to do with my life than sit on ass and help my supervisor lie to their supervisor in order to keep the checks coming in. "Oh, my gosh! Writing and maintaining this glorified CRUD app is so hard! We're gonna need a bit more budget next year, and here are exactly the metrics you will need to justify that."
Every interview since has been influenced by that experience, because I'm not walking blind into a corrupt workplace again.
On the flip side, these bands can monitor every worker every minute of the day. And even the top 10% of workers are likely to receive reprimands for having a bad day, be it a sore knee or being distracted because their children are acting oddly. There's no judgment involved when its automated like this - just numbers that have to be kept above a certain line.
https://twitter.com/CollectableCat/status/932738863449214976
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsReport...
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.
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?
At the FC where I work, managers printed metrics out from spreadsheets and posted them daily (ish) to encourage competition and productivity but there was no real way to verify numbers weren't being fudged, or that favoritism wasn't being shown.
Workers often won't know their error rate or accurate stow rate until they generate enough errors to trigger a warning, because only managers are allowed to see a worker's metrics. Amazon's policy is that an employee who follows procedure will never generate errors, and therefore, giving employees access to their own metrics is unnecessary - good employees won't need them, bad employees will either become good, or be fired. It's only recently that they've been able to see their stow rates as reflected by Amazon's own system, rather than a vague and inaccurate estimate.
>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?
Yes.
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.
"I see you had ten underperformers that you have kept on. Didn't you know our company is working hard to save money? I've taken the liberty to fire them, consider this your first warning."
Even the best managers will have a hard time trying to convince upper management that people who miss quotas are worth keeping on.
As you say, quotas have already decided many a employees fate. The difference now is the scale at which the lack of human judgement can be applied. Scale can only hurt affected employees; it can never help them.
You seem to have an unshakable belief in the people you have worked for and hired and their ability to treat their low-paid hires fairly. I've personally had that belief burned away by the realities of working in a minimum-wage job.
Why not install CCTV in the loo while you're at it? Staying inordinately long in there is also a form of slacking. How about microphone to monitor the conversation between workers?
1. The organization really has my best interests in mind.
2. The organization paid me millions of dollars to work for them.
To be a little more abstract, I'm talking about the degree of privacy and autonomy that workers are afforded. The reason people find the idea of wristband tracking objectionable is because it provides a means to reduce the autonomy of large numbers of workers beyond what was previously feasible.
(And the malleability of the definition of "slacking" after the practice of measuring it is established.)
>Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers?
This overall attitude doesn't distinguish between "slacker because they don't feel like working" and "slacker because they're unable to work to the degree an able-bodied person can". Your premise reduces someone to their profit-generating ability alone.
No they don't. Amazon's metrics are the same for everyone.