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Comment by next_xibalba | Hacker News Reader

I can't find a single source for your claim that warehouse workers are being made to wear ankle bracelets. The closest I see is an Amazon patent from 2018. This kind of hyperbole is not helpful to conversations like this.

I've worked in factories and seen the degree to which productivity is an issue. I actually lobbied for us to use the time tracking that was already available to us via our ERP, and management declined. Humans are lazy by default. We seek the highest return on our effort. Building great things (i.e. making life better) requires us to fight this instinct.

Additionally, I have seen absurd abuse of WFH/remote since COVID among co-workers. There have been instances where I truly cannot wrap my head around someone seeing it as anything but theft. I don't particularly like being monitored either, but I definitely understand the motivation for monitoring or RTO initiatives.

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Your company isn’t using remote workers correctly. If there’s no way to measure work output besides physically seeing someone work, then there are fatal flaws in how you measure work output in the first place.

Nice try. The memo from NLRB mentioned in the article makes the claim. National Law Review is the top search result on Kagi:

https://natlawreview.com/article/nlrb-general-counsel-issues...

Neither your link, the article from OP, nor the actual NLRB memo mentions ankle bracelets.

> For example, employers ... track [workers'] movements using wearable devices

2nd paragraph of GP's link.

> Abruzzo’s memo cites things like wearable devices for warehouse workers

6th paragraph of OP article.

I don't think the commenter meant literal ankle bracelets. But I think that's a bit pointless. I don't think it's okay whether it is a literal ankle bracelet, or some BLE tag in their badge. Do you think some option is okay?

> Do you think some option is okay?

Yes, definitely. The distinction between a supervisor watching their employee vs. cameras + CV vs. using wearables to automate the watching seems completely arbitrary to me. Are you OK with a cab company monitoring its cars via GPS? Or a trucking company monitoring its loads via tracker? I am, and again, I find the distinction arbitrary. With one caveat–the employee is informed prior to employment that these tools will be used and they are a requirement of employment.

> The distinction between a supervisor watching their employee vs. cameras + CV vs. using wearables to automate the watching seems completely arbitrary to me.

I'd be pretty weirded out by constant camera and CV monitoring too

> Are you OK with a cab company monitoring its cars via GPS? Or a trucking company monitoring its loads via tracker?

Those are (a) not monitoring a person and (b) much more coarse than "what shelf is this person standing in front of". They tell the company that the cab driver parked, not that the cab driver took exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds in the restroom.

I suppose my biggest concern with it is that it's measuring the wrong thing. If someone's doing as much as their coworkers even though they leaned on a shelf for 5 minutes yesterday, is that really a problem?

By comparison monitoring a car with GPS has legitimate purposes that actually advance the interests of the business.

The fascination with ankle brackets notwithstanding (does a badge worn at the ankle count? How bout an ankle bracelet obscured in the pocket?) I hope the safety aspects dominate anything like that. How many people are in the mine? How many minutes was each employee exposed to over 90 dB?

It is literally mentioned in the article, but sure.

It is not. If I'm wrong, please quote the exact line in full.

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the distinction of where a wearable device is worn on the body is not the most important point to most people.

I don’t see how someone can read the various articles about how closely workers are monitored in warehouses these days and be this defensive about the surveillance practices. Do you work for a tech company that uses a lot of warehouses? ;)

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