If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know

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.

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.

They already have scanners with countdown timers that track and enforce an average time to scan. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amazonemancipatory.com&#x2F;time-to-pick-countdown-timer" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amazonemancipatory.com&#x2F;time-to-pick-countdown-timer</a><p>This tracks pretty well with the beginning bit from the Manna short fiction. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marshallbrain.com&#x2F;manna1.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marshallbrain.com&#x2F;manna1.htm</a><p>Next up Alexa headsets with an AI to direct and fire workers.

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?<p>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.”<p>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

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.<p>I can’t help but notice it’s not on The Washington Post.<p>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?

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

Is it just me or does this sound like they&#x27;re using the wristbands as a way to build up a better dataset to further optimize their warehouse robots?<p>Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won&#x27;t exist in the very near future, right?

If Amazon can watch a grocery store with cameras and figure who bought what, I&#x27;m sure they can apply the same tech to figure out which worker is working without wristbands.

They call this dystopian, but I don&#x27;t get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers?<p>Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren&#x27;t very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.