The report shows how technologies are modifying the day-to-day work of people who organize, store, and package physical goods in warehouses. It found that technology and automation can help workers by reducing the “monotonous and physically strenuous activities” of, say, lifting heavy packages. But it also could affect workers’ health, safety, and morale, and accelerate the rate at which employees are replaced. That’s because tools like self-driving shelving carts, body sensors, and AI-powered management systems are putting pressure on workers to work harder, faster, and under more scrutiny. This is helping boost productivity but could be bad for workers, the report argues.

…“Technology has led to workers being pushed harder and also their privacy getting violated.”

…Even though some new technologies “promise to alleviate the most arduous activities” for workers, they can also contribute to an overall greater workload and more intense supervision.

…The report says technology can intensify warehouse work in two main ways. The first is by limiting the amount of human interaction, including in cases where employees can help each other. The second is by allowing the “micromanagement of work tasks at an unprecedented scale.”

That’s because many of these new machines are dissecting workers’ every move — like sensors that measure the time it takes a worker to reach a location where they can pick up an item, scan a label, select a product, and place it in a bin.

…“The assumption that streamlining processes leads in a linear fashion to greater efficiencies, and thus cost reductions, may be fundamentally flawed,” the report states. “Gains could be counteracted by new health and safety hazards as well as increased employee turnover due to overwork and burnout.”

There are also questions about data privacy and whether workers have a right to know how the data being collected on them on the job is being used — including if it’s being used to feed the AI behind new autonomous warehouse machines. If that’s happening, it would mean that workers may unwittingly train their own replacements.

Robots aren’t taking warehouse employees’ jobs, they’re making their work harder – Vox

hmmm