
What is the value of work in the age of automation?
Is it how much money you make for you and your organization? Or is it the contribution you make to the world around you?
Automation has the power to completely transform the way we work. How we use that power will ultimately determine the type of society we live it.
Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor recently wrote about working for a company in which your boss is effectively an algorithm.
Referring to UberEats employees striking about a pay dispute in London last year, she described them as “workers without a workplace, striking against a company that does not employ them…managed not by people but by an algorithm that communicates with them via their smartphones…they are rebelling against an app update.”
The app update in question involved UberEats’ drivers — who have no set wages and are paid for each job they do — waking up one morning to see the reward-per-delivery had dropped.No warning. No apology. No human input whatsoever.
And that’s the point here: we cannot let automation spell an end to the human touch. The principle behind the gig economy that companies like Uber and Deliveroo provide is a noble one: empower people to be their own boss and work as much or as little as they choose.
But the automation technology that has enabled this new economy to thrive could also be its downfall. Removing staff schedules and simply letting people log in when they want means more workers competing for business during peak times, resulting in fewer available jobs per user. Flexible working is supposed to have the opposite impact: enabling people to better plan and manage their workload around their personal lives. This seems like a step in the other direction.
Both Deliveroo and Uber have also come under fire for putting undue pressure on their ‘employees’ using automated updates. The former uses algorithms to closely monitor rider ‘performance’ and compare it to how fast it believes they should have been, while the latter has reportedly been sending its drivers ‘nudge’ messages encouraging them to work longer.
The problem with these approaches is they don’t leave any room for the things that make us human. Perhaps that Deliveroo driver is going through a personal crisis and isn’t sleeping well, making them tired and sluggish. Perhaps that Uber driver is already at breaking point with stress and needs to be encouraged to rest rather than respond to another ride request.
If you have a human manager (assuming they were understanding), you can discuss these things. But in an automated world everything is much more black and white. Do or don’t. Good job or bad job. Is all of this indicative of a company that truly values its staff, or even considers humans more important than machines? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
