The Robots are Just Automated Management Tools
Post-Pandemic Automation Part II
By Data & Society Director of Research Sareeta Amrute, Sr. Researcher Alex Rosenblat, and Postdoctoral Scholar Brian Callaci
In our first blog post, we argued that recent accounts of an automation revolution in the workplace are overblown and a distraction from the real impending change to labor conditions. Firms will use the recession to further fissure the workplace, doubling down on the worker-rights-weakening legal moves of the “gig” economy. This time, we discuss what companies are actually using technology to do: making fewer workers work harder for less.
De-unionization and the erosion of labor standards through subcontracting arrangements have combined to make “decent” work — a full-time, stable job with good pay and benefits — increasingly rare. There is some evidence that these trends toward precarious working arrangements accelerate during economic contractions such as recession resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. During downturns, firms tend to permanently restructure in ways that negatively affect workers. Companies often use recessions to permanently close older facilities, permanently rather than temporarily lay off workers, and substitute just-in-time delivery and outsourcing for the maintenance of inventories and internal slack (meaning keeping workers on the rolls to be prepared to meet accelerated demands) to smooth out fluctuations. This is all driven by declining worker power; without unions to limit permanent layoffs and the use of contracting and temps, companies can shift recession costs onto labor.
More people are likely to sign up for gig work when facing mass unemployment, but this work is precarious. The app-mediated gig economy, in particular, has weathered a decade of accusations that its employment model generally violates labor and employment laws in some U.S. states, including misclassifying workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. Economic instability plus low workplace rights equals fertile ground to establish gig work as a permanent change, rather than as a temporary buffer, to the culture of work. Gig companies appear technology-forward because their services are made available through an app, but the role of technology largely is not to replace humans but to manage a contingent workforce.
Gig companies look technology-forward because their services are made available through an app, but the role of technology largely is not to replace humans but to manage a contingent workforce.
Workplace Technologies: Surveil, Schedule, Speed Up
Even if near-term rapid automation is unlikely, technological change will have other effects on workers. The rise of the fissured workplace, after all, was enabled by communications and project management technology making it easier to segment work into discrete, outsourceable parts. This is how U.S. software and services firms moved parts of their operations to India, the Philippines, and elsewhere; using the wage gap between the countries to cut costs, relying on local vendor companies to deploy scheduling software and short-term contracts to manage a flexible labor force.
Algorithmic management in the gig economy is a further example of technology used to segment work through worker surveillance and intervention in worker behavior. This segmentation will likely increase during and after the pandemic. Software and tracking devices will be used to monitor and speed up workers. Meanwhile, logistics software may enable new capacities for workers to be dispatched for just-in-time schedules, to a variety of locations and for a variety of jobs. The productivity increases that rise from these techniques are based on “making more with less” — that is, intensifying worker effort levels. In short, automated surveillance helps companies weather downturns with leaner workforces by forcing the remaining workers to work even harder.
Automated surveillance helps companies weather downturns with leaner workforces, by forcing the remaining workers to work even harder.
Amazon is considered the poster child for automation, but its innovations in labor control through surveillance are worthy of at least as much attention. According to a recent report:
Any slack is perpetually being optimized out of the system, and with it any opportunity to rest or recover. A worker on the West Coast told me about a new device that shines a spotlight on the item he’s supposed to pick, allowing Amazon to further accelerate the rate and get rid of what the worker described as “micro rests” stolen in the moment it took to look for the next item on the shelf.
A worker may be asked to work faster and at the same time, be asked to work less consistently. Algorithmic scheduling technology, which predicts necessary staffing levels in increments as small as 15-minutes, threatens to exacerbate the prevalence of workers who would prefer to work full-time, but are forced to accept reduced hours. Previously, businesses absorbed the costs of fluctuating consumer demand, but improvements in scheduling software allow firms to shift the costs to workers, who risk being forever “on call.”
Opportunities for Change
There may be an opportunity for workers to counter the replaced-by-automation narrative with another: one that stresses the vital position workers have in making sure our economies and societies work. The fragility of the healthcare manufacturing supply chain might suggest that just-in-time manufacturing, where workforces are calibrated to production levels, has to be rethought by employing workers with an eye toward ramping up production quickly, instead of cost cutting. Workers who engage in protests at warehouses and meatpacking plants or who start petitions at Coworker.org, for example, may leverage their positions at key supply chain chokepoints to press for safety at work and better unemployment protections. They also may bring increased visibility to how uncertain the working conditions are for low-wage workers whether they have formal or informal employment, and whether they are working in the U.S. or in vendor firms controlled by U.S.-based companies elsewhere.
The pandemic has given new visibility to workers classified as “essential” by governments or policymakers. Activist front-line workers, from warehouse workers to nurses, are being credited as authoritative observers of their workplace conditions. At the moment, their voices—as they attest to their workplace conditions—are taking precedence over company spokespeople, which gives them greater power to shape public narratives over work. They may further use this platform to highlight migrant workers’ central role within healthcare and delivery systems writ large and press for worker and human rights broadly.
The robots are coming, but slowly, and not in the ways they are often portrayed.
Right now, workers might be able to use their essential status to garner public support for improving their working conditions. Strikes and protests that take place in the context of high unemployment however, are vulnerable to being undercut. As the pandemic drags on, working under COVID-19 may add additional pressures to worksites as workers are asked to labor under additional layers of surveillance. Construction firms are considering requiring workers to wear a device on their hard hats to track their distance from co-workers, while Amazon has said it will monitor building cameras to determine whether workers are violating its social distancing rules. While these tools may aid in slowing the SARS-CoV2 virus’s spread, they also shift the burden of workplace safety on to individual workers, and let employers off the hook for aspects of plant safety they control, such as worker spacing, physical barriers between work stations, line speeds, personal protective equipment and adequate handwashing breaks.
In short, the robots are coming, but slowly, and not in the ways they are often portrayed. What’s actually happening is that precarious work is becoming more visible, while management software hides the changing the nature of working conditions.
Sareeta Amrute is an anthropologist and author of the award winning book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin.
Alex Rosenblat is an ethnographer and author of Uberland: How Algorithms are Changing the Rules of Work.
Brian Callaci is an economist and has recently published in Phenomenal World and The American Prospect.
