Warehouses Are Tracking Workers' Every Muscle Movement (bloomberg.com) 54
Unions and researchers who study workplace surveillance worry that employers who begin gathering data on workers for whatever reason will be unable to resist using it against them. From a report: Productivity tracking is already widespread throughout the industry -- and workers can be fired or punished if their performance dips. The opacity of data-analysis tools can make it difficult for workers to fully understand how much employers can see. StrongArm, a company that makes such devices, says it has about 30 clients, including Heineken NV and Toyota Motor, and is also establishing relationships with insurance companies interested in ways to reduce workers compensation costs. Walmart says it's testing StrongArm in eight distribution centers and adds it has no plans to use them in stores.
StrongArm says about 15,000 workers have worn its devices, and most of them use it daily. The Brooklyn, New York-based startup expects to have 35,000 daily active users by the end of next year. StrongArm acknowledges that concerns about workplace surveillance surround its work, but the company says its products are designed solely to improve safety and cites a recent study it commissioned that found users wearing them suffered 20% to 50% fewer injuries. It says it's not tracking individual productivity and that its products aren't used to punish individual workers or to contest workers compensation claims. But ergonomic tracking isn't happening in isolation.
StrongArm says about 15,000 workers have worn its devices, and most of them use it daily. The Brooklyn, New York-based startup expects to have 35,000 daily active users by the end of next year. StrongArm acknowledges that concerns about workplace surveillance surround its work, but the company says its products are designed solely to improve safety and cites a recent study it commissioned that found users wearing them suffered 20% to 50% fewer injuries. It says it's not tracking individual productivity and that its products aren't used to punish individual workers or to contest workers compensation claims. But ergonomic tracking isn't happening in isolation.
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Or they could be tracking this [pics.me.me][NSFW].
They'll all be replaced by robots (Score:4, Insightful)
So will retail workers, drivers and farmers (Score:2)
That's tens of millions of jobs that are going away in the next 20 years. Anyone have any idea what's going to replace them?
"Jobs so futuristic I can't imagine them" isn't a good answer. "Web Programmer" was too futuristic for a textile worker in the 1800s to imagine, but they died without ever seeing those jobs.
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Not sure that fruit picking is going to lend itself to a process that is inexpensive enough to justify the replacement of workers. After all, fundamentally it still comes down to removing the harvest from the trees without damaging the trees or the harvest, in conditions that are extremely varied and hard on machinery.
Farming techniques that work on plants do so because farmers had to adapt their planting techniques to the machines, not because the machines particularly adapted to conditions on the ground.
INTELLIGENT fruit pickers (Score:3)
You missed the bit about having a computer. Sure, you cannot pick Mangos (say) like you can harvest wheat with a dumb machine. But a machine with an arm and cutter, that can recognize ripe fruit (they turn yellow, not that difficult), reach into the tree without hitting branches, and clip it. That is entirely possible.
There are machines that pick strawberries today using cameras to find the fruit and pick it without bruising it. And the Mango picker will not get Mango rash which affects human pickers.
Th
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And if such technology had been cost-effective on a large scale, it probably would have been implemented by now.
The harvest is probably the most expensive part of farming. Farmers would love to reduce costs there if they could.
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So it's like outsourcing, where you get to train your replacement.
Motion capture for robots? (Score:1)
government better then blacklist after big bill (Score:2)
government better then blacklist after big bill from non government healthcare.
With pre ADA plans they took you payments waited for you to get sick run up an big bill and they look for any way to get out of paying for it.
inmates get more then people on the street / er! (Score:2)
inmates get more then people on the street / er!
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They collect all that now and hide all the errors behind 'privacy laws' Grow up.
Re: Nationalized Healthcare (Score:1)
Nothing insidious about it (Score:3)
To me, this sounds like they want to keep their workers, as robotic warehouse systems already exist [slashdot.org]
Robots can't yet handle soft things (Score:2)
They don't want to keep their workers, they still need them. That said I don't think we're far off from not needing them anymore. Robots exist to replace those workers, but their too expensive/unreliable still. That'll change. Billions are being spent to change it.
I give it 20 years tops. Maybe less. I said that about self driving cars and Waymo's already got a
Not surprising. (Score:2)
That's because of their heightened senses after the transformation, which help them stalk their prey - usually middle class millennial couples looking for an affordable townhouse in the suburbs. Their only vulnerability is a silver wrecking ball.
Also, that should be an "e", not an "a".
Track Output not Work. (Score:5, Insightful)
That guy in a warehouse who may be moving a lot may not be productive as he may be wondering the warehouse trying to find the right box, or not efficiently taking the right path for optimal work. A worker who may wait for a couple order to queue up then stop and think of the ideal path. May be able to get more Output with less work.
Even with programming. The programmers who take breaks goof off a little bit, often can get more and better code out. Then the guy at they keyboard stressing out that nothing is working. Taking a break clearing your mind, looking at the world in a different light is a useful ability, that actually increases output.
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The point is that people who are not moving as much or who are taking breaks and goofing off are not performing at maximum effort. They are in effect stealing from the company, who is paying them for their time and not their output. If you can identify people who are short-changing the company in the time for pay trade, you can fix the arrangement. One could argue that salvaging the waste from your most efficient people has a better return on investment than trying to whip your bottom 10% with a stick to make them move faster.
Are you on the clock right now posting to Slashdot?
I understand the point, but it's still a scary thought. For human well-being a certain amount of slack is needed. Obviously people who abuse the slack and slack too much are not good for a business, but there should be a certain amount of slack. Being watched every moment people will think they can't have a "humane" level of slack.
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I speak from experience when I say that posting to Slashdot does not improve productivity. You cannot do it well without devoting enough of your brainpower to it that it will distract you... Though perhaps people doing it poorly explains the low quality of so many comments here.
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I speak from experience when I say that posting to Slashdot does not improve productivity.
No, it certainly doesn't, at least not in any short-term capacity. Long term though, if you work nose to the grindstone every day, every week, will you eventually burn out? Quite likely.
Unhappy employees eventually quit and move on, and then the company needs to hire fresh again and train fresh faces... it might still work in the companies favour to force work non-stop, even with higher turnover, but it's certainly not in the employee's favour. There is certainly a needed amount of slack in a human's day
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I speak from experience when I say that posting to Slashdot does not improve productivity.
Productivity is, as productivity does. The proud owners of Slashdot would argue against your above statement.
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The point is that people who are not moving as much or who are taking breaks and goofing off are not performing at maximum effort. They are in effect stealing from the company, who is paying them for their time and not their output.
BS. The employer owes all of its employees a decent working environment. Claiming that employees who are not turning themselves into burned out wrecks are "stealing from their employer" is corporate shilling. This a serious problem right now with logistics centers - demanding unsustainable levels of effort from its staff.
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"Claiming that employees who are not turning themselves into burned out wrecks are "stealing from their employer" is corporate shilling."
This is what I'm worried about as automation takes more work. Employers are going to have the upper hand and say you should be happy you have a job, while demanding more and more from you. I'm not lazy; I do good work for my employer, but there comes a point where the line needs to be drawn.
For all of those who are in their first or second jobs and happily cranking out 70/
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I think this is more the Revenge of the Bean Counters. They have nothing to do except count beans and putting more effort into getting more beans to count means squeezing more beans out of the proles.
The basic problem is that the BCs want to run every system as close to breaking point with no hysteresis. They can then claim to management they are running at maximum efficiency. That works until some problem crops up, and it will because the world is not a perfect place.
And when it comes to fixing the problem
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It's like buckminster fuller said. We've progressed far beyond the point where most of these positions have any need to exist and so they need to justify themselves somehow, and the way they do that is by "managing" people. They need to find ever more invasive ways to interfere with employees and visibly perform the act of "management" to justify the necessity of their positions.
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"as he may be wondering the warehouse "
I wonder why people have such a hard time spelling "wandering"?
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That's an easy lie to see through. Can you name ONE person that got rich by hard work?
I know a few that got rich while hardly working, that maybe.
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Only an interim measure (Score:2)
Until all those millions of robots take over and make them all redundant.
But... does it register the employees giving their bosses the finger at each and every opportunity?
Abuse is a certainty (Score:1)
While there are a lot of potential benefits, this is surveillance, and it will be abused ....waves off worries about surveillance: “I actually believe they’re emotional concerns.” "
from the complete article: " CEO
Historically, in industries where monitoring devices are already in use (such as transportation), too many managers cannot resist the temptation to idly "fish through the data" in the hopes of finding something to use for employee discipline. This is a
It really is for workers benefits (Score:3)
One doesn't need complex motion tracking algorithms to fire workers who are not productive enough.
Just count the number of boxes moved, if the number is too low, you are fired.
Here, the goal is to first understand why some employees are less productive than others. If the reason is that you are just lazy, then you will be fired, like in any company caring about productivity. But if the reason is that you are doing the wrong movement, then they will help you correct yourself. Win-win, you get to keep your job and health, and the company gets its productivity.
Never worry until it's too late. (Score:2)
oh hells no. (Score:1)
Bad managers will love this (Score:3)
This is a perfect Second Dotcom Bubble product: :-)
- Generates massive amounts of Big Data
- It's IoT (because your employees are Things)
- It feeds into the MBA fantasy that anything that can be measured can be managed with Big Data!
- It allows companies to check the Digital Transformation box even in the warehouse, and I assume the Cloud checkbox as well. Not sure about Blockchain but I'll bet it's there too.
The problem is that the MBAs of the world are going to use this to squeeze every last second of productivity out of workers who aren't able to object because of their status. The problem is squeezing too hard -- no one is capable of working 100% efficiently for an entire 8-hour shift. You don't want total laziness, but turning humans into robots isn't the answer either.
We're seeing this in development too. For all the productivity improvements that DevOps brings, being hooked into a tracking and monitoring system 24/7 has to have long-term issues. It's great that features get released and bugs get fixed faster, but I wonder how many bad managers are going to use it as a carrot-and-stick monitoring tool. "Well, Bob has a much higher commit rate than you, why can't you be more like Bob?" "Why are you taking vacation? You have 18 stories on the backlog! Get back to work!" The DevOps small batch and intensive monitoring mindset indirectly breaks down development tasks into tiny parts that can all be monitored (and as an added bonus, can be more easily offshored.) I think that when the bubble pops, we'll see developers questioning why their hyper-efficieint pipeline is being used against them,
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What an apt name. (Score:2)
(a) [noun] - technology to track employees' every muscle movement
(b) [verb] - companies forcing employees to wear (a) as a condition of continued employment
Sounds like they need a Union (Score:2)
Bad metrics (Score:2)
Worse than no metrics!
Moore's law + Murphy's law means that the liklihood of poorly thought out Orwellian work surveillance doubles every 18 months.
The problem is that those devising the metrics and surveillance, and certainly those making the decisions, rarely have any idea how the work gets done.
DEC and ARM (and Intel) Called... (Score:2)
...they want their SoC name back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
EVERY MUSCLE MOVEMENT? (Score:2)
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Keggles are made out of stainless steel and are hard to flex. Not sure why a person capable of flexing them would be slow?
https://www.kegglebrewing.com/... [kegglebrewing.com]
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What about data privacy? (Score:2)
USA not Socialist Society so why is this happening (Score:1)
Biological Robots (Score:2)