🔎 Amazon Surveillance: 'You Feel Like You're In Prison,' Workers Claim It Violates Labor Law

The Guardian, May 21, 2024. - Exclusive: employees at a Missouri warehouse file charges against firm alleging use of ‘intrusive algorithms’ to deter union efforts
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Amazon has been accused of using “intrusive algorithms” as part of a sweeping surveillance program to monitor and deter union organizing activities. Workers at a warehouse run by the technology giant on the outskirts of St Louis, Missouri, are today filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

A copy of the charge, seen by the Guardian, alleges that Amazon has “maintained intrusive algorithms and other workplace controls and surveillance which interfere with Section 7 rights of employees to engage in protected concerted activity”. There have been several reports of Amazon surveilling workers over union organizing and activism, including human resources monitoring employee message boards, software to track union threats and job listings for intelligence analysts to monitor “labor organizing threats”.

“Us coming together to file this charge will hold Amazon accountable. We don’t want this becoming the norm,” Wendy Taylor, a packer at Amazon’s STL8 fulfillment center in Saint Peters, Missouri, since August 2020 and an organizing committee member, said in an interview. “It’s out of control. “We have an injury crisis and we’re being watched and you feel like you’re in prison. We just want people to know we have a right to organize, the right to form a union and the right to have a safer work environment.”

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Artificial intelligence can be used by warehouse employers like Amazon “to essentially have 24/7 unregulated and algorithmically processed and recorded video, and often audio data of what their workers are doing all the time,” said Seema N Patel, a fellow and lecturer at Stanford Law School. “It enables employers to control, record, monitor and use that data to discipline hundreds of thousands of workers in a way that no human manager or group of managers could even do.” Taylor said: “Amazon tracks our every move. They know every move you make, when you’re working, when you’re not working. They surveil you with their cameras. Managers surveil you with their laptops...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/amazon-surveillance-lawsuit-union
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Heinrich (Henry) Ford's Bizarre Social Program to Control Workers' Personal Lives,
Yahoo News, Dec. 23, 2023. - Ed

- This disgusting program allowed the Ford Motor Company a hand in everything from their employees' love lives to the cleanliness of their homes.
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Henry Ford was a man whose personal life and general personality were fraught with more than a few flaws that would be considered borderline horrendous these days. If historical accounts of the man are to be believed, it would appear that he was a terrible racist, sexist, and had a particular distaste for immigrants. However, his father was an Irish immigrant.

Of course, this is not to say that the Ford Motor Company wasn't a massive innovator within the automotive industry, but these extreme values even made their way into how Ford did business.

The Ford Sociological Program was a sector of the Ford Motor Company dedicated solely to ensuring their employees' moral and social righteousness. This came from Ford changing its pay rate from $2.34/day (about $65.08/day in 2021) to $5/day($138.97/day in 2021) to reduce their terrible turnover rate of around 370% in 1913. This was an effective policy as it led to the reduction of employees, leaving the company at just 16% in 1915. So what was so wrong with this new Company initiative if the numbers seemed to show positive results?

Apart from the fact that this raise was entirely unsustainable for Ford in the long term, which eventually led to the program's ending.

It also came with many downsides in the form of constant monitoring of the employees' personal lives and personal value requirements.
The staff within the sociological department consisted of 50 investigators, which would eventually grow to over 200, who would make regular visits to employee households to check up on their homes, children, and spouses. If you were below the age of 22, you needed to be married, and if you were a woman, you weren't eligible for the raise unless you were a single mother...
https://autos.yahoo.com/henry-ford-bizarre-social-program-211500105.html