Wearable computers


For several years, general union GMB has been calling for safeguards for warehouse workers who are “electronically tagged” by wearing small computers on their wrists, arms and fingers. This is now commonplace at warehouse distribution centres run by employers supplying major chains, for example, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Boots and Marks and Spencer. 


These devices are strongly linked to deskilling. In a report for the GMB in 2011, Professor Michael Blakemore cited a supplier to Marks and Spencer that extolled how “new warehouse operatives can be trained to use basic scanner functions within an hour”. Workers using a wearable computer no longer need to learn the geography of the warehouse because the computer receives a picking instruction and then “pre-optimises” their journey. Any residual job satisfaction is removed and the minimal skill level means that sick or underperforming workers, as well as those who burn out through monotony or exhaustion, can be quickly and cheaply replaced. 


The system is equipped to provide “real time” data on employee performance, for example, estimating the correct journey time needed to select a particular item and then comparing it to actual time taken, or calculating pick rates and downtime. At the end of each shift, line management are able to track immediately whose performance is below average. Any mistakes can be traced quickly back to the worker who made them. In other words, paradoxically, workers face greater “task accountability” while at the same time suffer ever diminishing control — a recipe for stress. In this scenario, the worker effectively becomes an automaton or drone and “an extension of the information systems that drive the supply chain” (Blakemore, 2011). 


This kind of employment lends itself to a casualised workforce where contracts can be ended quickly and easily. And this form of surveillance is linked to a highly automated and dehumanising form of workplace management. 


The ICO Employment Practices Code suggests employers consider the adverse impact of monitoring and whether the practices will be “oppressive or demeaning”. Some of the examples discussed below can certainly be described as such. 


Arm-mounted terminals at Amazon


The GMB general union has highlighted how the most oppressive forms of employer surveillance tend to occur where workers are most vulnerable. For example, staff employed in the warehouses of online retailer Amazon are often agency workers and/or on zero hours contracts, or other forms of casual contracts, and denied basic employment rights and collective trade union representation while also subject to close surveillance. The union says that Amazon is so hostile to trade unions that union activity is driven underground adopting “the tactics of the French resistance or human rights campaigns in totalitarian regimes”.


Amazon requires its warehouse staff to wear digital arm-mounted terminals (AMTs) which track their movements while also transmitting “picking” instructions, with no agreed protocols regarding breaks or speeds. 


A Financial Times feature article on Amazon workplace practices at its Rugeley warehouse in 2013 explained that: “Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device.” Managers can also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up. “Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking,” the article explains, citing a picker at the Rugeley warehouse who claims he lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. 


The article also cites an Amazon manager as saying that warehouse workers were “sort of like a robot, but in human form”. Amazon had recently bought a robot company, but said it still expected “to keep plenty of humans around” because they were “so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells”.


According to the GMB, Amazon have a “three strikes and you’re out” sacking policy for missing targets and other workplace “transgressions”. Failure to meet a required “picking” timescale by a few seconds is enough to have one strike against your name (as is taking a day’s sick leave, according to an Observer report in 2013). Yet one order might require multiple items being picked, and require going from one end of a massive warehouse to the other to get to the required items. Amazon’s largest UK warehouse, in Dunfermline, is said to be the size of 14 football pitches.


A GMB national official told LRD that GMB members at Amazon are reporting having to literally run “a half marathon every shift” to meet picking instructions and required timescales. These are repetitive RSI-inducing tasks, and pose a serious risk of injury. 


The issue is not so much the surveillance, but how it is “manipulated and used”, according to the official. The way it is used at Amazon increases the pressure on staff to work at excessive speeds, with some workers targeted and given impossible picking targets to ensure they fall foul of the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. 


The GMB official said that this type of monitoring against picking instructions is “endemic” in warehouses in the logistics sector, and the complexity of on-line ordering businesses, and the size of warehouses — particularly with generalised logistics companies serving more than one company — makes the use of technology to meet complex orders and facilitate efficient “picking” inevitable. However, other employers are using the technology in “a less brutal way” than Amazon, which is probably the “worst culprit”.


Another GMB official referred to practices at other employers including Asda, with different technologies used to “monitor workers down to specific seconds.” “Voice Pick” (the use of electronic headsets) was also being used to tell operatives what to pick and where to go to pick. The timed information produced “can be printed out down to the second and has, and is, being used in disciplinaries for excessive down time (anything over two minutes).”