Your boss is watching | MIT Technology Review
Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. What matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. Managers and management consultants are using worker data, individually and in the aggregate, to create black-box algorithms that determine hiring and firing, promotion and “deactivation.” And this is laying the groundwork for the automation of tasks and even whole categories of labor on an endless escalator to optimized productivity. Some human workers are already struggling to keep up with robotic ideals. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power.
Data as power
Data has been part of the story of paid work and power since the late 19th century, when manufacturing was booming in the US and a rise in immigration meant cheap and plentiful labor. The mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who would become one of the first management consultants, created a strategy called “scientific management” to optimize production by tracking and setting standards for worker performance. Soon after, Henry Ford broke down the auto manufacturing process into mechanized steps to minimize the role of individual skill and maximize the number of cars that could be produced each day. But the transformation of workers into numbers has a longer history. Some researchers see a direct line between Taylor’s and Ford’s unrelenting focus on efficiency and the dehumanizing labor optimization practices carried out on slave-owning plantations.
As manufacturers adopted Taylorism and its successors, time was replaced by productivity as the measure of work, and the power divide between owners and workers in the United States widened. But other developments soon helped rebalance the scales. In 1914, Section 6 of the Clayton Act established the federal legal right for workers to unionize and stated that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity.” In the years that followed, union membership grew, and the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage were written into US law. Though the nature of work had changed with revolutions in technology and management strategy, new frameworks and guardrails stood up to meet that change.
More than a hundred years after Taylor published his seminal book, The Principles of Scientific Management, “efficiency” is still a business buzzword, and technological developments, including new uses of data, have brought work to another turning point. But the federal minimum wage and other worker protections haven’t kept up, leaving the power divide even starker. In 2023, CEO pay was 290 times average worker pay, a disparity that’s increased more than 1,000% since 1978. Data may play the same kind of intermediary role in the boss-worker relationship that it has since the turn of the 20th century, but the scale has exploded. And the stakes can be a matter of physical health.
In 2024, a report from a Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders, based on an 18-month investigation of Amazon’s warehouse practices, found that the company had been setting the pace of work in those facilities with black-box algorithms, presumably calibrated with data collected by monitoring employees. (In California, because of a 2021 bill, Amazon is required to at least reveal the quotas and standards workers are expected to comply with; elsewhere the bar can remain a mystery to the very people struggling to meet it.) The report also found that in each of the previous seven years, Amazon workers had been almost twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers, with injuries ranging from concussions to torn rotator cuffs to long-term back pain.
An internal team tasked with evaluating Amazon warehouse safety found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries.
The Sanders report found that between 2020 and 2022, two internal Amazon teams tasked with evaluating warehouse safety recommended reducing the required pace of work and giving workers more time off. Another found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries. The company rejected all the recommendations for technical or productivity reasons. But the report goes on to reveal that in 2022, another team at Amazon, called Core AI, also evaluated warehouse safety and concluded that unrealistic pacing wasn’t the reason all those workers were getting hurt on the job. Core AI said that the cause, instead, was workers’ “frailty” and “intrinsic likelihood of injury.” The issue was the limitations of the human bodies the company was measuring, not the pressures it was subjecting those bodies to. Amazon stood by this reasoning during the congressional investigation.
Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel told MIT Technology Review that the Sanders report is “wrong on the facts” and that the company continues to reduce incident rates for accidents. “The facts are,” she said, “our expectations for our employees are safe and reasonable—and that was validated both by a judge in Washington after a thorough hearing and by the state’s Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals.”
