In September 2020 a Vice reporter discovered that Amazon was seeking to hire two “intelligence analysts” into its Global Security Operations division (GSO). The analysts would use data analytics and other tools to detect and resist “labor organizing threats” and other political opposition to the company. Later that month an Amazon employee alleged that GSO had also monitored internal company message boards to spot union organizing, focusing on boards developed by workers of color and other groups typically underrepresented in Silicon Valley. Such pervasive worker surveillance backfired on Amazon in at least one case. Employees at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island unionized in 2022, in part out of frustration over incessant automated productivity monitoring. Corporate surveillance has also contributed to organizing among Uber and Lyft drivers, Apple store workers, and employees at Tesla’s self-driving program.
These efforts have implications for longstanding debates around technology and the future of work. For more than a decade, scholars, journalists, and tech leaders have focused on two ways that data-driven technologies are altering jobs: by automating tasks and therefore displacing certain workers, and by discriminating on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or disability. Those are critical issues, but surveillance technologies are having another effect on work as well. Companies across today’s vast service economy are using such technologies as tools of...
Hyderabad: BRS leader Aedla Sudhakar Reddy strongly criticised the statements of HYDRAA commissioner A.V. Ranganath regarding the status of Bathukammakunta. The official had claimed that the place...