It’s an object lesson for Amazon warehouse workers

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It could be worse, and it was… the bracelets sent messages saying “Please keep working, give it a go!” to workers who hadn’t moved for more than 20 minutes. Public outrage stopped the messages, but not the monitoring.
In Dublin, warehouse workers and forklift operators at grocery chain Tesco were monitored with Motorola wearables that recorded the speed at which they moved stock and the time they spent going to the toilet.

who may soon be using even more invasive technology: Two patents for ultrasonic wristbands filed by the company feature drawings of a modern-day Vetruvian Man fused with his workstation, detailing features like “proximity iceland number data activation.” The wristbands could also use haptics to guide workers.

“Amazon’s employment practices in its warehouses are particularly onerous in terms of how they monitor their workers and how fast they work,” says Paula Brantner, an employment lawyer and president and CEO of PB Work Solutions; she also spent 18 years at Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit that focuses on workers’ rights.

Sign of Dishonor
Much of the monitoring is done on blue-collar workers, but one of the most invasive systems is hidden in the badges some workers wear every day.

At Deloitte and Bank of America, workers wore Humanyze badges that see and hear everything they do. The badges analyze the wearer’s speech by intensity and pitch, and track who they spend time with and their daily routes. The tracking works via beacons placed around the office. Entrepreneur reached out to both companies for comment. A Bank of America spokesperson would not confirm that the company is currently working with Humanyze. And Deloitte had not responded at the time of writing.
In its statement of values, Humanyze says, “We are committed to data privacy,” and says that the data it collects is anonymized. In fact, employees have expressed concerns about the possibility that their bathroom activities are not private (Humanyze addresses this in its FAQ: “Q: Do we track when employees go to the bathroom? A: No, the Humanyze badge does not track employees in the bathroom.”)