The report finds that Amazon workers in robotic warehouses feel more isolated at work, which makes it difficult to unionize.

Amazon’s use of AI and robotics in its warehouses isolates workers and negatively impacts union organizing drives, a new report finds.

The report, conducted by Oxford University research team Fairwork and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, aimed to explain how AI impacts warehouse workers by interviewing employees at robotic Amazon warehouses in the U.K.

  • @[email protected]English
    26•26 days ago

    “In manual fulfillment centres, Jane would walk around the warehouse. That would be tiring—she could easily do 15 or 16 km per day, often more—but at least she would see people,” the report states. “In a robotic fulfillment centre, associates in pick work at fixed stations, with just the robots for company.”

    I remember someone on Lemmy linking to a story about how AI effectively isolated workers from their colleagues in order to be “efficient”. Now, I see it as a way to break solidarity between workers.

    • @[email protected]
      11•26 days ago

      Surely AI makes them so efficient they’re free to spend more time organizing a union right? /s

    • @[email protected]
      3•26 days ago

      That’s already being done to the general populace, especially now with sophisticated algorithms tailoring social media posts to individual needs. It’s gonna get worse with LLM-powered chatbots