While you are busy wondering what is a novated lease, employees are being fired by actual machines. Amazon has always been an industry leader, from the time they began to sell cheap books due to the convenience and accessibility they provided. Today, they have taken their initiative to the next level by allowing machines to preside over their workforce.
In a story that was first reported by The Free Press, an employee was fired by a machine employed by Amazon in order to increase productivity by tracking their efficiency. This cold-blooded move is like something out of a sci-fi movie, but instead of having A.I. eliminating the need for human labour, they are given the power to weed out the weak links with no consideration to the human condition or the current state of the world.
Inconveniences caused by the pandemic such as locked buildings or vacated offices are not things that the machine is able to comprehend or take into account when tracking delivery times because despite attempts at making machines intelligent, they will always lack the human flexibility and compassion.
Stephen Normandin, an Amazon delivery driver, found himself jobless upon receiving an automated email stating that he did not meet Amazon’s expectations and he had no one to appeal to, despite his years of experience and commitment to the e-commerce goliath. While this may work in favor of the corporation in terms of speeding up efficiency and productivity, it will unfortunately leave many hard-working employees out in the rain just because they were unable to meet certain algorithms.
In a company with over a million employees all over the country, hiring an HR team to manage the workforce is definitely less efficient than having a cold-blooded machine calling the shots. Without human compassion in play, the company will be able to filter out the best of the best for their team, rather than letting under performing, lazy coasters tag along because there isn’t enough manpower to oversee whether someone is lagging behind and merely coasting along. Clocking in the hours but not producing the work.
It is a double edged sword that will benefit the company in the long run, although it may also overlook employees such as Normandin who did his best to fulfill his end of the bargain, and failing to do so, not because of any problem on his part, but because of the restrictions that the pandemic has imposed upon us all.
To some, this move by Amazon may seem unnecessary, but in a world that pushes for faster and better products and services, it is a smart one that can keep Amazon working like the well-oiled machine that they are, and living up to the expectations that their consumers have of them.
While this machine take-over isn’t something that we were expecting, it is more horrible because the machines are being used to preside over the working class of labour-intensive positions. We won’t be replaced, but we’ll be working under machines, which is considerably worse.
