Amazon workers in a fidget fuss
Retail giant wins patent for wristband that would reveal when they stop work to scratch
LONDON — What if your employer made you wear a wristband that tracked your every move, and that even nudged you via vibrations when it judged that you were doing something wrong?
What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break?
What may sound like dystopian fiction could become a reality for Amazon warehouse workers around the world.
The company has won two patents for such a wristband, though it was unclear if Amazon planned to actually manufacture the tracking device and have employees wear it.
The online retail giant, which plans to build a second headquarters and recently shortlisted 20 potential host cities for it, has also been known to experiment inhouse with new technology before selling it worldwide.
The patent disclosure goes to the heart about a global debate about privacy and security.
Amazon already has a reputation for a workplace culture that thrives on a hardhitting management style, and has experimented with how far it can push whitecollar workers in order to reach its delivery targets.
Privacy advocates, however, note that a lot can go wrong even with everyday tracking technology.
On Monday, the tech industry was jolted by the discovery that Strava, a fitness app that allows users to track their activities and compare their performance with other people running or cycling in the same places, had unwittingly highlighted the locations of U.S. military bases and the movements of their personnel in Iraq and Syria.
In theory, Amazon’s proposed technology would emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee’s hands were in relation to inventory bins, and provide “haptic feedback” to steer the worker toward the correct bin.
The aim, Amazon says in the patent, is to streamline the “time consuming” task of responding to orders and packaging them for speedy delivery. With guidance from a wristband, workers could fill orders faster.
The patents, filed in 2016, were published in September, and were initially reported by GeekWire on Tuesday.
Critics say such wristbands raise concerns about privacy and would add a new layer of surveillance to the workplace, and that the use of the devices could result in employees being treated like robots.
Current and former Amazon employees said the company already used similar tracking technology in its warehouses and said they would not be surprised if it put the patents into practice.
Max Crawford, a former Amazon warehouse worker in Britain, said in a phone interview, “After a year working on the floor, I felt like I had become a version of the robots I was working with.”
He described having to process hundreds of items in an hour — a pace so extreme that one day, he said, he fell over from dizziness.
“There was no time to go to the loo,” he said. “You had to process the items in seconds and then move on. If you didn’t meet targets, you were fired.”
He worked at two Amazon warehouses for more than two years and then quit in 2015 because of health concerns, he said.