Sweating Bullets
Weapons of Math Destruction, Ch. 9
Employees of large-scale corporations — particularly those in the food service industry — are being increasingly managed by algorithms rather than human managers. Algorithms are able to optimize costs by allocating resources so that the company needs only to pay the bare minimum needed to successfully operate. This dynamic method of resource allocation is very profitable for employers; now, they can ensure that there are less moments where an excess amount of employees are working while business is slow or that there are enough employees during busy periods. Algorithms are also able to find the least costly way of choosing which employees to schedule.
This all sounds very good for employers, but it has severely negative results for employees. Since only the minimum amount of resources are allocated, these algorithms force the employees working to constantly be pushed to their limit; a more consistent scheduling paradigm would result in ups and downs for employees, but this dynamic scheduling removes the downs. It also can make scheduling incredibly inconvenient, inconsistent, and unmanageable for employees. Employees with a constant schedule are able to set up a routine for their lives, and they know exactly when they will and will not have time for other parts of their lives. If their work schedules are dictated by a constantly-shifting schedule that demands quick responses, employees will have an extremely difficult time managing anything in their lives besides their jobs. Parents will not know when they can spend time with their kids — they won’t even know when they need to find other resources like a babysitter for when they’re at work. They won’t know when they can spend their free time on other hobbies or self-care. Algorithmic scheduling without consideration for the well-being of the employees will inevitably milk them for everything they are worth.
What’s worse is that since this method of scheduling leaves everything so up-in-the-air for employees, they won’t have the time to try and improve their situation. School is incredibly difficult to manage without a constant routine, and it’d be very difficult to organize the workers to protest when none of them know when they’ll have time. This keeps the employees where they are, creating a toxic feedback loop that keeps these low-level workers exactly where they are, denying them the opportunity to create better lives for themselves. It also affects their friends and family; children won’t know when their parents will have time to dedicate to them.
The fault has less to do with algorithms and more on the capitalist hyper-fixation on profit that drives employers to disregard the wellbeing of their employees. People can talk for eternity about how these algorithms can be tweaked this way or that way, but at the end of the day, a strict capitalistic standard will dictate that profit always be prioritized over wellbeing. That is, after all, the only goal of capitalism.
