AI that steals from the poor: How Amazon USA’s pay system cuts wages to low-income families and workers
The NYT has released a chilling report , which starts with a first case, that of Tara Jones. On payday she checks her phone and sees that instead of $ 540 in pay she has only received $ 90. At this point, desperate she writes to Bezos himself, because she can't even pay the bills.
Apparently, due to a number of errors within the company's human resources system – errors caused by underinvestment, according to company insiders – some Amazon workers were regularly underpaid and some were even laid off. from what appears to be a mostly automated system that has mistakenly marked them as "no shows", absent from work ..
In addition to the cut wages and layoffs, even medical certificates due to illness have been canceled! Complainers were invited to turn to complex automated telephone systems that seemed built to lead nowhere. and that he could hardly do anything. Kafka could not have done better.
When it came time for some workers to return from medical leave, Amazon's HR system often took weeks or even months to register them and reintegrate them into the program. In many cases, this has resulted in wages being lost for weeks.
A worker who was paid for disability by Amazon after a heart attack said his payments stopped abruptly for months. Financial hardship essentially brought him and his wife to their knees. When they asked the top management for help, they received only silence.
So the Amazon USA HR system was created as a kind of Dante's hell of workers, who could do nothing, or almost nothing, against the abuses. The NYT claims that the top executives were unaware of it, and officially it is also probable, but this does not exempt them from responsibility:
- who gave the directions to design the software that manages employees?
- Who Decided to Outsource Employee Relations?
- Who has always cut employee software development money?
In short, we cannot think of freeing ourselves from responsibility with a “Beau geste”, solving some single cases, but we should investigate how this billionaire giant was created that has displaced competitors in the end by exploiting the work.
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The article AI that steals from the poor: how the US Amazon pay system cuts wages to low-income families and workers comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-ai-che-ruba-ai-poveri-come-il-sistema-paghe-di-amazon-usa-taglia-le-paghe-a-famiglie-e-lavoratori-a-basso-reddito/ on Tue, 26 Oct 2021 08:00:15 +0000.