How Unions Are Pushing Back Against the Rise of Workplace Technology

A few years ago, Marriott debuted a new app at hotels in five cities that was supposed to save housekeepers time by telling them which rooms to clean. It was a disaster.

Housekeepers ended up yo-yoing between rooms on different floors, ignoring messy rooms just down the hall. If anything, the cleaners felt that the app made them less efficient, and they worried about being disciplined by their bosses for failing to finish their work on time. “A wild-goose chase” is how Rachel Gumpert, a spokeswoman for Unite Here, the labor union that represents Marriott’s housekeepers, describes the episode.

Several months after the union became aware of the problems the app was causing, Marriott’s hotel workers went on strike, partly because of new technologies like the housekeeping app. In December, after intense negotiations, the hotel workers won a remarkable concession—a new contract that requires management to tell them 150 days in advance about new technology so they can raise any concerns.

In the retail industry, software for scheduling employee hours is a big sticking point, says Carrie Gleason, who directs the Fair Workweek Initiative at the advocacy group The Center for Popular Democracy. The technology weighs the hours when stores are expected to be busy or empty to schedule workers, creating a so-called just-in-time workforce.

In reaction, some unions representing retail workers have recently negotiated contracts that spell out how management can use scheduling software, to avoid disrupting the lives of employees. One example is a 2014 contract between the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5 and retail firm Macy’s that requires advance notice to workers about their schedules and any changes to them.

Then Macy’s will have to pay their worker’s more per hour.

I was a cashier for Walmart and faced the same issue. At $9.25 an hour I was required to end work one day at 12:30 am when Walmart closed and start at 6 am the next day when Walmart opened. The issue was that anyone who walked in the door at 12am was allowed to shop as long as they wanted and since I was the only cashier on shift I had to work sometimes leaving after 1 am instead of the 12:30 am I was supposed to. That gave me five hours in between shifts.

How long with unemployment as low at it is will Walmart be able to get cashiers willing to put with that kind of scheduling which was all done electronically?

Answer: I quit. And I doubt Walmart was very successful after I left.

Just look at the Trucking Industry to see the effect of Unions - If it wasn’t for UPS, the Membership would be down to less than 500,000. Union Trucking companies [NEMF] are closing while private drivers are picking up the work. The Teamsters will be down to nothing in the next 10 years.

Many of the latest generation of programmers seem to have no concept of the underlying processes that their software is supposed to automate or support. It seems lately that software is becoming more and more prettied up and graphic intense and less and less useful.

Well a big issue with this is that there's so many new languages that don't actually use line-by-line programming. Ruby-on-Rails is an example where the program writes a lot of your code for you, so kids these days don't actually know how to do any basic programming. Also, yes, so many people I know in the business are all about GUI and making stuff look pretty. Instead of practical and easy to use.

A what-should-be-frightening trend I've seen is that, as the software becomes an obstacle to accomplishment, people are starting to switch back to paper because they need to get their work done and the software isn't helping.

Yup, I see this at work a bunch with our new-ish inventory software. There's several tweaks I would want to make stuff much easier, but they won't add it as an option because either it costs $$, or it's not a so-called 'best practice'. Also, it's all cloud based so when there's internet issues, we pretty much just have to shut down for a time. Without a local database/software instance, we are 100% dependent on internet access to do anything. So difficulty of use, plus some employees not fully knowing the software, adds up into us often using printed lists or writing stuff down instead.

As one who is both a business analyst and a programmer, I do believe that one should be both, trying to separate the roles is a disaster waiting to happen, too much gets lost in the “hand off”.

“Heads Down” coders should go the way of the “Dodo Bird”

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