Amazon is increasingly using artificial intelligence to monitor its own employees. The focus is on an AI system that is intended to detect and predict possible unrest and union activities at Amazon locations.

Research by the news portalTruthoutshows how Amazon uses artificial intelligence to monitor its employees. New documents from a labor law case in Canada have revealed how extensively Amazon analyzes the mood and behavior of its employees. At the center is the internal AI system “Atlas,” which evaluates hundreds of data points, including workplace accidents, fluctuation, complaints, management reviews, economic conditions and posts on internal platforms. Public discussions, for example on Reddit, are also included in the analysis.

The prediction function is particularly explosive: Atlas assigns so-called “labor scores” for individual Amazon locations and ranks them according to the expected risk of labor disputes or union activities. In 2024, 16 locations were in the highest risk category. The system also analyzes which topics are worsening the mood and where negative trends are increasing. At particularly vulnerable locations, so-called “rapid response” teams can be deployed to take action against union organizing.

The information came to light in connection with a labor dispute at the Amazon YVR2 location near Vancouver. There, the Canadian union Unifor had achieved recognition as a workers' representative. After further legal disputes, the responsible labor authority even ordered arbitration of the first collective agreement in August. As part of the process, Amazon had to disclose internal documents, including the description of Atlas and more than 100 pages on training managers on dealing with union activities.

Artificial Intelligence: Technology of Capital?

AI surveillance is nothing new

As early as 2021, Amazon began monitoring suppliers in the USACamera surveillanceand AI-supported evaluation. Just a year later, an AI decided who would keep their job and who would be fired. Because AI gives Amazon a competitive advantage, which, among other things, brought the group to the top of the mail order companies in Europe and North America.

Even small, unplanned extra costs in the low millions are hardly a problem, as research by theFinancial Timesrevealed this summer. Because every second that you work faster brings more money. But this practice always causes resentment among the workers and their representatives. The ver.di spokesman at the time criticized this as early as 2024Veli Erogluthis practice with the words: “Employees should work like robots.”

But AI is not just for surveillance. AI systems, from chatbots in customer service to robots in warehouses, repeatedly cause mass layoffs. So the financial service provider quitblockAt the beginning of this year, around half of its employees and replaced them with AI systems.

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Bad working conditions at Amazon

Amazon is always in the spotlightcriticismto systematically undermine occupational safety laws. The minimum wage is ignored through subcontractors. AlsoTipsThe billion-dollar mail order company has already embezzled money for its employees in the past. But the working conditions at Amazon have also come under sharp criticism from employees and the ver.di union. The workload multiplies, especially during the “Black Friday” campaign period and during the Christmas shopping season, and the associated pressure on employees in the warehouses and delivery vehicles increases enormously.

So enormous that workers are also dying from it. The labor organization “Warehouse Workers for Justice” describes these as industrial murders. An example of this is aTornado stormin the US state of Illinois in 2021. Here the workers had to continue working despite the tornado warning. Six of them did not survive the collapse of the warehouse.

But in Germany, too, Amazon kills itself for profit. This culminated on August 15, 2022 in a mail order company near Leipzig. Here a worker died, and his body was left with only a fewCardboardscovered while work continued alongside it. Opposite theLeipziger VolkszeitungA colleague of the deceased stated at the time that “the company is not about people, but only about profit”.

Leipzig: Amazon worker dies – operations continue

AI to monitor the population

In Germany, AI like Palantir is not only used for monitoring in the workplace. It is being used more and more frequently by the...Police authoritiesand secret services used to monitor the population. This process was proclaimed as an “internal turning point” and is reflected in new assembly and police laws, most recently in the amendment to the Federal Police Act, which allows the large-scale use of AI analyzes that can be used for real-time surveillance.

Even before that, AI surveillance was introduced in individual locations classified as “crime hotspots”, such as Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg or in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel.

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