Group items tagged

"On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that directly affects "mega-retailers" like Amazon, and how these companies use algorithms to manage warehouse workers. Mega-retailers are those that employ more than 1,000 warehouse workers, and they include one of Amazon's main competitors, Walmart."

"Costco customers at four of the retailer's Chicago-area warehouses may have had their payment information compromised after employees discovered five card-skimming devices during routine PIN pad inspections at the end of August. "We promptly removed the skimmers, notified law enforcement, and engaged a forensics firm to analyze the devices," A Costco spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. "It appears that these skimmers had the ability to capture information on the magnetic stripe of a payment card, including name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.""

"At Amazon, some warehouse and delivery drivers complain that AI-driven bots have fired them without any human intervention whatsoever. At some companies, surveillance apps track how much time workers spend in trips to the bathroom, with some workers protesting that the time limits are too strict."

"About two years ago the retail team lost another key task: negotiating with major brands and manufacturers the terms of popular sales on the site called "Lightning Deals." Common during the holidays as well as Mother's Day and Father's Day, they help move lots of inventory in a short period. Now, instead of calling their vendor manager at Amazon, the makers of handbags, smartphone accessories and other products simply logged into an Amazon portal that would determine if Amazon liked the deal being offered and the quantity it was willing to buy. No small talk. No give and take. Thousands of Amazon man hours spent forecasting demand, planning marketing strategies and negotiating deals was now handled by software, a major leap in efficiency."

"Everything around us will be altered by autonomous vehicles-our roads, our warehouses and even our definition of what a car can be. Say goodbye to four wheels and a running board; the cars of the future will barely resemble the vehicles choking our cities today."

"The long-running issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colourfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) - a non-for-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on the trade of hazardous wastes - attempted to learn where exactly Australia's e-waste was going. The group fitted 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with GPS devices of a special make. Out of this sample the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped at Officeworks storefronts around the Brisbane metro area. Hayley Palmer, BAN's chief operating officer, was on the team that followed where they went afterwards. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old and a colleague tracked the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong and then on to an illegal dump-yard in a rural part of Thailand where they talked their way inside."

"Economists even have a term for it - the "lump of labor" fallacy. Innovation may destroy occupations but there is no fixed number of jobs and new ones take their place. Warehouse jobs, for example, replaced retail jobs as online shopping decimated shopping malls."