Evolving technology in the U.S. service sector isn’t benefiting older workers

Q: The prevalence of workforce surveillance tools has grown in recent years. In your workforce survey responses, what impact has this trend had on job satisfaction?  

Workforce surveillance has long been a feature of the American workplace—just think back to Taylorism, CCTV, and call center monitoring. What’s changing now is that new technologies and new analytic capacity, such as AI, are allowing automated tracking of workers’ labor and are able to connect that directly with sanctions and rewards. How does that kind of technology affect older workers? In contrast to sales technology, we find a more nuanced picture for workforce surveillance tools. On average, this kind of surveillance reduces older workers’ job satisfaction and makes them more likely to report planning to look for a new job. That’s consistent with intensification of work that makes life more difficult for older workers under technological surveillance. But this was especially the case when speed tracking was coupled with sanctions for slow work and was actually the opposite when speed tracking was coupled with rewards. In ongoing work, we’re broadening this inquiry to look at both the drivers of workplace adoption of technological surveillance and the consequences for workers of all ages.

Q: In the service sector, the proliferation of automated checkout machines at grocery stores and other retailers has become even more pronounced since the COVID-19 pandemic. Your survey of service sector firms in the United States provided one of the first examinations of the relationship between self-checkout machines, understaffing, and workers’ experiences of customer incivility. What were the key takeaways from this survey?

As consumers, we all know the feeling of making the check-out calculus—risk the self-checkout machines and the seemingly inevitable error messages, help that never seems to actually be “on the way,” and frustrating bagging or brave the long-lines at one of the few open and staffed registers. We find those experiences are generalized. Workers report much more understaffing at retail and grocery stores with self-checkout machines. All too often, consumers take out their frustration with self-checkout machines on the nearest available worker. Customer bullying and disrespect are higher in stores with self-checkout.  

Q: Are retailers starting to rethink the ubiquitous deployment of automated checkout machines? Are increases in retail thefts or other reasons a consideration?  

What governs the introduction of new workplace technologies, especially those that, like self-checkout, appear to lead to not just reductions in labor, but understaffing of labor?  On the one hand, there is a kind of sense of inevitability that any new technology that could have a cost-saving function at work is destined for broad adoption. Any prospect that such technology might be slowed or adoption treated more cautiously is then determined by a business logic—are there unanticipated costs? In the case of self-checkout, perhaps retail theft or customers “voting with their feet.” On the other hand, it is not obvious that this market logic always produced good ends for customers, workers, and the broader public interest. For instance, the approach of “compensating the losers” in globalization and free trade is now widely questioned. There is then a role for public policy to play in acting prospectively to regulate new technologies, especially those that are so potentially disruptive to employment.    

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Banner photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images. Faculty portrait by Lydia Rosenberg.