Robotic Nation Evidence

Manna arriving in the Workplace

The book Manna describes a workplace where robots take a larger and larger role in managing employees. In Manna's world, every task that an employee undertakes comes at the instruction of a computer, and every aspect of the employee's worklife -- down to the employee's location in the workplace and pace in moving from point A to point B -- is monitored and controlled by computer.

The article entitled Big Employer Is Watching in this week's WSJ describes the incremental steps we are taking in this direction:

In their drive to squeeze greater efficiency from staffers, a growing number of employers are embracing sophisticated electronic tracking systems to ensure their workers are at their desks and work stations when they are supposed to be. And while many blue-collar workers are used to punching a time clock, many of the new tracking systems are trained on white-collar, salaried employees.

Examples cited in the article include:

• "At New York law firm Akin & Smith LLC, paralegals, receptionists and clerks clock in by placing a finger on a sensor kept at a secretary's desk."
• "At the Mitsubishi Motors North America plant in Normal, Ill., Andy Whaley, a manager of accounting, can check from his desktop computer how many of the plant's 500 white-collar employees have shown up for work in a given period."
• "Economic Advantages Corp., a mortgage-services company with offices in Woodstock, Vt., and Manhasset, N.Y., installed an attendance-tracking system last month. It requires the company's 35 employees to punch in using a finger-recognition technology. The new system means that, in effect, the company's salaried workers, which mostly are client-services representatives, now get paid by the hour."
• "Illiana Financial Credit Union in Calumet City, Ill., has used a fingerprint-recognition system to track its tellers and loan officers since early 2001."
• "A large computer manufacturer that had used a Kronos system for hourly workers, extended the product to cover 25,000 salaried employees when it upgraded its system in 2001."
• "Tri B Nursery Inc., a Tahlequah, Okla., plant wholesaler, is testing a hand-recognition system to supplant punch-card time clocks to track more than 500 migrant workers across 300 acres during the company's busiest season."

The next step is headsets (or web-based task systems for people who work at desks all day long), where a computer is telling employees what to do on a minute-by-minute basis on the job.