What Amazon’s plan to improve worker safety reveals about the company’s true nature – GeekWire

Addressing the challenge of warehouse employee basic safety in reaction to a shareholder concern this 7 days, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained the company’s basic safety initiatives — most of them associated to technology and creation.

• Wearable technological know-how with haptic alerts to enable staff know when their movements are placing their basic safety at possibility.
• A application with algorithms that forecast when folks carrying out repetitive responsibilities are at risk of damage, so they can be moved to different pursuits.
• New varieties of transportation, which includes automobiles and technologies to lower incident prices.

Amazon’s emphasis on technology is “true to their DNA,” suggests previous Amazon standard supervisor and retail class chief Andrea Leigh, who is now founder and CEO of Allume Group, an e-commerce understanding corporation.

“They centered a minimal little bit significantly less on empathy and additional on the science and the know-how of office security,” Leigh says.

Wanting at it from Amazon’s standpoint, the solution can make sense, she factors out: “If you have 50 percent-a-million or extra warehouse workers, you are likely considering about it algorithmically.”

But labor unions and personnel are concentrated extra on the person human impression.

“And I assume those people two factors of view just will not ever marry,” Leigh states.

That’s one of the takeaways from our dialogue with Leigh on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recapping and examining Amazon’s once-a-year meeting this 7 days. Quite a few shareholder proposals at the meeting dealt with personnel troubles, like warehouse worker basic safety and unionization.

We also converse about Amazon’s exertion to return to profitability in its customer business, the greater intention behind its bodily retail shops, and the force for additional range and inclusion in its workforce, among the other topics.

Listen earlier mentioned, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or where ever you pay attention.

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