In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta. She suffered a concussion as a result, and was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her.
Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated her need to work more slowly, it took over a month for Watson to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she wasn’t provided the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant and could not easily connect with a human employee in HR.
In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had to sit down with her manager for what Amazon calls a “documented coaching session.” Just weeks later, she was reprimanded again—this time for working too slowly, which her doctor had said was necessary following her head injury.
“I told my operations manager: ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’” Watson recounts. “I thought that everyone thought I should go more slowly because I’m recovering. And he was like, ‘This is not our choice. This is Amazon.’”
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Over the past four years, Watson says automation has slowly changed how workers like her communicate with the HR department and raise issues on the job. (When reached by Fast Company, an Amazon spokesperson said, “Our employees have multiple ways to get support—from on-site HR and managers to digital tools that can help answer questions quickly. For something as important as a medical accommodation, we work directly with each person to make sure they get what they need.”)
In December, the worker advocacy nonprofit United for Respect surveyed Amazon and Walmart workers to better understand how AI and automation are changing the nature of their work. The findings were not entirely unexpected: Job displacement is, as always, a major source of stress for retail and warehouse workers at both companies. Out of more than 200 respondents, 60% said they’re worried about AI eliminating their jobs within the next year or two, and 49% cited losing their job to a robot as one of their top-three fears amid growing AI usage in the workplace.
But a surprising number of workers—62%—expressed being most concerned with how HR decisions are increasingly being outsourced to automated systems.