As technological change continues to upend the service industry, scholars with the Shift Project, a joint research initiative between Harvard Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the University of California San Francisco, are examining how workplace technology, such as self-checkout counters, surveillance and productivity tools, and scheduling apps affect service workers. We sat down with Shift Project co-director Daniel Schneider, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, to discuss his most recent research findings on technology and older workers, as well as how workplace technology is more generally impacting service sector workers.
Q: Your most recent paper looks at how technology is related to job retention among older service sector workers. Technology has been held up as a benefit for older workers, allowing those in certain high-strain jobs to remain in the workforce longer. Has your research borne this out?
The lengthening of American life expectancy is an incredible achievement but also potentially puts a considerable strain on the finances of such core programs as Social Security which is age-based and for which costs rise with length of life. Many have sought a “fix” for Social Security’s funding issues by suggesting that as lives have lengthened so too should workers simply work longer. While that may be all well and good for workers in professional or office jobs, workers in high-strain jobs face both shorter life expectancy and much more physical difficulty working later into life. The most equitable solution may not be to have these disadvantaged workers work longer, but rather to seek other sources of funding for Social Security. But, short of such structural fixes, many have suggested that technology could help older workers stay in the job longer by reducing strain. We take a close look at the service sector in the United States—jobs in retail and food service—and examine how technology often deployed there, such as sales tech like self-checkout as well as speed tracking and surveillance technologies, affects older workers’ job retention intentions. We don’t find any evidence that sales technology increases older workers’ job satisfaction or intention to stay on the job.
“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: 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.