New Zealand workers say AI tracking of toilet breaks forces them to ‘hold on’

Workers at New Zealand’s largest retailer have had to resort to defecating in the distribution aisles after their bathroom breaks were tracked by artificial intelligence, their union has claimed.

More than 300 employees of The Warehouse protested in Auckland and Christchurch on Thursday against technology monitoring them and taking over their jobs, The New Zealand Herald reported.

In recent months, the company had been using drones for stocktaking, a robot for packing orders and AI to monitor workers, Workers First Union told Radio New Zealand (RNZ).

Union organiser Hayley Courtney told the public broadcaster she had been fighting the issue for eight months. “Having supervisors and managers follow people to the toilet and telling them off for a fundamental right is absolutely ludicrous.”

There have been accidents as a result of staff “trying to hold on” instead of going to the toilet outside break times, according to Courtney.

“We’d been finding things on the floor. It did stop once I put my foot down, but there was accidents on the floor, we don’t know who it was or anything. Obviously, it’s very humiliating if you’re forced into that position, but there were multiple occasions where this occurred,” she told The Post newspaper.

“Only one faeces [was found], but there was a couple of other incidents with urine. They will come out and say that it was cat poo, and yes, there have also been lots of incidents where there has been cat poo found in the aisles, but this particular incident we’re talking about wasn’t that.”

The new management had been strict about toilet breaks on the job amid a drive for greater productivity, even escorting staff to bathrooms, Courtney said.

“People have become very terrified to do anything. If you’ve got Big Brother watching your every move every second of the day, and you’re getting in trouble for a fundamental, basic human right, where does that leave you?”

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One man, who had been with the company for 20 years, said colleagues had been talking about “spying gadgets” for a while. “Trying to keep an eye on us, toilet breaks, I mean, when we come to get to the toilet, what’s that stuff all about? It’s pretty crazy.”

The Warehouse Group, however, strongly denied the allegations on Thursday.

“We are shocked and appalled by the union’s claim that our team members are urinating and defecating on the floor at work. This has never happened,” its chief people officer Richard Parker told RNZ.

“We use technology, which is not AI as claimed, that has been commonly used in distribution centres around the world for decades to monitor efficiency through scanning devices. It has nothing to do with bathroom use.”

The bathroom break issue feeds into the larger concern that technology is making humans redundant.

“Do I look like a robot? No. I don’t,” said one woman protester, who had worked at the Wiri distribution centre for 23 years. “We are here to protest about these things [because it should be a human doing] the job, not a robot job.”

Staff, especially the older ones, were worried about losing their jobs to automation, the male employee said.

“Times are tough, mate, especially living in Auckland. Prices are high, some of us have got kids to feed, and even some of our kids are working, but it’s even harder for them,” he said. “There’s lots of money there. We know there’s enough for all of us – we just want a little piece of it mate, like, honestly.”

Courtney said that workers’ fears were “genuine and real”. Some of the workers had been with the company for between 15 and 30 years and would find it difficult to find another job with unemployment at an 11-year high.

“We’re not trying to kill the robot or AI by any means. We’re just trying to put in some protection and some mechanisms for our workers for the inevitable loss of jobs. Things like redeployment to other areas and helping them find meaningful work within the company.”

Parker, however, maintains there have been no job losses as a result of its stocktaking drones, nor redundancies of permanent roles due to “goods-to-person automation”.

“In fact, we currently have three additional temp roles in this area. The drones improve stock accuracy and the customer experience, while making our distribution centres safer by removing the need for people to work at height in machinery every night,” he said.

“The new automation is designed to increase capacity and efficiency, and our team are doing an excellent job learning new skills and working with new technology.”