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

Addressing the difficulty of warehouse worker basic safety in reaction to a shareholder query this 7 days, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy described the company’s basic safety initiatives — most of them connected to know-how and creation.

• Wearable technological know-how with haptic signals to let staff know when their actions are placing their security at chance.
• A method with algorithms that forecast when people accomplishing repetitive duties are at danger of personal injury, so they can be moved to unique activities.
• New kinds of transportation, which includes vehicles and systems to minimize accident fees.

Amazon’s concentration on engineering is “true to their DNA,” says former Amazon standard manager and retail classification chief Andrea Leigh, who is now founder and CEO of Allume Group, an e-commerce learning business.

“They focused a minor bit fewer on empathy and much more on the science and the technology of workplace basic safety,” Leigh claims.

Hunting at it from Amazon’s perspective, the approach helps make feeling, she details out: “If you have half-a-million or far more warehouse staff, you are probably considering about it algorithmically.”

But labor unions and personnel are focused additional on the person human impression.

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

That’s a single of the takeaways from our discussion with Leigh on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recapping and examining Amazon’s yearly conference this week. Numerous shareholder proposals at the assembly dealt with staff issues, including warehouse worker safety and unionization.

We also chat about Amazon’s effort and hard work to return to profitability in its purchaser business, the greater aim guiding its bodily retail merchants, and the press for a lot more diversity and inclusion in its workforce, among other subjects.

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