Ultimately, Amazon’s effort to add AI-powered cameras to its fleet of delivery vehicles was just the latest in a long line of efforts to monitor employees on the roads. Consider this: according to a new dive from CNBC, Amazon has for years used an app called Mentor to monitor how its hired delivery drivers behave at the wheel. As you can expect, however, this service – which Amazon says is a means of ensuring the safety and efficiency of these drivers – is not without its flaws.
Amazon delivery drivers (who most often work for a third-party delivery fleet, rather than Amazon itself) must log into the app at the beginning of their shifts, at which point Mentor tries to keep a continuous record of problems such as aggressive acceleration, sudden braking, improper use of the seat belt, excessive idling and much more. At the end of a seven-day period, these factors are incorporated into what the developer Mentor eDriving refers to as a FICO score, which looks a bit like a traditional credit score: flawless performance deserves a total of 800, while any anything below 499 may be grounds for disciplinary action, such as loss of benefits and temporary suspensions.
Individual drivers are not the only ones who need to worry about maintaining FICO scores. CNBC’s The report confirms that Amazon uses these scores together to classify its delivery service partners and prevent underperformers from accessing benefits such as “ideal routes”.
The problem is that drivers sometimes find Mentor too authoritative to do their job well. How CNBC notes, some drivers who received calls – even those that went unanswered – were picked up because Mentor believes they were using their phones while driving. Others carefully store their devices by running the Mentor in glove boxes, so the app does not perceive typical road shocks as attempts to use these devices while driving.
What’s more, not all of Amazon’s nearly 1,300 delivery service partners provide their drivers with devices designed specifically to run Mentor. As a result, these people had to install the app on their personal phones and tablets and potentially deal with employers’ uninterrupted GPS tracking because the eDriving guide requires always-on access to a device’s location. (Fortunately, this is an issue that may not be as problematic as before – iOS 14 and Android 11 make it more difficult for users to opt for constant location tracking in the background.)
The idea of people being monitored almost every time they’re working may seem daunting to some, but it’s normal when it comes to Amazon. Company call center workers have long dealt with intense corporate scrutiny, whether through apps that lead them to choose products within strict time limits, dedicated analysts who keep an eye out for potential union activism and, more recently, cameras designed to guarantee employees follow social distancing guidelines.
It is not difficult to understand why Amazon is so obsessed with tracking its employees – the company’s relentless pursuit of efficiency is what has helped it become so uniquely widespread in global retail. By building systems that provide people with exactly what they want in just a few days, the company helped define a culture of convenience that can be torture to break away from. This quest for efficiency, however, also requires a certain level of dehumanization of Amazon’s line-level employees and partners, which continues to set scary precedents for the industry – and for society at large.