Jack Wesley works in a warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania, and his job involves a lot of bending, lifting, twisting, and reaching. Every day. Done wrong, all this repetitive motion can lead to variety of back injuries that are all too common for his profession. So when his boss has recently asked him to try out this new piece of technology that they said would keep him safer, he said, sure, why not. It's a motion tracking sensor that sits on his chest. Yeah.
Come in the morning, I grab this, I grab my radio. Um yeah, trap it right on and go to work. It's pretty easy. The device basically warns Jack when he's lifting boxes with bad form. He says, it's hot in better habits. Yeah, sometimes I noticed, uh, if I was bending forward a little more like reaching deeper into a palette, that might have been something that would they would vibrate on me for but uh started walking around to the side of the paletts. Yeah, thanks to the reminder and
kind of gotten away from that now too. This same sensor, though, is also gathering incredibly detailed information on his every movement, and it's sending that information to his bosses. It's one of the many technologies today allowing employers to monitor their workers, especially in blue collar professions, and it's a trend that's troubling worker rights advocates. Today, in the show, reporter Joshua Bustine investigates the dilemma behind the technology Jack's been testing.
Tools like it have the potential to bring real benefits to high risk jobs, but do workers risk giving up too much information about themselves? Amako, you're listening to Decrypted Stay with us, Jash. How's it going good? How are you good things? I think your story this week is something that hits a nerve and a lot of people. Yeah. No, one really likes the idea of being tracked by their boss, right. You know, this is something that's become pretty widespread, I
think in the blue collar workforce. I've been reading a lot about the ways that workers in Amazon's fulfillment centers, for example, have been tracked. Yeah, but you're referring to are the production quotas that a lot of workplaces use. Amazon certainly uses them. The idea being that you can track exactly how fast a worker is doing something from minutes a minute, and then make sure that they're not doing it even the slightest bit slower. The tracking we're
talking about here is actually slightly different. The company that makes the trackers, a startup in Brooklyn called strong Arm, says that they are tracking only data to tell how someone is moving in an attempt to determine when they might be at higher risk of injury. And they're specifically saying that they are not trying to track production data. Tell me about them strong Arm. Sure. They're a small company started by a guy named Sean Peterson, and he's
a pretty interesting guy. He told me that he always wanted to be an inventor. His grandfather invented things for the railroads, and then his dad had a construction company out on Long Island, where Sean is from, and even as a kid, Sean would work alongside him. Said he always just really loved the idea of working with his hands. He had a pretty amazing workshop, and before he passed away, he just taught me how to kind of get into the tools and start working at Then my father was
a rant, a construction company and that contracting company. You know, by the time I was twelve, I could lay an entire roof by myself. Um, the gratification and work itself was just ingrained in me when I was a little guy. And Sean actually started getting interested in workplace safety issues when he was young and his father was actually killed in a workplace accident. Uh, I don't really want to talk too much detail about kind of stinking of it,
but he died on the drop in. They're way way too many things that happened that could have recoided that. And as he got older, Sean combined these two principles of his and he wanted to invent something that would help prevent workplace injuries um in the future. And so Sean started a company. It's called strong Arm Technologies, and its main product is a small device that sits on
your chest and tracks all of your movements. And the idea is that if people in manual labor jobs warthies all day, you would gather enough information to tell who was making movements that were associated with injuries and then be able to deal with them. So, Josh, what what does the device look like? So the device is a small black box. Basically, it's a rectangle. It's about the size of a small smartphone maybe, and it fits into a little harness you wear kind of over your shoulders.
So it sits right against your chest, left shoulder, it's gonna come around your waist. And that's Alex Teller. He's another strong Arm executive. And what you're hearing is him actually helping me put on the device. Feel a buzz in your hand, Yeah, but already warning me that I'm doing. And this device tracks your movement kind of like a fitbit. It's sort of like a fitbit, but gathering detail at a much greater level. A fitbit counts your steps, which
doesn't actually tell you all that much. This thing counts exactly the way that you bend from moment to moment for the entire day, So you know, it's taking the fitbit and it is like massively increasing the detail that the device gathers about your physical activity throughout the day. And Josh, where's this thing being used? So strong Arm, for such a small company, actually has a very impressive list of clients. I talked to Toyota about a pilot that they just started with strong Arm at a plant
in Indiana. They're used by some facilities that Heineken runs. And I also visited a warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania that's run by a company called geodas friends, and what was it like. So it's in an area where everything is logistics facility. It was actually right next door to an Amazon fulfillment center, which was interesting and really just enorm a facility. Workers picking things out of boxes, packing them into smaller boxes. There were conveyor belts and fork cliffs,
and the workers there were wearing strong Arms device. So strong Arm is currently in a pilot phase at this facility. Jack, this is Josh, Josh, Jack, Are you good yourself? So that's Jack Wesley. He's the warehouse worker we heard from
at the top of the episode. Jack works in the freezer, which is maybe the most dangerous part of the Geodas warehouse, and he's actually wearing the strong Arm device when I talked to him, even in the interview, he said he puts it on every day just as part of his routine. Jack and all the other workers you spoke with, did they seem a little skeptical or worried about this idea of being tracked all day by this device. I talked to a handful of workers and all of them were
a little bit worried at first. They had some misconceptions. Here's Jack again. When it first came out. You know, I heard from some of the other people myself included. It had a video camera, you know, microphone things like that, but it's just monitoring your movements, make sure you're bending properly, and yeah, that's all. That's all it does. So once we figured that out, everybody was kind of they were
more relaxed about it. And you're comfortable with that because you feel like that is a benefit to you opposed to if they're taking video of your then like if you're rolling your eyes or something, they'll figure that. Yeah, oh yeah, like, uh, it's not like a chest cam at a traffic stop or anything like that. It's uh, just making sure you're you're bending properly. We don't want any injuries at the workplace. It's worth noting that the
workers are tracked in other ways as well. The warehouse is full of cameras and Geodas also uses a production tracking system where workers are measured on how fast they're working. People at Geodas make between twelve fifty and fifteen dollars an hour to start, but if they work fast enough they can get bone to say, up to five dollars extra per hour. Wow, So that's a lot of ways that they're being tracked. Yeah, and as I understand it, this isn't an unusual level of monitoring for the industry.
The businesses who work in logistics and transportation are really data hungry. They're trying to gather as much information about their facilities as possible. Here's Mike Conius, he's the chief operating officer at GEODAS, and he explained to me how he wants to eventually be able to take all these different data streams and put them together to learn new things about his operations. So I pulled my productivity data. It shows exactly the type of speed and productivity this
person was doing by the minute. We can actually break it down by the second. Then you apply the ergonomics data to it on the exact same timeline, and you can see the motions of the person bending and what they're doing, and you can see that right along the same timeline as the productivity. And then you can put the robotic side on it and you can see all that play out. And then all of a sudden, from there you can look at, Okay, is there an opportunity
we have a little bit idle time? Was there some lifting there? That created the operator, you know, our teammate to slow down and can we correct that. In the past, traditionally we haven't been able to see that, And in the meantime, Geodas is actually already making some changes. There's one place in the warehouse that I saw, and it's a conveyor belt. Workers stand alongside it and they're picking
boxes up and moving them off to the side. And what the company noticed was that there were certain parts along the conveyor belt where people were just twisting too far. So they had a manager go talk to people who work on this part of the operation and say, hey, watch out for this right now, it's just a coaching opportunity, But Geodas says it may also use this information to change the layouts of the conveyor belts in the future
so that people don't end up making these motions inadvertently. So, Josh, it sounds like people are pretty happy about this, but
I don't know. I'm worried that this could go very wrong. Yeah, So, both strong Arm and the clients I talked to put a very cheery face on this, but other people who I've spoken with are really concerned about worker surveillance and put this into that bucket, and I think they're worried first of all, that just any sort of data you're gathering about workers in this situation is going to be used to just squeeze a little bit more productivity out
of them, And workers don't like that because they're already working super hard. Yeah. I who wants your boss to tell you, oh, you have to work at your absolute capacity every time? And also I know what your absolute capacity is. And once you're determining just how fast everybody can work, you could see employers wanting to punish those people who don't work quite as fast as everybody else.
And why are workers so worried about that? So a lot of workers feel like their bosses have plenty of power over them already, and giving them another tool that they might use to punish them is just not need Yeah, it just feels like it's further tipping the balance. And the final thing that I heard when talking to people about this was that if you're gathering information about workers health, there is bound to be a tie in to workers
compensation claims. Yeah. I can see this being freely contentious, especially in a field of work where the rate of injury is so high. Yeah, I think this comes down again to whether or not workers trust their employers. And you know, the people I talked to at geodas said they did, but that's not universally true. So what does strong arms say about all this? These are not criticisms
that strong harm has not heard before. The first thing they say is that they do not measure productivity data, and they have discussions with their clients in which they say they do not want the trackers to be used to punish individuals. But I also talked to Sean about it. He said he hadn't seen clients do anything that even got close to problematic, but that if they did, he would be willing to take the technology back or just
cut off certain types of data. And we trust the clients to do the right thing with that right now, and if we start to see clients not doing the right thing, we can further adjust the dissemination of some of that information. So it sounds like these concerns haven't materialized yet, but it does sound like this would be something that labor unions would have a lot of problems with. One thing that made my ears really perk up in my first conversation with strong Arm was there, claims that
they worked closely with organized labor. Because I'm like you, Aki, I've had conversations with organized labor about technology before, and this just didn't seem like something that they would be particularly enthusiastic about. So I was eager to talk to those unions. And when I asked strong Arm to put me in touch with some of them, they balked, So what did you do? Well? I tracked down union local in Lynn, Massachusetts that took part in a strong Arm pilot.
The guy I spoke to was Adam Kazinski. He's the current president of i U e c W, a local two oh one. Adam was a shop steward at the time that strong Arm showed up at his workplace, and he did say that there were lots of injuries amongst the folks who worked there. I was in an area that requires a lot of twisting and turning and pushing and pulling bench work, sheet metal spot well, and we had had high rates of ergonomic injuries in the area.
And even though Adam acknowledged that there was a real problem where he worked, he was really skeptical of this idea. He thought that this was giving his employer a lot of information that he wasn't sure it needed, and he told me that he actually advised other members of the union not to participate in the program, which was voluntary. Well, when you work with your body, ergonomic data is production. By the way, when Adam says armstrong, he means strong arm.
So you know what, whether Armstrong says that's their intention or not, there are clients or potential clients to see your value in tracking productions through monitoring people's bodies. He just didn't believe that this sort of tracking would end up benefiting workers, no matter how was pitched initially. You know that I don't have to speculate about why people are interested in it. It's because they want to do more with less. They want workers to work faster, longer,
and increase production while mitigating workers. Comps claims, that's I mean clearly what this is about to me. You know that's surprising given what strong arm told you. Yeah, I
was certainly surprised. So what ended up happening. Adams says that a lot of people didn't want to wear those trackers and that those who did soon stopped wearing them, and the pilot kind of fizzled well, that they didn't collect an up data to tell him anything, and that people kind of dropped off before they were able to get any good data, and that no one was impressed with the program and the way it went down, so basically just flopped. I a strong arm about this, and
they took issue with the idea that it flopped. But they did say that they didn't finish the pilot program, that they weren't able to kind of gather all the data and implement any of the sort of changes that they've done in other places, and that basically this was
um a learning experience for the company. Josh. At the start of this episode, we talked about how widespread workplace surveillance has become in blue collar industries, but the reality is that this is everywhere right and in white color work too. Yeah, I think the tension is really across the working world in both blue collar and white collar workplaces. It's just easier to gather more and more information about what your workers are doing and then do something with it.
The company makes a good case that it can gather more data about how you move at work and use it to reduce the rates of injuries, but it can't get away from the fact that when it does that, it's also creating all this information that employers might use
for other things as well. And I think that fuels a real broader vulnerability going on here, which is that everyone's aware that there's more and more data being collected about us in the workplace, other places online, and we know that there's a lot of power in this information being gathered and analyzed, but we don't have a mechanism to say, hey, let's stop and figure this out before we go forward, and so it just kind of progresses whether we like it or not. Joshua Bristine, thanks for
coming on the show today. Thank you. Decrypted is hosted by me as Sean When is Our Executive producer, Ethan Brooks mikes a show today and Francesco Levie is ahead of Bloomberg podcast. We'll see next week.