Ethics in the digital workplace
Digitisation and automation technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), can affect working conditions in a variety of ways and their use in the workplace raises a host of new ethical concerns.
A high profile industrial dispute has led to some 2,000 catering workers, including 670 fired staff , being offered enhanced redundancy payments by Gate Gourmet if they agree to quit the company. Both the Transport & General Workers Union and the firm - which supplies airline meals to British Airways - look keen to settle the dispute. The redundancy offer - worth two-and-a-half times the statutory minimum - will be made by letter to all the workers. The deal was agreed after a day of further talks with the union.
A spokesman for the company, which hired agency workers at lower rates of pay to fill the gap left by the strikers they fired, said it still needed 675 voluntary redundancies. Much will depend on how many people decide to take the cash and look for new jobs.
Eurofound (2005), Gate Gourmet, Internal restructuring in United Kingdom, factsheet number 62157, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/62157.