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.
The traditional knitwear manufacturer Gebrüder Wolff, which is headquartered in Hard (Vorarlberg) and runs several plants in Hungary and Slovakia, was declared on 23 January 2007. According to one of the firm’s managers, this insolvency has resulted from an aggressive price policy performed by most of the competitors and thus significant losses in turnover during the past years. As a consequence, all of the 320 domestic employees at the site in Hard and additional 235 workers who are employed by subsidiaries abroad stand to lose their jobs. The governor of the province of Vorarlberg, Herbert Sausgruber, announced a joint drawing up of a re-employment scheme by both the Land and the Labour Market Service.
Eurofound (2007), Gebrüder Wolff, Bankruptcy in Austria, factsheet number 64826, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/64826.