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 Department of Work and Pensons has announced that it intends to cut 12000 jobs over the next three years. The job losses come after a headcount reduction of 30,000 over the last three years which was achieved without significant numbers of compulsory redundancies. A spokesman for the DWP said that they were confident that the job losses over the next 3 years would not mean that staff that wanted to retain their jobs would be forced to leave.
Unions blamed spending restrictions for the job cuts as savings of 5% must be made in each of the next 3 years with the aim of reducing overall departmental expenditure by over £1.2billion. Public and Commercial Services Union general secretary Mark Serwotka attacked the job cuts, saying that they were “purely about crude cost-cutting”, and that the reductions were another blow to a workforce struggling to maintain service levels in light of the massive cuts it had endured and “below-inflation pay increases”. He argued that the job losses would “do nothing to improve service delivery to some of the most disadvantaged in society”.
Eurofound (2008), Department of Work and Pensions, Internal restructuring in United Kingdom, factsheet number 66356, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/66356.