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.
Finnish public service news and broadcasting company Yle has initiated employer-employee negotiations aiming to cut up to 145 positions within its production and design branch. The reason for the redundancies is new guidelines from the Yle parliamentary task force which state that Yle should increase the amount of services bought from external actors. In addition, Yle has previously presented plans to lower the amount of in-house production and increase the amount of services purchased from other production firms. All 439 individuals, of which 289 are based in Helsinki and 150 in Tampere, working with production and design will be affected by the negotiations. The ERM har previously reported on redundancies at Yle in 2014.
UPDATE 3/2 2017:Following concluded employer-employee negotiations 63 employees will be directly dismissed and 35 employees will be retired. In addition, 17 people will be transferred to other parts of the company. Moreover, negotiations regarding 20 employees within Yle's radio department will be initiated on 7 February 2017.
Eurofound (2016), Yle, Internal restructuring in Finland, factsheet number 89137, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/89137.