Recently, a series of internal Amazon documents revealed that, true-to-form, the tech giant’s Draconian warehouse kingdom is infused with meticulous surveillance of its wage workers. Using radio-frequency handheld scanners, Amazon tracks every minute of what they call “time off task”: a brazen quantification of personal time and attention. If an Amazon warehouse worker accrues thirty minutes of time off task on a given day—say, by using the bathroom or talking to their coworkers—they’re given a written warning that puts them on the road to termination after just two subsequent warnings within a one-year period. (In 2021, the company claimed they would begin averaging time off task “over a longer period,” but details were predictably scant.) Time off task is depicted as the villain of the orderly and efficient workplace. The phrase itself invokes delinquency, connoting a failure to comply with rules or a failure to be a loyal worker.
Time off task is a perverse little metric; a product of run-amok capitalism’s fetishization of productivity, efficiency, and other quantifications. It’s the kind of policy that was only a dream for burgeoning companies of the industrial revolution, as they clawed for more time and yield from laborers. Now though, calculating time off task can be fully
— source thebaffler.com | Matt Murphy | July 11, 2022