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 North American group Smithfield Foods has announced it will invest more than USD 75 million in 2006 to retool Comtim, its pork processing complex in Timişoara (Vest region, Timiş county). Smithfield first entered the Romanian market by buying Comtim in 2004. The group plans to invest more than USD 850 million in Romania in the coming years. So far Smithfield invested more than USD 250 million. ‘We will reinvest 100% of the profits derived by our Romanian operations over the next ten years here', said the executive vice-president of the company on 20 January 2006.
‘By 2011, we will have 1,800 employees. The plant will process 16,000 pigs a day, i.e. four million pigs annually' said Mircea-Ioan Cotosman, the corporate affairs director of Smithfield Romania. Smithfield wants to turn Romania from a pork importer into a major pork exporter.
Eurofound (2006), Comtim, Business expansion in Romania, factsheet number 63001, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/63001.