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.
Friends Provident, a financial services company specialising in pension and life products, is to close down one of its two sites in Manchester. The company has not specified yet the exact number of jobs to be lost but it has announced that the losses will be implemented by December 2009. According to the Unite union, there would be about 280 job cuts while some of the jobs might be transferred to the company's smaller Manchester site. The affected posts include customer services, IT and other head office functions. The total number of employees at both sites is 465. As of November 2008 there is no information on the exact number of job losses and on the number of jobs potentially transferred to other head office operations.
Eurofound (2008), Friends Provident, Closure in United Kingdom, factsheet number 67378, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/67378.