More than a Machine at Work: Exploring the Impacts of Technological Change on Mental Health

Abstract

With the current technological transformations being developed, the focus seems to rely mainly on the increase of productivity and on promises of the reduction of physical constraints for workers. However, in the analysis of the new human-machine relationships induced by technological advances, other less visible impacts should be debated, namely for workers’ health and well-being. In a garment factory in Portugal, characterized by rigorous quality demands, sectored and short production cycles, with production times controlled by the minute, this study aims to analyze human-machine interactions from the point of view of their protagonists. A qualitative and participatory methodology was used (observations; individual and collective interviews; and moments of auto-confrontation). The results show how these work situations potentiate a "contained" suffering due to the lack of space for its verbalization, which ends up being managed individually, under penalty of being considered unfit for the work’s current demands.

A Systematic Review Discussing the Sustainability of Men and Women’s Work in Industry 4.0: Are Technologies Gender-Neutral?

“…There is a shared representation within the company that these machines need less human intervention, that they do not require previous work experience, that they are almost 'risk-free', and that learning is almost immediate. As such, the time available for the appropriation of technological artifacts became limited, the variability of work with these machines was not taken into consideration, and the actual efforts made and described by workers became invisible [69].…”

“…As the studies that obeyed the inclusion criteria and corresponded to the second research question were limited, the discussion will firstly focus on two studies that described the development of technologies centered on enhancing health at work. As aforemen-tioned in the introduction, one of the main premises of I4.0 is to make work contexts more customizable and interconnected through technology, with the focus being increasing productivity [68][69][70][71][72]. In this light, the study developed by Turk et al [55] focused on creating an ergonomically suitable workstation for each worker, which could increase the productivity and efficiency of a manual assembly process.…”