Budget sickness in banks, new pressures between opaque algorithms and privacy violations

Second-generation sales pressure. No way has yet been found to counter the old budget malady and here come new forms of pressure on the banks' sales networks. The complaint is in thefirst pages of the platform developed by the five unions (Fabi, First Cisl, Fisac CGIL, Uilca and Unisin) in view of the negotiations with Abi for the new collective agreement.

"Algorithms for the extraction and management of work-related data that are opaque and 'closed', whose construction criteria remain unknown and inaccessible to workers". This is one of the most interesting passages of the document to understand what is happening in bank branches.

The goal, legitimate, is efficiency, cost-cutting and the pursuit of profit; through what means? A 'scientific measurement of individual performance' and an 'obsessive management control through comparative assessments based on the extraction of data and productivity indicators'. Perhaps the means are less legitimate. It would suffice to recall the Pope's recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on artificial intelligence.

More simply, the representatives of bank workers (there are 260,000 of them in Italy) line up the problems arising from the use of these new instruments. 'With such second-generation commercial pressure instruments, not only privacy is put at risk, but also and above all social cohesion in the world of work,' reads the document. The violation of privacy is no small matter. And then there is the damage to health: work-related stress is a well-known phenomenon in connection with budget sickness. This time, however, it goes further.

What is detected is precisely 'an emotional abandonment (so-called 'quite quitting'), which invariably results in disaffection, in a sense of estrangement from corporate objectives, pursued with increasingly aggressive policies'.