Extract from Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport Questions (Commons)
Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab): I raised the
issue of the electronic programming guide with the right hon.
Gentleman during the Committee stage of the Digital Economy Bill.
It is vital for the guide to have prominence. Amazon, Netflix and
all the other platforms have no electronic programming guides,
and even Sky has reduced its guide. Although I raised the matter,
the Government have done nothing. They are doing very little to
protect public service broadcasters. When will the right hon.
Gentleman and the Government act?
The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and
Sport (Matt Hancock): As I have said, we have already
acted in the Digital Economy Act. The hon. Gentleman served on
the Bill Committee—with great distinction, I might add. I made it
clear during the debates on the Bill that if Ofcom’s report makes
it clear there is a problem, and one that can only be fixed by
legislation, we will introduce that legislation.
Extracts from Data
Protection Bill Commons committee stage (eighth
sitting)
(Birmingham, Hodge Hill)
(Lab):...Central to the new clauses is a concern that
unaccountable and highly sophisticated automated or
semi-automated systems are now making decisions that bear on
fundamental elements of people’s work, including recruitment, pay
and discipline. Just today, I was hearing about the work
practices at the large Amazon warehouse up in Dundee, I
think, where there is in effect digital casualisation. Employees
are not put on zero-hours contracts, but they are put on
four-hour contracts. They are guided around this gigantic
warehouse by some kind of satnav technology on a mobile phone,
but the device that guides them around the warehouse is also a
device that tracks how long it takes them to put together a
basket...
(Stoke-on-Trent Central)
(Lab/Co-op): My right hon. Friend is making a powerful
case about the importance of the Equality Act in respect of the
Bill, but may I offer him another example? He mentioned the
Amazon warehouse where people are tracked at work. We know that
agencies compile lists of their more productive workers, whom
they then use in other work, and of their less productive
workers. That seems like a form of digital blacklisting, and we
all know about the problems with blacklisting in the construction
industry in the 1980s. I suggest that the new clauses are a great
way of combating that new digital blacklisting.
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