More than 300 workers at two distribution centres run by The Warehouse Group, New Zealand's largest retailer, took to the streets in Auckland and Christchurch this week. They are worried that automation and AI monitoring will lead to large-scale job cuts, and they are worried about their personal privacy.
The most jarring allegation comes from the union Workers First: because bathroom time is tracked by AI, some employees have been afraid to leave their posts, and there have been cases of people urinating or even defecating in the distribution aisles. The company denies it, saying “this has never happened” and that it is “shocked” by the union's claims.
What the union says
Union organiser Hayley Courtney told local media that managers have followed employees to the toilet, and that scolding people over such a basic right is “ridiculous”. She said she had been raising the issue for eight months, and that the practice only stopped after she pushed back hard in person, but that “things were found on the floor” beforehand and it is impossible to say whose they were.
According to Courtney, the company is bringing in a “giant robot” to handle picking, and part of the stocktake team has already been replaced by AI drones. She stressed that workers are not against using technology to raise efficiency; what they want is a guarantee about their future jobs.
A worker with 23 years at a distribution centre told public broadcaster RNZ:
“Do I look like a robot? No. I don't.”
What the company says
The Warehouse Group's chief people officer, Richard Parker, gave an account that contradicts the union's almost point by point. He told RNZ that the technology is “not AI as it has been described”. It is scanning equipment that distribution centres around the world have used for decades to measure work efficiency, and it has “nothing to do with toilet use”.
On the drones, Parker said no job has been lost because of stocktake drones, and that the area has actually gained three temporary positions. The drones make inventory more accurate and spare staff from having to climb to height every night to operate machinery. He also acknowledged that “no employer can guarantee what jobs will look like in the future”, adding that the company will consult with staff and try to retrain and redeploy people where it can.
The dispute comes down to “is it AI?”
In this clash, the two sides are really arguing over a definition. In the union's telling, AI is what tracks bathroom time; in the company's telling, it is simply scanners recording work-efficiency data. Both can be true at once: a scanner gun contains no AI itself, but the data on pauses it generates can still be used to assess how long someone is away from their post. The reporting does not disclose which fields the system records, who gets to see the data, or how long a pause has to be before it counts as abnormal, and those are exactly the points that determine how it works in practice.
For readers in China, this kind of scene is familiar. E-commerce and courier warehouses commonly use barcode scanners and handheld terminals to measure productivity per item, and “time away from station” often shows up on performance sheets. The difference lies in how the parties frame it: in this New Zealand case the union chose to file it under AI, while the company is working hard to distance itself from that label. China's Personal Information Protection Law requires employers to give notice when processing employees' personal information, and the questions of how monitoring data is collected, who sees it and how long it is kept cannot be avoided in any country.
The company firmly denies the allegation about defecation in the aisles, and the union has not produced evidence that can be verified, so this point cannot currently be confirmed. The UK's The Independent said it had contacted The Warehouse for comment and, as of publication, had received no further response.
Sources: The Independent, RNZ, CocoLoop, The Post; statements from both sides follow the quotes carried by RNZ and The Post, and the number of protesters follows The Independent's figure.