Hello world,

AI hasn’t taken Elsa Roldan’s job as a hotel housekeeper. But it has taken some of her autonomy. 

Roldan began working as a hotel housekeeper nearly two decades ago, using a clipboard to  track her room-to-room progress. But a few years ago, she began toggling through an app called HotSOS Housekeeping, which directs her on what room to clean next in her hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

“You have a device telling you, ‘move here, move there,’ like if you were a robot,” Roldan told Proof News. 

The story we published today in Proof News, "More Stress, Fewer Breaks: Hotel Housekeepers Reveal What It’s Like Working for an App," reported by Rebecca Plevin, explains how automation technology is now controlling the workdays of thousands of hotel housekeepers. Its relentless pace — adding rooms to the housekeepers’ queue automatically — means that some housekeepers are skipping lunch and breaks to keep up. (The company that makes the app didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

This story is part of our examination this year of how AI is impacting people’s jobs right now. We launched with a story about a therapy app that is using its clients’ therapy transcripts to build an AI model — and how one of those transcripts ended up being used against a patient in court. Then, we followed up with a look at how police officers are using AI to help write up police reports — a seemingly simple use case for AI that, in fact, turned out not to be saving them time after all.

Today’s story is not only a story about a loss of worker autonomy, but also a rise in worker surveillance. It was a hard story to report because many workers are justifiably scared to speak to a reporter – so Rebecca had to traipse through a resort to try to get housekeepers to talk to her. This type of shoe-leather reporting is what we are investing in this year.

If you’d like to see more groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of AI & the workplace then please consider donating to support our work. 

We’re aiming to show a groundswell of support from small donors who see this coverage as vital. Please contribute any amount. Consider it a vote for more of what you want to see in this world. A vote for Proof. 

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Best, 

Julia Angwin