Cashier hostess in the Auchan hypermarket in Perpignan, Nathalie Prieur will not forget March 16, 2023. That day, management announced to the teams that their store was selected as one of the brand’s pilots to experiment with a “planning tool” supposed “put the right person, with the right skills, in the right place and at the right time”. “Artificial intelligence software [IA] responsible for creating our work schedules based on the labor code, company agreements and sales forecasts which was put in place at the beginning of the year”, summarizes this CFDT delegate. Since then, his daily life, and that of his colleagues, has no longer been the same.
Until then, managers created schedules for the 450 employees of this large store, located in the Aushopping Porte D’Espagne shopping center, and they posted them two weeks in advance. From now on, for the eighty people of “cash register sector” in the testing phase, it is “the software which, with its parameters, will distribute the workload to be covered”.
It’s difficult to chat with “the machine” over coffee in the hope of adapting your schedule. “She doesn’t look to see if an employee, aged 57 and having shoulder surgery, is at the end of her schedule, tired, to arrange her time slots”underlines Mme Prior. One of his colleagues who was used to working six hours a day for three days suddenly found himself with a schedule of seven hours and thirty minutes for two days, supplemented by a three-hour day.
“The software understands that you have to do a certain number of weekends per year, but it can give you four Saturday nights in a row, continues the trade unionist. For single mothers, with young children, who were previously able to find arrangements with their manager, it has become very complicated. » And for good reason: at the slightest change in an employee’s schedule, “the software reorganizes the schedules of the entire team, because it is aligned with the store’s workload”.
Less capital-intensive management methods
The emergence of AI to manage the scheduling of teams in this hypermarket is the latest upheaval affecting a sector with 678,573 employees (in the third quarter of 2023, according to the Horizons Commerce platform), making it one of the leading employers in France. A figure that has been generally stable for around ten years, behind which numerous phenomena impact employment and working conditions.
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