May 8, 2026
Yves Valerus was thriving as a single mother of three in New York City. She told NPR that her full-time, remote-work job as a Haitian Creole-English interpreter had a stable schedule and good benefits (1).
Then, last year, her employer, LanguageLine, experienced a financial crunch. The company adopted a software tool called NiCE Workforce Management, which is one of many products that use artificial intelligence to forecast work needs, plan shifts and optimize schedules and assignments in real time, even once the workday has already started (2) — called "intraday management" in the business (3).
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Overnight, everything changed for Valerus. Her shifts were often cancelled last-minute, sometimes in the middle of the day. She'd come back from lunch and find her afternoon schedule gone. According to tax returns shown to NPR, her income from interpreting dropped 18% year-over-year. And her previous two-minute downtime between calls shrunk to an impossible 15 seconds: no time to quickly run to the bathroom or grab a drink of water.
Those quick breaks really matter when the work is emotionally draining and intense. Interpreters may be called in by phone or video to read out a sentence for someone convicted of a serious crime, or relay a family's end-of-life wishes while their loved one is on life support.
A different, former interpreter with the company told NPR the gruelling schedule caused her to lose focus and make mistakes, which LanguageLine told the outlet it "categorically" does not want for its workers, adding that it has a health and safety committee to review complaints.
LanguageLine's parent company is French call-centre giant Teleperformance — the same one that made the news in 2021 for using an AI-enabled webcam that periodically scans remote employees' workstations and snaps photos if it detects "infractions" like eating or picking up a smartphone while on the clock (4).
Software for managing, scheduling and surveilling workers has become ubiquitous, especially for low-wage, hourly work. Now, Valerus is part of a group of workers that’s fighting back.
The problem with algorithmic scheduling
Workers have been raising the alarm about the potential harms of using algorithms for "just-in-time" scheduling since they were introduced over a decade ago.
According to Harvard's SHIFT lab, which studies the impact of technology on workers' rights, these tools are part of a trend: A shift of business risks from companies to workers.
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Traditionally, in the service sector, shifts are planned ahead and there's always a possibility of scheduling either too many people or too few. That's a risk of doing business. But, with help from software that optimizes for covering work hours at the least possible cost, employers shift the burden of dealing with that unpredictability onto workers.
The result: 60% of service workers receive their schedule with less than two weeks' notice, 57% have last-minute changes to shifts, 13% regularly have shifts cancelled, and 27% are asked to work on-call, keeping their availability open in case they are asked to work. On average, part-time workers face fluctuations of 34% in hours between the weeks they work the most and the least in a month.
A Starbucks vice-president once told the New York Times that algorithmic scheduling was a "magic" way to save money on labor. But for workers, the unpredictable hours and income make it very difficult to make a monthly budget or manage everyday responsibilities like school pickup.
Lifting yourself out of low-wage work, such as by going to college, feels even more out of reach. How can you sign up for classes if you never know when you'll have to work (5)?
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Workers vs. algorithms is the new labor fight
The impact of technology on workers has become a rallying point for unions around the U.S. and the world.
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Valerus is part of an effort to unionize LanguageLine interpreters under the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Workers hope changes to back-to-back call scheduling and "impossibly short break times" will be up for negotiation (6).
Some workers have succeeded at similar efforts. According to a 2018 report from Fortune, Marriott hotel cleaners were given a scheduling app that was supposed to make their work more efficient, but it ended up sending them up and down floors seemingly at random, tiring them out and wasting time.
Their union complained and negotiated a contract that requires management to alert workers 165 days before introducing a new technology so staff can raise concerns (7).
Last year, the Senate heard testimony about the impact of AI on workers, including from Carlos Aramayo, president of hospitality union UNITE HERE Local 26. He urged those listening to understand that taxing working conditions are not "pre-ordained outcomes of the software," but conscious choices.
"They are management decisions," he said (8), echoing an often-quoted fragment from a presentation given at IBM in the 1970s (9): "A computer can never be held accountable … Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
NPR (1); NICE (2); Genesys (3); The Guardian (4); The New York Times (5); Communications Workers of America (6); Fortune/Yahoo Finance (7); U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (8); Simon Willison (9).
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Genna Buck is a podcaster and college instructor who edits for Moneywise.
