I don't know if gamification is the enemy here. I don't think this would be an issue if driver incomes hadn't taken such a massive hit in the past year or so with Uber / Lyft.
I worked as a checkout operator at a supermarket for four years while in High School / College and really enjoyed it - I used to play a game where I'd see how many items I could scan per minute (we needed to do 15, my average was between 22-25 from memory). I did the same thing when I worked a paper run before that, challenging myself to see how quickly I could get it done.
Gamifying tedious activities is good and we should be doing more of it.
There's a happy medium somewhere between gamification to make the somewhat monotonous job of a checkout operator more enjoyable, and metrics-driven employment where you're peeing in the corner of an Amazon warehouse because if you drop below the equivalent of 22 items per minute you're fired without the chance for appeal.
I agree that it's not the enemy, and can at times be a useful thing to have as an ally within a healthy business relationship, but it disproportionately gives ammunition to management strategies that don't respect the human.
Checkout operators are graded (ie performance assessment) on their speed in some supermarkets. I can confirm Aldi does this, can't speak for other orgs.
I worked as a checkout operator at a supermarket for four years while in High School / College and really enjoyed it - I used to play a game where I'd see how many items I could scan per minute (we needed to do 15, my average was between 22-25 from memory). I did the same thing when I worked a paper run before that, challenging myself to see how quickly I could get it done.
Gamifying tedious activities is good and we should be doing more of it.