Opening the Amazon black box
Amazon is using machine automation to exert total control over work processes, creating an unsafe and unfair environment for workers.
Illustration by Liza Friedman
The big idea
As another edition of Amazon Prime Day comes and goes, and as we settle back into lockdown 2.0 awaiting the presents we bought for ourselves, I want to open up the black box that is Amazon.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is the richest person in the world and, with a net worth over $200 billion, it’s not particularly close. While the rest of us have watched our funds depreciate during the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon stock is up nearly 80 percent since the beginning of the year, and Bezos, whose 11 percent stake in the company makes up more than 90 percent of his fortune, has seen his net worth almost double since January.
As I wrote in the first newsletter: “Those with extreme wealth often accumulate their fortunes by perpetuating the myth of a utopian future, relying on disenfranchised people to work for poor wages and under dangerous conditions.” Bezos has done exactly that, so it’s no wonder Amazon workers have gone on strike two years in a row on Prime Day to strike over unsafe working conditions and unfair wages.
In fact, Amazon workers have been trying to organize for years, but since the start of the pandemic in March their complaints have become more serious and wide-ranging, from Amazon failing to honour pregnancy accommodations for warehouse workers to delivery drivers being so overwhelmed and overworked by COVID surges that they have to pee in cups to Wholefoods and warehouse workers striking against the lack of personal protective equipment offered during the pandemic. Most worrisome of all, perhaps, is Amazon’s refusal to even acknowledge the unions representing Amazon workers while having recently been caught spying on their workers’ private Facebook groups and trying to track “labor organizing threats.”
On Tuesday, Amnesty International wrote that the non-profit organization is "alarmed by the growing evidence in recent months that Amazon is interfering with workers’ rights to organize, and investing significant resources in monitoring workers and the perceived ‘threat’ of potential trade union activity."
How is it that Amazon employees are without basic working rights while their boss is so rich that he could do this?
And how can Bezos justify his refusal to acknowledge the unions while he focuses on becoming Spider Man’s greatest villain, Dr. Octopus, instead?
People usually answer these questions by attacking Bezos’ character, and while I have no doubt that he is not the type of person I would enjoy grabbing a beer with, attacking the character of any of these tech billionaires would be missing the point. Jeff Bezos is not the problem, and eliminating him would only ensure the transfer of power to the next rich white man in a long line of like-minded capitalists.
The system is working exactly as it's supposed to, and that’s the problem.
We have the perception that machine robots are behind Amazon’s rise to power — that robots are creating the things Amazon sells, packaging them, and, soon enough, delivering them to our homes, too — but the reality is that brutalized bodies are behind the company’s rise to power, and this subjugation of the working class is built into capitalism.
Contrary to popular belief, machines are not made to make work easier for humans. Since the auto industry normalized machine automation at the start of the 20th century, these technologies have forced humans to work at high speeds on dangerous machinery. As Gavin Mueller points out, “Automation’s prime function is to destroy the ability of the workers to control the pace of work. The results are often bloody.”
While company management (and most of the public) attributed productivity gains in the auto industry to automation, it was brutalized Black workers that made those cars. A 1973 study estimated that sixty-five auto workers died per day from work-related injuries, a higher casualty rate than that of American soldiers in Vietnam.
Amazon has picked up on what the auto industry started: Working for one of the richest companies in the world is so unsafe that there were more than 600 ambulance call-outs to Amazon warehouses over the past three years, warehouses that are disproportionately staffed with Black and Latino workers.
If machines are not made to make work easier for humans, then what is their purpose? As Mueller writes, “machine automation is used and designed to be used to maintain capitalist control over work processes, especially when the workers start getting organized. They are weapons against potential revolt. It’s no coincidence that the disciplinary mechanism of surveillance is such a crucial component in automation.”
Speaking of surveillance, it was just last month that Amazon was caught spying on workers’ private Facebook groups while also posting two job listings for analysts that can keep an eye on sensitive and confidential topics "including labor organizing threats against the company."
The Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit that studies monopolies, published a report on Amazon's employee surveillance efforts, claiming that these practices "create a harsh and dehumanizing working environment that produces a constant state of fear, as well as physical and mental anguish."
Although automation is not an inevitable result of capitalism, it’s deeply embedded in Amazon’s business model and would be extremely difficult to eliminate. But instead of accepting the current reality, where capitalists like Bezos suck up the surplus value of automation as profit, we need a model where that surplus is shared between workers and put towards social welfare.
North America has a rich history of effective worker strikes, particularly pertaining to workers revolting against machines, but as technology becomes more and more advanced, humans have less power and leverage, making revolts less and less common. Machine automation has come to exert total control over work processes, making it almost impossible to organize against the machine.
The first step is to understand what goes on under the hood of Amazon’s black box. The next step is to help the people working inside of it.
Notes
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dzn4a/8-amazon-prime-day-tips-you-should-know-before-buying
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/amazon-workers-strike-prime-day-22837197
Questions
Aside from boycotting the company, what can we do to help Amazon workers achieve safe working conditions and fair pay?
Is automation the inevitable result of capitalism?
How could we fairly distribute the surplus value attained from automation?
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I’m always looking for writing work! If you have any leads, email: orenweisfeld@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter: @orenweisfeld. My published work can be found here.