I met with a friend recently at the University of Michigan. Because she attends the art school there and I attend a small liberal arts college, we quickly came to the topic of jobs and employment prospects after graduation, (which we know are far from promising). Both of us, we noticed, are preparing for years of precarious employment and voracious competition for existing jobs––such is the condition of the so-called ‘gig economy’.Our talk partly confirmed my own thoughts about our generation and the ways we are conditioned to be continuously productive, adaptable and self-disciplined. Malcolm Harris advances this idea in his book Kids These Days (Little, Brown, and Company), where he describes how the education system compels youth, in many different contexts, to be always working on themselves. I think our collective willingness to stomach unpaid internships is an excellent example of how far this goes. General trends of the workforce aside, my friend Miles told me an anecdote that I hadn’t expected and that revealed something else about labor in our present era, namely the kinds of jobs available to those outside of the school-internship credentialing machine, at rapidly expanding companies like Amazon. Her girlfriend spent several months working in an Amazon warehouse in Connecticut, doing a kind of machine-aided and closely-monitored work whose value was appropriated with algorithmic precision. Far from the stereotypical work of the ‘freelancer’ or ‘content producer’ and far from anything resembling ‘affective’ or emotional labor, this work is fast, menial and far from gratifying.
We all have a platitudinal knowledge of the functioning of the economy, consisting of heaps of shiny buzzwords (like ‘gig economy’) many of which originate in the marketing of companies that they describe. If we treat this image as the surface (and hence as inevitably ideological) we could also do well to take heed of Marx’s suggestion to ‘descend into the realm of production’ and see what kind of work people are doing. Tech companies are no strangers to exploitative labor practices, though mostly in what we consider the ‘workshop’ countries of the world (take Foxconn, the Apple parts manufacturer, as an example). In the global North, the tremendous monopoly power of tech companies has only recently become apparent, and their readiness to exploit labor has consequently caused some public surprise. Amazon especially has made a splash in the past year with a series of labor incidents across both Europe and the US, capping it off with the recent 48 hour strike at a warehouse in Madrid.
The media attention no doubt stems in part from the whiffs of techno-dystopia in working trends at the warehouses. To the general impression of long-hours, heat-strokes, threats from management, and a brutal, points-based disciplinary system, have now been added stories of GPS tracking armbands. The recent acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon added insult to injury, with workplaces being turned into crushing, unbearable environments by ‘scorecards’ and absurdly demanding stocking instructions. An employee quoted in Business Insider remarked that ‘it had become normal to see someone cry at work’. Similar buzz has erupted about Amazon’s acquisition of the Washington Post in 2013 and its recent attempts to gut unions there. Multiple lawsuits and growing press coverage (including a particularly high-profile NYTimes article) have brought all of this to the fore, but the problem is widespread and serious enough to make me skeptical about the ‘Amazon should just treat its employees as well as its customers’ narrative, which seems to have been the most common response in the news media.4
This kind of narrative assumes that Amazon operates as basically a benign entity, committed to fairness and efficiency, and in which occasional trespasses on the quality of human life are incidental. I think it is important to be aware of the ways that Amazon’s business model has a critical dependence on squeezing the most out of its base of employees, both white and blue collar, and that this dependence is a generalizable trend.
Amazon Marketplace, specifically, has had tremendous success because of its capacity to create extremely efficient streamlined and adaptable shipping networks. Amazon Web Services is as important though less well known and their model here works in similar ways. AWS provides computing services like data analysis, storage, communication, media delivery, and productivity, all geared toward businesses. In order to do this Amazon needs to become, in the words of Bezos, an “invention machine,” constantly changing, always forward-thinking and with comfortable with risk.5 Ironically, the kinds of services Amazon provides are not in themselves very profitable. They do not produce limited quantities of goods. They extract a kind of rent on their innovations. In order to be profitable and extract enough rent from their products, Amazon needs to destroy competition and utilize network effects to make their products more valuable. This means constantly shaving off inefficiencies, making more streamlined and integrated programs, networks, and warehouses, and being as adaptable and as quick-moving as possible. . In this context, it makes sense that tech companies are always pushing the rhetoric of speed and hyper-competition in their corporate cultures.
Workers in Amazon warehouses are a good reminder that underneath all of the technology are wage employees. The general obsession of employers about employee efficiency is perhaps surprising at first, but it shouldn’t be. The difficulty of remaining competitive in a tech economy ensures that the cost of labor needs to be kept as low as possible, which does not necessarily mean decreasing wages, but instead means hiring fewer people and having them work harder for more time. In the larger picture, labor is actually being devalued structurally, as the ownership of technology becomes more decisive than the work being done to it.
The tech economy represents a moment where the proportion of value added by labor shrinks dramatically against the proportion of value already existing in capital, which is in this case, technology. The rent being sought by capital and hence the profitability of companies like Amazon depends on remaining ultra-competitive. This has two outcomes: one being the general tendency to replace humans with machines, the second being cutting costs by getting more from their workers. An added layer of complication, which I will not elaborate here is Amazon’s value on the stock market, based on bets about its future profitability.
As a tech company, Amazon must operate at minimum cost, maximum flexibility. The workers it hires are extremely productive, but also expensive for how much profit can be gained from them. Moreover, their profitability is dependent on a fickle, quickly changing market, making them a potential liability in ‘changes of weather’. On the other hand, they themselves expect to work longer than ever before. With this in mind, we can begin to see the initially paradoxical trends of, on the one hand, increasing mechanization and unemployment and, on the other hand, the intensification and regulation of human labor.
Though it may seem that not much can be done, I think it is it is crucial to understand how the underlying dynamics of the tech economy necessitates crummy jobs. The tech economy represents an extreme separation of those who own from those who work. And hence, it requires a degree of working intensity and flexibility which has become alienating to those working it; both in the offices of Silicon Valley and in the warehouses of Amazon. Simultaneously, work is itself becoming less valuable with increasing mechanization. Those wanting to fight for a decent life for all must be aware of the ways life is structured by the demands of capital today. BP
