What Amazon warehouses tell us about the future of work
Automation might not deprive us of our jobs, just of our powers
The idea of a “workless world” dates back to Keynes, who endorsed automation, for he expected the “technological unemployment” to bring about a “leisure society”. People would be used to working, but as there wouldn’t be any work to be done, they would resort to other, arguably more pleasurable activities. On the other pole of philosophical and economic thought about the future of work was Marx, who predicted that technology would not lead to a reduction of working hours, as exploitation of workers is not bound to technology, but to the capitalist organisation of society.
Today however, we often hear and read about job losses, workers’ layoffs and scepticism about automation’s detriment to workers in low skilled labour professions. Today’s job automation operates through particular labour input in particular jobs, meaning that a singular task done by a person before is now conducted by a robot. Automation is spread unevenly across the labour market, because not every kind of task can be automated. The ones which can be need to meet certain criteria, like being routine and easy to describe so that they are programmable. Take for example a job of a manager who must have good organisation, communication and other interpersonal skills. It is and could remain difficult to programme caring communication which would foster a good working environment. A warehouse worker, on the other hand, does mundane and repetitive tasks, in which the human factor of intuition and common sense is not prevalent. Some of their tasks can be automated and you wouldn’t be surprised about the fact that this automation has already been taking place. This is undoubtedly changing the nature of work, but it does not automatically have to result in job losses.
Keynes and Marx gave very radical accounts of how work life around 2030 would be organised, but I don’t think either of us thinks of revolutionary change. A lot has changed in the past decades of course, but the change seemed to be rather gradual, a series of events maybe, which saw our work tasks progressively more automated. Langdon Winner coined the term “technological somnambulism”, which stands for technological sleepwalking, or a situation in which we do not have enough insight into how technology transforms aspects of our lives. Rather than being cautious, we seem to automatically trust our technological advances. We have sleepwalked into incremental changes to the nature of work, into the implementation of algorithms in our jobs and we did not ask many questions.
The “why” question
We have answered the “what” question by defining automation as the ability to replace human tasks by robot tasks in certain fields. Thus, automation is a labour-saving technology and yet, not only has automation not wiped out jobs, but labour and automation are complementary and result in increased productivity levels. To understand how this is possible, we shall ask the “why” and “how” questions and take look at the infamous Amazon warehouse.
In an Amazon warehouse, people are still employed for routine and scripted tasks like unloading and picking goods. Automation has not deprived them of their jobs, but it has changed the way warehouse jobs are conducted. Algorithms are used to allocate work and monitor employees, which leads to increased productivity. The datafication increases the information about the workers and the tasks they do, but this information flow is unidirectional- the workers are logging their location, their productivity into a machine, but only the software can work with this data and only the higher management with the data results. The unequal access to information is clear. But that wouldn’t be such a problem, if workers saw other benefits from this automation, such as shorter working hours, or increased job satisfaction, right?
An Amazon warehouse in Italy saw a workers’ strike with the slogan “We are not robots”. This was a response to the increased pressure to obey the algorithm in their scan guns, which are used to give detailed guidelines on how to work as efficiently as possible. These guidelines, according to the accounts of Italian Amazon workers are as detailed as “as you are loading your cart you start moving, and as you are arriving you already take a look at what you are to pick next, you don’t stop, and then you look at the shelf.” We are witnessing rising unsatisfaction about the ways through which automation reaches higher productivity, even though it does not result in job loss.
Employing “why” questions, we could ask why are we automating and to who’s benefit? Automation reduces bargaining power of workers, but it would be difficult to argue that worker’s power reduction was engraved in the original technological design. It is an unintended consequence. Technology has intended consequences, such as increased productivity of work and its developers rightly take credit when these are achieved. As in many other areas, however, unforeseen negative and unintended factors accompany the positive, intended ones and we don’t often see companies taking up responsibility for these. We don’t see Amazon executives making amendments due to the stated feelings of alienation of their workers, who’s labour is complementing the automation of some of their tasks. We seem to be locked in an idea of technological determinism in which technology once invented takes on its own course of action and changes to its design in an attempt to counteract the unintended consequences are rare.
We seem to assume that technology left to its own devices will somehow solve our problems. But while it does that, it creates others, such as unequal access to technological benefits. Sheila Jasanoff does not consider regulation a sufficient measure. After all, we live in a globalised world with shared technological devices (to an extend). The change we need to see is a democratic one. Those, whose lives are to be altered by technology ought to have access to information. They need to know what will happen, how it will happen and to who’s benefit.
