The contentious politics of data: Striking Amazon workers.
Contentious politics are not new. They have been in play for hundreds of years where people making claims joined forces in struggles to advance their interests. Within the workplace, the trade union movement was how workers organised to resist management exploitation and assert claims for better pay and conditions. The strike–the withdrawal of labour to hurt company profits and force collective agreements–has always been a central tool in their organisational repertoire.
The global rise of neoliberalism has, since the early 1980s, eclipsed the union movement and led to a dramatic collapse in membership, especially in the private sector. This trend has suppressed the growth of wages and led to rising inequality and deteriorating working conditions. Many of the issues associated with the rise of a new, more precarious workforce, especially amongst migrant workers, are evident in the gig economy–like Uber and Delivereasy–where workers are governed by algorithmic forms of management. In many countries the trade union movement has been regrouping, enagaging with precarious workers and organising to obtain union recognition and better pay and conditions.
A few weeks ago, Amazon workers in the Coventry fulfilment centre in the UK shut down the centre as part of an ongoing campaign for better conditions and a wage increase from £11-an-hour (just over the national minimum of £10.42-an-hour) to £15-an-hour . This is in the context of soaring UK inflation rates and reported company profitability of $3.2 billion in the first quarter of 2023 alone. And then there is the personal wealth of Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, currently standing at around $160 billion.
The Coventry strike was organised by members of the GMB, who have also been campaigning for Amazon to recognise the trade union. Since the start of their campaign, the number of union members has increased tenfold, from one hundred to one thousand.
If union recognition is refused by a company in the UK, it can apply to Central Arbitration Committee to enforce recognition, but this is conditional on having 50% of the workforce as union members. At the time of the application the GHMB had 800 members and was comfortable about meeting this criterion in a centre with 1,400 staff.
When the GMB initially requested recognition, the firm responded with a statement saying:
Amazon respects our employees’ rights to join, or not to join, a union. We offer competitive pay, comprehensive benefits, opportunities for career growth, all while working in a safe, modern, work environment. At Amazon, these benefits and opportunities come with the job, as does the ability to communicate directly with the leadership of the company.”
Following the application, Amazon management responded by flooding the centre with 1,000 new starts forcing the GMB to withdraw the application. If it had gone ahead, the Central Arbitration Committee may have balloted the workers to gauge support from staff, and if the union lost the vote (due to the huge number of new starts) it could not make another request for three years.
If hiring 1,000 extra workers (to join a previous workforce of 1,400) seems an extreme way to rig a ballot, that only points to the priority Amazon gives at global level to crushing unions, even if this means spending more money than it would cost to meet workers’ demands locally. (Morning Star Editorial)
Despite the claims made in its press release, Amazon’s active hostility to trade union organising was also evident in several different tactics reported by Coventry workers, including talks from managers urging them not to trust the union and to think about their future job security. Large electronic noticeboards inside the Fulfillment Centre were also deployed to encourage workers to “recognise the facts” about the union.
The job is not human
The trouble is that if Amazon recognises the union, not only will it be expected to engage in collective bargaining for fair wages, it will also be expected to engage in dialogue about its algorithmic work processes that force the pace of work: a fast pace known as the “Amazon pace” where workers must not run but walk as quickly as possible.
The job is not human, I’ll be honest. It’s not human to last that long, because it’s just mentally stressful because you just are working, working, working constantly. Literally you have no social life. Even the night shift manager says “there is no life for us, we just come here every night and just work.” The workload it can get crazy at times. (Ajin cited in Cai et al., 2022, p.40)
People often associate Amazon warehouses with sophisticated robotics, but this idea in the popular imagination is a useful way of masking the fact that the majority of Amazon’s fulfilment centres, algorithmic processes are used to drive human labour. A minority of fulfilment centres do use robotic shelves where workers stand in workstations served by robots, but even here, stowing and retrieving the items remain a process governed by the manual labour of humans.
Technology dictates the pace of work at Amazon. It is used to increase workers’ productivity, standardize tasks, facilitate worker turnover, and ultimately gain control over the workforce. Workers are acutely aware of the uneven nature of their relation with machinery, and at the same time, they know the warehouse needs their living labor. As I was told by a manager, “technology codifies, understands and manages. But the real machine is the human: everything is done manually”. (Delfanti, 2021, p. 40)
Alessandro Delfanti argues that to understand the algorithmic production process harnessed by Amazon, we need to pay less attention to its deployment of robots, and more to how it finds “ways to force workers to become robots that seamlessly and efficiently abide by the rhythms automation imposes” (Delfanti, 2019, p. 40). One of the main technologies driving the production process is the barcode scanner (or ‘gun’) held by each worker.
At the beginning of each shift, workers scan the barcode on their badge then “From that moment on, the scanner mediates between workers and management, assigning tasks, communicating orders, and monitoring work” (p. 42).
As you are loading an object onto the cart, the next one appears on the scanner. So 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, is it a book or something else? In which area of the shelf is it? (Delfonti, 2021
The barcode scanner drives the pace of the work, communicating the position on the shelves of the items requested and allocating time to complete the task. Not only that, but the scanner is also a tool of managerial surveillance, monitoring workers’ performance against targets and communicating results to managers who can challenge or praise performance in real-time. When workers fall behind targets, managers will challenge them, but targets are also competitive with high and low performance displayed on screens in real time:
So whatever is on the screen that is what the manager will see so that’s what they go for. That’s how they monitor people, through the computer and not through themselves.’ (Marianne cited in Cai et al., 2022, p.32)
An ex-operations manger from Amazon expressed concern that these targets were harmful:
The targets might be too constrained for human labour, oftentimes and it becomes work, work, work, work, 30 hours, 30 minutes break. From a human perspective it’s not efficient for the health. It’s not advisable. I wouldn’t advise a friend of mine to be a level I, to be a warehouse operative for a long period of time. Healthwise it’s not advisable, psychologically wise it’s not advisable because at some point warehouses will be expecting efficiency of robots from humans so to speak. (Danielle cited in Cai et al., 2022, p.44)
Across the world, trade union organisations are recognising the harms associated with algorithmic work processes: physical harms from accidents, psychological harms from the stress of constant surveillance and harm to workers’ autonomy limiting control over their decision-making in the workplace. The company has even trialled “wearable haptic feedback devices for warehouse workers, which use targeted vibrations to guide arm movements as quickly as possible to ‘maximise efficiency’.”
Amazon is a global company and trade union organisations across the world are beginning to coordinate their actions to challenge these algorithmic practices. For example, the European Trade Union Confederation has lobbied the Europe Union to respect the principle of “humans in command” and to strengthen “workers’ involvement in the design, deployment and use of AI technology”
