Researcher describes how Amazon turns its employees into 'automated machinery'
Devika Desai - POSTMEDIA - JUNE 2,2021
© Provided by National PostEmployees are seen on duty at work stations part of mobile robotic fulfilment systems also known as 'Amazon robotics' during the inauguration of a new Amazon warehouse in Bretigny-sur-Orge, some 30kms south of Paris, on October 22, 2019.
In the long-running annual series Oh, The Humanities! National Post reporters survey academic scholarship at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which has gone entirely virtual this year, hosted at the University of Alberta from May 27 to June 4.
For years, Amazon has come under a harsh spotlight for its treatment of its employees.
Workers at the retail giant’s fulfilment centre warehouses have become especially critical of their work conditions in the past couple of years. In protests in 2018 and 2019, they sent a rallying cry to top management: “We are not robots!”
Yet, that is precisely what Amazon wants them to be, Brendan Smith, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, posits in his research, to be presented this week at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Titled, “Thanks Amazon for Ruining My Life’: Worker Breakdown and the Disruption of Care at Amazon,” Smith’s paper suggests that Amazon’s “technoscientific regime of labour management and control” purposefully supports disintegration of the individual to coerce them to function as “automated machinery.”
“Worker breakdown is not just a byproduct of the exploitative labour process,” reads a working draft of Smith’s research, “but is also an embodied experience of Amazon’s attempts and ambitions to transform workers into automatic subjects through the technologically mediated conditions of labour in Amazon warehouses.”
Smith, who has long been interested in the relationship between humans and machines, said it was the employees’ rallying cry that prompted his research.
“What is it from (the workers’) perspective in terms of how they come to understand how they’re being treated?” he said in an interview. “And in this case they see themselves as being treated as a kind of machinery.”
Drawing on YouTube confessionals posted by former and current Amazon warehouse workers, Smith explored workers’ narratives of what it was like to work in the warehouses, their perception of being monitored remotely via low-tech devices and their experiences of mediation if or when they resisted working at Amazon.
“It doesn’t take too much reading on Amazon, I guess to understand there’s been a problem with how workers are expected to meet a certain rate output,” he said, referring to how Amazon measures productivity.
He had already heard of, for example, the “bathroom breaks fiasco,” wherein if workers leave their station to visit the bathroom or get a drink of water, their productivity rate meter, which constantly measures their hourly output, immediately drops.
However “it was interesting to hear how significant the rate metering function was,” he said, as a form of remote surveillance over workers and their daily productivity.
“It’s not that managers even have to see you going to the warehouse bathroom, or going out for a smoke break or taking too long,” he said. “They can tell if you’ve been doing something else for any given period of time when you shouldn’t be.”
The lower a worker’s productivity, the higher the likelihood that he or she will get written up by managers. “Multiple write-ups can and most likely will lead to their termination,” Smith says in his paper.
It becomes a form of “temporal labour,” his research says, in which the workers’ are forced to pit their wellness against their performance, often compromising their bodies just to keep up with their target rate.
By forcing workers to account for their own well being, the meter takes on a disciplinary role, filtering out those who “learn to take on more injury and pain” from others, who ultimately quit.
“The metrics of the rate meter, and the subsequent write-up, both function as signifiers of debt, more specifically of the worker’s time-wastefulness and irresponsibility,” his research reads.
Then comes the scanner, a low-tech device carried by every Amazon warehouse employee.
But the device carries a double-edged sword, several people warn in their videos. “The scanner technology isn’t just a device of work, it’s a device of management,” Smith said.
Through the scanners, employees receive blaring notifications from management. The messages are often connected to their measured productivity. If the rate of productivity is low, then the worker risks being notified of their termination. If it’s high, then they might be shifted to a “more physically straining job … to maximize productivity,” Smith’s research notes.
“The Amazon scanner’s notification system brings workers closer to breakdown, either through imposing heavier workloads on them or through leaving them unemployed and discarded,” Smith says in his research. “It is a system that threatens each worker at every moment with commands, without the necessary presence of any managerial staff.”
Even the strongest and fittest of workers, despite being the most desired by Amazon, are not exempt. “Their work will likely be made more difficult over time as they are made to learn how to work through ever increasing levels of pain and injury,” Smith says in his paper.
By minimizing interactions between employees and managers, the scanner also keeps “workers as invisible as possible,” making it harder for them to say no to overtime and forcing them to operate as the employer needs.
“This cultural and behavioural software at Amazon is one of automaticity; it incorporates the body as something that can be automatically activated and deactivated at the will of the employer, and in accordance with the worker’s performance metrics,” the paper says.
As a result, workers come to identify themselves as “automatic subjects” who react to stimuli, such as their scanners, without much thought.
One ex-packer was quoted describing their colleagues behaving like “zombies.”
“And they’re young people and it’s like, damn, we gotta put ourselves through this?” the ex-packer said, according to Smith.
Those who experience depression as a result of their workdays come closer to being subsumed by the Amazon culture.
“It affords Amazon to transform its workers into automatic subjects by normalizing the conditions of their pain through an interiorization of one’s conception of their ‘wellness’,” Smith says in his research.
Others who attempt to resist, perhaps by suing the retailer for health or physical injuries, are subjected to “more explicitly coercive or even hostile techniques.”
A former employee described how her health insurance claims with Amazon led to her being monitored by private investigators with video cameras. Footage showed her holding her smartphone in her hand and was allegedly used to suggest that she faked her hand injuries.
“That’s one example of me trying to understand how workers’ surveillance and control isn’t just something on the warehouse floor,” Smith said.
Ironically, by attempting to squash worker individuality and emotion, the system’s weakest link is exposed — “it is the worker’s own thoughts and feelings,” Smith wrote in his paper.
And it is this weak link that could expand post-COVID, as Amazon, which repeatedly came under public fire after multiple outbreaks were reported at sites in the U.S. and Canada, becomes susceptible to more workers voicing their discontent with conditions.
“The more discontent we see on the warehouse floor, the more workers are going to want to reach out and collectivize in certain ways, or talk about their experiences with one another,” Smith said. “I think we’re going to see more and more of that.”
