[D66] Amazon’s 24/7 Hell

[J.N.]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazons-247-hell-is-the-future-of-work


Amazon’s 24/7 Hell Is the Future of Work
Written by
Brian Merchant
Senior Editor

August 18, 2015 // 12:34 PM EST
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Working at Amazon may be hell, but so is working everywhere else. Or at
least it will be soon. The blockbuster New York Times report documenting
Amazon’s “bruising” white collar culture is a fine piece of labor
reporting, yet its revelations shouldn’t be too surprising. Amazon is
revealed to be a more efficient and more unpleasant formulation of the
standard modern workplace; one shaped by globalization, digitalization,
and increasingly limitless expectations placed on the plugged-in worker.

While Amazon’s management does come off as particularly callous, many of
the biggest grievances that employees shared—working extraordinarily
long hours; enduring persistent stress and anxiety; getting penalized
for taking time off, regardless of the cause; being “on duty” around the
clock; and suffering an environment inherently less fair to women and to
those who fall ill or spend more time with their families—aren’t
particularly novel.

Ample research shows that job satisfaction has been falling for years—a
2010 Conference Board study found that satisfaction was lowest in two
decades, and a 2006 Pew Research survey found the same—while worker
productivity, abetted by technology, has been skyrocketing. (Wages, of
course, have stagnated.) Meanwhile, longer working hours and higher
stress levels are prime contributors to the fact that Americans are
increasingly unhappy. Headline after headline over the last few years
details how “Most Americans are Unhappy at Work.”

The Times story has been met with outrage, but that outrage has mostly
been focused on a handful of anecdotes, when the core problem lies with
the system itself. Companies have the tools, technology, and means to
push their employees to work around the clock, and to penalize those who
make themselves unavailable.

“I wasn't surprised about anything in the report, except maybe the
desperation that allows workers to accept such conditions,” Douglas
Rushkoff, a professor of media theory at CUNY, and the author of Present
Shock, told me in an email. “But what Amazon is doing is entirely
consistent with the way most companies are using digital technology.
It's a way of extracting value from humans and converting it into share
price.”

Sure, it’s appalling that a woman returned from taking time off for
cancer treatment and was met with a negative performance review. That
employees are explicitly told to spend less time with their families if
they want to succeed. That management encourages employees to use
bizarrely branded snitch-tech (Anytime Feedback Tool™) to clandestinely
complain about each others’ performances, and actively promote ruthless
peer- and self-criticism. That the environment gets so mean-spirited
that adults weep at their desks. (And that it’s much, much worse at
Amazon’s blue collar distribution centers, where conditions are actually
back-breaking.)

    "What the New York Times reports about Amazon seems generally
consistent with the ways in which institutionalized work is being
reorganized all over the planet"

That’s all horrible—but that sort of thing is happening everywhere, in
less-blunt permutations. It’s mostly Amazon’s style and approach that’s
sparked the outrage; its culture’s brazen disregard for human nicety.
Endless hours, round-the-clock availability requirements, a greater
burden on women with children, and stress—these are endemic to modern
work culture itself, which is in the process of adapting to and seeking
to exploit a new global marketplace where the flow of information,
ideas, and capital never ceases.

Matt Yglesias argues at Vox that Amazon’s work culture is so relentless
because it’s a “startup that never grew up,” but Silicon Valley is
exporting that startup culture to companies desperate for modernization,
everywhere. So 24/7 digital communications, big data, and a veneer of
world-changingness—the implements of torture for Amazon employees—are
increasingly commonplace. Amazon, in other words, is not some dystopian
outlier. It’s the new normal. It’s just a little more frank about its
goals and intentions.

“What the New York Times reports about Amazon seems generally consistent
with the ways in which institutionalized work is being reorganized all
over the planet,” Jonathan Crary, a Columbia professor and author of
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, told me. He notes that “in
corporations everywhere now, it is imperative that one fully internalize
the demand for maximum performance regardless of the toll it might take
on one’s health, family or sanity.”

That means, first and foremost, blurring the lines between work and
not-work; being constantly available. As Crary tells me, “One is
expected to fashion one’s existence as something perpetually flexible
and adaptable to the changing and always intensifying requirements of
the enterprise.” It’s why we’re waking up in the middle of the night to
check work emails. It’s why Jason Merkoski, a 42-year-old Amazon
engineer told the Times that “It’s as if you’ve got the C.E.O. of the
company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.”

Work is monopolizing our time, in part because digitization has, as has
been much remarked, broken down the boundaries between the personal and
professional. And it's a lot of time. “Not only are Americans working
longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept, but now
they are also working longer than anyone else in the industrialized
world,” a 2014 ABC report explained. According to BLS statistics, the
average American now works 49 hours a week. Last year, Tony Schwartz,
the founder of the business consulting firm the Energy Project, and
Christina Porath, a professor for Georgetown’s Business School, wrote a
piece for the New York Times sharing the results of their research into
modern working conditions. Only 37 percent of 12,115 workers polled said
they were able to balance work and home life at their current jobs.

“Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity—draining us
of the energy we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life,” they
wrote. “Increased competitiveness and a leaner, post-recession workforce
add to the pressures. The rise of digital technology is perhaps the
biggest influence, exposing us to an unprecedented flood of information
and requests that we feel compelled to read and respond to at all hours
of the day and night.”

“I guess the main problem is that Amazon's workers are in an always-on
situation,” Rushkoff said. “They are monitored by machine, and judged
according to specific metrics. Labor is a resource like any other, and
people are part of the bigger program.”

“Plus, believe me, if Amazon let up their shareholders would be mad,” he
added. That’s probably true, and supported by the fact that the scathing
report didn’t seem to worry investors—share prices for AMZN rose $3.70
on the first day of trading after the Times story was published. CNBC’s
Jim Cramer said on his show that investors “would love Amazon even more
now.” For investors, Amazon’s efforts to maximize output is ideal.

“But of course, except for a tiny number at the top, it’s a system
driven by fear and panic, and the portent of failure, redundancy and
disposability are always at the periphery of one’s actions every day,”
Crary tells me. Which may explain why the loudest voices defending
Amazon from the Times’ reporting are those profiting most from the
extreme productivity.

So far, two of the company’s executives—CEO Jeff Bezos and Senior Vice
President of Global Corporate Affairs Jay Carney—have stepped up to say
they “don’t recognize” the company they see portrayed in the article. At
least two others, Nick Ciubotariu, the Head of Infrastructure
Development, Amazon.com Search Experience (SX), and Tim Bray, an
entrepreneur and coder working on Amazon Web Services, offered spirited
defenses of the company on their personal blogs and LinkedIn accounts.

And industry scribes like Fortune Magazine’s Matthew Ingram intoned that
while he doesn’t think that any inhumanity is hard-wired into the
system, “What I think is hard-wired into the company’s culture, based on
conversations with former Amazon employees, is a desire to do great
work—even if that requires some level of personal sacrifice—and a
feeling that the company is doing something worthwhile, perhaps even
revolutionary.” It’s also probably worth noting that all of the above
are men in positions of power.

Much of the commentary about the Times exposé has dwelled on the fact
that these are highly paid, well-educated employees who are free to
leave—and that’s true. Amazon’s truly exploited workforce is the tens of
thousands of warehouse employees who do hard labor for much less pay,
and often without any job security at all.

But major companies like Amazon are helping to normalize the 24/7 work
culture that stands to define tomorrow’s jobs. Amazon is now the world’s
most valuable retailer—it’s worth $250 billion. As automation continues
to move more jobs away from the warehouse floors, how we define—and
limit—work done online, over the cloud, will be one of the great labor
challenges of the near future.

Because, as Crary reiterates: “this is hardly just Amazon.”

Topics: Amazon, amatopia, work, labor, future of work, business,
culture, Marketplace, Internet, commerce, ecommerce, delivery,
distribution, exploitation