The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers
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My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:
When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power β immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone β even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.
All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).
Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrance for their different classes of workers β they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.
Importantly, almost none of these workers β whether low-status or high β are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.
At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.
Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:
They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:
That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:
Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.
At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:
Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):
Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:
Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:
In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with β they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.
Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers β it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers β both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.
This is "twiddling" β exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:
Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):
When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.
Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts β a captive audience meeting in every pocket.
Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.
But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.
For now.
The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.
In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity β instead of unions β as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.
Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.
Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.
Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:
It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money β they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:
"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."
Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance β and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter β than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.
That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:
As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges β they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:
Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present β it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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