Behold, now behemoth … Behold, he drinketh up a river … The Book of Job, 40: 15 and 23.
‘Most of us don’t know 95 percent of what Amazon is doing,’ Amy Webb warns in her The Big Nine (2019). While Amazon Prime is diverting audiences with its rom-com, The Idea of You, the Australian Signals Directorate is paying Amazon Web Services two billion dollars to store secrets in three locations on the Cloud with a golden lining for Amazon which holds the largest slice globally, at around a third.
(Will the ASD sites need Dutton’s nuclear plants to power them?)
Jeff Bezos began by distributing books in July 1994 to customers with discretionary incomes to build into ‘The Everything Store,’ helping to put 2,500 bookshops out of business (Brad Stone, The Everything Store, 2013). First called Cadabra, as in the sleight-of-hand magic spell ‘abracadabra,’ then rebranded Amazon within a few months to match the mightiest river with its expansive delta.
The tributaries to Amazon’s reported income of $6.7 billion for 2023 have a common spring in the labours of 1.46 million ‘Amazonians’ employed as wage-slaves in warehouses, on piece-rates for the Mechanical Turk, or as ‘in/dependent’ delivery drivers for Amazon Flex.
In Management-Speak, Amazon warehouses are ‘fulfillment centres,’ which is true for packages but not for the pickers and packers who endure them as ‘hellscapes.’ Unlike chattel-slaves who could run off into the Amazon delta, wage-slaves have nowhere to hide from the all-seeing-eye of devices which have patrolled ‘Scamazon’ for twenty years.
The Wall Street Journal parades ‘Besozism’ as an advance on Taylorism and Fordism for its ‘mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering … and an ever-growing array of clever and often proprietary technologies.’
On the frontier of Telematics, Amazon patented a wrist-band which reports hand-movements, before sending vibrations back to nudge the workers into being more productive.
Along with other distributors, Bezos had rented the first-generation KIVA robots ‘to increase the output capacity of their warehouses; store and ship a wider range of product; shorten the amount of time required to fill an order; and ultimately either lower the cost of their services, increase their profits, or both.’ In 2012, Bezos bought KIVA’s manufacturer for $775m., rebranding it Amazon Robotics. He did not renew its contracts with competitors such as the now bankrupt Toys’R’US, which had to set up its own. One product-line which his ‘Everything Store’ does not sell is its labour-slaving technologies.
An Amazon recruit takes a couple of days to learn to pull sticky tape at the maximum speed from its dispenser without twisting it. The dispenser is programmed to extrude the exact length but workers out-performed the device at fastening the tape around cartons of multiple shapes and sizes. A novice who does not pick up that knack by the third day is ‘set free.’ The Bezosmoth did not rack up his cool trillion by dispensing with fixed-capital at that rate. Like every agent of capital, he juggles outlays between equipment and wages in pursuit of more than the average rate of profit.
Workplace-wide sensors track every move of every Amazonian down to the milli-second to determine the floating average ‘rate’ at each warehouse, helping to lift the pick-rate from 100 to 300 per hour per worker. AI devices report in real time the pick-rates around the planet, globalising labour-times. Saving one millisecond is nothing. To do so 1,000 times per second on a 10-hour shift piles up on the bottom line.
What the Bezosmoth insists on as ‘the rate’ confirms Marx’s recognition that ‘everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required for the reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus labour’ to realise as profit
Cardinal automatic scanners replaced scanning by hand in 2021. Loaded with Augmented Reality ID vision and AI, they pluck items of up to 22kg., read the labels, place them in the correct bin before they are moved further along the shipping process. Promoted by Amazon as a boon to the ‘pickers’ by reducing repetitive strain, Cardinal is a blessing for a boss suffering workforce churn because of those injuries, or who are burnt out after two weeks of 10-hour days. Gift vouchers cannot retain recruits.
Amazon’s conglomerations of labour rival those at Detroit auto-makers before the 1980s. Once brought together, workers can become ‘dangerous classes’. Bezos’s determination to block unions is more than his ‘trademark hard-charging attitude towards work.’ Even a tame-cat union might negotiate legally-enforceable agreements which hamper Amazon’s redirecting of labour to increase the ‘rate.’
Amazon’s acceleration machine does not clock-off at the warehouse gate. Its monopsony clout compels suppliers to drive down the labour-times required for the units that their workers produce. Amazon’s abuse of its labour-force points to how effects from its practices spread back down its supply chains and across to competitors.
Amazon runs flexibility-scheduling platforms which let its full-time workers choose their shifts. Should they fail to put in thirty hours during the week, they lose one point. Chalk up eight points for a range of faults, and you’re fired: ‘expectation of the sack is pervasive.’ Nothing is ‘flexible’ in that power relationship, any more than there is in ‘the rate’ set in Amazon hellscapes. Nonetheless, ‘the rate’ remains ‘flexible’ in that its victims are pushed to go ever faster.
These congeries subject ever more full-time permanents to the conditions of a gig economy. Bezosism will not mean that all jobs will become gigs but that they all will be managed as if they were, as David Weil explores in The Fissured Workplace (2014).
For the 2023 mid-year sales in Australia, Amazon recruited 1,000 drivers with their own vehicles, thereby externalising fixed-capital costs, as does UBER. Cost-of-living pressures boosted the number of applicants willing to accept low rates of pay since an Amazon gig was not their principal source of earnings but what their recruiters called ‘extra cash,’ and the applicants experienced as desperate measures.
Low wages at Amazon help to keep them down at DoorDash and Uber, while all three benefit from their employees’ being driven to chase two or three jobs to cobble together a living income.
Next year, will open a four-storey fulfillment centre, the size of eleven Melbourne Cricket Grounds, on Macaulay Rd, North Melbourne, while installing robots at both north Melbourne and the Craigieburn site, close by Tullamarine, the better to despatch to regional centres adding a threat to their street-front outlets.
The Bezomoth makes local governments in the U.S. of A. compete with offers of tax concessions and the like for the privilege of having a warehouse built in their district to the detriment of existing distributors and retailers.
Amazon drops suppliers for ‘no reason’ other than a encourage les autres – thereby reminding all of them that no one of them is indispensable and so they had better cop whatever terms Amazon dishes out. It shifts the costs of holding inventory back to suppliers by making them wait for payment. Amazon’s behaviour is worse than that from Supermarkets here.
Amazon employs 7,000 Australians, 4,000 in the Cloud and 2,000 ‘permanents’ in its six fulfillment centres; 1,300 are body-hire, and 3,000 more in/dependent delivery contractors. To protect their rights at work, how much due diligence did AustralianSuper exercise before its ‘ethical’ investment in Amazon’s robotic fulfilment centre at Craigieburn?
In like vein, under which kind of labour relations will the Australian Cloud staff be employed: Bezosism or FairWork? Will the ‘Labor values’ of Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Burke, ensure workers’ rights to unionise and to disconnect?
Gender equity should also be a concern given Kristi Coulter’s 2023 memoir, Exit Interview, that throughout twelve years as an Amazon executive she had been bullied and never given a top job.
Given how easy it was for PriceWaterhouseCooper to bamboozle Tax Office sleuths, what chance will Defence boffins have in a showdown with the Bezomoth? Hard bargaining assumes that the prospect of post-retirement consultancies for politicians, bureaucrats and top brass does not make them a soft touch. After all, they are safe from another whistle-blower after the jailing of David McBride.
One certainty is the contract will be another commercial-in-confidence trick.
He who sups with The Bezosmoth, should have a long spoon.
[Humphrey McQueen declines to use Generative AI to finish his Can robots dream of becoming time-poor?, from which this piece is drawn.]