The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Wednesday 14 June 2023

Organizing Amazon and the platform economy (trans)nationally

In this guest post Sarrah Kassem outlines key arguments of her recent book Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization, in which she dives into two of Amazon’s platforms: its e-commerce platform of Amazon.com and its digital labor platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). These two platforms essentially organize workers in different ways. While the former pays workers a traditional time wage and concentrates workers within a single location, the latter pays workers, who labor from behind their screens, through gig wages. MTurk workers join therefore other workers in the gig economyBy taking a closer look at these two Amazon platforms, their (digital) shopfloor and relations of alienation and exploitation, we can then grasp the different ways by which workers form solidarity (trans)nationally and the diverse ways by which they come to organize themselves, traditionally and alternatively