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 economy. By 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
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