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 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

 

Union organizing at Amazon – traditional and grassroot unions

Amazon warehouse workers are organized along a clear Taylorist division of labor, where they are assigned for a time-being a specific part of the circulation line of customer orders. Workers may be assigned a task in the Inbound, essentially referring to the prepping and stowing of items, or the Outbound, where items are picked and packed to head out to the customer. While historically workers concentrated within walls such as factories could resist by laboring more slowly for instance, this becomes incredibly complicated as workers’ productivity is digitally monitored through Units Per Hour (UPH) rates and socially through supervisors. This traditional organization of workers brings about their collective labor. In other words, the division of labor necessitates that all steps are collectively carried out for customers to receive their orders.

This underlines the crucial importance and potential of striking, disrupting and industrial action more generally for workers to leverage Amazon. However, the bounds of such action is closely related to the industrial relations and political-economic context of where workers are located. While workers can easily unionize in one country, in another they may have to take on one or multiple rounds of ballot votes to be able to unionize. We see this in the range of Germany’s traditional service sector union of ver.di that has been organizing workers at Amazon for a decade now, to Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots union that grew out of the pandemic and the firing of Christian Smalls in the US. Amazon’s transnational nature necessitates also transnational action and networks like the Amazon Workers International and UNI Amazon Global Union Alliance, as workers are united by their working conditions and their struggle for better, safer and fairer working conditions.

Online global communities – alternative forms of solidarity of MTurk workers

Workers on the MTurk platform labor from behind their screens, and thus can be located anywhere across the globe, as long as they have a device by which to connect to the Internet. We can imagine MTurk as a digital market for outsourced labor that is available 24/7. Workers labor here microtasks, dubbed Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), that may be something like answering surveys, digitizing receipts or labeling data. The different microtasks can also be understood as a division of labor here of a production line of data, generally used for training machine learning algorithms for AI. However, not only are forms of resistance such as working slowly complicated on MTurk but so too is traditional industrial action.

By laboring through the interface workers are managed by algorithms which essentially determines their approval rating based on whether their tasks are accepted or rejected. As with piecework, refusing to labor a task would mean a slower productivity rate and in this case no payment. Additionally, the question is: against whom do workers strike – those who hire them by the task (called requesters) or Amazon as the mediator of the MTurk platform? These workers are located across the world, do not encounter one another on their interfaces and labor different hours. This means for workers that if they want to communicate with one another, they have to do so outside of MTurk. We see that happening through online communities, whether subReddit threads like Turker Nation ">on which workers ask each other for tips and advice, or Turkopticon where workers are the ones rating requesters. These can be understood as acts of transnational solidarity, as workers – instead of safeguarding and gatekeeping the ways by which they navigate the system to make the most wages possible, they share these with one another.

 

The wide spectrum of agency

The working realities of platform workers can strongly vary, from those working for a location-based platform or a web-based one, to those receiving a traditional hourly wage or a gig piece rate. These dimensions in turn hold implications for how workers can resist and the ways by which they do so. By taking a small glimpse at the Amazon warehouse workers and MTurk workers, we can also observe the wide spectrum of what labor organization and solidarity can look like. This is crucial, as it can allow us to think of labor organization today not just in traditional terms, but also more broadly in alternative ones. This can in turn hold implications for our organizing strategies and the ways by which we can support these labor struggles. 

Sarrah Kassem is a Lecturer and Research Associate in Political Economy at the University of Tübingen. Her current research interests center around workers, working conditions, different forms of labor organization and the intersectional dimensions of the labor movement.