OPINION: The convenience that Amazon customers enjoy comes at the expense of Amazon’s lowest-paid workers, who are beginning to rebel.
With Britain suffering through its worst cost-of-living crisis in decades—owing to high inflation and soaring energy prices—hundreds of workers at an Amazon AMZN, -1.57% warehouse in Coventry, England, this month demanded a wage hike. If the demand is not met, they say they will go on strike in November, just ahead of Black Friday and the holiday shopping season.
The mastermind behind the operation is a man named Jeff Wilke, who combined Taylorism and Fordism to create a warehouse model capable of processing more than a million units per day. With the help of robots and close surveillance, human “pickers” and “stowers” now process several times as much merchandise per hour as they once did.
Compounding the indignity, all are closely monitored by a dystopian surveillance system that punishes infractions like talking to co-workers or missing productivity targets . These skirmishes have fatally undermined the narrative that Big Tech tells about itself. Amazon may be a logistics pioneer, but it is no less reliant on worker exploitation as the “satanic mills” of the First Industrial Revolution.
Disposable workforce Before stepping down as CEO last year, Bezos viewed employee churn as more of a feature than a bug of Amazon’s model. To have an entrenched workforce, he reportedly said, was to “march to mediocrity.” Hence, the company reports an employee turnover of roughly 150% per year—twice the industry average—meaning that its entire workforce is replaced every eight months.
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