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Amazon's Human Robots: No Jobs For Real People
Ian R Thorpe
6 March 2013
Hundreds of dead eyed people in orange vests shuffle around a warehouse the
size of nine football pitches, looking for all the world like Epsilon Semi Morons in an
avant garde movie version ofAldous Huxley's Brave New World. They push trolleys
around, constantly referring to the screens of their hand-held satnav computers for
directions on where to walk next and what to take from the shelves and put into their
trolley when they get there.
They dare not linger, there is no stopping to exchange a greeting, joke or
comment with other Epsilon Semi Morons as they pass in the aisles; the devices that
intsruct them on every move are also measuring their productivity. These
humandroids might each walk between seven and 15 miles today.
The people are not semi morons of course, they are ordinary people like you and
I, unlike me not fortunate enough to be part of the most fortunate generation,
liberated by social change from the moral repression of the church - state duopoly
Inside an Amazon fullfilment centre
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before Our New Unhappy Lords, the science and technology masters took over the
world with the complicity of our elected leaders, but bright, intelligent people who
did not get a high enough degree or who signed up for the wrong course to get into
the professions that grant access to the new elite.
Before these unfortunate workers, let's drop the literary reference as it might
seem slightly insulting and refer to them Humandroids, can go home at the end of
their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk
through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything.
After being scanned they walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde
woman in an orange vest. This is the best job I have ever had! says a speech bubble
near her head. A cardboard cut out it would say that, you might well think, but it's
suprising what positions cardboard cut outs can occupy these days thanks to equality
laws.
Were time an onion, we could peel back the layers and read the history of this
town layers by layer. In the muddy deposits of the River Trent's flood plain we would
find remains of the first settlers to occupy the region after the ice age. Their skeletons
are here, fragmented, the bones scattered. We would also find stone and bone toolsand shards of crude pottery. A little further away from the river are remains of bronze
Cardboard cut-outs can hold top jobs thanks to anti - discrimination
laws
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and Iron age settlements and the medieval farms, worked by peasants and owned by
feudal lords. Below the ground are the collapsing, flooded tunnels of the coal mines
where fuels for the factories and foundries of the industrial revolution and in the
twentieth century a major power station was extracted. The mines, where men
sweated as, kneeling to work the thin seams they chipped at the coal were the local
economys beating heart. The coal was loaded into skips that were pushed on iron rail
tracks to the shaft to be hoisted up to the pit head. Mining was dirty, backbreaking
work yet the industry forged stronger community bonds than any other.
Now, above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon the global
online retailer, have replaced the skips and weighbridge of the mines.
Between a grimy power station and a canal, on the edge ofRugeley, a small
industrial town where the industries have all moved east, the long, featureless
building crouches low against the skyline like an ants nest and like ants, the workers
inside go about their appointed tasks, unquestioning, without deviation from the
prescribed process.
As online shopping, encouraged by tax breaks from government and waiving of
regulations by local authorities destroys our traditional town centres in Britain,
traditional retailers such as Jessops Photographic, JJB Sports, Barratt Shoes, T J
Hughes (budget goods), Principles (fashion), Comet electrical out of business, more
and more business are moving from High Street shops into warehouses like this one
while more and more jobs are moving into history. No figures are available for the
number of empty shop premises in Rugeley itself but for the South Staffordshire
industrial area the figure is twenty - four per , a
figure repeated throughout the nation. And there
are few prospective tenants around.
In the face of criticism over its tax
arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how
many jobs it is creating across the country at a
time of economic malaise. Amazon, an
undisputed giant in modern online retail world
Amazon creating many jobs
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claims to have invested more than 1 billion in its UK operations and announced last
year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create
2,000 more permanent jobs. The company likes to boast of the 7billion in sales it
generated in 2011 and unashamed to admit the profits on those sales attracted no tax.
Strangely Amazon are rather coy when it comes to talking about how many people
they employ in Britain. After spending a considerable amount of time delving through
several hundred search results I finally found the average number of people employed
by Amazon in the UK, including those employed on temporary contracts through
agencies is about 3000. Compared to the 6,000 jobs lost due to the closure of four
major high street retailers in January 2013 and without counting jobs lost in smaller
businesses that do not make the national news when they fail, that suggests Amazon
(and by extension other online retailers) are destroyers rather than creators of jobs.
And yet the politicians, besotted with big money and corporate power heap praise
on the firms that are keeping unemployment high and turning our town centres into
ghost towns. Amazon even had a quote from the Prime Minister, in its September
2012 press release. This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find
work, but for the UK economy, said David Cameron, not pausing to think of ll the
people Amazon's arrival would put out of work.
People in Rugeley shared the Prime Minister's enthusiasm when, in the summer
of 2011, they heard Amazon was going to occupy warehouse. Rugeley is a white
working-class town of about 22,000 that has never fully recovered from the mines
closure in 1990. The arrival of Amazon was seen as a chance to relaunch the
community after decades of economic decline. Most people are still see Amazon as a
boon to the town, believing that any sort of work is better than no work at all, but
many are dismayed by reports of the conditions of employment and bitterly
disillusioned to discover the lack of security in working at the warehouse and the soul
destroying boredom of the type of employment on offer.
In common with most jobless people in Rugeley, 54-year-old Chris Martin started
scouring the internet for application details as soon as he heard Amazon was coming.
Chris was thrilled when he passed the Amazon recruitment process, which includes
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drug and alcohol tests, and was given a job on the night-shift.
Global employment agency Randstad, which handled the recruitment process for
Amazon, was also contracted to arrange his shifts, manage him on the warehouse
floor and pay him his near-minimum wage.
Under the rather draconian terms of his contract, after three months, if he had
performed well, Chris could apply to be an Amazon employee, though there was no
guarantee he would be taken on the direct payroll. This kind of system, which is now
commonplace, is called Inhouse Services Management or if an entire function is
outsourced, 'facility management.' Both are euphemisms for temporary work.
Randstad describes its service as a flexible work solution designed exclusively for
each client to optimise the work force and drive cost-effectiveness. Very close to
nineteenth century day - labour, the system of queueing at the factory warehouse or
dockyard gate by the sound of it.
One of the benefits for clients, it says, is the removal of the administrative
burden of recruiting and managing large numbers of staff.
Workers in Amazons warehouses
or associates in Amazons fulfilment
centres as the company likes to describe
them are divided into four main groups.
There are the people on the receive lines
and the pack lines: they either unpack,
check and scan every product arriving from
around the world, or they pack up
customers orders at the other end of the
process.
Another group stows suppliers
products somewhere in the warehouse.
They put things wherever theres a free
space in Rugeley, there are inflatable
palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazons
H R Geiger's nightmare vision of
dehumanization
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vast computer brain knows where everything is.
The fourth group, the pickers, push trolleys around and pick out customers
orders from the aisles, guided by the software that calculates the most efficient
walking route to collect the items that will fill a trolley, and then directs the worker
from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav.
Even with these efficient routes, theres a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley
pickers lost almost half a stone in his first few shifts. Youre sort of like a robot, but
in human form, said the Amazon manager who wished to remain anonymous. Its
human automation, if you like. Like we said, Humandroids. Get a job with Amazon,
brain not required.
What do the people of Rugeley
make of all this? For many who
have previously worked in
unionised workforces it has been a
culture shock. The feedback were
getting is that its like being in a
slave camp, said Brian Garner, the
chairman of the Lea Hall Miners
Welfare Centre and Social Club, still
a popular local drinking spot. He
might just as easily have said a prisoner in a Russian Gulag.
Is this the future for the workforce then, after all the blether about "Education,
education, education, our children and grandchildren if they cannot worm their way
into a technocratic elite where like Orwell's Winston Smith they are completely
controlled and a single step out of line can lead to personal destruction, they are
going to be reduced to the level of medieval serfs.
Although many of the new starters when Amazon's Rugeley 'fullfilment centre'
assumes their jobs were permanent, a significant number were released with little
warning or explanation they workers said, after the first busy Christmas period.
Chris Martin's job lasted less than a week after he took a day off for blisters and
Inside a Soviet gulag
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returned to find the night shift he was on had been abruptly cancelled. One of the
advantages for companies like Amazon of using agency staff is that agencies can take
people on as temporary workers. While employers who want to treat staff decently
are hamstrung by employment law that makes hiring a lengthy and costly
bureaucratic process and firing somebody without a long legal process almost
impossible, agencies are spared this because they employ people on weekly rolling
contracts.
The job insecurity is what has most disillusioned Glenn Watson, manager of
economic development at the district council. Our definition of a good employer is
someone who takes on people and provides them with sustainable employment week
in week out, not somebody who takes on workers one week and gets rid of them the
next, he said. The council had understood Amazon would use the first 12 months to
gradually build up its own local workforce, transferring agency staff on to its payroll,
but by last autumn, Watson thought there were only about 200 Amazon employees,
with the rest supplied by Randstad and two smaller agencies.
He complained that Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data
every six months, but it had not done so. We had no idea Amazon were going to be
as indifferent to these issues as they have been: its come as a shock to us how
intransigent they are, he said.
Chris Forde, professor of employment studies at Leeds University knows
arrangements such as Randstads with Amazon are becoming increasingly common in
Britain. He has encountered situations in which workers on short term, temporary
contracts make up 90 per cent of a companys workforce in sectors such as
manufacturing, food processing, hotels and restaurants.
Across Britain, with the number of people employed only part time exploding,
the number of people in temporary jobs who can be laid off at a moment's notice has
swelled 20 per cent since the financial crisis hit in 2008. A similar increase has been
recorded in the group who say they want permanent jobs but cannot find secure, long
term vacancies.
Amazon says it is proud to have given its associates a great working
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environment, including on-the-job training, opportunities for career progression,
competitive wages, performance-related pay, stock grants, healthcare, a pension plan,
life assurance, income protection and an employee discount. The company added that
it takes on temporary workers during periods of high demand, and when permanent
positions are available we look to the top-performing temporary associates to fill
them.
Elsewhere, Britains economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains
moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a
million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008
crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the
previous peak.
Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work,
while a testament to the British labour markets flexibility, helps to explain why
economic growth remains elusive.
Sources:
Much of my information came from personal messages in reponse to an appealfor information in a blog about the dehumanization of the workforce. Thanks to
the contributors who must remain anonymous.
Retail failures:
Empty shops:
The Lives Of Amazon Warehouse Employees - Huff. Post
Amazon Employees Say They face Brutal Conditions Yahoo News
Interview: Reporter Who Exposed Amazon's Working Conditions
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