[...] Amazon warehouses are considered among the best in the industry relative to wages for both direct hire and temporary agency workers. A job ad posted by Amazon in 2017 for a full-time warehouse worker of "fulfilment associate" position in Rialto offered $12.25 per hour, somewhat better than the regional average wage rate cited above. Yet this wage is still below a living wage for the region, and no higher than the starting rate Amazon paid such workers four years earlier.

WWU did not pursue a traditional unionization campaign for several reasons. First, temps are highly vulnerable to employer retaliation, while undocumented immigrant workers face the further threat of deportation. Organizing temps into unions is not only practically challenging given their high turnover, but also legally complicated, as their employer of record and right to collective bargaining are complex and decided on a case by case basis. In light of this WWU sought to improve warehouse workers' employment conditions mainly through a combination of coalition building and collective action, while WWRC helped workers to file formal complaints against labor law violations.

Rather than targeting warehouse employers or temporary agencies, WWU targeted retailers which have the most power and resources in the goods movement industry. [...]

Warehouse workers have the capacity to make history, but not as they please--the circumstances inherited require innovation and novel forms of organizing and resistance. The obstacles to organizing posed by capital mobility, automation, political/legal uncertainty and the sheer structural power of capital requires multi-site, coordinated campaigns throughout the global supply chain and across the boundaries of firms. Workers face the daunting task of overcoming the tension between local demands and the demands of workers in other nodes of supply chain networks. Yet these impediments are not insurmountable. Just as capital has adopted new organizational forms to overcome the power of workers in the past, warehouse workers and other workers can and will adapt novel organizational forms in their struggle against neoliberalism and global capitalist hegemony.

Amazon allows workers to log into a system that monitors each worker's performance, and the data is used to set their obligatory work rates, such as the demanded number of products scanned per hour. As long as they do not do anything that can be registered in the system (like "scanning goods") the system records "time off task". That means even if they work -- doing something that is not registered -- this time is recorded as taking a break. Such periods are added up and calculated as illegitimate "extra breaks". If workers do not meet the rates (that is, they work "too slowly") or have too many "extra breaks," they get negative "feedback," and after several "feedbacks" they can get a warning and eventually be sacked.

Trying to reach the rates is stressful enough, but even worse are days when Amazon tries to set "records," like 1 million orders processed in one warehouse within 24 hours. Warehouses compete with each other, and Amazon uses those days to push workers to the limit, ordering obligatory overtime and cancelling breaks before midnight. If workers reach the desired "record," managers get a extra bonus and workers get T-shirts.

Before a strike in Germany in June 2015, the management the Poznań warehouse announced one hour of overtime during the upcoming strike day across the border. Workers in Poznań were already aware that Amazon tried to bypass and undermine strikes in Germany by shifting orders between warehouses (in this case to Poland). Growing local tensions in the Poznań warehouse and the prospect of being used as scabs led to vivid discussions among workers on how to resist. Eventually, during the night shift on June 24-25, 2015, a few dozen workers improvised a slowdown in one department, taking advantage of a bottleneck in the processing of orders and disturbing operations in other parts of the warehouse. They showed a collective will to resist, their solidarity with workers on strike in Germany, and a keen knowledge of the work process and how to disrupt it.

Workers from temporary agencies are in a more precarious situation. They are under pressure to work hard (should they want to "qualify" for permanent employment) and can be sacked easily. Some of them have been active in the union, and IP has tried to get them involved by addressing their specific situation, organizing rallies in front of agency offices, starting collective bargaining processes in the agencies, and including them in the strike ballot--but it remains difficult to bridge the gap created by the dual employment structure.

Of course, to effectively question technology requires, first, a critical perspective on the development of capitalism, particularly the relation of technological change to profit rates and the social organization of labor, and, second, intimate knowledge of technology’s scientific bases as well as how it works in specific spheres. Such knowledge, along with a thorough acquaintance with the history of the scientifically and technically based professions and the history of labor’s experience with technology, would be absolutely necessary to the emergence of a labor movement rooted in the relations of production and contemporary labor processes. And we still need an informed history of labor’s attempts to organize professionals in the private and public sectors.

Global value chains (GVCs) have reconfigured production processes over numerous geographies of the globe, leading to an international division of the labor process. This division has been congruent tot he plot of the expansion of transnational corporations, posited within the logic of capitalism, which continuously seeks to traverse to greenfield avenues. This process has been aided on one side by capital becoming increasingly mobile, and on the other by the financialization of markets. However, these transitions in the world economy have been made possible by the coming-in of a supranational state embedded in the international bodies that govern world trade, finances and credit structures in our present times.

In all of these processes, an important factor has been the "locking in" of economies to maintain their competitive advance. The shift of global capital from the developed to the developing world has been made possible by the extraction of relatively cheap labour, flouting basic regulatory mechanisms, and an expanded market opportunity. The logic of global capital would be to maintain the status quo of the developing countries by retaining their competitive advantage. Thereby, what has been witnessed is that even after changes in the world economy from the early 1980s onwards, production processes have bee delineated in specific pockets of developing countries that promise a higher output-input ratio. Moreover, any attempts to rectify this arrangement through the coutervailing force of worker organizations or trade unions have been met by the heavy hand of the state.

Genuine social movements arise when a social formation can no longer realize its aspirations for the good life in the prevailing system and are prepared to travel the arduous path of social transformation.1 Historically, movements that cease to expand and improve and under adverse economic and political conditions are likely to stagnate and decline. Samuel Gompers’s “More” may have served the AFL’s craft union members adequately for the first decades of the twentieth century, but neither he nor his comrades in leadership considered the aspirations of the industrial workers or the possibility that changing economic, technological, and political conditions might affect the crafts. In the 1930s, industrial workers were inspired by the idea that the union was a way to achieve industrial citizenship—that workers could get off their knees and out from under an imperial ownership that watched and controlled them on and off the job and dictated the terms and conditions of their employment and their lives. These workers sought to take their fate into their own hands. Just as workers had at the turn of the twentieth century, they brandished their desire for dignity in every strike, workplace occupation, and march through city streets. Their vision was not typically anticapitalist, but industrial unionism was a movement of a class that aspired to power over their own labor in the factory and other workplaces at least, and in many instances also in their cities and towns. Union members ran for city council, were elected to school boards, and made their voices heard on a wide range of public policies.

Today, U.S. unions have lost any semblance of this radical imagination, and so are generally unable to inspire working-class passion. They have been passive in the face of dramatic changes in the economy, which have visited hardship on a considerable portion of the workers, and accepted the indifference of the political class to their problems. Their explicit commitment to the existing setup, particularly to the capitalist economic system, and to a perverse version of class peace, have put most of them in a dependent and defensive position. Specifically, they have no tools for any analysis that would help workers evaluate the state of their own affairs and those of the country at large. Dimly, unions recognize that we live in an age when national borders no longer define the economy, but they are still tied to conceptions of reform that this new age has outmoded. More egregiously, instead of acting for themselves, they have fixed their hopes on a series of political “saviors” who either ignore the needs of their labor allies or else pay them lip service and then proceed to betray their trust at almost every turn.

Since the emergence of precarity as "the central organising platform for a series of social struggles that spread across the space of Europe," there has been an effort, particularly by prearious activists, to build a subject that could be considered as the dominant form of the contemporary (post-Fordist) working class:

The precariat is to postfordism what proletariat was to fordism: flexible, temporary, part-time, and self-employed workers are the new social group which is required and reproduced by the neoliberal and post-industrial economic transformation. It is the critical mass that emerges from globalization, while demolished factories and neighborhoods are being substituted by offices and commercial areas. They are service workers in supermarkets and chains, cognitive workers operating in the information industry.

Nevertheless, it seems that the experiences of precarious workers cannot be accommodated in a unified subjectivity in analogy with previous patterns of class-based collective identities. Precarious labor exists only in the plural, as a multiplicity of experiences variously positioned, exploited, and lived within contemporary capitalism, and not as a unified subjectivity or "preciariat". Precarity is a multifaceted and ambivalent condition, including vulnerability, insecurity, and possibly poverty, but also ambivalences such as flexibility and mobility, as well as a strange kind of freedom. [...]