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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.
this is so fucked up
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.
amazing how similar this is to other industries
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.
when it's laid out this way it all makes so much sense. kind of obvious yet describes it way more eloquently than i could
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. [...]
quoting some random paper
[...] As of 2011, UPS has six subcontractors and uses 256 agencies. In addition to its permanent workers, the company is also recruiting workers under fixed-term employment contracts, corresponding to a highly flexible labor regime, a strategy which compounds the difficulty for unions in gaining a majority of signed-up workers. [...]
the fucking same everywhere
In 1987, Topkapı-Istanbul transport warehouses were in operation and 1100 workers were working in 110 workplaces, and Tümtis has organized 37 of 110. The biggest employer was employing 55 workers. In the majority of the workplaces, employers were only hiring six or seven workers. When unionization started in one of these workplaces, employers were increasing the total number of workers by hiring their children as workers on paper while half of the workers were already working informally. [...]
hahaha this is just wild
In Turkey, employers seek to prevent unionization in three primary ways. First, they establish separate companies and transfer unionized workers; second, they use anti-democratic laws against trade unions: objecting to the threshold and re-enumerating the number of workers by appealing to the labor court or objecting to unions' branch of activity; and third, they try to force workers to quit their union, and if they refuse, fire them without compensation. Although employers could face imprisonment of six months for breaking the labor laws, in practice this penal imposition is rare in Turkey. [...]
Companies with foreign capital avoid unionization through extending the authorization process, while pressuring workers to quit their unions; laying off unionized workers or threatening dismissals; helping to organize company (compliant) unions; shifting production out of union jurisdictions; and withdrawing from the market and re-entering the market again under a new registration:
[...] at Mersin International port, where subcontracted workers were organized in a union, the main employer cancelled the subcontracting agreement and transferred all the workers to become permanent staff of the main firm in order to remove the union. Of course, even if the union loses representation in cases like this, the workers have achieved employment security as the result of the union's struggle, which is an obvious achievement in neoliberal Turkey. [...]
something to watch out for
Some of the features of industrial relations in Indonesia's post-dictatorship phase are that they are liberal, flexible, and decentralized. A flexible labor market policy was implemented to create a "friendlier" pro-business environment. Since the enactment of Law No. 13/2003 which legalized contract work and enabled labor outsourcing practices to take effect, employers turned more workers into casual and contract labor, hence there is a more precarious workforce. Since 2003, it has been the norm for companies to have three groups of workers: permanent, contract, and outsourced (agency) workers. Each has a different employment status and consequently different wages and benefits, despite their doing the same work. An outsourced worker is hired not directly by a company, but through an employment agency. The worker remains the employee of the employment agency and is temporarily contracted to work for a company. Thus, the company is not responsible for the worker's social security payments or for providing medical insurance, paid holidays, paid sick leave, or any other benefit provided to regular workers, as required by law. And importantly, in practice the employment agency that contracted out the worker does not provide them with any of those benefits either.
A contract worker, which is one level "better" than an outsourced one, is higher by the company, but unlike a permanent/regular worker does not receive any benefits--they just receive wages that are a little higher than the wages of outsourced workers, and are hired directly. Therefore, outsourced workers are paid less than contract workers, who in turn are paid less than the permanent workers, who receive minimum wages and several benefits such as transport allowances and annual bonuses. The practice of using a large number of outsourced workers, contract workers, and recent graduates (such as apprentices and trainees) as full-time workers who are usually paid less than the minimum wage puts tremendous downward pressure on the wages of all workers. Numerous sources indicate that the typical composition of labor in an Indonesian company is 20 percent permanent, 30 percent contract, and 50 percent outsourced (agency) workers. [...]