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We have two 35-minute breaks in our shifts. The rule is that you must be working each minute on either side of it, which can be monitored by your scanner. So, for instance, if you go on a break at 12pm, you must make a scan at 12:00pm and another at 12:35pm, or you will be classed as overstaying your lunch break and are liable to have pay deducted. Of course this means the breaks aren’t really as long as advertised, as the time it takes to walk from your workplace to any one of the five canteens scattered around the huge building can be anything up to 10 minutes, especially with 2 metre social distancing rules being enforced - meaning you can only walk as quickly as the slowest person in the corridor. In reality my break time is more like 20 minutes before I have to walk back to my shift area so I can be on time to make another scan the minute I’m back.
For this reason, I rarely bother buying food at the canteen, as the extra time it takes queuing up means you barely have time to finish before you need to start walking back. You are allowed to bring in packed lunch or other items into the building, provided you use a clear plastic carrier bag that Amazon provides you with. It’s never been explained why exactly this is necessary. I’d normally guess it’s to ensure we don’t bring weapons into the building or something, except the rules have got far stricter with the pandemic so that doesn’t make sense. It feels like going in and out of prison.
An example of worker solidarity and resistance in this place is how workers are constantly coming up with tactics to get around the monitoring and game the system so they can bend the rules but not get flagged up on the system. For example, if you want to go to the toilet without being flagged for idling, a good get-around is to carry a few small items with you (e.g. a lipstick) and just scan and stow one every few minutes as you’re walking down the aisles, so the system never picks up on you being away from work for very long. I don’t mind describing that one as I’m sure management have worked out that people do this already, but that’s just to give you an idea of the tricks workers come up with to keep the automated monitoring off their backs.
damn
Another interesting feature of this workplace is the fire safety routines. All my co-workers agree that during our initial training period, we were told repeatedly that if a fire alarm was to go off, we must all immediately drop whatever we are doing and follow the green lines on the floor, which would lead us to the nearest fire exit. Sounds sensible enough. Then one day I thought about it and looked at the ground, and then suddenly it hit me.
What green lines?
I must have spent 10-15 minutes one morning trying to find where these green lines were. There’s plenty of yellow, white and grey lines all over the place but no green ones. This is not a very useful fire safety procedure. I guess if a fire alarm goes off I’ll just follow everyone else and hope for the best. Your chances in a fire seem very much dependent on where you’re working anyway.
[...] the true highlight of the fire alarm was finally discovering these legendary green lines. There’s two of them. They’re around 6ft long extending immediately in front of the fire exit door, so totally useless as a guide unless you happen to be standing right next to it, by which point it’s pretty obvious where the fire exit is anyway. The mind boggles at why they spent so much time training us about these fire exit green lines.
I was warned one day that my stowing speed had dropped to less than 50% of the average of everyone else that morning and was told to explain myself, but it was more bad luck (for example, lack of shelf space slowing me down) than me working slow so this wasn’t repeated. Someone told me on the bus going home that a lad had turned up to work that morning at 7am only for his entry ID not to work when he tried to scan in, and was then told it didn’t work because he’d been released. Must not have seen the email.
Yes ‘released’ is another Amazon Language word, nobody is ever sacked here. I first heard that word when I was late one day and off sick for a day not long after, and was told that if I had another sick day I would be released. Not sure what the timeframe of that was, surely not forever, but I haven’t been off sick again to find out. This does seem to undermine their strict anti-covid stance though, when they’re essentially incentivising workers to come in sick or else risk being sacked for poor attendance.
When a problem arises, there are a limited number of ways to access support. These have reduced over time. When I first started there was an office where we went to sign up, to “onboard” (their term for hiring), pick up equipment, or generally ask questions. At first, this was in a temporary location, giving it a transitory sense like the companies were not even sure themselves how long they would stay in a city and could leave any minute. Later, Uber moved to a permanent office, but it wasn’t very accessible. It was only open two days a week for a few hours and often you would not be seen without an appointment. The staff were focused on signing up restaurants, couriers were a second thought. Although they did order food quite often! We were so numerous we were regarded as disposable, however long or hard we had worked. In theory, there is a phone line you can call with an issue while on an order, but it often doesn’t connect. We are now directed to use in-app help or email, which has limited help too, as it is either automated replies or someone with a script they must stick to. It is so frustrating to get an automated reply to a concern you have got or a genuine problem on the road. Everyone has a story of someone being asked “Can you still deliver the food?”, after reporting a crash – a bleak reminder of UberEats priorities.
[...] For a few weeks in August, different events were planned such as boycotting certain restaurants, doing press interviews, putting up posters in busy areas, and holding a protest outside Deliveroo’s main office, all trying to force them to engage in dialogue. These actions culminated in a final evening of action: a coordinated mass “fall over.” Riders called Deliveroo support to say, unfortunately, they had been in an accident and could no longer deliver the food, which was then given to homeless people. Customers were informed of this action a week prior and only the larger restaurants were targeted. Following this, a critical mass of riders came together to form a “flying picket.” Making lots of noise and holding banners we cycled throughout the busy city centre, Lyon’s famous restaurant district where many tables are set out on the street. Riders joined as we made our way around the area. We were not hopeful that the changes would be reversed, but these riders were not going to go out without a bang either.
fucking love this
In part, the motivation for this book comes from observing the ahistorical nature of discussions about technology. This has, at best, led to a benign yet thoughtless form of technological optimism. “When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place,” declared Mark Zuckerberg back in the early days of Facebook, with an impressive combination of naiveté and disingenuousness. At worst, and dismayingly, this sees revolutionary moments recast as cultural shifts generated by disruptive thought leaders: history understood as the march of great entrepreneurial CEOs. This kind of thinking sees the future as defined by universal progress—rather than by a messy, contradictory struggle between different interests and forces—and never driven by the aspirations of those from below. It reduces the value of human agency to entrepreneurialism and empty consumerism.
History has a role in telling us about the present but not if we use a frame that valorizes those who currently hold positions of power. We need to reclaim the present as a cause of a different future, using history as our guide.
[...] As the planet slides further toward a potential future of catastrophic climate change, and as society glorifies billionaires while billions languish in poverty, digital technology could be a tool for arresting capitalism’s death drive and radically transforming the prospects of humanity. But this requires that we politically organize to demand something different.
These methodologies for predicting and shaping our behavior have grown more sophisticated over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Collection and analysis of big data about people is a well-established industry. It includes the companies collecting data (miners), those trading it (brokers) and those using it to generate advertising messages (marketers), often with overlap between all three. It can be hard to obtain reliable estimates of the size of the industry, given its complexity, but one study says that by 2012 it was worth around $156 billion in the United States and accounted for 675,000 jobs. It has undoubtedly grown since then. Like slum landlords who rent out dilapidated apartments, or greedy hotshot developers who take advantage of legal loopholes to build luxury condos, companies that trade in personal data represent the sleazy side of how digital technology is impacting the real estate of our minds. This industry uses the faux luxuries of choice and convenience to entice us to part with our data, but often what they are really selling is overpriced and dodgy.
interesting analogy
The most valuable consumer platforms have both the capacity to collect highly valuable personal data and the opportunity to use it to market to users at the most lucrative moments of their daily lives. These are the places in which the invisible hand of what I call technology capitalism is at work—between data miners and advertisers, with data on users as the commodity being traded.
the fckin gateways!!