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What this article shows is that what I call managerial control mechanisms can
be applied to just about any kind of work. These go back a long way, to the
centralization of workers in factories, the detailed division of labor,
mechanization, Frederick Taylor's systematic analysis of these three elements
of control and the formulation of "scientific management," personnel management
with its Theories X, Y, and Z, lean production (the Japanese-led refinements
and extensions of Taylorism), etc. Amazon is applying managerial control to
relatively highly paid, educated, and skilled white collar workers. What is
interesting is that many people aspire to work for Jeff Bezos, and not a few of
the people interviewed either relished the insane competitiveness and long
hours or said that they learned so much about themselves and what they could
"accomplish" under Bezos's psychopathic leadership, even as they left the
company. Note that other companies are following suit, and former Amazon employ
ees are highly sought after by these businesses. Think how powerful is the
ethos of modern capitalism that workers were willing to sacrifice spouses,
kids, parents, vacations, and every other thing that makes us human beings to
help invent more efficient ways to sell things to consumers. And they say life
in the Soviet Union was harsh!
I don't think academe is quite like Amazon. In colleges, well-educated white
collar workers no longer can get full-time employment. There are not tens of
thousands of openings for one thing. The weeding out process occurs much more
impersonally too. Performance is increasingly measured, though, and that is a
similarity. I suppose too that you might consider Amazons' white collar workers
like adjuncts in that they are very unlikely to make it to the top of the job
hierarchy and will be kicked to the curb not long after they are hired.
However, adjuncts are not sought after much when this happens. They just try
for another shitty teaching gig. Also, it is harder, for me at least, to muster
nearly as much sympathy for Amazon's white-collar laborers as for adjunct
teachers. The Amazonians chose to work under Bezos's rules and surely went in
with the knowledge of what they might be in for. It's not as if they were part
of some reserve army of labor, desperately seeking employment.
Whatever we make of this article, one thing is certain. Work in capitalism
denies us our humanity, period. There is really nothing that can change the
long trajectory toward alienating labor except the overthrow of capitalism,
root and branch. As radicals we ignore the absolute necessity to transform work
radically, and to eradicate the mindless consumption that now defines the
limits of what human beings can expect from life and labor.
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