Amazon's union battle is an omen of future conflict

Workers at one of the retail giant’s US sites are pushing for collective representation – not over pay, but to protest being ruled by robots. Photo / Getty Images

For the last two weeks, the city of Bessemer in Alabama, a former mining and steel town, has been at the centre of a heated row over the future of labour.

Just a year after Amazon opened a giant warehouse in the city, workers at the facility have mounted one of the most substantial efforts in the company's history to form a union. Voting on the plan ended last week, and results are expected in the coming days.

If union campaigners are successful, the immediate impact will be relatively small. Amazon has more than 1m workers, just 6,000 of them work at the Bessemer facility.

But the implications of the vote, whichever way it goes, will be greater. Politicians including Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, as well as actors and sports stars, have wedged themselves into the debate. Amazon executives, who had initially sought not to draw attention to the unionisation effort, have recently changed tactics and gone on the offensive against its detractors, reportedly at Jeff Bezos's bidding.

This all illustrates the high stakes involved: if Amazon wins, it is likely to quiet further unionisation efforts for some time; if it loses, Bessemer could become the first of many. But the reasons behind the employees' campaign also hints at a brewing friction between staff and their paymasters that goes far beyond Amazon itself.

The gripes of Amazon's warehouse workers (or "fulfillment associates" as the company calls them) – are not those most typically associated with labour movements. Staff are paid a minimum of $15 (£11) an hour, double the minimum wage, and benefits such as healthcare and retirement contributions are above average for the pay grade. The job is physical and tiring, but not obviously more so than similar jobs at other companies.

Amazon itself has made such arguments in ubiquitous notices and regular meetings at the centre in an attempt to discourage support for the union. But multiple workers campaigning against the company have a different complaint: the way they are managed by machines, not humans.

I have been on (pre-pandemic) tours of Amazon warehouses, put on by the company to demonstrate how, contrary to common criticism, its centres are safe, as well as beacons of innovation. This appears to be the case: fewer Amazon workers in the US tested positive for Covid-19 than the average, when adjusted for age and location.

But the centres have an unnerving, robotic quality. Literally in one sense: the centres are packed with moving, bookcase-like robots that ferry stacks of items to the human "pickers" that load them for packing. But also due to the hyper-efficient, software-driven way that the cavernous warehouses operate.

Repeatedly, employee complaints about Amazon appear not to focus on more tangible issues such as pay, but on the feeling like they are cogs in a machine. Workers are continuously tracked: at the start of a shift they log into a machine that proceeds to measure how many items they pick an hour, and their accumulated "time off task": the accumulated minutes and seconds not spent at a workstation.

Employee complaints about Amazon appear not to focus on more tangible issues such as pay, but on the feeling like they are cogs in a machine. Photo / Getty Images

Staff say it can be unclear what targets they are meant to hit, and struggle to get an answer, since so much of their interaction with the company happens through a smartphone app rather than a manager. Despite having thousands of colleagues, one common complaint is loneliness on the job, a sensation amplified by constant surveillance.

Automation and monitoring is gospel at Amazon, not only in its massive retail logistics network but at head office too. An ongoing programme called Hands Off The Wheel has replaced white collar tasks such as making product orders. When it comes to its delivery network, it is installing cameras in vans that use artificial intelligence to check for drowsy drivers and other potential hazards.

Opposition to this is distinct from often-repeated fears that widespread automation and robotics will render humans obsolete and lead to mass unemployment. These concerns have existed for centuries, and have rarely been justified. Staff are typically assigned new roles where they accomplish things machines cannot.

But if anxieties that we will be replaced by robots have been overblown, Amazon shows us an alternative where we are managed by them.

Automation and monitoring is gospel at Amazon, not only in its massive retail logistics network but at head office too. Photo / Getty Images

The company is typically early to such practices; many others are following in its steps.

This is most evident in gig economy companies that outsource work to armies of non-employees using smartphone apps to complete tasks. Uber, for example, argues that its employment model allows drivers to be their own boss; drivers themselves say it feels as if the app's algorithm is the one in charge.

Many independent artists and influencers who rely on social media for a living have found themselves worse off by a small tweak in a social network's code that sends their audience plummeting. The more that data is collected and software improves, the likelier it is that the rest of us will have an element of algorithmic oversight in our own jobs.

In theory, being managed by software could be liberating and meritocratic: while bosses play favourites, we are all equal in the eye of the algorithm. In reality, it can mean being governed by incomprehensible decisions and processes.

There is, no doubt, more to Amazon's union dispute than this. But the company's embrace of automation had a part to play. It may be a glimpse at the future of work.