Like a clone army of Captain Renaults, the world woke up last weekend to the astounding New York Times story that Amazon’s workplace was brutish, nasty and cultish. And like that unforgettable character in Casablanca, the world was “shocked – shocked!” to discover there was ugliness in the machinery of such a tech darling.
The analogy is particularly apt because the crux of the scene is that Renault, a moment after blandly asserting he’s shocked by gambling, is handed his winnings. Many of the same media outlets telling this story of Amazon’s bad behavior have similarly lionized Jeff Bezos and Amazon for decades.
This pretending to be surprised is convenient and ridiculous. It’s ridiculousness in the tradition of Žižek – first it was tragedy, and now it has become farce. Not because the conditions the story describes aren’t absolutely true – they are – but because it has been true for so long and so thoroughly that it says a lot about our culture that we can even pretend it is news.
This latest piece isn’t coming out of a vacuum. The Seattle Times ran a series last year covering much of the same ground. Three years ago, Mother Jones did an extensive expose of conditions at Amazon’s warehouses, whose blue-collar brutality makes the psychological nastiness at the corporate headquarters look like child’s play. That article received attention but didn’t merit mentioning in the Times piece, and judging from the world’s reactions we can see why: white collar (and largely white) workers are fascinating, and warehouse jobs performed by the lower classes aren’t worthy of the same level of interest.
I know how far the record of Amazon drudgery stretches back, because I created a theatrical monologue and a memoir 13 years ago about my time working there, from blue-collar customer support to white-collar business development. The portrait of the culture that I draw in my book is clearly the same workplace that the New York Times is reporting on. Amazon’s defenders who cry about a few bad managers are absolutely wrong – this culture is pervasive in the company, and it has endured for the 20 years of Amazon’s existence because it was crafted from the top down to impose, intimidate and extract as much as possible from each worker through shame, humiliation, power dynamics and groupthink.
The real question isn’t why Amazon is such a brutal workplace – we know the answer to that already, and his name is Jeff. The question we refuse to ask is: why have we repeatedly heard stories about Amazon’s harmful culture without any of the criticisms sticking? And the answer is that right now, we believe in the marketplace more than we believe in human beings.
The fact is that Amazon’s stock is flying high, and nothing about these revelations will pull it down. The latest version of late-stage, post-national capitalism doesn’t believe in the value of work except as dictated by a marketplace, and with a whole planet to play with, corporations can afford to spread their work out onto people you will never see, never think of and never hear from.
It doesn’t matter if this conception, which prioritizes profits over workers, makes you feel guilty as an individual or not, because at the end of the day you’re human. The entities we’ve created that organize and execute inhumane work systems don’t actually have feelings. Amazon isn’t exploiting its employees, both white and blue collar, until they burn out; it is churning through an indiscriminate biomass, which is in fact us. We are its fuel.
Many have forgotten that Amazon doesn’t make any money; they don’t like talking about how they barely turn a profit. Amazon’s valuation, which is many times its actual revenue, only makes sense if you believe that at some point in the future the worm will turn and Amazon will have so much market leverage, so much control, that it will become tremendously profitable. And that profit will be extracted, by tooth and claw, from its customers. From us.
In our perverse relationship, the market can never wish that Amazon is a reasonable business, because it never was one. Bezos built it to leverage the market’s assumptions and effectively create a non-profit, which means it can undercut almost every competitor on both scale and expectation. The entire thing is the object example of acting in bad faith.
We don’t know if it will be their dominance and increasingly ironclad control of the book market, or through their hosting services or the ability to buy a genuine Mongolian yak herder’s jacket, but rest assured they are working hard to find a day when they will screw over absolutely all of their customers. They have to, or they can never justify over 20 years of waiting for the serious money to come in. In this sense Amazon is the most dangerous, least trustworthy tech company. It’s the company for the corporate age, and the stories about Amazon absolutely reflect that mindset. And that mindset is reflected in how they eat their own young in the nest – the workers are meaningless, and replaceable, and loyalty is both an excuse and a weakness.
Numerous business outlets have responded this week with standard-issue think pieces saying that Amazon shouldn’t be chastized, but applauded for its market and labor savagery, and that it doesn’t matter, anyway – this is simply the way business gets done. In the sense that the pot we workers and customers are being cooked in is hot, they are absolutely right. There’s a reason there is a business section in every newspaper and no labor section, and stories like these rupture the feeble illusion of “objective” journalism. A little outrage, a mild indigestion, is acceptable. Actual change would not be.
The techniques Bezos pioneered at Amazon are percolating out to become the new standards throughout our corporate world. Rather than forming unions and standing up for rights, it’s a vision of workers betraying and informing on one another as though they live in a cubicle farm reminiscent of North Korea. The face of Amazon is the new face of corporate America, and in that sense the pundits who are yawning are right: this change has already been occurring for quite some time. It’s the water we’ve all been steeping in for years. As the temperature rises, we can all tell each other as we sit in the water together how shocked we are, or we can decide, finally, that we need to act. Being honest about how rarely we tell the whole story would be a real step.