13 April 2022. Cities | Amazon
The allure of place. // Amazon hates its workers.
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1: The allure of place
The pseudonymous blogger WrathofGnon has an intriguing post on their site in defence of ‘beauty’ as a metric when it comes to urban design. As they point out, planners and architects are often dismissive of such suggestions, demanding definitions of what constitutes beauty, and so on.
WrathofGnon has a suggestion: rather than using the word ‘beauty’, we could use the word ‘allure’, which already comes with some layers of scientific and technical definition:
(R)ather than letting ourselves become tangled up in metaphysical debates and holier-than-thou status games, we might do better adopting another word for what we want to achieve. For this purpose I propose a word that is already in use by “hard” scientists (the kind that work in lab coats and uses sophisticated neurological monitoring gear, the kind of people who recoil from epistemological status games as if it were kryptonite): allure.
Allure, meaning the quality of being powerfully and mysteriously attractive or fascinating.
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(Street sign sticker by street artist Clet of the David, in Florence).
They quote Christopher Alexander’s question, ‘Which feels more alive?, and have some other questions that may or may not have come from Alexander as well, such as, ‘Forget about everything else, which feels like the better place to be?’.
So what would such an alluring place be like:
It would probably use natural materials—because these age gracefully—and incorporate a large dollop of the natural—whether a roofline that attracts the eye to the naked sky and frames it, or an old woman's humble window-box of roses—, it would be a combination of the public and the private, the commercial and the official. It would speak to us, and it would say things like “linger a little if you please”... An alluring place would be both satisfying to body and soul, and appetite inducing at the same time.
As the piece evolves, it sounds as if WrathofGnon is writing about forms of place that are also convivial, to borrow Ivan Illich’s use of the word—human-scaled, ‘anchored in time’, a place where you can both live and make a living. And slower. Because I think we know now that speed kills.
If you read this and think that I am talking about the slow life, you are right. An alluring place is the very antithesis (literally, from ancient Greek anti- and tithenai (place)) of the fast food, the fast fashion, the disposable, the use and replace model of consumer experience that has dominated the developed world for generations now. It has low turnover, low churn. It has permanence. On the short scale it invites you to spend further time there, and on the long scale it invites you to settle down as a patriarch or matriarch of your own.
They are still thinking about this question; their may be a second instalment in their newsletter in due course.
Hat-tip to Peter Curry for the link.
2: Amazon hates its workers
Amazon—the company, not the rainforest—is testing to the limit how big a gap a company can manage to have between its customers’ perceptions of its service and its customers’ perceptions of its behaviour and its ethics.
Everywhere in the world, it monitors workers to the minute and the second in a way that would make the great ‘time and motion’ advocate F.W. Taylor deeply happy. Amazon does Taylorism, but with added algorithms.
In the US, where its workers are busy in many depots trying to unionise, it adds to that a layer of management style that recalls those exciting times in the 1920s and 1930s when Pinkerton’s specialised in union-busting. (Amazon’s not alone in this: Starbucks also combines a customer-friendly profile and some progressive talk on climate with absolute hostility to unions—yet Starbucks is slowly unionising, one store at a time.)
A union vote at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer had to be re-run on the instructions of the National Review Labour Board after Amazon had, shall we say, compromised the last one. Apparently the second vote is on a knife edge that will come down to interpretations of contested ballots.
Meanwhile—and this was a surprise to everyone—the small and independent Amazon Labor Union has just won a union vote at an Amazon Staten Island site. (Of course, Amazon is challenging the result). There’s an extended interview in Jacobin with one of the organisers, Angelika Maldonado, about how they managed to do this, and the TL:DR answer seems to be complete commitment to the ballot (the local organisers were going in on their days off to talk about the union to colleagues); talking to everyone, in person and on Telegram; and a brass front—for example making a point of going in to the meetings that Amazon’s hired union-busters were holding on the premises:
We did things like going into union-busting captive audience meetings even when we weren’t invited. We spoke up for everyone and we told the facts. We combated what the union busters were saying, letting everybody know that they were telling lies. Of course, we were told to leave because we weren’t invited — what the union busters do is take employees off their stations randomly to go into these meetings. But that time we all went in as a group and demanded to tell our side.
And it’s also worth sharing here Maldonado’s perspective on the level of Amazon’s anti-union activity:
Amazon really instills fear in workers. It wasn’t just that there were anti-union posters everywhere; Amazon hired a ton of union busters that were constantly walking around the building talking to workers. It was intimidating. The union busters basically lied and told our coworkers that we were a third party. But in reality, we were workers just like them. We didn’t come from somewhere else to organize JFK8; we literally work there — we’re a worker-led union.
I was reading this Jacobin piece at around the same time that Charles Arthur’s blog pointed me to a piece on The Intercept about a new internally managed staff chat app that Amazon was considering introducing. It seems that the management had devoted a lot of time to making sure that this wasn’t subverted by anti-management messages, or even just complaints about working conditions:
(C)ompany officials also warned of what they called “the dark side of social media” and decided to actively monitor posts in order to ensure a “positive community.” ... Following the meeting, an “auto bad word monitor” was devised... In addition to profanities, however, the terms include many relevant to organized labor, including “union,” “grievance,” “pay raise,” and “compensation.” Other banned keywords include terms like “ethics,” “unfair,” “slave,” “master,” “freedom,” “diversity,” “injustice,” and “fairness.” Even some phrases like “This is concerning” will be banned.
Obviously this is addressing symptoms rather than causes, and quite a long way downstream, and I have a feeling that no-one in that meeting paused, even for a micro-second, to wonder if there might be a more effective way of dealing with this set of problems.
If the Amazon management wonders why their industrial relations are so poor, maybe they should read one of the several very good Jacobin articles. Rather than smart-arse manipulation of an Amazon-commissioned app, maybe they should spend some time on working conditions. Here’s another of the Staten Island organisers, Bryma Sylla:
Amazon doesn’t treat us like real human beings; we’re treated just like machines. The job is very unhealthy: we have to spend such long hours standing — our shifts can be as long as twelve hours. After a shift, it feels like someone beat you up. Often you don’t want to wake up in the mornings, knowing you have to go back into that building.
At work, we get harassed from management over basic things like bathroom breaks. And if you try to complain, they just ignore you. All they care about is how they can use and control your time while you’re in that building. It’s not humane — to be honest, it’s a real plantation.
There’s a few points that are relevant here. The first is that Jeff Bezos (no longer CEO, but still Chairman) thinks the only thing that matters is the customer experience. He’s said a thousand times or more1 that customers will always want lower prices and quicker delivery, and the Amazon ‘flywheel’ (effectively what Peter Drucker would call a ‘theory of the business’) is focussed only on this.
The second is that this isn’t good business. If anything, the cycle of disruptions is getting worse—there have been a wave of strikes and walkouts in Amazon plants in the United States and Europe over the last two years. It’s Management 101 that having a combative relationship with your workers isn’t a good way to run a business. And Industrial Sociology 101 says that unions tend to help smooth things out in tough working environments. (This is probably the place where I need to add that company spokespeople routinely insist in every article on this subject that wages and benefits for Amazon employees are good.)
Third, the Amazon Labor Union seems to have a strategy—about building worker resolve and experience by small walkouts and so on, before moving on to full unionisation votes, both to prove itself to staff and demonstrate successes and gains. Amazon just has tactics (bus in union busters). For a company that is famously strategic about everything else, this tells us something.
The fourth is that the cost of treating your workers better is trivial as a cost line in the scheme of things, and you generally get whatever you spend back in terms of reduced turnover, better quality staff, retained knowledge and so on. This is even more true in tight labour markets, such as we’re currently seeing in the US. (Though its worth noting that one of the rationales for the Amazon Taylorist management system is that the scope for workers to disrupt you, by slowing the line or picking the wrong object, is vastly reduced, which is maybe a subject for another day.)
The fifth is that when you’re as large as Amazon, governments start paying attention to these things. In the US, Biden has so far talked about Amazon respecting union organising rather than doing anything about it, and this may may have something to do with Amazon-friendly donations to the Democrats. There’s some pressure on him to reintroduce the Obama executive order that required companies to disclose their spend on anti-union activities. In Europe, with its longer tradition of industrial councils, governments are likely to take it more seriously—Germany is Amazon’s largest market, and now has a left of centre government. When you are as big as Amazon, you generally need governments to be onside.
All this suggests that Amazon’s anti-union position is an ideology, not a rational economic calculation. The long bet is whether Bezos is right about customers or not.
Russia notes
The editors of the Russian student news site DOXA are due to be sentenced today for publishing a video in January 2021 about protests. They have been under house arrest for much of the time since then. Open Democracy published three of their final statements to the court.
Here are two extracts, the first from Armen Aramyan:
We have learned a lot in these 12 months. Thanks to the Investigative Committee (a Russian investigative body), which collected the materials in our case, we first learned about the real extent of the pressure on young people in our country. We saw that intimidation exists not just in individual universities and schools, but that there is already a state program of terror against young people. Preventive talks (to dissuade students from attending) rallies, propaganda lectures about the war, displacing protesting students — all this was set in motion long ago by Russian universities and schools. We could not imagine the scale of the phenomenon. As we said in our video: “The authorities have (really) declared war on youth.”
And this extract is from Natasha Tyshkevich:
It’s interesting, this work with time — I already feel like a veteran of this time-war; I reach out to myself from the future to pull myself by the hair out of the Moscow swamp of the 2020s. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed and manifests itself through anomalies and miracles. From the future, we can look back and deconstruct the past narrative, knowing that the future was already glimmering through the cracks.
j2t#298
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Don’t factcheck this number. But he’s said it a lot, and other people have quoted him as saying it a lot.