No Jobs For Real People In The New Economy

7/29/2019 No Jobs For Real People In The New Economy

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Amazon's Human Robots: No Jobs For Real People

Ian R Thorpe

6 March 2013

Hundreds of dead eyed people in orange vests shuffle around a warehouse the

size of nine football pitches, looking for all the world like Epsilon Semi Morons in an

avant garde movie version ofAldous Huxley's Brave New World. They push trolleys

around, constantly referring to the screens of their hand-held satnav computers for

directions on where to walk next and what to take from the shelves and put into their

trolley when they get there.

They dare not linger, there is no stopping to exchange a greeting, joke or

comment with other Epsilon Semi Morons as they pass in the aisles; the devices that

intsruct them on every move are also measuring their productivity. These

humandroids might each walk between seven and 15 miles today.

The people are not semi morons of course, they are ordinary people like you and

I, unlike me not fortunate enough to be part of the most fortunate generation,

liberated by social change from the moral repression of the church - state duopoly

Inside an Amazon fullfilment centre
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before Our New Unhappy Lords, the science and technology masters took over the

world with the complicity of our elected leaders, but bright, intelligent people who

did not get a high enough degree or who signed up for the wrong course to get into

the professions that grant access to the new elite.

Before these unfortunate workers, let's drop the literary reference as it might

seem slightly insulting and refer to them Humandroids, can go home at the end of

their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk

through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything.

After being scanned they walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde

woman in an orange vest. This is the best job I have ever had! says a speech bubble

near her head. A cardboard cut out it would say that, you might well think, but it's

suprising what positions cardboard cut outs can occupy these days thanks to equality

laws.

Were time an onion, we could peel back the layers and read the history of this

town layers by layer. In the muddy deposits of the River Trent's flood plain we would

find remains of the first settlers to occupy the region after the ice age. Their skeletons

are here, fragmented, the bones scattered. We would also find stone and bone toolsand shards of crude pottery. A little further away from the river are remains of bronze

Cardboard cut-outs can hold top jobs thanks to anti - discrimination

laws
http://www.scribd.com/doc/125794705/Our-New-Unhappy-Lordshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/125794705/Our-New-Unhappy-Lords


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and Iron age settlements and the medieval farms, worked by peasants and owned by

feudal lords. Below the ground are the collapsing, flooded tunnels of the coal mines

where fuels for the factories and foundries of the industrial revolution and in the

twentieth century a major power station was extracted. The mines, where men

sweated as, kneeling to work the thin seams they chipped at the coal were the local

economys beating heart. The coal was loaded into skips that were pushed on iron rail

tracks to the shaft to be hoisted up to the pit head. Mining was dirty, backbreaking

work yet the industry forged stronger community bonds than any other.

Now, above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon the global

online retailer, have replaced the skips and weighbridge of the mines.

Between a grimy power station and a canal, on the edge ofRugeley, a small

industrial town where the industries have all moved east, the long, featureless

building crouches low against the skyline like an ants nest and like ants, the workers

inside go about their appointed tasks, unquestioning, without deviation from the

prescribed process.

As online shopping, encouraged by tax breaks from government and waiving of

regulations by local authorities destroys our traditional town centres in Britain,

traditional retailers such as Jessops Photographic, JJB Sports, Barratt Shoes, T J

Hughes (budget goods), Principles (fashion), Comet electrical out of business, more

and more business are moving from High Street shops into warehouses like this one

while more and more jobs are moving into history. No figures are available for the

number of empty shop premises in Rugeley itself but for the South Staffordshire

industrial area the figure is twenty - four per , a

figure repeated throughout the nation. And there

are few prospective tenants around.

In the face of criticism over its tax

arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how

many jobs it is creating across the country at a

time of economic malaise. Amazon, an

undisputed giant in modern online retail world

Amazon creating many jobs
http://rugeleypower.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugeleyhttp://rugeleypower.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugeley


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claims to have invested more than 1 billion in its UK operations and announced last

year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create

2,000 more permanent jobs. The company likes to boast of the 7billion in sales it

generated in 2011 and unashamed to admit the profits on those sales attracted no tax.

Strangely Amazon are rather coy when it comes to talking about how many people

they employ in Britain. After spending a considerable amount of time delving through

several hundred search results I finally found the average number of people employed

by Amazon in the UK, including those employed on temporary contracts through

agencies is about 3000. Compared to the 6,000 jobs lost due to the closure of four

major high street retailers in January 2013 and without counting jobs lost in smaller

businesses that do not make the national news when they fail, that suggests Amazon

(and by extension other online retailers) are destroyers rather than creators of jobs.

And yet the politicians, besotted with big money and corporate power heap praise

on the firms that are keeping unemployment high and turning our town centres into

ghost towns. Amazon even had a quote from the Prime Minister, in its September

2012 press release. This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find

work, but for the UK economy, said David Cameron, not pausing to think of ll the

people Amazon's arrival would put out of work.

People in Rugeley shared the Prime Minister's enthusiasm when, in the summer

of 2011, they heard Amazon was going to occupy warehouse. Rugeley is a white

working-class town of about 22,000 that has never fully recovered from the mines

closure in 1990. The arrival of Amazon was seen as a chance to relaunch the

community after decades of economic decline. Most people are still see Amazon as a

boon to the town, believing that any sort of work is better than no work at all, but

many are dismayed by reports of the conditions of employment and bitterly

disillusioned to discover the lack of security in working at the warehouse and the soul

destroying boredom of the type of employment on offer.

In common with most jobless people in Rugeley, 54-year-old Chris Martin started

scouring the internet for application details as soon as he heard Amazon was coming.

Chris was thrilled when he passed the Amazon recruitment process, which includes


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drug and alcohol tests, and was given a job on the night-shift.

Global employment agency Randstad, which handled the recruitment process for

Amazon, was also contracted to arrange his shifts, manage him on the warehouse

floor and pay him his near-minimum wage.

Under the rather draconian terms of his contract, after three months, if he had

performed well, Chris could apply to be an Amazon employee, though there was no

guarantee he would be taken on the direct payroll. This kind of system, which is now

commonplace, is called Inhouse Services Management or if an entire function is

outsourced, 'facility management.' Both are euphemisms for temporary work.

Randstad describes its service as a flexible work solution designed exclusively for

each client to optimise the work force and drive cost-effectiveness. Very close to

nineteenth century day - labour, the system of queueing at the factory warehouse or

dockyard gate by the sound of it.

One of the benefits for clients, it says, is the removal of the administrative

burden of recruiting and managing large numbers of staff.

Workers in Amazons warehouses

or associates in Amazons fulfilment

centres as the company likes to describe

them are divided into four main groups.

There are the people on the receive lines

and the pack lines: they either unpack,

check and scan every product arriving from

around the world, or they pack up

customers orders at the other end of the

process.

Another group stows suppliers

products somewhere in the warehouse.

They put things wherever theres a free

space in Rugeley, there are inflatable

palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazons

H R Geiger's nightmare vision of

dehumanization


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vast computer brain knows where everything is.

The fourth group, the pickers, push trolleys around and pick out customers

orders from the aisles, guided by the software that calculates the most efficient

walking route to collect the items that will fill a trolley, and then directs the worker

from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav.

Even with these efficient routes, theres a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley

pickers lost almost half a stone in his first few shifts. Youre sort of like a robot, but

in human form, said the Amazon manager who wished to remain anonymous. Its

human automation, if you like. Like we said, Humandroids. Get a job with Amazon,

brain not required.

What do the people of Rugeley

make of all this? For many who

have previously worked in

unionised workforces it has been a

culture shock. The feedback were

getting is that its like being in a

slave camp, said Brian Garner, the

chairman of the Lea Hall Miners

Welfare Centre and Social Club, still

a popular local drinking spot. He

might just as easily have said a prisoner in a Russian Gulag.

Is this the future for the workforce then, after all the blether about "Education,

education, education, our children and grandchildren if they cannot worm their way

into a technocratic elite where like Orwell's Winston Smith they are completely

controlled and a single step out of line can lead to personal destruction, they are

going to be reduced to the level of medieval serfs.

Although many of the new starters when Amazon's Rugeley 'fullfilment centre'

assumes their jobs were permanent, a significant number were released with little

warning or explanation they workers said, after the first busy Christmas period.

Chris Martin's job lasted less than a week after he took a day off for blisters and

Inside a Soviet gulag


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returned to find the night shift he was on had been abruptly cancelled. One of the

advantages for companies like Amazon of using agency staff is that agencies can take

people on as temporary workers. While employers who want to treat staff decently

are hamstrung by employment law that makes hiring a lengthy and costly

bureaucratic process and firing somebody without a long legal process almost

impossible, agencies are spared this because they employ people on weekly rolling

contracts.

The job insecurity is what has most disillusioned Glenn Watson, manager of

economic development at the district council. Our definition of a good employer is

someone who takes on people and provides them with sustainable employment week

in week out, not somebody who takes on workers one week and gets rid of them the

next, he said. The council had understood Amazon would use the first 12 months to

gradually build up its own local workforce, transferring agency staff on to its payroll,

but by last autumn, Watson thought there were only about 200 Amazon employees,

with the rest supplied by Randstad and two smaller agencies.

He complained that Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data

every six months, but it had not done so. We had no idea Amazon were going to be

as indifferent to these issues as they have been: its come as a shock to us how

intransigent they are, he said.

Chris Forde, professor of employment studies at Leeds University knows

arrangements such as Randstads with Amazon are becoming increasingly common in

Britain. He has encountered situations in which workers on short term, temporary

contracts make up 90 per cent of a companys workforce in sectors such as

manufacturing, food processing, hotels and restaurants.

Across Britain, with the number of people employed only part time exploding,

the number of people in temporary jobs who can be laid off at a moment's notice has

swelled 20 per cent since the financial crisis hit in 2008. A similar increase has been

recorded in the group who say they want permanent jobs but cannot find secure, long

term vacancies.

Amazon says it is proud to have given its associates a great working


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environment, including on-the-job training, opportunities for career progression,

competitive wages, performance-related pay, stock grants, healthcare, a pension plan,

life assurance, income protection and an employee discount. The company added that

it takes on temporary workers during periods of high demand, and when permanent

positions are available we look to the top-performing temporary associates to fill

them.

Elsewhere, Britains economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains

moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a

million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008

crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the

previous peak.

Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work,

while a testament to the British labour markets flexibility, helps to explain why

economic growth remains elusive.

Sources:

Much of my information came from personal messages in reponse to an appealfor information in a blog about the dehumanization of the workforce. Thanks to

the contributors who must remain anonymous.

Retail failures:

Empty shops:

The Lives Of Amazon Warehouse Employees - Huff. Post

Amazon Employees Say They face Brutal Conditions Yahoo News

Interview: Reporter Who Exposed Amazon's Working Conditions

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