I saw this whole thing coming.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it has recently surfaced in the mainstream media that working conditions at these giant Amazon fulfillment centers (basically warehouses where they put your order together and ship it) are terrible. Specifically, it’s a very high-pressure, coldblooded, morale-killing wasteland where employees (all of whom are of low social status, whether it’s working class people or college kids) are held to an inhuman standard of efficiency and a lot of people get ground up and spit out of the system shattered and disillusioned.

I was worried this would happen.

When I first heard that Amazon was building these giant cube shaped fulfillment centers, I got nervous. Large scale facilities have a tendency to become as cold and dehumanizing as something out of Metropolis, and I was worried that even a golden-halo company like Amazon would fall prey to the inherent problems with this particular form of systemization.

Turns out, I was right to be worried.

Then, about a year ago, I started reading personal accounts of what life was like in an Amazon cube, and it confirmed my worst suspicions. Entirely the wrong kind of people were in control, and something akin to a human disaster was the result.

These people are clearly those who think efficiency is measured in numbers and whatever makes those numbers go up is good. Their narrow definition of efficiency ignores non-quantifiable human costs and drives them to demand increasingly inhumane things of their employees and feel nothing but glee at the fact that they made their numbers better.

Then something like a crisis in morale and subsequent breakdown of the entire work environment starts making those numbers go in the wrong direction and they are mystified, absolutely mystified, as to what might have caused it.

Sooner or later, they will blame the workers for not being enough like unfeeling machines and for having pesky needs like humanity, warmth, comfort, consideration, and some kind of sense that the system gives a shit whether they live or die.

Money in, work out! That’s how these people think it’s supposed to be.

So the situation at these fulfillment centers is dire. All the employees are expected to fulfill a very high number of orders per second, despite the fact that their inventory system puts incoming items in whatever space is available and therefore to fulfill one order, you might have to go all over the giant warehouse to get everything. New employees are given a woefully inadequate amount of time to get up to speed, and if they don’t, they are fired and replaced by someone else who is desperate for a job.

See, this, to me, is the real problem with high unemployment. It’s not just that it makes people poor. It’s that it makes them exploitable. The higher the unemployment rate, the shittier the workers can be treated.

And I am sure that’s exactly how the powers that be like it. Quick tip : if you can’t afford to quit your job, then you are not free. The whole premise of labour capitalism is that because you are free to quit a job where you are treated poorly, and this puts pressure on the system to treat their workers better, the workers are free, not slaves.

But how free can anyone be if losing their job will mean their children starve?

Anyhow, back to Amazon. Up to this point in my revelation, a point could be made that the conditions at these centers are harsh and it’s a demanding job, but overall it’s not that bad. I mean, some people must be able to meet these goals or the whole system would break down, right? So it’s a tough job, but it pays $15/hour, so it’s clearly worth it to people.

But the thing that clinched it for me, that proved that entirely the wrong kind of people are in charge, was that they have a snitching program, where employees are encouraged, and rewarded, for reporting their fellow workers slacking off and/or breaking the rules somehow.

And there are a LOT of rules.

Now that is out and out lunacy. The literature proving snitch programs are a terrible idea could fill the Grand Canyon. There is absolutely nothing that is a more effective morale killer. Sowing mistrust and paranoia amongst your employees is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE idea and the very idea that the people in charge of these places would enact a policy that is the most deadly morale assassin known to humanity despite the fact that business literature is nearly unanimous in its opposition to it proves, without a doubt, that there are some cruel hearted bastards who hde their sadism behind their piss poor definition of “efficiency” in charge at these fulfillment gulags.

These bastards are primarily to blame for the problem, of course. But the mother corp bears some responsibility too, for farming the jobs out to these facilities then treating those fulfillment centers as “black boxes” that you never open as long as they continue to give you what you want.

I am sure a lot of the people who have been at Amazon for a long time, well educated middle class Silicon Valley types, are shocked, shocked to find out that the working class people doing the grunt work are being treated poorly. After all, they never told anyone to do that!

But as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Graib, and countless other examples, nobody needs to force evil into existence. All they have to do is set up the conditions for it, and then stop paying attention.

The nerds at Amazon can say, quite truthfully, that they had no idea that any of this was going on. And that’s the problem. They should have known what evils were being done in their name.

But they chose to close their eyes to what was going on inside their fulfillment centers, and as a certain song of which I am fond says, evil grows in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.