The dominance of capital and the subjugation of human labour are concomitant with the various stages through which capitalism has developed historically. Sarrah Kassem’s Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization (published by Bristol University Press) in 2023, ventures into examining the unique case of the platform economy particularly focusing on Amazon. The book takes you through a journey of understanding worker alienation and labour agency from a Marxian perspective, In the first section, it briefly discusses the physical and the digital structures of production that define Amazon. In the second section, the focus is to show how the nature of platform work promotes worker alienation and how different workers express their agency within such a system. Despite the book’s dense theoretical framework, the lucid writing in the book succeeds in making complex concepts accessible to a wider audience.

The initial chapters of the book construct a framework for studying worker alienation and labour agency. Historicizing the evolution of the platform economy within capitalism, Kassem locates the growth of Amazon and the labour process within Amazon since the 1990s. Starting as an e-book seller with location-based work, Amazon expanded with the spread of the internet to include web-based services through Amazon Web services and the digital labour platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk), promoting gig work. Behind this model of super-efficiency and growth of Amazon, there lies a much darker aspect to the alienated and disempowered workers that it promotes. The book highlights three crucial aspects of the labour process within Amazon’s warehouse workers and its digital labour platform, namely: hypertaylorization of work, algorithmic management and surveillance and control. These three aspects are central to creating a lack of autonomy, promoting deskilling, fostering a sense of individualism and undermining workers’ inherent creativities. Furthermore, the reliance on cheap labour and the promotion of fierce competition allows Amazon to outsource its labour costs. Although the book lays out a framework for studying both the alienation and the labour agency of workers within Amazon’s business it also offers insights into the broader context of alienation and labour agency in platform work.

The book discusses the alienation of workers in four forms: estrangement from their role in the entire process, dissociation of workers from the product of labour, estrangement from their creativity and alienation from other workers. Both for labour in the production sphere (such as the MTurk workers) and labour in the circulation sphere (Amazon warehouse workers) this alienation takes different forms. For Amazon’s warehouse workers, the repetitive nature of work, the expropriation of surplus through extending the workday, the “machinic dispossession” of labour from its activity and the scientific management are masked by building a façade of communal work through phrases such as “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” Practices such as setting high targets using Units Per Hour significantly impact workers’ mental and physical well-being. In contrast for MTurk workers, the benefits of being independent contractors with work flexibility are highlighted to hide the ultra-competitive nature of work and the encroachment of work into the household space. Across warehouse work and gig work the labour process within Amazon separates “intellectual work from the work of execution” (Braverman,1998).

Labour agency and its expression in platform businesses is a recurring theme throughout the book. Unlike literature that focuses solely on quantitative measures like unionization rates, Kassem defines labour agency in four modalities: structural power, institutional power, associational power, and societal power. In the later chapters of her book, Dr Kassem provides a compare-contrast approach to understanding how these four modalities vary for warehouse workers and MTurk workers. Amazon’s warehouse work is more easily replaceable and requires lower entry-level requirements which reduces their structural bargaining power. However, their geographical proximity to other workers is an advantage in forming institutions such as traditional unions and leveraging traditional labour laws. For MTurk workers, the challenges are unique since informal digital unions are harder to form and they are considered gig workers therefore traditional labour laws such as minimum wage laws do not apply to them. Traditional unions often struggle with Amazon’s strong anti-union stance and the challenges posed by the dispersed nature of platform work. Despite these obstructions, the examples of worker unions that the book discusses provide a fresh perspective on worker organization and advocacy in the platform economy. Beyond the traditional unions, the book discusses promoting transnational worker solidarity and government regulation of platform businesses as important policy proposals.

Amazon’s monopoly power in product markets is gradually being challenged by state authorities (FTC, 2023). As Amazon and other platform businesses increasingly challenge efforts to build equitable labour markets, this book serves as a powerful instrument, bringing labour agency into focus and providing valuable insights into the impact such businesses have on people’s lives, emphasizing issues of worker alienation.

References

Braverman, H. (1998). Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. NYU Press.

FTC (2023) (FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power) https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power

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Swayamsiddha Sarangi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, University of Utah.