Alessandro Delfanti on Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:39:02 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike

Interesting points, but I believe that the relation between data and labour go in a further direction too. Data are of course used to feed the algorithms that organize work in the warehouse (i.e. choose the task that a “picker” will need to perform, and direct them through the barcode gun they use to “shoot” commodities). But the reality of work in e-commerce warehouses has to do with brutal command over workers’ bodies, and even big data are geared towards that goal. Working at Amazon is a matter of physicality, speed and resistance – you have to run and carry stuff all day. Management can manually tweak the algorithm so that a certain worker will have to pick heavier stuff, or commodities that are distant from each other in the “pick tower,” thus crushing their physical resistance and/or making it impossible for the worker to meet performance goals and exposing them to backlashes. This is how you discipline troublesome workers or set them up for dismissal. In sum, at Amazon (but the same is true for Zalando or IKEA, which also operate warehouses in the area) data are used in the service of quite an embodied form of capitalist command. So perhaps it is data-against-work? Or discipline-regardless-of-data?
Finally, to add to the previous comment, turnover is so high that the local territory is no longer enough as a supplier of bodies. Indeed, Amazon has its own Google buses from hell: temp agencies now run buses that bring scores of young workers to Amazon from poor neighborhoods of Milan, Alessandria, and other cities that can be more than one hour away from the warehouse. Clearly big data has to do with this spatial configuration based on the need to increase the exploitation of masses of unemployed youth, but does not tell the whole story.
As for the more political side, Amazon has been very good at keeping one specific union out of the warehouse. SI Cobas is the small militant union that has won many battles in the area, including at other e-commerce giants such as H&M or IKEA. They have no presence at Amazon, which is why the requests of this strike only addressed stable unionized workers while overlooking the problems faced by the thousands of “green badge” precarious workers hired via temp agencies. I know some of the workers involved in the Black Friday strike and I am by no mean blaming them. But I wanted to stress that the militant union has won by putting their bodies on the line with pickets and strikes, and going against all the powers that be (the center-left party which runs city and region, the co-operatives that provide precarious workers to logistical giants, and the traditional unions). Si Cobas even had one victim, Abd Elsalam, killed by a truck trying to cross a picket line last year – many Nettimers will remember about this tragedy.
I don’t know what the future trends will look like, but for now successful struggles have been based on a model that resembles the 50s, plus one 21st century flavour: the key role of migrant labour in the struggles, especially workers from Maghreb who have won rights that the local white youth had no collective memory of. Data-based forms of intervention are difficult to imagine in this context of brutal exploitation and direct action response.
I am researching exactly this stuff in Piacenza (my old hometown...) and would be very happy to keep on discussing. 

Ciao from Toronto
a



casilli.fr

Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike: industrial action that does
not factor in both work AND data is doomed to be ineffective

https://www.casilli.fr/2017/11/28/lessons-from-amazons-italian-hub-strike-industrial-action-that-does-not-factor-in-both-work-and-data-is-doomed-to-be-ineffective/


On Nov 24, 2017, the three main Italian unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) have
called for a strike over the failure to negotiate Black Friday bonuses
for the 1,600 permanent workers at the distribution hub near the
Northern town of Piacenza. Unions say 50% of the workers partake in the
strike. Amazon says it was more like 10%.

Bottom line: the strike did not stop Black Friday in Italy. Someone was
working. Yet, according to several sources, it was not not permanent
workers, but the 2,000 temps that Amazon recruited until Xmas who saved
the day. They were not hired to replace striking workers. Even in Italy, this would be illegal. They were hired to face Nov./Dec. surge in retail 
sales. And of course they did not stop working on Black Friday 2017.
That said, Amazon is known internationally for its brutal workplace
discipline, its anti-labor stance, and has been accused of hiring temps, contingent workers and even workampers to edge out unionized labor force. 

In Italy, one can recruit a lot of those. Unemployment is at 11.1% and
there’s a millions-strong industrial reserve army of faux-freelance,
part-timers, “coordinated collaborators”, “project-contractors”, “leased 
staff” and many other forms of non-standard employees. Especially since
the infamous Jobs Act heralded by the government of former PM Matteo
Renzi, among young workers temp jobs accounts for 50% of employment and
they are up 7% since Sept 2017.
But Italian retail workers and their strike tell only part of the story. 
Amazon isn’t about e-commerce: it’s about big data. Interestingly,
Matteo Renzi’s government has been very helpful in facilitating the
strategy of “data entryism” of the Seattle giant, going as far as to
hire Amazon’s former vice-president and now-biggest employee shareholder of the platform as “Commissioner for Digital Italy”. He’s doing this for 
free, and you know what they say when you’re not paying for something…
Which brings us to the main point. Amazon strategy is predicated on data 
and work. Even better: it is predicated on data-as-work, because it
extracts value from the data stored in its humongous cloud and hosting
services, and because it uses people-as-a-service (according to Jeff
Bezos’s early characterization of Amazon Mechanical Turk) to train,
enrich, refine data.

Btw, do you wanna know what the new Italian Digital Commissioner
considers as a success story for digital transformation? The
controversial Indian biometric ID system… And do you know where 36% of
Amazon Mechanical Turkers live? India… (Here’s the interview [in
Italian] where the Digital Commissioner talks about Indian ID system
while at the same time declaring that “he misses Amazon so much”).

Take-away message: Amazon corporate takeover of Italy is as much a
matter of labor policy as it is of data politics. As long as the unions
continue to focus on the former while neglecting the latter, their
action is doomed to be ineffective. Case in point: after dominating
Black Friday sales, Amazon’s shares are up 2% and Jeff Bezos is still
world’s wealthiest man. So Amazon Italia just gave a giant middle-finger to workers by cancelling the meeting with unions and rescheduling it for 
after Xmas…



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