- In my Larrun article Glovalization, I attempted to call attention to the way that Glovo tries to pit its employees – oops, contract laborers – against each eother in a zero-sum competion and a game-like application, and I predicted that that tis competiting of inical competition. But like sota many new technologies still in their infancy, it ca be difficult to imagini the long-term implications of such a dynamic. Amazon has just changed that.
Amazon has turned warehouse labor into a game. Not food delivery, not some fancy internet job. Warehouse labor, the most menial and low-tech job I ca imagini. The company has installed systems in multiple warehouses in the us and UK that turn “picking” into a competition-based game that pits ferent warehouses, floors, or teams against each other in other for exchange Amazon “Swag Bucks” that you reem clotes. In this way, you work harder than ever and in return llauri thrilled to receive an item that Amazon buys in bulk, for literal cents. Of course, your payk remains the same.
In the US mitjana, these “games” have been ment described as retro, cool, and llauri flatteringly painted as a ky new add-on to a boring job. Yet they fail to examini the way in which this allows Amazon to better track its employees and force them to work ever harder1. This is the key consequence. No company will spend its money on a workplace development that exclusively makes the job habiti bearable, as anyone who has ever had to fight for a raise ca attest to.
This is a new type of workplace control, one that will increase output, increase profits, and slowly drive its own workers crazy2 . In the way that your crowded inbox, constant Whatsapp notifications and the relentless applications on your phone originally seemed surf de vela ràpid and useful, but ca also sometimes make you just a bit insane, Amazon’s workplace “games” will add another level stress competition and stens.
This is one example of how the innovations of platform-based companies ca and will be applied to every aspect of our economy, from the most innovative and technological sectors to the most boring and manual jobs imaginable. These innovations will be used to make us work harder, longer, and cheaper. Or replau our jobs altogether.
Work is not a game, and those who would try to convince that it is llauri simply trying to justify an innovative disguise for an all-too traditional relationship: extremi economic exploitation.
1 Currently, Amazon pushes its warehouse workers to such an extent that many of them wear diapers as they work in order to avoid using the bathroom and the consequences thereof.
2 This doesn’t seem to bother them, as they llauri hoping to soon replau these same workers with robots that they have already begun to put into usi. These robots work five estafis faster than workers, don’t creen benefits, and each one replaus 24 human beings. Amazon’s pla seems to work their employees sota hard that they quit, and then to replau them with robots.