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Moving on from the larger historical development of the platform economy, this chapter focuses on contextualizing Amazon’s expansion and platforms within this larger trajectory. Amazon spreads its roots across the platform economy, becoming foundational to it and making it increasingly difficult not to encounter Amazon in one way or another while using the Internet. This chapter traces its development within the larger platform economy from its establishment in the 1990s to the monopoly it has grown into today. Focusing mainly on the perspective of capital, this chapter underlines the dimensions of Amazon’s growing and expanding ecosystem. It highlights how Amazon has organically created platforms across all three generations in relation to the wider context in which these are situated. It especially focuses on its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, as these constitute the focus for the later investigation of the world of workers. Amazon is increasingly regarded as a trendsetter for other platforms and industries, holding repercussions and implications within and possibly beyond the platform economy.
It is becoming increasingly clear: platforms, formerly hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, are (re)shaping the world of work and workers. As Amazon has become a forerunner in setting these trends, this book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms: its e-commerce platform and its digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). By accessing the workers of the (digital) shop floor, it explores how different organizations of platforms estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency. To do so, it differentiates between the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. While the former can be location-based or web-based, the latter refers to a traditional time-wage or gig wage. The case of Amazon's e-commerce platform, meaning the workforce in its warehouses, resembles a location-based traditional time-wage platform, whereas MTurk is an example of a web-based gig piece-wage platform. By investigating these platforms within their political-economic context and approaching their workers on a (digital) shopfloor level, this book argues that the nature of the platform and the nature of the work organize and alienate workers in different ways, with different repercussions for their collective organization, which make themselves felt in traditional and more alternative ways. In doing so, this book shares insights into the different ways in which platforms are structured and reproduce historical continuities in organizing workers and their labor, as well as into contemporary developments that reshape labor realities and how workers organize themselves within these.
This chapter focuses on the perspective of capital, which is crucial to grasp the world of labor, as capital–labor relations operate in relation to the wider co-evolving context. It traces and analyzes the organic development of the platform economy in relation to the political–economic, social and technological conditions. Grounded within the neoliberal context, in which venture capital (VC) and Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) fueled the growth of the platform economy, this chapter identifies three specific generations of platforms. The first one is traced back to the dot-com era in the 1990s, evolving from the creation and wider dissemination of the Internet. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, technological conditions resulted in a more user-friendly Internet while political–economic conditions pushed second-generation platforms to search for a new source of financial capital. As changes in the wider conditions also bring about changes in the platform economy, I finally look at the third-generation platforms that erupted after the economic crisis of 2006–8. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that each kind of platform, with its own way of organizing workers, has organically developed in relation to the wider conditions within capitalist temporality. The platform economy is not separate from, but part of, the larger economy.
As this book seeks to move away from a deterministic analysis, its analytical framework includes not just how workers are organized but also how they organize themselves. This chapter thus provides the second part of its analytical framework to investigate the agency of workers. While this does not constitute the focus of the book, it refers to the importance of class consciousness and subjectivity, in order to bridge the relations of alienation within the larger analysis of agency. It then focuses on sketching out the Power Resources Approach (PRA), inspired primarily, but not exclusively, by the works of Beverly Silver and Erik Olin Wright. It presents four different power resources that workers mobilize while navigating (counteracting) political–economic conditions. Understanding these power resources as co-evolving with one another and bound to their larger context, this chapter first presents the structural power of workers (marketplace and workplace), tying the latter to different forms of resistance. It then moves on to discuss associational power, institutional power and societal power (coalitional and discursive power). The analysis of these power resources is integral to examining the case studies, highlighting labor’s different efforts in organizing and fostering solidarity given the implications but to an extent also possibilities of the differing nature of the platform and of the work.
This chapter sets out its theoretical foundation before delving into the first part of its analytical framework based on examining alienation. Understanding the development of material production, and thereby social life, as the guiding force of history, its theoretical foundation is informed by an understanding of historical materialism, dialectics and labor theory of value based primarily on Volume I of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. In doing so, it centers the workers within capitalist class relations and focuses on the systematic analysis of the relations of alienation based on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These relations are fourfold: alienation to the labor activity, labor’s product, species-being and fellow humans. When regarded holistically, these relations underline the different dimensions by which workers are estranged and fragmented through their organization and working conditions within capital’s larger circuit of accumulation. The relations of alienations are crucial for the later analysis of the case studies, where their appearance can differ depending on the organization of the platform, demonstrating how these foster atomization and individualization, and, in part, explaining why workers may not organize.
This chapter provides the second half of the analysis of the Amazon warehouse case study by focusing on how such a platform provides both challenges and possibilities for these workers to express their agency. It examines their four power resources in relation to the organization of the platform: structural power, associational power, institutional power and societal power. It integrates in its analysis the larger political–economic context, the larger (trans)national context and Amazon’s union-busting, which can prove to be additional obstacles to the organization of workers, as Amazon continuously attempts to disrupt, undermine and diminish their efforts. Despite weak marketplace power workers may navigate their material obstacles and Amazon’s counterstrategies to instrumentalize their workplace and disruptive power derived from their assembly within warehouses. While labor organizations, from traditional and grassroots unions to transnational and digital movements, support associational and institutional powers to improve their working conditions and fight back against the various facets of alienation, workers are increasingly gaining momentum in organizing themselves and making their movement intrinsic to the wider public debate. In doing so, they are claiming their agency and conceiving of it more holistically in terms of a possible transnational, inter-platform and inter-sectoral movement.
As the second half of the analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, this chapter looks at their agency to focus on the new challenges and different possibilities created by the organization of the platform and wider political–economic, social and technological conditions. It engages with their structural, associational, institutional and societal power resources in relation to the platform’s web-based gig nature. Despite a weak marketplace and workplace power and having their hands tied on MTurk, workers navigate and, in varying ways, reclaim and instrumentalize the very infrastructure of the Internet for their interests. In doing so, they form solidarity, interact and provide support for one another through alternative spaces of online associations and collectivities beyond traditional unions. This potential of an associational power is not accompanied, however, by any institutional power for MTurk workers, as their precarious status leaves them outside of any governing legal and industrial relations framework. This may be changing, in view efforts to reclassify workers and improve their conditions, thereby also strengthening their societal power. Studying the case of the MTurk workers can shed light on the repercussions of web-based labor and precarization for their agency within and beyond the platform economy, as well as potentialities for collective organization.
This introductory chapter underlines the importance of investigating the platform economy, something that has come to be intrinsic to our social fabric and daily lives. As platforms have instrumentalized the Internet to also mediate labor relations, they have come to shape and reshape our current world of work and workers. This chapter thus focuses on these workers and presents the general question and argument of the book regarding their alienation and agency. In doing so, it gives an outline of the way the platform economy is organized, and this constitutes the foundation for how this book categorizes and approaches different platforms. It looks at these from two perspectives: the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. By engaging with various strands of literature, it identifies its two case studies of location-based traditional time-wage Amazon warehouse workers and web-based piece-wage Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) gig workers. This chapter underlines how the contrast between these two case studies, which differing both in their nature of the platform and the nature of the work, can provide insights into their repercussions for their workers and their agency, shedding further light on the continuities and novelties of the world of work(ers). The chapter concludes by sketching out the book’s structure.
This chapter contrasts the power resources of its two Amazon cases, while contextualizing them within the larger platform economy. It discusses the implications of the different configurations of platform organization regarding the larger question of agency. Despite hostility from capital and despite being undermined by the broader context, traditional time laborers like Amazon warehouse workers have mobilized their growing workplace and associational power and show signs of an institutional power. Such location-based workers, including gig ones, hold an advantage over web-based workers when it comes to their societal power because of their visibility in society. Gig workers generally experience, however, overall weaker power resources because of the nature of their work and, in MTurk’s case, additionally the web-based nature of the platform. Yet they have demonstrated alternative ways of forming solidarity and digital collectives, instrumentalizing the very infrastructure of the Internet. This chapter thus highlights both traditional and more bottom-up grassroots and alternative ways of organizing in the platform economy, forming inter- and intra-platform solidarity and showing the potential of a growing labor movement. It ultimately emphasizes that, just as the conditions of the platform economy need to be understood historically and holistically, so too does the agency of workers, as it co-evolves alongside the larger political–economic and technological context.
Once hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, it is now clear that platforms are reshaping the world of work, and Amazon has been a forerunner in setting the trend.
This book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms that differ in how they organize workers: its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform (Mechanical Turk). With access to the people who are working at the heart of these platforms, it explores how different working conditions alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency in traditional and alternative ways.
Written for social scientists, studying and researching the platform economy, this is a timely and important analysis of work and workers on the (digital) shop floor.
