Contesting Global Amazon: Tentative Conclusions on Work Organization and Employment Relations in the E-Commerce Giant

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Abstract

This paper offers tentative generalizations and a future research agenda flowing from a multi-author research project on work organization, employment relations, and contests around them encompassing North America, Mexico and Brazil, Western and Eastern Europe, and India. Managing by algorithm and seeking to deploy an interchangeable precarious workforce lacking job security naturally point toward an effort by Amazon to elide or relegate the vagaries of place of operation to secondary status. Yet some of the contours of the economic landscapes in which Amazon operates require it to pay attention to and adjust to “details” it might wish to consider secondary: the type of contracts that are (dis)allowed and (dis)incentivize; policies and norms regarding employment of minority or disadvantaged groups; and the norms governing union formation and presence/absence of pre-existing unions and sometimes collective bargaining structures which they must deal with or operate within at some level.
Particularly where outsourcing is widespread, a dualism or segmentation exists in the conditions of work at Amazon. This situation becomes both a major weakness for labor action (making difficult the accumulation of associational worker power) and a thorny issue that unions must deal with. In the socio-demographic characteristics of its workforce, Amazon’s sweet spot is a segment with just the right level of formal education and literacy and digital literacy—a segment that disproportionately suffers from forms of discrimination or exclusion whose precise forms differ across countries. With regard to labor regimes, a variable mix of mechanism of coercion and consent—and varieties in the company’s anti-unionism adapted to national contexts—is found across national and subnational settings, and to present quite variable strategic challenges. Viewing global Amazon in its totality and its variegations and variations is argued to be a central task for future scholarship as well as activism surrounding the company and global e-commerce logistics

Author

• Scott B. Martin, The New School