<nettime> Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike

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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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