It’s Black Friday. If you’re an online shopper, it’s incredibly hard to stay away from Amazon with its big holiday season sales that stretch from October, to Black Friday Week to Cyber Monday and Christmas. It’s no wonder that Amazon made its biggest net sales revenue yet in this fourth quarter (Q4) of 2023, amounting to a staggering 169.96 billion USD. How has Amazon come to be synonymous with shopping, especially during this time of year, and what makes this period so significant for its workers?
Amazon has come a long way from the ’90s online bookstore to the everything store it is today. It now operates on six continents, and continues to expand across these, monopolising many ecommerce markets. It doesn’t always start from scratch but relies at times on acquiring existing ecommerce platforms and then rebranding these over time to Amazon. While we mostly associate Amazon with online shopping, its ecosystem stretches beyond that in ways that are quite relevant to our technological world: think of AI. Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are among the workers essential for data annotation necessary for machine learning algorithms used to train AI. Beyond AI, Amazon Web Services has monopolised the cloud computing market, which is the essence of running and maintaining the infrastructure of the internet and everything related to data. It is no exaggeration to say that if we use technology in any capacity, we are most likely to come into contact with at least part of Amazon’s ecosystem in one way or the other. If we consider all these developments and how customer-centric Amazon frames itself to be, it is no surprise that Amazon has been able to grow its infrastructure to where it is today over the last three decades. For many, it has become the first stop for all the Black Friday deals and seasonal shopping.
While this last quarter of the year is marked across many shopping calendars, it is a crucial time for workers. To guarantee that customers receive their orders in time during this peak shopping period in which Amazon makes billions in net sales revenue, it needs to hire thousands of additional workers. In the US, Amazon has just announced the need to hire an additional 250,000 workers, while this number amounts to 15,000 across the UK for this time of year. Not only does the workforce increase in number but so too does the intensity and pace of work. In fact, the rate of injury tends to be especially high during the peak season of Q4. What appears as a seamless process to the customer is a labour-intensive process for the warehouse workers.
While Amazon has a track record of being hostile towards unions, workers have been organising across the globe in various ways. This has been especially important during this peak time, given its significance for Amazon’s business model, customers and of course the workers. The season, however, brings both potential and challenges when it comes to labour organising. For one, strikes and walkouts are most likely to have the highest impact during this time of year if workers and unions are able to successfully mobilise and grow their labour struggle. But not only are workers dealing with different political and legal contexts and a corporation that makes headlines for its anti-union tactics, but additionally an influx of thousands of seasonal temporary workers. All these factors require additional resources and shop floor efforts to organise the workforce. Since these seasonal workers are only there temporarily, they may also have no interest in joining a union, or may not even be able to do so, depending on the country they are in. This begs the question: how can workers and unions successfully mobilise this additional influx of seasonal workers to push for better working conditions, unionisation and potentially collective bargaining agreements during this crucial time of year?
This brings us to the Make Amazon Pay campaign. It brings together over ‘80 organisations working towards labour, tax, climate, data and racial justice, and over 400 parliamentarians and tens of thousands of supporters from across the world’. It aims to broaden the movement to include not just workers, but also civil society, the public and policy makers in the wake of the growing corporate power of Amazon. It describes Amazon as squeezing workers, communities and the planet, addressing Amazon’s economic, political, social and ecological consequences and implications for our world today. To bring these issues into the spotlight, Black Friday has become the global day of action. In 2023, Make Amazon Pay ‘organised strikes, protests and other actions in over 30 countries’. Given the various challenges and contexts to be manoeuvred across the globe, this day has become one of various actions and protests to express international solidarity.
On a day like Black Friday and during this time of year as we do our shopping, it is important to take a moment to recognise the labour of the workers that make sure our orders arrive on time: from the warehouse staff picking our items to the drivers delivering our packages to our doorstep. In light of the ways in which Amazon is growing its ecommerce market, but also how it is impacting us beyond that, we can find opportunities to show our appreciation and solidarity with workers in their struggle for better and fairer working conditions – not just at Amazon but across our economies.
Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy by Sarrah Kassem is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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