Where Are The Amazon Robots? (Part Three)

WHERE ARE THE AMAZON ROBOTS? (Part three)

(Image from wikimedia commons)

Last episode, I ended with the claim that we have become so used to markets based on competition under conditions of scarcity that we discourage progress from pursuing innovations that could result in an end to the need of most people to submit to wage labour.

This attitude can be found among those who have already achieved sufficient financial security to ensure wage labour is optional. For example, the celebrity chef Tom Kerridge, in an in interview with ‘i’ newspaper, spoke of his dilemma regarding how best to raise his son:

“My wife Beth and I discuss how to bring him up constantly, but we feel conflicted with wanting to provide him with everything that I didn’t have as a kid and wanting him to fight for everything and learn you’ve got to work hard to make a living”.

Many would no doubt sympathise with a father’s desire not to see his offspring grow up to be spoiled brats, but it seems to me that there are a couple of dubious beliefs embedded within that statement. Firstly, there is that assumption that one must work hard if one is to ‘make a living’. But this is just not true, not for everyone. It’s certainly not true of anyone born into a rich family. If your ancestors are millionaires or billionaires, that wealth could be your inheritance, and it’s obviously not the case that you have got to work hard. Some family fortunes are so large, generations of that family could sit around all day and would be pretty-much guaranteed to grow richer than those working at full-time employment at minimum wage (or even a basic living wage). In Tom Kerridge’s case he admits that he actually does have the necessary capital to ensure his son could have ‘everything that I didn’t as a kid’, so we can assume that, provided the son is taught sound money management and has appropriate life expectations, he could live very well pursuing interests without ever having to submit to wage labour.

Talking of doing what you love, think of those people who are known as ‘social media influencers’ or ‘YouTube Celebrities’ who do very well for themselves, financially, just by playing videogames or giving out fashion tips or whatever. There’s simply no way that these people work remotely as hard as anyone submitting to low-wage work in an Amazon fulfilment centre, or in the care sector. If ‘hard work’ was the way to get rich we should expect to find the richest people were also the hardest working. But this is not the case at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. The most hard-working people in the world are counted among the very poorest.

It probably sounds like I have something against ‘hard work’, but that’s not quite how it is. My attitude is that there are scenarios in which it is permissible for crap jobs to exist. That is, if a job fulfills some basically essential role (so we can’t just eliminate it without that resulting in even worse circumstances overall) and it is physically impossible to make the job less crap, or if that crap job is the bottom rung on a career ladder an employee has every opportunity of climbing.

The problem is that globalisation is providing businesses with an almost inexhaustible supply of vulnerable people ripe for exploitation, and this is creating a race to the bottom that supports a decadent lifestyle where we just expect some class of people (migrants? Benefits-claimants?) to toil away in dead-end jobs.

According to undercover reporter, James Bloodworth, it’s nigh on impossible to progress up the bottom rung of the Amazon career ladder, meaning it’s no rung on a career ladder at all. “Every contract we pickers were on...was zero-hours or temporary...After 9 months, Amazon would either take you on permanently or cast you aside...In practice you were extremely lucky to make it to nine months”.

So long as sweatshop employers like Amazon have access to an inexhaustible supply of vulnerable people, they’ll have no incentive to make such jobs bottom rungs on a career ladder you can expect to ascend, or to invest in ways and means to reduce the levels of exploitation expected of those doing pick and pack-work.

In a way this is rather reminiscent of Ancient Greece. This was a state famous for its thinkers, producing such legendary thinkers as Socrates and Plato. But it also seemed strangely slow in terms of technological development, never engineering labour-saving devices like windmills even though such things were well within the technical capabilities of these people.

The reason why is because Ancient Greece was a slave society, so given that they had access to the ultimate in cheap, exploitable labour, they saw no need to innovate technologically.

Economies based on wage-labour obviously encourage technological innovation to a greater extent than that, since we do have windmills and, indeed, lots of labour-saving devices our ancestors could not have imagined. But even now a case could be made that societal attitudes still hold back potential progress towards peak technical efficiency.

It’s the ‘work ethic’ that perpetuates conditions like this. Whenever conditions of exploitation are exposed, the response is not a call for such conditions to end, but rather to denounce as ‘lazy’ other groups unwilling to submit to that level of exploitation. You hear things like “those employers have to turn to cheap migrant labour because today’s youth deem such work beneath them. We should make the unemployed do these jobs!”.

Look, the labourers who built the Burma railroad had a terrific work ethic, if by that we mean the ability to struggle on through brutal, soul-destroying conditions. But their strength of character should never distract us from what should be the real point, which is that no job that entails this level of abuse should be deemed acceptable to begin with.

Now, however gruelling it may be, there’s no way that a ten-hour shift at an Amazon fulfilment centre is bad as conditions endured by those who built the Burma railroad, but so what? To me, progress should be marked by reducing levels of tolerance to exploitation.

Instead, we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where we won’t tolerate the idea of eliminating jobs, and instead insist on there being more of them, and the outcome of this is environments filling up with discarded consumer garbage, sold by an advertisement industry increasingly focused on creating bogus problems in order to sell bogus solutions, those ‘solutions’ financed by runaway debt, which puts pressure on us to submit to more jobs, all overseen by a vast, complex, needlessly wasteful bureaucracy of managers and administrators who seem to exist primarily to either feed the egos of the rich or to make the lives of the poor unnecessarily hard.

For some reason, the unemployed are denounced as the greatest burden society has to shoulder. “Why should they get to sit around all day when I’ve got to go out and do a job”.

Personally, I don’t think many people would prefer to just sit around watching TV all day. That sort of behaviour strikes me as what you do when your ‘time off’ is really just time recovering from your job (the only thing ‘free’ about ‘free’ time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything!). If people were not constantly badgered into submitting to wage labour through draconian workfare policies, most would feel liberated to pursue their passions. Maybe a few would stay home watching TV, but if so at least they’re not harming anyone. On the other hand, if you have a job there’s a fair chance that somebody is being harmed, since unless you are very lucky your job either contributes to more garbage harming our environments, or it’s a bullshit white-collar job that pays well but offers no or even negative social value, or it’s a highly socially-valuable job that works its employees so hard to such low wages your health is at risk if such work is long endured.

This is the 21st century, not the 19th. Amazon should not be running a Victorian-style workhouse in this day and age. At the end of the day, the service that this company provides is not all that important. It’s not as if Amazon runs hospitals and their staff are striving to save people’s lives. They are merely a redistribution company, taking in commodities, packing them, and sending them off to consumers. As a society, we can afford to wait a little longer for those packages to arrive, and I think most ethical people would rather wait a bit longer if they knew just how much exploitation there is behind a delivery service that promises next-day delivery. It’s just that since this exploitation happens out of sight in those warehouses, it’s also out of mind to most people.

As for those warehouses, Amazon could afford more comfortable conditions, such as adequate toilet facilities, adequate temperature controls, and breaks that last longer than five minutes. Bezos is a billionaire one hundred times over, so he can well afford to treat those who earned his wealth better than many an expose has suggested they are being treated.

And if we were properly intolerant of exploitation and demanded it should decrease as technical capabilities increased, we would insist on the fullest-possible automation. Instead we think some group of people should continue to endure sweatshop labour and talk about the prospect of robots doing enough jobs to ensure nobody needs to submit to wage labour anymore as something that cannot happen, both insisting and hoping that new jobs will spring up to replace current ones. Notice that nobody ever adds the caveat that these jobs should be good for anything. Given that between 30 and 50 percent of jobs that exist now are BS jobs offering scant social benefit when analysed, it’s obvious that if new jobs are made up to replace what real work remains in management, production and services, they’ll probably be BS jobs too, existing only because we continue to exist that ‘everybody has got to work a job to earn a living’.

It’s obvious that the ‘work ethic’ is now increasingly holding us back. I said earlier that hard work is not necessarily what is required to live well, and cited groups of people (those set to inherit wealth, those who happen to become social media influencers) as examples of people who don’t or need not work anywhere near as hard as those in low-wage jobs but nevertheless do very well financially. But people in that situation are in a minority and for the most part, getting ourselves to the point where we have enough technical knowhow to automate away most jobs has been a tremendous collective struggle entailing heroic risk-taking and a great deal of work. Ever since human societies organised themselves into large enough groups to make hierarchy necessary, the practical need for most people to work hard has matched the ubiquity of feeling that hard work ought to be our means of living the meaningful life. Having endured all that work to get us to a point where it is no longer necessary, we feel somehow cheated if future generations should take advantage of this infrastructure past generations have built and adopt a radically different lifestyle based on abundance and leisure. The practical need for full employment has shrunk and could be reduced even more, but the ideology that manifests in attitudes like‘Why should they not work when I had to?’, becomes the justification for perpetuating economies based on competition and scarcity, where the line of progress is bent away from climbing to the point where true, ethically-guided abundance is achieved.

At the same time, companies are actually OK with being technically wasteful and will continue to rely on human labour even when it could be automated away, since automating it away would ultimately lead to a radically different society in which those who are in possession of great material wealth can no longer consider themselves kings and queens amongst commoners. After all, having reached the pinnacle of success possible under conditions that perpetuate capitalism, why would this capitalists pursue cost-cutting, productivity-increasing technologies, when the only possible outcome would be luxury communism and the end of wealth inequality that makes them seem so high and mighty today?

The world as it is today is proof that progress won’t be pursued to the point where luxury communism is possible. That’s why you don’t see robots at Amazon.

References:

‘Hired’ by James Bloodworth

‘Debt: The First Five Thousand Years’ by David Graeber