Re: [Marxism] [Pen-l] Fwd: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I was blown away by this article yesterday. The more I thought about it the more Amazon sounded like where academia is going. Brian On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: > Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high > ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, > who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and > weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a > less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a > problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him > and never returned to Amazon. > > “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they > see it as a major weakness,” she said. > > A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after > she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while > she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee > who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had > surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she > said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a > family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.” > > A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a > “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of > being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had > interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others > from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been > judged harshly instead of being given time to recover. > > A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman > who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another > who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, > accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What > kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her > bosses. > > The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just > experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled > via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make > sure my focus stayed on my job.” > > > full: > > http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html > ___ > pen-l mailing list > pe...@lists.csuchico.edu > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Brian McKenna, Ph.D. Department of Behavioral Sciences CASL 4025 Dearborn, Michigan _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [Pen-l] Fwd: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * What this article shows is that what I call managerial control mechanisms can be applied to just about any kind of work. These go back a long way, to the centralization of workers in factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Frederick Taylor's systematic analysis of these three elements of control and the formulation of "scientific management," personnel management with its Theories X, Y, and Z, lean production (the Japanese-led refinements and extensions of Taylorism), etc. Amazon is applying managerial control to relatively highly paid, educated, and skilled white collar workers. What is interesting is that many people aspire to work for Jeff Bezos, and not a few of the people interviewed either relished the insane competitiveness and long hours or said that they learned so much about themselves and what they could "accomplish" under Bezos's psychopathic leadership, even as they left the company. Note that other companies are following suit, and former Amazon employ ees are highly sought after by these businesses. Think how powerful is the ethos of modern capitalism that workers were willing to sacrifice spouses, kids, parents, vacations, and every other thing that makes us human beings to help invent more efficient ways to sell things to consumers. And they say life in the Soviet Union was harsh! I don't think academe is quite like Amazon. In colleges, well-educated white collar workers no longer can get full-time employment. There are not tens of thousands of openings for one thing. The weeding out process occurs much more impersonally too. Performance is increasingly measured, though, and that is a similarity. I suppose too that you might consider Amazons' white collar workers like adjuncts in that they are very unlikely to make it to the top of the job hierarchy and will be kicked to the curb not long after they are hired. However, adjuncts are not sought after much when this happens. They just try for another shitty teaching gig. Also, it is harder, for me at least, to muster nearly as much sympathy for Amazon's white-collar laborers as for adjunct teachers. The Amazonians chose to work under Bezos's rules and surely went in with the knowledge of what they might be in for. It's not as if they were part of some reserve army of labor, desperately seeking employment. Whatever we make of this article, one thing is certain. Work in capitalism denies us our humanity, period. There is really nothing that can change the long trajectory toward alienating labor except the overthrow of capitalism, root and branch. As radicals we ignore the absolute necessity to transform work radically, and to eradicate the mindless consumption that now defines the limits of what human beings can expect from life and labor. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com