What The Hell America!

Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno

Exactly. Like all firms, Amazon is competing with other firms in various sectors across the economy over market share, but it is also locked in a competitive struggle with its customers and suppliers to capture the maximum quantity of surplus value within value chains. It wants to acquire the largest possible amount of surplus by forcing suppliers to accept the lowest possible prices (and other conditions) while charging customers the highest prices it can get away with. But its ability to raise prices is limited by the intensely competitive nature of these markets. Amazon has to attract supplier firms by offering them the opportunity to reduce their costs, compress turnover time, and reach the widest markets. Meanwhile, it has to attract customers by offering them fast delivery times and low prices. This means Amazon is under incredible competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, intensify work, and exploit labor.

In order to pull this off, Amazon undertakes extremely high levels of investment in its warehousing and logistics system. The competitiveness of Amazon, including AWS, hinges on the efficiency of its warehouses, where thousands of workers are employed laboring together under conditions of bitter exploitation, close work discipline, and intense surveillance. In many respects, it looks like a scene out of Capital Volume I.

As you mention, these warehouses are hubs within Amazon’s regionalized logistics network: 76 percent of orders are shipped from an FC in the customer’s region. This means that although Amazon operates on a national scale, its operations are segmented at the regional level. While the intense competitive pressure Amazon is under makes it vulnerable to disruption, the regional structure of its system potentially allows workers to exert significant leverage by organizing regionally. And this points to the centrality of the warehouses, which serve as regional hubs.

Of course, the scale of these facilities, and the level of surveillance and discipline workers are under, as well as the high level of turnover and other factors, mean that organizing there is definitely very challenging. As others have pointed out, smaller facilities such as delivery stations and the “last mile” may be easier to organize with the relatively small resources available to us. And certainly this could play a role. But questions of strategy have to come back to how the company will react.

Amazon has a relatively large amount of flexibility to respond to disruption in the smaller delivery stations through uberization and subcontracting delivery to other carriers, rerouting flows of commodities through other stations, or even moving delivery stations. If organizing efforts are going to focus on delivery, we need a plan to respond to such moves. Disruption at the warehouses, on the other hand, is much harder to get around. The assumption often seems to be that organizing delivery can spill over to the warehouses, but this faces significant challenges that would also need to be addressed.

As we argue, “organizing Amazon” seems to ultimately mean organizing the warehouses that are the hubs of its system. But this demands a strategy that combines disruption and scale. Given the size of the warehouses, building power there requires broad and deep organizing involving a relatively large number of workers. And to be effective, these efforts cannot just be limited to a single warehouse but need to take place at a regional scale. But scale alone is not enough. Amazon’s investment strategy affords it substantial surplus capacity, and therefore flexibility in the face of challenges or blockages. This means that the traditional business unionism model, whereby union strategy is limited to collective bargaining over contracts at regular intervals, is unlikely to be sufficient for exerting real leverage over the firm. The flexibility of Amazon’s model, along with its vulnerability in the context of the intense competition it faces, means that building power requires that workers develop equally dynamic capacities for disruption.