Sarrah Kassem - Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy

Sarrah Kassem

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Bristol University Press

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Bristol University Press 2023

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ISBN 978-1-5292-2654-6 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-5292-2656-0 ePub

ISBN 978-1-5292-2657-7 ePdf

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To those who have supported me and grounded me, my family

To those who have motivated me and inspired me, the workers

And finally to all those whose voices are not heard.

F igures

Tables

It was both through interest and by chance that I found myself researching Amazon. I am fascinated by the world of workers, who, despite the unequal structures of capitalism, retain their humility, strength and agency. Agency, essentially the ability to act, allows us to imagine possibilities for change and to pursue these, historically and contemporarily. But as we are always bound to a specific moment in time and place, I have been eager to combine my interest with an essential development in our world today: technology, and more specifically the platform economy. These transnational corporations, such as Amazon, Google, Airbnb and Uber, which instrumentalize the Internet to mediate what they may not directly own, intrigue me. While these may not (yet) employ, relatively speaking, the largest amount of global workforces, they continue to grow in power and capital, equivalent to national economies, and contribute to the unequal distribution of wealth globally. I found myself increasingly absorbed into the orbits of Amazon, its exponential growth and what it has come to symbolize. It was Amazons former CEO, after all, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans in our planets history, who joined the summer 2021 ten-minute Blue Origin flight to the edges of outer space to experience zero gravity. In the press conference he later stated, I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this ().

The curiosity about what unfolds behind the virtual and physical walls of Amazon fueled my dissertation, on which this book is based. I wanted to dive into the different worlds of those who essentially power it the workers, both of its e-commerce platform, Amazon.com, and of its digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. This book is my thank-you to you, for your trust, time and efforts to let me into your world in an attempt to shed some light on your realities. Having to accept that research itself is bound to the time and space in which we pursue and develop it, I hope that it is in a future step that I integrate not just your class but also more of your gendered and racialized subjectivities and material realities. This book thus presents part of these realities but is far from claiming their entireties.

It has always been important to me not to speak for the workers. I was eager to access the field through ethnographic participant observations to grasp their dynamics, contexts and experiences in their world of work. Accessing Amazon warehouses has been more traditional and straightforward, as Amazon for one offers public tours. I thank Leo Bieling and Thorsten Schulten, who took on the supervision of my dissertation and encouraged my fieldwork. Thorsten, you helped me establish my initial contact to ver.di, given my focus on the German context. I am grateful to ver.di for allowing me to join meetings and industrial action, during which I first spoke to Amazon workers, and to UNI Global Union both Nigel Flanagan and Nick Rudikoff for inviting me to transnational union meetings. Thank you for supporting and defending our positions as researchers and recognizing our role in the struggle. I am indebted to at least a dozen warehouse workers who trusted me in their (in)formal interviews, at times out of a common interest to get the word out a task intrinsic to research itself, in other times, based on our racialized and gendered subjectivities. For them, it has been a show of solidarity and empowerment to support me as a woman of color. I deeply value these acts of solidarity.