Amazon jobs in Australia

Back in 2006, a guy called Chris Anderson, now a robotics hobbyist but then editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote a best-selling business prophecy. His book The Long Tail asserted that the near future of everything would be radically different from the present, still a “tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare”. Technology, he said, would soon be refined to the point that it could reflect and appease the uniqueness of every human urge. Mass culture would become niche culture and we would each be free and motivated to define our shape beyond the cookie cutter.

We would see this transition first, he declared, in the consumption of entertainment. Inexpensive digital reproduction meant that a greater variety of cultural items could be more cheaply bought and that an era of “selling less of more” would create both a business and artistic renaissance. Using the company Amazon, then still largely a vendor of books, CDs and DVDs, as his starting point, he predicted a time where we could really be us. If you wanted to watch the cinema of Godard or read the Restoration drama of Aphra Benn, you could. Heck, you probably would.

Since the publication of a manifesto that foretold the rise of consumer power and the death of the blockbuster, two things have occurred. The purchasing power of most Western consumers has diminished. The truly popular culture has become more monolithic. Properties like Fifty Shades of Grey, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, Twilight and all the literary crimes of Dan Brown eclipse the arthouse and have not altered the demand curve — neither on the Amazon Top Ten list, nor anywhere else.

The ongoing marketability of boy wizards and sparkly vampires does not, by any means, counter Anderson’s claim that all sorts of people can be drawn to all sorts of cultural challenges. I also believe that people, given the opportunity, will flourish in their curiosity. But, the thing that Anderson, and many other business analysts, overlook is that our consumer economy is not truly demand driven.  

[Razer: Uber boss’ departure is a cynical ploy and won’t make the company ‘more ethical’]

This week in Australia we learned for certain that our consumption would soon be driven by supplier, Amazon. This is one foreign player local reporters are happy to embrace, with local site Lifehacker not even bothering to temper its longing with real analysis. “There can be little doubt that Amazon’s presence in Australia will affect local retail: that’s what disruptors do,” said the report. But don’t worry about it, because “it will also be injecting a swag of new, locally sourced jobs into the economy”.

This is some claim. While it’s true that Amazon, which will be headquartered in south-east Melbourne close to both major freeways and a large population of the desperate and underemployed, will generate a few hundred jobs, it is also true that the company does not boast an exemplary employment record. Vanity Fair has published an account of Amazon’s digital wall of employee shame. Salon offers a record of a culture of systematised bullying. Business Insider reports on suffocating warehouse conditions that have caused employees to faint. The Independent describes the feudal conditions at a Scottish property where impoverished workers live in tents beside their lord. The New York Times, the BBC and even the conservative UK Telegraph have published on the low wages, unintelligible contracts and physical hardship to which employees are subject.

I guess for the sake of balance, we should also include a recent report by The Washington Post, owned, as is Amazon, by Jeff Bezos, a man who last month briefly overtook Bill Gates to become the world’s wealthiest individual. The paper shows thousands eager to work at the company, and even finds a “liberal-leaning” intellectual to say that the $14 per hour jobs, “could actually be a real positive for income equality”.

[Even Keating now admits that neoliberalism should be dragged out the back and shot]

Just how an annual, often unsecured wage of less than $30,000, a bracket in which more than half of all US workers find themselves, works to restore anything other than Bezos’ lost top spot on the global rich list is quite beyond my macroeconomic understanding. But, then again, so is Amazon itself to a majority of pundits who can say things like “that’s what disruptors do!” with a smile.

The true purpose of Amazon is not lost on shareholders, however, who continue to invest in it precisely because it is a company that saves on the variable capital of labour and seeks to destroy all competition. That the company has only shown a few quarters of profit in its 20-year history doesn’t matter one bit. If it continues to dominate consumer markets — cheered on by naifs who celebrate a “swag” of “locally sourced jobs!”– someone other than Jeff will probably see some dividends.

There are a few who see Bezos, once an unapologetic libertarian oligarch, as a political opportunist and as a destroyer, not creator, of jobs. Among them is early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer, whose famously “banned” Ted talk is certainly worth a view. There are those of the one per cent so troubled by a lack of sleep, they are prepared to say not only that monoliths like Amazon destroy jobs, but will ultimately undermine the economies on which they currently feed.

If we’re all earning that “inequality busting” wage described in The Washington Post, we’ll all be unable to buy even the low-cost goods of Amazon. But. Hey, that’s what disruptors do! They provoke inevitable crisis in the systems that brought them life.