Thread by @doctorow

AI researchers talk about "centaurs" - machine-human collaborative teams that outperform either computers or people. The greatest chess players in the world are collaborations between chess-masters and chess software.

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But not all centaurs are created equal. A "reverse centaur" is what happens when a human is made to assist a machine, rather than the other way around. Amazon may not have invented the reverse centaur, but they perfected it.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/rev…

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Take the "Mechanical Turk," a massive cohort of precarious, sub-minimum-wage pieceworkers who do human decision support for automated processes. There's a reason that South Asian labor activists say "AI" stands for "absent Indians."

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Or Amazon warehouse automation: Amazon warehouse robots can't pick-and-pack the items they locate, so they shuttle them to human pickers at a dangerous tempo. The more automated an Amazon warehouse becomes, the more injuries it reports.

ft.com/content/087fce…

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Reverse-centaurism isn't the only human-life-destroying area where Amazon leads. It's also a leader in "#chickenization," a labor economics term that comes from the US poultry industry, where workers are misclassified as independent contractors.

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The poultry packers have divided the country into noncompeting territories, so "independent" farmers only have one vendor who'll take their birds. The farmers have to buy their chicks from that monopolist, who also specs their feed, medicine and housing.

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The farmers are told everything - except what they'll be paid. When the farmers bring their birds to market, the monopolist exploits its information asymmetry advantage to offer just enough for the farmer to start over again, but not enough to get ahead or out of debt.

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Chickenization is like avian flu: prone to jumping its niche and spreading virulently to every corner of the world. Chickenization is now rampant across all labor markets, from call-centers:

pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chi…

to medical care:

pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/alw…

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Amazon loves chickenization, too. Its Flex delivery program uses employees misclassified as independent contractors, paying sub-minimum wage. The company subjects these drivers to constant overt and covert surveillance.

pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/fre…

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But as bad as Flex is, it's not the end-state of Amazon's innovative workplace terrors. For that, you need to look at Delivery Service Partners (DSP), a workforce of chickenized reverse-centaurs. This is some peak innovation right here.

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Writing for @wired, @caitharr describes the suffocating horror of chickenized reverse-centaurs.

Amazon claims that DSP drivers don't work for them. Instead, they work for "entrepreneurs" who buy Amazon delivery vans and pay drivers to operate them.

wired.com/story/some-ama…

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There are 158,000 DSP drivers, working for 2,500 DSPs. They wear Amazon uniforms and drive Amazon vans. Amazon packs those vans with reverse-centaur gear: Rabbit (realtime tracking), Mentor (automatic driver-scoring) and Netradyne (a mesh of always-on AI spy cameras).

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Amazon DSP vans have Netradyne cameras inside and out, including one that is always trained on drivers' faces, performing digital phrenology on them, scoring them based on junk-science microexpression detection and other imaginary metrics.

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Now DSP drivers aren't just expected to match an impossible machine pace by limiting water intake so bathroom breaks won't derail the 300 packages they deliver during a 10-hour shift.

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Netradyne cameras are next-level reverse-centaurism. They make sure you're not yawning while you deliver 300 packages during a 10-hour shift - and if you do, they deduct points and notify your manager.

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And because they're both chickenized and reverse-centaured, DSP drivers are left with little recourse. Amazon doesn't allow any individual DSP to 40 vans. That means that if a DSP's drivers unionize, Amazon can just cut its contract with the DSP and put them all out of work.

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Unions are (maybe) finally coming to Amazon's US ops. The union drive at the Bessemer, AB warehouse could be the start of a new era for Amazon and its workers: fair wages and safe working conditions for the workforce that we've all come to depend on.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/dea…

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But that won't help DSP drivers win wage- and condition-parity with other drivers in the industry (UPS's unionized drivers make $38/h plus benefits and pensions). DSP doesn't work for Amazon, they work for an Amazon contractor.

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But as Harrington points out, there is precedent for this kind of fragmented workforce attaining labor justice. In the 1980s, large firms fired their custodial staff and replaced them with subcontractors working for staffing firms.

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The Justice For Janitors movement targeted the companies where these workers showed up for work, not the companies that sent them a paycheck. This got all the subcontractors' janitors ready to unionize: they signed union-cards en masse and doubled their wages.

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Justice for Janitors didn't have to contend with the kind of digital controls Amazon has mastered - but they also didn't have access to the Discord and Reddit forums where DSPs are organizing today.

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And Biden's NLRB is seeking to strike down Trump's annihilation of the "joint employer" classification that Obama used to force McDonald's franchisees to bargain with their workers.

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The 1935 National Labor Relations Act was wise to worker misclassification, and allowed workers to provided service to a company to unionize. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 gutted this protection by excluding contractors from collective bargaining.

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Flex drivers - and Uber drivers and other "gig economy" chickenizees - are prisoners to this exemption, and the PRO Act, which is headed for a showdown with the GOP in the Senate, would fix it, restoring the right to unionize.

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Follow @amazonda3 to learn more about Amazon drivers' campaign for fair wages and decent treatment.

Image: Todd Van Hoosear (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amaz…

CC BY-SA:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa…

Cryteria (modified)
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CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the…