labor

Most Mechanical Turkers are Young, College-Educated and Making Less Than $5 an Hour

Moshe Z. Marvit In These Times
Since 2005, a dispersed group of sub-minimum wage workers has been performing online tasks for pennies through an Amazon-controlled marketplace called Mechanical Turk. These workers tag photos, transcribe audio, take surveys, and do whatever current computer technology cannot. Their work-product is littered across the Internet, and through academic publications, but they have largely remained invisible.

Why Big Tech Companies Are Open-Sourcing Their AI Systems

Patrick Shafto
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been making remarkable progress in artificial intelligence. Recently they have released much of their work to the public for free use, and adaptation. This seems bizarre: why would companies reveal the methods at the core of their businesses? And what does their embrace of open-source AI say about the current state of artificial intelligence?

labor

Strikes at Amazon German Warehouses up to Christmas

Emma Thomasson and Alison Williams Rueters
German workers continue their fight against Amazon, over low pay and poor working conditions in the warehouses. The union Verdi is trying to push the retailer to raise pay in accordance with collective bargaining agreements in the industry. They have been striking at warehouses on and off since May 2013.

labor

Working for Amazon Sounds Utterly Soul Crushing

Maddie Stone Gizmodo
Amazon factories, with their insane, round-the-clock delivery schedules, are notoriously hellish places to work. But life at corporate Amazon isn’t exactly a picnic, either.

labor

The Amazonization of Everything

David Golumbia Jacobin
Amazon’s success lies in worker exploitation and intrusions into consumers’ private lives.

The Sharing Economy Must Share a Level Playing Field

Dean Baker Cato Unbound
Regulations serve a public purpose. It may not be necessary to maintain the same scope of regulation in all cases, and it certainly is not necessary to maintain the regulations in their current form, but it does not make sense to have one set of rules that apply to incumbent taxi services and a whole different set that applies to Uber. The appropriate policy going forward should be to modernize the regulatory structure and establish rules that apply equally ...

labor

NLRB Makes a Good Decision, Supreme Court a Bad Decision

Tom Raum, Adam Liptak Associated Press, NY Times
In a turn-around decision, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employees can use their workplace email to organize a union. The Supreme Court continued it's pro-business agenda by ruling that Amazon can detain workers at the end of their shift to search them, and they do not have to pay them for the time it takes.

labor

"Suffered or Permitted to Work" - When Is a Worker an Employee?

Ellen Dannin Truthout
At the end of each day, all the workers were required to pass through a security clearance checkpoint where they had to remove their keys, wallets, and belts, pass through a metal detector, and submit to being searched. The whole process could take up to 25 minutes. Should these workers be paid for the time they spend being searched?

labor

Amazon Warehouse Workers Want to Be Paid for Waiting in Line

Josh Eidelson Bloomberg Business Week
In 2010 two former employees of Integrity Staffing Solutions, a temp agency that supplies workers at many of Amazon’s U.S. warehouses, sued the company demanding back pay for the time they spent in security lines after clocking out at Amazon warehouses in Nevada. On Oct. 8 the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether that time counts as work.
Subscribe to Amazon