Is There A Union in Amazon's Future?

 

Amazon is one of the biggest and most powerful corporations on Earth.  It is one of the main reasons why shopping nowadays usually involves a smart phone and a delivery truck rather than a drive down to a brick-and-mortar store.  Its tremendous dominance was only increased by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down (and often eventually shuttered) many local and regional in-person businesses, but only improved Amazon's bottom line.  So when such a corporate giant faces a threat to unionize, it's big news.

 

Over half a million people work for Amazon worldwide.  Most of them are low-level warehouse employees who typically spend ten-hour shifts keeping up with the robots that tell them everything from which package to pack into which box down to how often they can go to the bathroom.  Working at an Amazon warehouse is no picnic, and yearly turnover rates approach 100% in some places.  In Bessemer, Alabama, at one of Amazon's warehouse facilities, a few workers decided they'd had enough and approached the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to see if they could jump through the necessary hoops to hold an election about organizing a local.

 

A recent article on the Wired website points out that the twenty-first century has not been kind to U. S. unions.  Union membership, as a percentage of all workers, has declined from a high of 27 percent in 1979 to 11 percent more recently, so forming a union at an Amazon facility would be bucking the trend.

 

A personal note:  I am no fan of unions, having grown up in the famously anti-union state of Texas, and having had an unpleasant personal encounter with a faculty union at my former university in Massachusetts.  I won't say the union there was the main reason I left Massachusetts for Texas, but it didn't incline me to stay, either. 

 

Nevertheless, I recognize that if powerful corporations in need of employees are left strictly to their own devices in a competitive environment, they will tend to extract the maximum amount of labor for the minimum amount of pay, and that labor will work under conditions designed to maximize the corporation's profit, and not to make the workers' lives easier.  That seems to be what has happened in Amazon's warehouses, which are among the most automated in the world.  But even Amazon hasn't yet been able to devise a "lights-out" warehouse (no people inside) which can handle the unimaginable variety of stuff that Amazon sells.  So they hire lots of workers, work them very hard, and when the workers get tired of it or suffer work-related injuries, they leave and Amazon hires others.

 

Believe it or not, something like this went on for decades with another monopoly:  AT&T, back when it was the Bell System.  Look into the biographies of middle-class women who were in their 20s from the 1910s up to the 1950s, and the chances are surprisingly good that they spent time as a telephone operator.  It didn't take a lot of special training, the jobs were spread out all over the country, and typically an operator's career tided her over between high-school graduation and when she got married.  It was not as physically demanding a job as working for Amazon is today, but it was tedious, and eventually AT&T operators and technicians joined a union that became the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in the late 1940s.  The union led some strikes in the 1950s and 1960s, but by then the network was so automated that supervisory personnel stepped in to keep the phones ringing.  And as the number of operator jobs declined, so did the clout and influence of the union.

 

Did the CWA improve the lot of phone-company employees?  As there is no way to rewind history and run it again without the CWA, it's hard to tell.  And the same thing goes for the question of unionization at Amazon.  As with most controversial issues, the dire prophecies at both extremes are probably not going to happen.  While working at Amazon is not done for jollies, it also does not typically wreck the lives of all who enter its doors.  And while unionizing Amazon employees would no doubt take away some money from the company's bottom line, it's not like they're running on fumes.  One share of Amazon stock would currently set you back $3,300 these days, and it's nearly doubled since 2018. 

 

Human justice is always an inferior approximation to divine justice, and unions, being made of fallible people just like corporations are, are not the surefire answer to every worker's prayers.  Everything is so politicized these days, including unions, that whatever union might be formed for Amazon employees would perforce become a supporter of the Democratic Party, whose winning candidate for president is currently doing what he can to create a more favorable environment for unions generally.  If a union of Amazon employees would stick to its knitting and use every dime of dues to better the working conditions of its members, then I'd have no objection.  But if it went the way of all too many unions these days and turned into yet another self-perpetuating bureaucracy supporting a few well-paid union tycoons on the backs of the lowly exploited workers, then I'd say it should be sent to perdition, with no return address on the package.

 

The unionization vote in Bessemer failed, by the way, although the union is saying it's going to fight the results in court.  The times being what they are, chances that unionization of Amazon workers somewhere will succeed eventually are fairly high, and then we'll get to see if the RWDSU will live up to its promises.  If they do, well and good, because it would be nice if one of the few manufacturing-like job categories that is in a growth mode became a more viable option for more people—and if it paid enough to support a family, for instance, without landing the breadwinner in the hospital or rehab.  If they don't, well, the only way we'll get rid of it is if Amazon finally figures out how to run that lights-out warehouse, and lays off its last unionized warehouse worker some day in the future.

 

Sources:  The Wired article "As Amazon Workers Organize, They Stress: 'We Are Not Robots'" by Caitlin Harrington appeared on Apr. 9 at https://www.wired.com/story/we-are-not-robots-amazon-bessemer-union-result/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Communication Workers of America. 

Can Democracy in America Survive Big Tech?

 

Two articles I came across recently raise the question in the headline of today's column.  One is by a journalist named Allum Bokhari, who gave a speech last November at Hillsdale College, one of the very small number of U. S. colleges that does not accept Federal grants, loans, or other funding.  The other is by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitics specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  Both gentlemen are deeply concerned that social media, as it now works, constitute an existential threat to American small-d democratic government.

 

Kaplan is concerned that social media may create conditions in which the "fragile, perhaps even ephemeral" experiment called American democracy cannot survive.  His studies of nation-states range widely over time and geography.  The old USSR, he points out, was not defeated from without by nuclear or conventional warfare.  Rather, it was destroyed by internal weaknesses and a crisis of purpose that led to its disintegration.  Regarding the present rivalry between the U. S. and China, he sees social media playing radically different roles in the two countries.

 

In China, the authoritarian government ensures that everything on social media reinforces the "blood-and-soil nationalism" of the dominant Han cultural matrix.  Traces of dissent are ruthlessly stamped out, and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs are suppressed and even locked up in concentration camps.  There is basically one political story available in China, and social media reinforce it.

 

In the U. S., on the other hand, Big Tech effectively control social media, and recent events emphasize the subtle but increasingly effective control they exert.  The dominant vision embraced by those who inhabit the upper reaches of corporate and cultural America is a transnational one which, when it looks at American history at all, sees a story of exploitation and shame, exemplified by the New York Times's "1619 Project" that attempted to show that the founders based America on slavery, not on anything noble.  Even worse, the economics of social media have come to embrace the divide-and-conquer principle that feeding different kinds of people what they most want to hear means cutting up the citizenry into "racial, gender, political, or sexual" identity groups that are often pitted against each other, to the great loss of the basic unity that any nation needs to survive.

 

Allum Bokhari brings his experience with Breitbart News to the table.  While I am no fan of Breitbart News, the old principle of free speech (much abused lately) says that every voice deserves to be heard, if not believed.  And he brings some indisputable facts to the table that are worth considering.

 

Unlike the early days of the Internet when no single social-media platform was dominant and everybody had more or less equal access to everybody else's website, today's Internet is a creature of the Google-Facebook-Amazon complex of corporate control.  And control is the right word.  The velvet glove of free apps and fun-looking websites conceals an iron hand of manipulation that is so subtle and complex, powered by advanced AI software, that the vast majority of users have little or no idea that they are being manipulated.  But they are.  

 

Cadres of software engineers spend countless hours devising complex algorithms to change behavior, not only to the benefit of advertisers on Big Tech's media, but for other reasons as well.  One quote that Bokhari reports from a source he interviewed at Facebook says it all:  “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.”  If this isn't manipulation, I don't know what is.

 

In recent months, the manipulation and control has come above ground for everyone to see.  Bokhari cites the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech firms in de-platforming President Trump, and of Amazon and Apple in kicking the upstart social-media platform Parler off their equipment (or in the case of Apple, off the privately owned phones of millions of users).  One can argue about the motivations for such actions.  But the bare fact of the actions remain:  privately owned companies, largely unhindered and in fact protected by government regulation from lawsuits that private individuals can be subject to (that is what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does), unilaterally censored an entire social-media network regardless of who or what was on it, and also censored the sitting President of the United States. 

 

For those who can remember the old days of only three television networks, the only analogous action I can imagine would be if the President decided to make a speech one day, and in the middle of his words spoken to the "pool" camera that all three networks were taking their video feed from, executives decided to pull the switch and return to their regular programming of the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever.  Nothing like that ever happened, but if it had, the roars of outrage from common citizens of every political viewpoint would have been deafening. 

 

Today, roars—or anything else—can't be heard unless Big Tech approves of the roar.  The dominant progressive political views of the transnational cultural elite who are in charge are squeezing out the wide spectrum of views that, no matter how annoying some of the extremes are, turn out to be vital to the survival of democracy.  To those who deplore disagreement and debate, I would say this:  disagreement and debate are features of democracy, not bugs.  Cut them off and you are left with a softer form of what China has:  a homogenized, uniform, expert-driven technocracy that maintains the form of democracy, perhaps, but denies its power.  If this nation, which has endured for 245 years, is to preserve government "of the people, by the people, for the people," the malignant effects of social media and corporate control must be dealt with.  And soon, before it is too late.

 

Sources:  Allum Bokhari's post, based on a modified version of his Nov. 8, 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, is available at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/control-need-rein-big-tech/.  Robert D. Kaplan's article "How We Lose Against China" appeared in the Feb. 8, 2021 issue of National Review on pp. 27-29.

Amazon's Ban on Police Use of Its Face Recognition Software

Last Wednesday, June 10, the tech giant Amazon announced that it was banning police agencies from using its face recognition technology Rekognition for a year.  The company gave no official reason for its timing, although it comes less than two weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police force. 

Critics have charged that face recognition technology in general, and Rekognition in particular, has biases when it comes to race or gender.  According to an Associated Press report, in the past Amazon has defended its software against the results of studies by MIT researchers who showed that such software marketed by Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM sometimes made mistakes that put darker-skinned people and women at a disadvantage.  (Microsoft and IBM pledged to address the deficiencies as a result.)  Amazon's product is a fairly minor player in a field that includes products from Japan and Europe as well, which many police agencies use.  Both Amazon and other producers have called for federal regulation of face recognition technology amid concerns of abuse and bias.

Another portion of the human anatomy has been used for identification by police and security agencies for decades, largely without recent controversy:  the unique patterns on fingertips.  But at least so far, fingerprints cannot be sensed remotely, and taking them usually requires the cooperation or at least physical contact with the individual being examined.  With the proper optical technology, one can image a face from a distance of a kilometer or more, leading to the possibility of mass identification in crowds with software that can unambiguously connect faces to persons.

Speaking from an engineering ethics viewpoint, we can identify the parties in this controversy as follows.  There are the firms that make face-recognition technology.  There are the customers and potential customers for such technology, which include but are not limited to law-enforcement agencies, governments in general, and also private firms wanting to make personalized advertisement appeals, for example.  There are regulatory agencies with the potential ability to regulate such technology.  And then there is the general public, a subset of whom are criminals, but the vast majority of whom are just ordinary people trying to live their lives in these lately rather extraordinary times. 

The dangers of misusing face-recognition technology are many, even if it works perfectly.  In China, for example, it is already being used in combination with other techniques to monitor movements and activities of the general public in what we in the U. S. would consider gross violations of privacy.  But even if the agency using the technology was entirely benign (and if there are real human beings running it, it won't be entirely benign), flaws in the technology such as a preferential tendency to make false positive identifications of darker-skinned people will lead to injustices such as innocent persons being identified, and possibly arrested and worse, in connection with wrongs they did not commit. 

So concerns like these are probably behind the motivation that made Amazon ban its Rekognition software from police use for a year.  Such concerns comprise at least one reason that face-recognition firms have called for federal regulation of the technology as well.

However, it does seem rather perverse for a company to defend a product they made for police departments, only to turn around and take it away from them for a year.  And here I wish to tread lightly, because in today's "cancel culture," anything you say can be used against you, as the police used to say (and maybe still say, for all I know).  Only you used to have to be formally charged with a crime for that to be the case, but no longer.  Anyway, here goes.

The publicity surrounding George Floyd's death has led to both intense outrage expressed in print, in words, and in massive demonstrations, as well as to criminal acts such as looting and rioting.  Understandably, a lot of the hostility inspired by Floyd's death has been directed against law enforcement agencies ranging from local police organizations up to and including the federal government.  Recently, some have called for "defunding" police forces, the interpretation of which varies, but at a minimum means a punishing cut in financial support.

Order is a fundamental need for any functioning society.  It is not the ultimate good of society, which lies elsewhere, but it is needed as much as food and water.  Because there are always a few people who will not follow the rules simply because someone in authority tells them to, most functioning societies of any size have law-enforcement agencies. 

The modern concept of law includes the principle that it applies equally to everybody.  Sometimes the police fall short in trying to achieve that ideal, and certain groups that include minorities receive unfair treatment.  Every reasonable means should be used to try to remedy such wrongs, and to get closer to the ideal of equal treatment under the law. 

But to penalize entire organizations for the wrong acts of a few of their members is to erode the very thing we are trying to achieve, namely, equal treatment under the law.  A crippled (or, perish the thought, abolished) police force will lead to increased disorder, and a reaction that may well institute a much harsher order than any of us want. 

Speaking specifically of Amazon and Rekognition, if the software really didn't work that well, Amazon should never have sold it to the police in the first place.  Taking it away for a year looks suspiciously like the time I took away my 10-year-old nephew's toys for a day to punish him for not minding his aunt and uncle.  And one can certainly question the right of a private company to punish police departments, which are under the authority of those governmental divisions that control them, not Amazon. 

Sources:  The Associated Press article about Amazon's banning Rekognition from police use appeared in numerous news outlets, including the Tampa Bay Times on June 12 at https://www.tampabay.com/news/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-its-face-recognition-for-a-year/.  The argument about the rule of law was inspired by an interview I heard with Princeton professor Robert P. George on the Sheila Liaugminas Relevant Radio network show "A Closer Look."

Welcome to the All-Digital Economy

. . . and how's that working out for you?

The United States, along with many other industrialized nations, is currently engaged in a large-scale experiment that is in some ways the realization of the fondest dreams of a small but influential segment of the population.  For some time now, many investors, as well as leaders of the dominant high-tech companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.—have strived to move us toward an ideal future in which all human interaction and economic activity would take place by means of digital platforms—owned and operated by them, of course.  This ideal world would consist of two classes:  the small symbolic-manipulator elites of owners, designers, and engineers who create and operate these platforms and profit mightily therefrom; and the masses of consumers whose only useful function is to use what the platforms provide. 

Well, the shelter-in-place orders that affect about half the U. S. population and have shuttered all non-essential businesses have violently catapulted us into this ideal future in a matter of a couple of weeks.  And so far, the results are not good.

Yes, a few lines of business have benefited:  food-delivery services, the online videoconferencing system Zoom, and those who provide binge-watched TV series.  But we have also seen the largest number of applications for unemployment benefits in history (over 3 million last week), a stock market slide resembling an avalanche, and a level of economic uncertainty that has no parallel in living memory. 

I have the privilege of knowing one of the few people in the U. S. whose weekly routine has been almost completely untouched by these events.  He is not a resident of a desert island, nor a fantastically wealthy hermit living in an isolated compound with years worth of supplies.  It's just that for years now, he has been following the shelter-in-place rules by choice.  This relative of mine acquired enough funds to retire about twenty years ago, and chooses to live by himself and spend most of his waking hours online in chatrooms, watching YouTube programs, and viewing the occasional sports show on TV.  He ventures outside once a week or so for grocery shopping, but other than the occasional medical problem, he has no other human contact, and likes it that way.  The only inconvenience he has experienced so far from the coronavirus restrictions is that he had to go to four grocery stores last week to find bread—the first three were sold out.  But other than that, his lifestyle is largely undisturbed.

A nation can afford only so many people like my relative.  It's a free country, so far, and so if a person chooses to cut himself off from society like that, he is allowed to do so.  But we are currently experiencing what happens when he is joined by dozens of millions more forced to live that way.  Yes, we're glad there are such things as Zoom, Netflix, YouTube, and for that matter, cellphones, electric utilities, and water supplies.  But we are also finding out by direct experience that a vast part of our economy consists of embodied people going places and being together to do useful and entertaining things.  And when you cut that part out, everybody suffers in one way or another—the subsistence-wage person who loses the low-wage service job at a restaurant or movie theater, to the wealthiest investor who has seen his net worth decline by a third recently. 

Underlying the prejudice in favor of digital everything, and the corresponding disdain for people and industries that make things rather than bitstreams, is a kind of Gnostic dualism.  The Gnostics were sects popular in the early years of the Christian era.  One prominent branch of Gnosticism believed that the universe was divided into a good spiritual part and a bad material part.  Because the physical human body was material, they disdained it and believed that the real person was a good spirit who just happened to be imprisoned in a decaying material body.  The goal of life was to free yourself from the body and all its trappings, and rejoin the other good spirits after death.  Or something like that.

Well, we are finding out what happens when we all become temporary Gnostics, and eschew as much human contact with each other and with our physical workplaces as we can.  The distant goal of having everybody exist mainly online as an anticipation of the day hoped for by transhumanists (a popular movement in Silicon Valley) when we can all free ourselves from our mortal biological "meat cages" and live forever as software, has just jumped into our laps without being invited. 

The fact is that human beings are creatures that don't just inhabit bodies:  we are bodies, but we are also more than our bodies.  We are also immaterial minds, but a mind without a body is incomplete, as is a body without a mind.  Any rational political economy will acknowledge this fact, and will plan for a future that includes bodies as well as minds—full human beings interacting in accordance with human nature, which—despite the last few hundred years of innovations in philosophy, science, and culture—has not changed. 

We as a nation will get through the coronavirus pandemic somehow, though not without serious losses that could have been mitigated with more foresight.  But the experiment we are now undergoing of trying to live all-digital lives holds lessons for us that we can all profit from, and I don't mean just dollars and cents. 

Here's an idea:  if your life has been disrupted by the pandemic, start writing a list of things you miss from back before the pandemic began.  Ask yourself why these things were important.  And when things get back to whatever the new normal will be, don't lose the list.  Ask yourself, and ask your leaders, what things we have chased after too hard, and what things we have neglected.  And then let's try to apply the lessons that this experiment is teaching us, before we forget about the whole thing and go back to the mistakes we were making before.

Sources:  The 3 million unemployment compensation applications recorded for the week of Mar. 22-28, 2020 were reported in numerous sources such as The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemployment-rate-coronavirus-business.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Gnosticism. 

Safe People or Safe Systems? The Ring Security Breach

On Wednesday, December 4, eight-year-old Alyssa LeMay heard the sound of Tiny Tim singing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" coming from her bedroom upstairs in her home in Mississippi.  As she walked into the room, the music stopped and she heard a voice say, "Hello there."  As she looked around the room to see where the voice was coming from, it called her a racial slur which was neither acceptable nor accurate, claimed that it was the voice of Santa Claus, and told her to start misbehaving by, for example, breaking her TV.

Having more sense than to listen to such temptations, she went downstairs and told her father, "Someone's being weird upstairs."  He discovered that a Ring security camera that the family had bought during a Black Friday after-Thanksgiving sale had been taken over by someone who obviously wasn't supposed to be able to do that. 

The LeMays eventually contacted the Washington Post, whose story on the episode was republished widely.  When the LeMays called Ring to complain, they were told basically that the breach was their fault.  Ring determined that the bad actor had obtained the LeMay's username and password from another site and used them to hack into Alyssa's bedroom.  Ring castigated the LeMays for not using the two-step authorization method that Ring recommends.  In a statement published on Ring's website, the company said "we have investigated this incident and have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network."

Let's step back a moment and parse that statement.  What Ring means by unauthorized, and what the LeMays mean by unauthorized, appear to be two different things.  Only an authority, an entity or person capable of authorizing someone, can really authorize an intrusion or compromise.  For that matter, saying "unauthorized intrusion" is like saying "impermissible burglary."  I'm not aware of any kind of burglary that is permissible, or an intrusion that is authorized.  But the point is that the LeMays were by any reasonable standard, the only people who are logically empowered to authorize access to the camera, microphone, and speaker in their daughter Alyssa's bedroom.  They did not authorize the criminal who gained access to the Ring device, and therefore, by this reasonable, common-sense definition of "authorized," there was unauthorized access.

Now look at it from Ring's point of view, which by implication is Amazon's point of view, as Amazon owns Ring.  Think like a software lawyer for a minute.  When we sell a product to a consumer, we have to make sure that the consumer has enough information to avoid problems with the product.  We as lawyers observe the legal fiction that every one of our customers always reads all the fine print and boilerplate that comes with all our products, including the stuff about installing two-step verification for passwords, using strong passwords, and so on.  If we actually made the product so that it wouldn't work unless the user really took all these complicated measures, very few people except computer nerds and lawyers would buy it, so we make it so it will work even if you leave your username as "1234" and your password as "password."  But if the user is so negligent, stupid, (fill in your favorite lawyerly pejorative adjective here) as to not take the recommended precautions, well, too bad.  We've done our lawyerly job, and if anything goes wrong it's on the consumer's head.  To us, "unauthorized" means that somebody hacked into our system and was able to access a device that even the most computer-savvy consumer installed with all the security bells and whistles.  And that didn't happen here, so we are blameless.  Legally speaking.

There is a progression in the safety and security of innovative technologies that often follows a well-known pattern.  At first, a new technology requires the users to learn lots of detailed precautions that must be followed to avoid injury or other types of harm.  But as the technology becomes more widespread and lesser-trained people use it, the harms that can come from uneducated users sometimes happen more often, so often that the very existence and continued use of the technology is threatened.  Only then will the technology's designers step back and ask themselves, "How can we make this really foolproof, so that someone who knows next to nothing about it can nevertheless use it safely?"  At that point, engineers begin to design safety into the technology itself.  It may cost a little more, but the improvement in safety when used by untrained personnel is usually worth it.

This pattern happened with railroading, it happened with automobiles, and in some ways it's happened with computer and information technology.  But not nearly enough, as Alyssa's story shows.  In consumer electronics, where ease of use and cheapness are two paramount requirements, security often becomes an afterthought.  A non-technically-trained user who simply wants to be able to check on his or her daughter with a camera should not be expected to do anything that isn't strictly necessary to set up the system.  The two-step verification security precaution obviously wasn't necessary for the camera to work, so the LeMays didn't do it.  And by reusing passwords—an unfortunate but understandable practice in these days of seventeen gazillion passwords that all our devices and services demand of us—they created a situation in which some hacker stole their credentials and used them to access the Ring device in Alyssa's room.

Ring wants their consumers to be safe people—people who don't reuse passwords and who read enough of the fine print in the online instructions to go the extra mile and install extra, though non-necessary, security precautions.  But people, by and large, want safe systems—systems that simply will not work unless they are set up with sufficient security to begin with.  And history shows that the systems and technologies that survive beyond a highly trained niche market are usually safe systems—systems that anybody off the street can get running with a minimum of effort without running the risk of endangering himself, herself, or one's family members. 

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the Washington Post's article "Camera in child's room hacked, 8-year-old harassed" on pp. E3-E4 of their Dec. 15, 2019 edition.  The statement from Ring concerning this incident can be found at https://blog.ring.com/2019/12/12/rings-services-have-not-been-compromised-heres-what-you-need-to-know/.