Amazon Employees Tweet Happiness from Fulfillment Centers - Slog - The Stranger

What the workers at the Happiness Center might look like... alvarez/gettyimages.com
Seattle Times

reports that a "group of more than a dozen Amazon Twitter users in the last two weeks started responding to critics of the company on the social media site." Their job is to counter negative tweets with ones about the wholesome wonderfulness of life in town-sized warehouses called Fulfillment Centers. These workers are "identified by first names and 'Amazon FC Ambassador.'" Each of these Amazon social media ambassadors "opened a Twitter account this month." Their message comes down to this: Amazon is not exploiting their workers because the workers are not sad and screwed but happy to work for the e-commerce giant whose CEO has more money than there are stars in the sky. In mere seconds, he makes more money than the average employee in a warehouse makes in a year. The ambassadors are even positive about the astronomical difference between themselves and their boss. “As an amazon employee," tweeted Sean, "I leave my shift stress free knowing I completed a hard days work. The company that brings him wealth is still able to treat me and my coworkers with respect and provide us great wages and benefits…” In short: What more does an American worker want out of life?

amazon literally has bot accounts that follow the same strict format now. dystopian

[Name] - Amazon FC Ambassador 📦 @AmazonFC[Name]


[Role] @ [Amazon location]. [X] year Amazonian. [Hobby], [Hobby], and [Hobby].
Following: 0
Registered in August 2018 pic.twitter.com/N66pfPZ8eR
— Vanson (@slutaburger) August 24, 2018

But what is wrong with this super-positive social media campaign? Why does it make a depressing situation appear to be even more depressing? Because its purpose is to rob the worker of a happiness that might be their own. Happiness cannot just be outside of work, or when you clock out. The boss also wants that, too. This doesn't mean all work needs to be bad or soul-sucking, but at least you must be free to decide what does and doesn't make you happy. And often, it is not the job, which for most is nothing more than a means to get things you need or desire. This understanding is not subversive. The struggle for higher wages and better benefits is based entirely on it. The purpose of a company is not to make workers happy, but to make a profit. And wages take a big bite out of profits.

So, why does the boss want the happiness of workers? French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon's book Willing Slaves of Capital has the answer. It goes something like this: In the old days, workers knew that their time at work was not theirs but bought/owned by the company. Their time was off the clock. And so there was this tension between work and the outside. In the latter, you could be you; in the former, you weren't you. But around the 1970s, there was a massive structural change in the economy, and as a consequence, a transformation of labor/management relations. Unions went into decline, managers became committed not to the companies they ran but to their shareholders, and workers were atomized. Attached to this atomization (or individualization), were the ideas of a school, based at University of Chicago, that replaced "class consciousness" (inside/outside) with a subjectivity that measured all aspects of life in entrepreneurial terms. Drinking, driving, working, stealing, sleeping, fucking, or raising children could be seen as situations that had clear economic outcomes. Gary Becker, the father of human capital, was the leader in this kind of thinking.

These ideas constructed a subject who wasn't really going to work but instead taking advantage of a business opportunity in the market. A he or she was now in competition with other enterprises for available ventures. In this way, the only boss could be you. As Lordon points out, this radical restructuring of the life-world of capitalism resulted in an alignment of the interests of all, from top to bottom, in an enterprise. The entrepreneurial subject had to be happy, in the way his or her boss, also an entrepreneur, was happy. This erased the line between the outside and inside. Home was also inside. The bedroom was inside. For homo economicus, happiness was as much at the desk or counter or factory or boardroom as the bar or cafe or country club or sofa in the living room.

But none of this is new. It's very old. "Making the dominated happy so that they forget their domination is one of the oldest and most effective ruses of the art of ruling," writes Lordon. But as a cultural mode, this form of domination (which claims not only your time but also happiness, and eliminates class issues like higher wages and social benefits—what usually makes workers happy), was achieved in the past 40 years.

Later, he writes:

Neoliberal... assumes the specific task of producing on a large scale desires that did not previously exist, or that existed only in a minority of capitalist enclaves: desires for happy labour, or, to borrow directly from its own vocabulary, desires for ‘fulfilment’ and ‘self-realisation’ in and through work. And the fact is that, at least instrumentally, it gets it right. Intrinsically sad or extrinsically joyful, the affects-desires that capitalism was proposing to its enlistees fell short of taking away the sting of the idea that ‘real life is elsewhere.’

Exactly. This is the source of this kind of sadness. The ontology of Amazon's happiness campaign is the removal of the hope that "real life is elsewhere." It is in the warehouse. It is a Fulfillment Center.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/08/24/31289926/amazon-employees-tweet-happiness-from-fulfillment-centers