Being a fun sort of a guy my Christmas reading is David Harvey’s book The Limits To Capital. On page 42 Harvey writes “The labourer gives up rights to control over the process of production, to the product and to the value incorporated in the product in return for the value of labour power… Everything else is appropriated as surplus value….” He could have been thinking about Amazon while he was penning those lines.

The Murdoch press hasn’t made its reputation by indignant undercover reporting of hyperexploitation so it was a bit unexpected for The Times to run a story about how rubbish it is if you have the misfortune to work for Amazon. The staff who get the stuff off the shelves, pack and despatch it are called  “fulfilment centre associates”. That sounds like a great job walking around fulfiling people all day. Not really. According to the workers’ friend,The Times, staff have to pack 140 xboxes an hour. They are entitled to a 15 minute break and a 20 minute break during an eight hour shift in which they may have to walk up to 14 miles. Naturally you have to ask to go to the toilet and they award penalty points for taking time off sick even if you have a doctor’s note. The money is commensurate with the general misery. The hourly rate for a day shift is £6.30, 57p more than the minimum wage. Oh and if you don’t have your own transport it costs £8.50 per day to use the company bus to get to the Amazon warehouse if you are a temp employed by Quest Employment.

The Times report adds that “fulfilment centre associates” have to work “a compulsory 10½hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shift, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.”

Amazon does not contradict anything in The Times report. Their view is that they are a listening, democratic type of employer and they even let their staff tell them as much. “We want our associates to enjoy working at Amazon.co.uk and the interests of all workers are represented by a democratically elected employee forum who meets regularly with senior management. This forum was consulted before the workforce elected to reduce breaks to 15 and 20 minutes on an eight hour shift in order to cut the total working day by half an hour.” That’s according to Allan Lyall, Vice President of EU Operations.

Now when even a paper as unsympathetic to working people as The Times says “Amazon also keeps down overheads by paying Christmas temporary staff low wages and making them work as hard as possible”. It’s useful to contrast the conditions at Amazon with life in a section of the distribution industry which is unionised such as the Royal Mail. Notwithstanding the erosion of conditions and the loss of jobs the Royal Mail has some way to go before workers there are casualised and degraded to the extent that is happening in relatively new firms like Amazon.

By any measure cds are now much cheaper than they were ten or fifteen years ago. Firms like Amazon have helped force down the prices  of thousands of commodities by taking advantage of weak union organisation, low levels of militancy and class consciousness and a labour market in which secure jobs with fairly basic rights are at a premium.

Does anyone out there know of any successful attempts to try and unionise firms like this?