Taylorism Returns: Life under the algorithm, how a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class

I'm only putting up three paragraphs from this article off The New Republic, as I don't want to cause any copyright headaches.  This is a long, detailed article and is well worth your time.  It is a review of two recent books on this gig economy Victorian redux narrative.

In her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous experiment in Nickel and Dimed. Guendelsberger, a reporter for the alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper until it was sold off and shut down in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery was that there still existed an exploited working class—a controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these jobs are doing to the millions who work them.


In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away. 


Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.


https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm

Here's a videoclip of relevance from PBS Newshour:

An inside look at injury rates in Amazon warehouses

https://www.pbs.org/video/prime-risk-1574896564/

I really do not know why the formatting is all over the place, nor how to correct it.  My apologies.