'Amazon is focused on one thing – eliminating as many jobs as possible to enrich one multi-billionaire'

EDITOR'S NOTE: Click here to read a related New York Times story.

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

The opening of Amazon’s new cashier-less grocery in Seattle doesn't surprise sociologist David Nickell. 

"This is a big deal, and coming fast," said the professor at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and a longtime member of my union, American Federation of Teachers Local 1360. 

Business and industry owners and managers, he added, figure it's "always...more profitable to replace workers with technology."

Critics of the new store include the United Food and Commercial Workers, the nation's largest grocery union. Many members of Louisville-based UFCW Local 227 work in grocery stores across the Bluegrass State and in southern Indiana. 

“Amazon represents a clear and present danger to millions of good jobs," UFCW International President Marc Perrone said in a statement. "The brutal truth is that Amazon is focused on one thing – eliminating as many jobs as possible to enrich one multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos. Despite the failure of their Amazon Go stores, it is clear that Bezos is determined to pursue a ruthless strategy that is designed to destroy millions of grocery worker jobs.

“At a time when millions of Americans are already struggling, when most Americans are one paycheck away from disaster, what does it say that Bezos wants to create stores that serve food and groceries and eliminate the jobs real people need. Now, more than ever, it is time for our nation’s leaders – Democrats and Republicans – to wake up and act before Amazon and Jeff Bezos do permanent damage to America’s economy and the future of work.

“Make no mistake, the UFCW will make sure that Amazon’s ruthless business model is a 2020 election issue. Every voter – and every candidate running for office – will be made aware that they have a choice to make: support good jobs or support Amazon’s destruction of jobs.”

"The Seattle store "uses the same technology from the company’s previous Amazon Go stores that have faced a national backlash for discriminating against low-income shoppers and threatening good jobs," the AFL-CIO reported. "The continuation of cashier-free technology shows one of Amazon’s main goals is eliminating as many jobs as possible to take over America’s $800 billion grocery industry."

David has been studying job-gobbling technology and its impact on workers for years. He often cites his friend Wendell Berry and the Luddites, more on the latter in a minute. 

Berry is an internationally-known writer, environmental activist, social critic and farmer who lives in Henry County. Berry warns that advances in technology are creating a surplus population with no role for the surplused. He meant farmers and farm workers. But bailing water from the same leaky boat are blue- and white-collar workers who've lost--and are still losing--livelihoods to “progress.”

"The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines, or other technologies, to make the cost of production as low as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands," Berry said.  

He also zeroed in on those who "talk about 'job creation' as if that had ever been the aim of the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines."

Echoed David: "The bottom line is that this is the inevitable result of economic fundamentalism.... As [pioneer sociologist] Max Weber pointed out, capitalism transforms all value into monetary value...Communities, families, the environment we rely on, all suffer when we can recognize no value but money and determine our course based on profit alone."

in a 2017 story posted on the webpage, David also pointed out pointed out the big difference between meaningful work and just "having a job." He explained, "The alienation of the worker has now become so expected that it seems extremist even to point it out.  If the technologies were used properly, they would replace the alienating, tedious, and back breaking jobs, and not the people."

Anyway, the Luddites were early 1800s English textile mill workers who broke machines that were taking their jobs. Like Bezos, wealthy mill owners equated new technology with “progress” -- meaning more profit for them. The workers' supposed leader was Ned Ludd, hence the movement's name.

Today, "Luddite" is a slam for somebody like David and me who dares suggest that "technology" is not necessarily a synonym for "progress." 

In league with the mill owners, the British parliament, whose members were all rich and powerful men, passed laws to crush the Luddite movement. They also dispatched soldiers to shoot or arrest them; several Luddite leaders were hanged, imprisoned or transported to penal colonies in Australia.

"Time to reconsider the Luddites?" asked the headline on a 2014 story in the online U.S. edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper. The author, Robert Skidelsky, a professor at Warwick (England) University, wrote that Wal Mart and Amazon were "prime examples of new technology driving down workers' wages...Given the predictable improvement in computing power, there seems to be no technical obstacle to the redundancy of workers across much of the service economy."

Skidelsky recalled the Luddites. "They claimed that because machines were cheaper than labour, their introduction would depress wages. They argued the case for skill against cheapness. The most thoughtful of them understood that consumption depends on real income, and that depressing real income destroys businesses. Above all, they understood that the solution to the problems created by machines would not be found in laissez-faire nostrums."

In their headlong embrace of technology to boost their bottom lines, business and industry owners would do well to remember that jobless workers can't afford to buy the products made by the computers, robots and machines that replaced them.

For sure, unemployed mill workers couldn't afford the clothing the mechanized mills were producing. At the same time, cashiers thrown out of work won't have the wherewithal to shop at cashier-less stores.