Not all jobs in the information economy are are high-wage, high-skill jobs
that engender creativity and innovation. Consider the following story
about a $10 an hour job at one of the coolist companies: Amazon.com.
kelly
the Seattle Weekly
Published
July 16 - 22, 1998
Features
Today's knowledge worker is overworked, underpaid, and as badly beaten
with carrots as with sticks.
How I "escaped" from Amazon.cult
BY RICHARD HOWARD
December 10, 1997, 7:05 PM
I've just finished a grueling phone shift at Amazon.com, where I've
been working at one of two tables in a "quad"--a cubicle in a
windowless room carved up by partitions. I share my quad with three
other "Customer Service Tier 1 E-Mail Representatives." We sit two to
a table, with our backs to the backs of the other two at their table,
and talk constantly on the telephone in a voice that is supposed to be
loud enough for the customer to hear us and quiet enough to keep from
distracting our quadmates. I've been doing this for the past three and
a half weeks, spending fully half of my daily shift in one of Amazon's
telephone "queues," dealing with an endless stream of holiday-frazzled
shoppers and would-be shoppers. Not that we ever sink to the status of
lowly order-takers, mind you. We're more like guides: "I'm sorry,
ma'am, we're not set up to take orders over the phone--only through
our Web site . . . yes, it's really quite simple . . . yes, it's
perfectly safe to enter your credit card number online; just be sure
to click on 'Secure Server' . . . It's not working? One moment while I
transfer you to an order specialist. . . ." And so on, ad nauseam. You
manage to survive by telling yourself that every goal has its price.
And if you're an idealistic, young college grad with one of those
ubiquitous liberal-arts degrees and a dream of moving up the ladder in
a hot, technology-based Seattle start-up, the price you pay in this
case is an entry-level job worthy of the Electronic Sweatshop Seal of
Approval. And the price they pay you for your services is a
breathtaking $10 an hour, made marginally palatable by the constantly
whispered mantra of "stock options." I have time to take no more than
three deep breaths to unwind from the stress of talking nonstop for
four straight hours when I see my supervisor walking determinedly my
way. Normally this woman, whom I'll call Lisa, has her jaw worked into
an almost perpetual horsey grin, even when she's offering a critique
of my performance--which usually has to do with my failure to conform
my phone or e-mail responses tightly enough to the surprisingly rigid
format prescribed by management. I say "surprisingly" because the
superficial atmosphere around the headquarters of "Earth's Biggest
Bookstore" is one of alternative-minded, almost New Agey liberalism.
Capitalism with a kinder, gentler face. Everyone here seems as earnest
and personable as the workday is long (and the workdays feel really
long), and there's not a shade of cynicism anywhere. No wonder I feel
out of place around here. It doesn't help that I'm well over a decade
older than the average Amazon.com employee. The company makes a
conscious effort to hire intelligent and overwhelmingly youthful
just-out-of-college types because these are precisely the worker bees
most likely to buy into the hallowed Start-up Dream: Toss them a
little "win-win" free-enterprise prattle and the promise of a
promotion to a salaried position somewhere down the line and they'll
launch a Children's Crusade for you. (That salaried position, like the
stock options package, turns out to be sleight of hand . . . but more
on that later.) Lisa walks right up to me and asks if I've got time to
talk. She is straining to keep her voice neutral. Not having to
contend, for once, with the smile-borne glare of her thoroughbred
teeth, I notice her other features for the first time. Her eyes appear
a bit dull and tired; there's a furrow between her brows. I reply that
I really don't, that if I miss my bus, which arrives in about seven
minutes, I'll have to wait until almost eight for the next one. I
pause for a moment, then ask if it's urgent or something. She seems
not to know how to answer at first, then says that it is but that she
could always talk with me first thing in the morning. I tell her no
way--now that she's sounded her alarm bells, she can't honestly expect
me to wait until tomorrow to let her drop her little bombshell,
whatever it is. As if I couldn't guess. I can't deny that I've felt
like an alien in this curiously insular environment ever since I first
set foot in it; couple that with the temp-worker wages--for a
remarkably complex and demanding job, when all is said and done--and I
knew straightaway I was just going to be biding my time here. Still,
given the horse-shit pay, I never really dreamed they'd have the
audacity to actually care about how well you met their idiosyncratic
notions of attributes like "competence," "team skills," or "the right
attitude." But care they do. Lisa tells me I've been fired.
I should have known from the beginning that this wouldn't be a fit. At
the temp agency, after all, I had been warned by my recruiter--who'd
mentioned that the job involved a lot of rote memorization of cryptic
UNIX minutiae--that you could expect to do at least six months of hard
labor in the phone and e-mail "queues" before having any chance of a
promotion, and that promotions tended to be to supervisory positions
within Customer Service rather than Editorial, where I wanted to be.
No matter how unglamorous she made the job sound, though, it still
seemed to offer all the superficial elements I was seeking: writing,
technology, online commerce, stock options. . . . I was even inclined
to put a positive spin on Amazon.com's requirement that all
prospective hires provide three letters of reference, two writing
samples, SAT scores, and college transcripts: The implied aura of
rigorous selectivity convinced me that quick promotions and raises
would be a matter of course.
My first day in training did little to dispel that illusion. To begin
with, I was stunned by the backgrounds and level of prior
accomplishment boasted by members of my training class (a published
book author, a former translator with the Moscow branch of the Soros
Foundation . . . ). Why, I asked myself, were people with these
credentials training for a $10-an-hour job? In the "sizzling" Puget
Soundarea economy the local media were constantly blathering about,
surely they could find something more gratifying and lucrative. But
then, what was I doing there?
The following day, our training began in earnest, and proved to
consist of a maddening initiation into the almost impossibly cryptic
and counterintuitive UNIX interface that comprised our virtual
workspace. Not only is training on this system quite costly to the
company (particularly since there's a sort of never-ending quality to
it, as the developers constantly figure out new and better ways to
manipulate and tweak this unwieldy beast, regularly adding new tools
and fixes to the repertoire while phasing out older ones); you do not,
for the most part, learn a skill transferable to any other job on the
planet.
After a very full day of this torment, I rode the bus home in a
decidedly pessimistic mood. The next morning (Day Three) I awoke to a
full-fledged attack of the sciatica that I'd felt pooling in my lower
back and left leg the previous two days. This rebellion by my body
served as a depressing reminder that I was older and creakier than
most of my wide-eyed co-workers; that the cramped working conditions
at Amazon's bursting-at-the-seams downtown headquarters weren't doing
me any good, physically or psychologically; and that working in a
low-paying job with no health-insurance benefits or sick leave was
viable only as long as nothing went wrong. One little medical crisis
could trigger the double-whammy of large bills and lost income.
When I arrived the next morning, I was greeted with a round of
sympathetic and unexpected "How ya feeling today?" inquiries from my
fellow trainees. Their solicitude struck me as a mixture of surprise
that I hadn't dropped out (these training sessions had a high
attrition rate) and charitable concern that missing a whole day of
training would leave me at a distinct disadvantage. And indeed, I had
missed, among other things, the crucial orientation to Customer
Service's utterly indispensable tool: the "Blurb Index."
As a Customer Service rep, the half of your daily shift not spent on
the telephone is consumed by grinding out responses to customer e-mail
inquiries. These can range from requests for help in finding a
particular out-of-print title to suggestions that the company shove a
particular policy up its corporate ass. One of the first surprises you
encounter on the job is that you almost never respond to these queries
from scratch. Instead you learn to troll the Blurb Index--a roster of
pat responses, or "blurbs"--designed to address practically every
conceivable scenario a customer might present. If a genuinely new
situation arises more than once, there will probably be a blurb
written for it.
As my trainer explained, the use of blurbs saves Customer Service reps
time and helps impose a consistent voice (in terms of both tone and
policy matters) on official interactions with customers. Naturally, we
were encouraged to tailor the blurb to fit the specific situation in
question, as well as to disguise the more obvious signs of blurbosity.
But to respond to the questioner as a person rather than simply a
customer, to insert a genuinely personal--much less quirky, off-beat,
or engagingly eccentric--tone into the transaction was deemed to be
crossing the line and was emphatically discouraged.
I soon discovered that there was an unwritten three-strike rule where
this category of violation was concerned. During my initial feedback
session with Lisa at the end of my fourth day in the queue, her usual
tone of overbearing enthusiasm dropped a notch when she pulled out a
handful of my "problematic" responses to e-mail questions.
Evidently--at least according to her feedback that day--it violated
department protocol to provide extemporaneous suggestions about topics
and titles that the rep found relevant to the customer's topic of
interest. If someone expressed interest in historical fiction about
the Civil War period, for instance, and mentioned James Michener's
Centennial, it was apparently out of our purview to suggest that
perhaps Gore Vidal's Lincoln might better suit her purposes--even
though this is precisely the kind of helpful human input expected of
employees in any quality bookstore.
The preferred way to handle such a situation, I was advised, was
simply to tell the customer how to locate and order Centennial (even
if you knew that it had precious little to do with the Civil War),
then include a blurb from the index suggesting he or she sign up for
"Eyes," the programmed topical referral service that harangues signees
from now till eternity with "helpful" future purchasing suggestions.
Despite its legitimate and useful purposes, the Blurb Index eventually
came to symbolize for me a corporate management obsessed with
enforcing a blandly conventional zone of contact between its agents
and customers. This seemed shockingly at odds with the hip-literati
Amazon.com image promoted both within the actual workplace and in the
company's ad campaigns. How different was working here, I began to
wonder, from toiling at Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or the vile Barnes &
Noble? After all, our customer service department's policies seemed
(ungenerously) to presume a client base of faceless ciphers who crave
the cookie-cutter mediocrity of a mall bookstore over the more
adventurous atmosphere of, say, an Elliott Bay Book Co. This latter
class of book retailer, unlike Amazon.com, intuitively understands
that excellence and eccentricity are not mutually exclusive in the
bookselling business, and that mass-market pandering is in large part
responsible for the dumbing-down of the publishing industry and the
demise of independent bookstores across the country.
Not long after Lisa's critique, I was approached by one of our
department's earnest young "old-timers," who took it upon herself to
reassure me that Amazon.com was a great organization and that this was
the best job she'd ever had, a "truly life-changing" experience. This
was only the first of several unsolicited testimonies I was to receive
over the next week or so, and eventually I got to wondering whether I
was being singled out for such pep-talk treatment. I finally
approached a fellow trainee, one of the more irreverent-seeming people
in the class, and mentioned it to her. "Oh, I know," she replied,
somewhat reassuringly. "I've gotten a couple of those too, only my
friend warned me in advance that working here was sort of like being
in The Stepford Wives, so I've more or less taken it in stride."
While the Stepford Wives analogy might be going a bit overboard, it
did seem that management employed an almost Skinnerian system of
psychological rewards and punishments in training its new devotees . .
. er, employees. In this vein, if the overly insistent smiles and
breathless words of encouragement functioned as reward, then the
punishment consisted precisely in the withdrawal of these signs of
recognition and approval. That is, once I'd begun to fall out of favor
with my trainers (for asking too many "dumb" questions; for my failure
to sufficiently toe the homogeny line in the phone and e-mail queues;
for displaying insufficient enthusiasm over being part of the Amazon
team), I realized that the wellspring of affirmations I'd become
accustomed to had abruptly gone dry. This was driven home one
afternoon during what turned out to be my final week with the company.
One of my class's trainers (a young, self-styled hipster I'll call
Biff) was strolling through my "quad" and right down my aisle,
displaying his usual exuberant charisma to those he deemed worthy. I
noticed that he'd gotten his hair cut so that instead of his trademark
ponytail, he now had sidewalls above his ears and a shiny, exposed
neckline. So I threw out a line of banter that a week before would
have surely drawn a genial response: "Hey Biff, like your haircut."
Now, however, he barely glanced my way and without breaking stride
responded only with a muffled "Thanks."
Of course, by this point Biff had not only weathered my "obtuseness"
in the training sessions, but had also been part of the supervisory
group that listened in on our telephone interactions with
customers--this as part of the company's drive to impose order and
standards. I learned of this during my termination session with Lisa;
as she was explaining management's rationale for the bad news she had
to give me, she alluded to the "continuing issues" (or some such pop
officialese) that she and other formally sanctioned eavesdroppers had
with the tone and style of my conversations with customers, and with
my judgment over when and under what circumstances to escalate a call
to the next level of "order specialist."
Speaking of escalating, there's a more pervasive issue here--of which
Amazon.com is more symptom than cause. I recognized it one day while
pondering how a company that enjoys the backing of Silicon Valley's
premier venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and
touts itself as the harbinger of the "next big thing"--serious online
profiteering from a product other than pornography--can get away with
paying the bulk of its employees essentially unlivable wages, here in
trendsetting Seattle of all places. I mean, aren't the local and
national media constantly sounding the drumbeat about the overheated
economy we have here in the Puget Sound region, how there's a dearth
of qualified workers, how it's a job seeker's market, how area
businesses (particularly technology-related ones) are forced to engage
in bidding wars with each other for scarce labor resources? To the
extent that I, a new arrival to the area, had ingested all this
economic boosterism, I felt embarrassed over having been reduced to
taking a $10-an-hour job in this, one of the "hottest" regional
economies in the nation.
"But what about those vaunted stock options?" you wonder. So did I.
After hearing a decidedly vague and breezy overview on the topic early
in the training session, I quizzed Lisa for specifics. She explained
that a new employee has the option to purchase "up to 100" shares of
common stock over a five-year period, for the price it held on the day
you were made a permanent employee. Now granted, certain stock-option
packages can indeed be quite lucrative: Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, for
example, has become a multibillionaire due to the recent run-up in the
company's stock price (he holds a modest 19.8 million shares). A
paltry 100 shares, however, almost certainly won't make any of his
overworked customer service minions wealthy. Even those fortunate few
who got in on the ground floor and have seen their holdings, say,
quintuple in value since Amazon's IPO are tallying profits in the
neighborhood of perhaps $10,000-$12,000 thus far--a welcome payback
for all those underpaid hours of phone-queue drudgery, no doubt, but
hardly the stuff of Microsoft-millionaire fables.
Don't get me wrong: Even an optionless $10 an hour isn't too bad for
some random, no-account temp position (although in Seattle's overblown
housing market, you're hard-pressed to pay your share of the rent on
such a wage, much less even entertain the requisite fantasy of a
sport-utility vehicle with cell phone). But to find yourself competing
for a job within a company that demands as much of your loyalty,
commitment, and zeal as Amazon.com does, and which then pays you back
a poverty-line wage--that signals the real issue: American workers'
lack of leverage in the face of globalizing labor markets,
deregulation, merger mania, and a stock-market-driven impulse to
maximize short-term corporate profits at all costs.
I can't help but recall here author and filmmaker Michael Moore's
comments about another ostensibly progressive book retailer he sparred
with while on tour last year promoting his surprise best seller,
Downsize This! A number of his engagements took place in Borders
bookstores, and at one outlet in Iowa, disgruntled employees covertly
briefed him on the company's union-busting response to their
unionization attempt. As Moore puts it, Borders "seem[s] to think they
can require their employees to be highly educated and take a test on
the great works of literature and then pay them slightly more than
minimum wage. People should be able to have the basic needs of life
taken care of--transportation, raising a family, getting adequate
housing--and you can't do that on $6.25 an hour." By the same token,
Amazon.com likes to boast about how many of its entry-level customer
service employees sport graduate degrees, thereby qualifying them for
the privilege of toiling at a wage that, based on the local cost of
living, roughly compares to $6.25 an hour in Iowa; it's also about the
same money you could earn for a generic data-entry or clerical job
through any number of area temp agencies.
April 15, 1998
In the four months since I worked at Amazon.com, something will
occasionally draw my attention back to "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." I
read somewhere that Barnes & Noble filed suit last year to prevent
Amazon.com from falsely staking claim to that title. Just as well; I
understand Amazon is now on the verge of a big push into CD music
titles, and that movies on video and laser disc might soon follow, not
to mention plans to open a warehouse and command center in
Germany--all as part of a master plan to become something on the order
of earth's largest "content" purveyor.
Speaking of grandiose, I've been working as a contractor since the end
of January out at Microsoft, for one of the more worthy and endangered
providers of A&E content within that company's once-ambitious
online-content campaign. And given the reputation of "Earth's largest
software company," I've been pleasantly surprised at how much looser
and less pretentious the atmosphere is around here than at Amazon.com.
I suppose there are any number of reasons for this shocker. The one
that makes the most sense to me is that, for all the well-intentioned
idealism around Amazon, a sense of humor was in strikingly short
supply there; people were too busy taking themselves and their
corporate mission oh-so-seriously. Adding to this tone of
quasi-religiosity was the unspoken taboo against any speech or
expression (including gallows humor) that betrayed your lack of
commitment to the long-term success of the enterprise; if you weren't
prepared to stoically endure the present purgatory of low wages, long
hours, and sweatshop working conditions for a shot at a blissful
future of profitability and soaring stock prices, then you were best
advised to head back out into the world of cynics and naysayers where
you belonged.
All of which would make sense if the outside world held little in the
way of viable employment alternatives. But again--at least according
to the mainstream media--the opposite is the case: A gushing article
in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the other day reported that the job
market for this year's college graduates is so torqued up that "even
English majors are looking at average offers of $28,129, up 18 percent
from last year's average."
Obviously, there is a major disjunction between myth and reality where
the brave new information economy is concerned, at least here in
Seattle. I mean, I've got an advanced degree in English, serviceable
technology skills, and nine months' experience grappling with this
region's job market. If there were some cornucopia of $28K-$30K
entry-level jobs with benefits out there just waiting to be plundered,
I'd know about it.
Just recently, I've watched a couple of fellow contractors leave
Microsoft for jobs at Amazon.com. (They each were offered editorial
positions, presumably with decent pay and a degree of respect.) And
while one of them later confided to me that the atmosphere there is
indeed a bit boot-campish, his outlook for both his own prospects and
the company's eventual profitability remains high. But having been on
the receiving end of Amazon's micromanagement compulsion--watching it
expend all sorts of energy making sure its lowly functionaries toe the
line, while Barnes & Noble continued to extend and tighten its
stranglehold over the book-retailing industry--I remain far less
optimistic than he.
Still, Amazon's management team could care less about inspiring my
confidence as long as it maintains Wall Street's. And reports like the
one I read just yesterday about the company's '97 sales figures,
showing a ninefold increase over the previous year to somewhere in the
$150 million neighborhood, are likely to pull that off. So if
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' initial time frame for profitability has
been quietly revised backward, no one at the company is worried so
long as investors remain bullish and the stock market continues its
record-breaking ascent. As long as that remains the case, Seattle-area
job seekers will continue to be seduced by the cleverly worded
classified ad designed to induce fits of digital envy in its target
audience: "Customer Service Tier 1: Lame Title--Cool Job . . .
Internet concepts . . . incentive stock options . . . " Virtual poetry
for a high-tech, low-wage, post-industrial marketplace.
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