5 - The Crisis of Growth

Summary

“Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” Amazon's motto is emblazoned across its Seattle offices, alongside other motivational slogans such as “build yourself a great story” and “try something new”. Much like the business it houses, Amazon’s campus has expanded over time in new directions and into new spheres, including three interlocking geodesic domes that run along Lenora Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. Before the pandemic hit, Amazon's Seattle premises were home to over 50,000 staff, many of them well-paid knowledge workers who benefited not only from generous salaries and stock options but also from fussball tables, craft classes, a rooftop dog park and film previews. Amazon employees work in cutting-edge fields such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, language processing and the design of new consumer electronics, while Amazon also invests heavily in the creation and distribution of digital content such as TV dramas and documentaries. Amazon's success story seems to epitomize the rise of the knowledge economy, as predicted by earlier advocates of knowledge-driven growth.

Yet there are other ways in which Amazon epitomizes the rise of the knowledge economy, reflecting facets of knowledge-driven growth that this previous generation of techno-optimists either failed to predict or sought to downplay. Amazon, like the knowledge economy era itself, does not only generate highskill, high-pay employment but also an abundance of less skill-intensive, lower-paid work in warehouses and on the streets. Modern managerial techniques are not exclusively a matter of break-out rooms and brainstorming spaces, craft classes and dog parks; lower down the income distribution, these techniques might involve optimizing the number of orders processed, the miles of warehouse corridors covered or the directions followed by delivery drivers, while minimizing time lost to sick leave and comfort breaks.

Amazon also epitomizes the ambiguous impacts of the rise of the knowledge economy on labour markets in advanced capitalist democracies. Emerging economies such as India and China now compete with developed democracies for knowledge work: Amazon's single largest office building in the world opened in Hyderabad in 2019, with its occupants working in fields such as machine learning and new payment technologies. Moreover, in addition to creating new jobs – for computer programmers, network architects, delivery drivers and warehousing staff – Amazon also seeks to automate these tasks, replacing workers with machines.