LIVING AND WORKING ON ‘INTERNET TIME’ might be all fine and dandy for tech-company execs and senior team members who can expect gorgeous bonuses and stock options (even if the latter may turn to negative values if the NASDAQ takes another dive).
But it’s no road to riches for the average Janes and Joes in the ranks.
Of course, you can’t very well expect the management to realize this.
So, some believe the time has come to rise up, to demand to be treated like real people with real lives, not like pieces of equipment to get used up and thrown away.
Amazon.com officials appear to have a hard time understanding this, or why anyone awarded the privilege of working for them could ever have anything to complain about.
Not only is management publicly pooh-poohing any need for the unionizing drive among its customer-service staff, it’s sent supervisors some (publicly leaked) memos warning to watch out for the danger signs of union troublemaking (such as workers who talk too much to one another).
The AFL-CIO affiliated Washington Alliance of Technology Workers is helping out the Amazon workers, who may very well need the strength of Amazon warriors by the time this is through. The organization drive’s called “Day2@Amazon.com. Washtech’s site quotes organizer Zach Works, “We call our group Day2@Amazon.com because [founder Jeff] Bezos is always telling us, ‘It’s Day One, we can’t stop or rest,’ and we think five years of Day One is generating lots of problems for us.”
In the huge Wired cover story earlier this fall about the Microsoft antitrust case, Bill Gates was repeatedly quoted as saying he didn’t want MS to ever become like today’s IBM–solid and profitable but staid, established, structured, stable.
A lot of dot-com execs feel the same–that their enforced regimens of 60-plus-hour workweeks and cultlike employee-motivation schemes represent a forward advance, not a return to the dark ages of worker exploitation; and that giving in to demands for fair hours, fair conditions, and fair compensation would turn their dynamic “new economy” powerhouses into ordinary, no-fun, old-economy drudgeries.
But the stock markets this month have been favoring the old and the stable over the new and the mercurial.
Maybe there could be some PR advantage for a company with a roller-coaster stock price (such as Amazon) to reorganize, to reinvent itself as an outfit digging in for the long term; partly by treating its own people at least a little less dysfunctionally.
(P.S.: The Washtech organizers have not called for a boycott of Amazon; they insist they want the still-unprofitable company to succeed and for its employees to receive their just share of that success. So the Amazon links on my site are staying up.)
TOMORROW: Some of the top events of 2000, so far.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
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