Presenter:
Alessandro Delfanti
Date-Time-Space:
Wednesday October 24th, 6:30-9:00pm, Workers Action Centre (Annex) – 2nd floor (meeting room)
Description:
Between your Amazon home delivery and Jeff Bezos’ bottom line is a platform-based system that organizes a massive workforce, speeds up work, and contributes to making jobs more precarious and unstable. But it is not just about digital technology. While most of the thousands of workers who enter the gates of Amazon’s gigantic distribution centres every day have no experience of work in a Fordist factory, the assembly lines of 1960s factories share many similarities with today’s algorithmically-managed shelves. In fact, work at Amazon is underpinned by its specific corporate culture but also by processes of deskilling and a strictly hierarchical division of labour. Through an empirical study of work and struggles at an Italian warehouse, Delfanti discusses the changing nature of work, class composition, and the evolving relation between capitalism and technology.
Materials:
Alessandro Delfanti (2018) Amazon is the New FIAT
Rand Wilson and Peter Olney (2018) Socialists Can Seize the Moment at Amazon
Bio:
Alessandro Delfanti teaches at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. He was one of the key organizers of Log Out! Worker Resistance Within and Against the Platform Economy (you can listen to presentations, here). He tweets at @adelfanti and publishes his writing at delfanti.org.
The Capitalism Workshop 