Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That\u2019s a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/pluralistic.net\/2023\/04\/12\/algorithmic-wage-discrimination\/#fishers-of-men<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cChickenization\u201d is a term out of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be off or on. They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don\u2019t tell you is how much you\u2019ll be paid for your birds \u2014 that\u2019s something you only discover when it\u2019s time to sell them, and the sum you\u2019re offered is based on the packer\u2019s region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring, and is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.<\/p>\n At its root, \u201cchickenization\u201d is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they\u2019re told that they\u2019re their own bosses. The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure \u2014 without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers\u2019 expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process. If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.<\/p>\n Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many \u201cself-employed\u201d workers, like the clickwork \u201cturkers\u201d who power the Mechanical Turk service. But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon\u2019s network of cutouts and arm\u2019s-length arrangements are the \u201centrepreneurs\u201d who are lured into starting a \u201cDelivery Service Platform\u201d (DSP) business.<\/p>\n To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon\u2019s exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery, and kitting them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon\u2019s exacting specification. Then, you hire workers \u2014 giving Amazon a veto over who you hire \u2014 and you train them \u2014 using Amazon\u2019s training materials. You sign them up for Amazon\u2019s platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon\u2019s sole discretion.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?<\/p>\n In automation theory, a \u201ccentaur\u201d is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.<\/p>\n The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers\u2019 eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more. These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call \u201celectronic whips\u201d:<\/p>\n https:\/\/crackedlabs.org\/en\/data-work\/publications\/callcenter<\/a><\/p>\n The chickenized owners of DSPs must enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers \u2014 Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an \u201cindependent entrepreneur\u201d with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages, long terms leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.<\/p>\n So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.<\/p>\n In \u201cDriven Down,\u201d a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams\u2019s own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It\u2019s not good:<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.dair-institute.org\/projects\/driven-down\/<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cDriven Down\u201d vividly describes \u2014 often in drivers\u2019 own words \u2014 how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.<\/p>\n DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems \u2014 at least nine apps that monitor, score and discipline them. These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren\u2019t all running during their shifts. As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers\u2019 own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24\/7, whether or not they\u2019re on the clock. It\u2019s not just DSP owners who are chickenized \u2014 it\u2019s also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.<\/p>\n First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called \u201ctraveling salesman\u201d problem:<\/p>\n https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Travelling_salesman_problem<\/a><\/p>\n But it turns out that there is an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn\u2019t work. This doesn\u2019t optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.<\/p>\n Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make \u201cgroup stops\u201d \u2014 where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon\u2019s mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are very distant. If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels without moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.<\/p>\n When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP\u2019s per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon\u2019s apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps\u2019 expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.<\/p>\n This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app. Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator. The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van\u2019s brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van\u2019s brake lights didn\u2019t light up).<\/p>\n Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take car of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it\u2019s even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van \u2014 where cameras record everything you do \u2014 and manage things there.<\/p>\n Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers do get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.<\/p>\n The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers\u2019 employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back. When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the media, the driver was penalized \u2014 the driver this happened to had his score in \u201cMentor\u201d (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won\u2019t tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers \u2014 and DSP owners \u2014 believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.<\/p>\n Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do \u2014 it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict \u2014 and also not disclosed. Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren\u2019t allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it\u2019s a moving target.<\/p>\n Among drivers, there\u2019s a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they\u2019d start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of \u201csecurity through obscurity\u201d out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:<\/p>\n https:\/\/pluralistic.net\/2022\/08\/07\/como-is-infosec\/<\/a><\/p>\n All this isn\u2019t just dangerous and dehumanizing, it\u2019s also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can\u2019t possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor. As the report explains:<\/p>\n Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Drivers are also assigned \u201chomework\u201d \u2014 videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend \u201cstand up\u201d meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.<\/p>\n Amazon makes a big show of \u201clistening to drivers,\u201d but they\u2019re never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.<\/p>\n Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.<\/p>\n But \u2014 thanks to chickenization \u2014 none of this is Amazon\u2019s problem. It\u2019s all the problem of a chickenized DSP \u201centrepreneur\u201d who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment\u2019s notice should they fail to do Amazon\u2019s precise bidding.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a \u201cjoint employer\u201d of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:<\/p>\n\n