Taylorism, Meet Bezosism

By Baxter

We cats were captivated by the New York Times take-down of Amazon this past weekend. Mostly because, like billions of other people in the world, we have ordered stuff from them — but also because we: 1) have an inherent interest in quality workplaces, and 2) continue to wonder what effect Jeff Bezos's ownership will have on the shadow-of-its-former-self Washington Post.

We can't answer the second question, except to say that the Post continues to fall short of our expectations (and yes, we are longtime subscribers to the print edition, so shut up, Martin Baron).

The first question, however, leaves us a little unsettled. We are not sure how contemporary American workplaces are providing employees with meaningful career opportunities if they are increasingly unable to unionize, and if their performances are being constantly monitored in real time by data and metrics — "a phase in which technology mediates our experience of the physical world," as New York magazine aptly put it.

This is disturbing. Why? Because back around the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Taylor introduced a scientific concept of management by instituting systems in which productivity would be taken out of the hands of the workers and put under the control of the bosses. It was the first time that measurable results were used to gauge worker performance. The problem was that it effectively disarmed the employees whose productivity was being measured.

So we cats are sorry to say that we see no difference between the present-day Amazon of Jeff Bezos and the early-20th-century Taylorist factory floor managers — who monitored assembly line workers for how many widgets they screwed into place per hour, and how many minutes they took for a bathroom break. The methods of measurement are different, that's all. The pressure to perform — without the ability to control one's environment — are, sadly, all too similar.

We would be pleased to have "Amazonians" (a term we have to say we frankly despise) dispute our impressions of their workplace. But until we do, we cats will have reservations about patronizing Amazon — and you can be sure that we'll be keeping an extra eye on The Washington Post. Not that it could get much worse — but if the Jeff Bezos who was portrayed in The New York Times is at all accurate, we cats believe it could. So we HISS.