From the Seattle Weekly:
Today's knowledge worker is overworked, underpaid, and as badly beaten with
carrots as with sticks by Richard Howard
December 10, 1997, 7:05PM
I've just finished a grueling phone shift at Amazon.com, where I've been
working at one of two tables in a "quad"--a cubicle in a windowless room
carved up by partitions. I share my quad with three other "Customer Service
Tier 1 E-Mail Representatives." We sit two to a table, with our backs to the
backs of the other two at their table, and talk constantly on the telephone in
a voice that is supposed to be loud enough for the customer to hear us and
quiet enough to keep from distracting our quadmates.
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I've been doing this for the past three and a half weeks, spending fully half
of my daily shift in one of Amazon's telephone "queues," dealing with an
endless stream of holiday-frazzled shoppers and would-be shoppers. Not that we
ever sink to the status of lowly order-takers, mind you. We're more like
guides: "I'm sorry, ma'am, we're not set up to take orders over the
phone--only through our Web site... yes, it's really quite simple... yes, it's
perfectly safe to enter your credit card number online; just be sure to click
on 'Secure Server'... It's not working? One moment while I transfer you to an
order specialist...."
And so on, ad nauseam. You manage to survive by telling yourself that every
goal has its price. And if you're an idealistic, young college grad with one
of those ubiquitous liberal-arts degrees and a dream of moving up the ladder
in a hot, technology-based Seattle start-up, the price you pay in this case is
an entry-level job worthy of the Electronic Sweatshop Seal of Approval. And
the price they pay you for your services is a breathtaking $10 an hour, made
marginally palatable by the constantly whispered mantra of "stock options."
I have time to take no more than three deep breaths to unwind from the stress
of talking nonstop for four straight hours when I see my supervisor walking
determinedly my way. Normally this woman, whom I'll call Lisa, has her jaw
worked into an almost perpetual horsey grin, even when she's offering a
critique of my performance--which usually has to do with my failure to conform
my phone or e-mail responses tightly enough to the surprisingly rigid format
prescribed by management.
I say "surprisingly" because the superficial atmosphere around the
headquarters of "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" is one of alternative-minded,
almost New Agey liberalism. Capitalism with a kinder, gentler face. Everyone
here seems as earnest and personable as the workday is long (and the workdays
feel really long), and there's not a shade of cynicism anywhere.
No wonder I feel out of place around here. It doesn't help that I'm well over
a decade older than the average Amazon.com employee. The company makes a
conscious effort to hire intelligent and overwhelmingly youthful just-out-of-
college types because these are precisely the worker bees most likely to buy
into the hallowed Start-up Dream: Toss them a little "win-win" free-enterprise
prattle and the promise of a promotion to a salaried position somewhere down
the line and they'll launch a Children's Crusade for you. (That salaried
position, like the stock options package, turns out to be sleight of hand...
but more on that later.)
Lisa walks right up to me and asks if I've got time to talk. She is straining
to keep her voice neutral. Not having to contend, for once, with the smile-
borne glare of her thoroughbred teeth, I notice her other features for the
first time. Her eyes appear a bit dull and tired; there's a furrow between her
brows. I reply that I really don't, that if I miss my bus, which arrives in
about seven minutes, I'll have to wait until almost eight for the next one. I
pause for a moment, then ask if it's urgent or something. She seems not to
know how to answer at first, then says that it is but that she could always
talk with me first thing in the morning. I tell her no way--now that she's
sounded her alarm bells, she can't honestly expect me to wait until tomorrow
to let her drop her little bombshell, whatever it is.
As if I couldn't guess. I can't deny that I've felt like an alien in this
curiously insular environment ever since I first set foot in it; couple that
with the temp-worker wages--for a remarkably complex and demanding job, when
all is said and done--and I knew straightaway I was just going to be biding my
time here.
Still, given the horse-shit pay, I never really dreamed they'd have the
audacity to actually care about how well you met their idiosyncratic notions
of attributes like "competence," "team skills," or "the right attitude."
But care they do. Lisa tells me I've been fired.
I should have known from the beginning that this wouldn't be a fit. At the
temp agency, after all, I had been warned by my recruiter--who'd mentioned
that the job involved a lot of rote memorization of cryptic UNIX
minutiae--that you could expect to do at least six months of hard labor in the
phone and e-mail "queues" before having any chance of a promotion, and that
promotions tended to be to supervisory positions within Customer Service
rather than Editorial, where I wanted to be.
No matter how unglamorous she made the job sound, though, it still seemed to
offer all the superficial elements I was seeking: writing, technology, online
commerce, stock options.... I was even inclined to put a positive spin on
Amazon.com's requirement that all prospective hires provide three letters of
reference, two writing samples, SAT scores, and college transcripts: The
implied aura of rigorous selectivity convinced me that quick promotions and
raises would be a matter of course.
My first day in training did little to dispel that illusion. To begin with, I
was stunned by the backgrounds and level of prior accomplishment boasted by
members of my training class (a published book author, a former translator
with the Moscow branch of the Soros Foundation... ). Why, I asked myself, were
people with these credentials training for a $10-an-hour job? In the
"sizzling" Puget Sound-area economy the local media were constantly blathering
about, surely they could find something more gratifying and lucrative. But
then, what was I doing there?
The following day, our training began in earnest, and proved to consist of a
maddening initiation into the almost impossibly cryptic and counterintuitive
UNIX interface that comprised our virtual workspace. Not only is training on
this system quite costly to the company (particularly since there's a sort of
never-ending quality to it, as the developers constantly figure out new and
better ways to manipulate and tweak this unwieldy beast, regularly adding new
tools and fixes to the repertoire while phasing out older ones); you do not,
for the most part, learn a skill transferable to any other job on the planet.
After a very full day of this torment, I rode the bus home in a decidedly
pessimistic mood. The next morning (Day Three) I awoke to a full-fledged
attack of the sciatica that I'd felt pooling in my lower back and left leg the
previous two days. This rebellion by my body served as a depressing reminder
that I was older and creakier than most of my wide-eyed co-workers; that the
cramped working conditions at Amazon's bursting-at-the-seams downtown
headquarters weren't doing me any good, physically or psychologically; and
that working in a low-paying job with no health-insurance benefits or sick
leave was viable only as long as nothing went wrong. One little medical crisis
could trigger the double-whammy of large bills and lost income.
When I arrived the next morning, I was greeted with a round of sympathetic and
unexpected "How ya feeling today?" inquiries from my fellow trainees. Their
solicitude struck me as a mixture of surprise that I hadn't dropped out (these
training sessions had a high attrition rate) and charitable concern that
missing a whole day of training would leave me at a distinct disadvantage. And
indeed, I had missed, among other things, the crucial orientation to Customer
Service's utterly indispensable tool: the "Blurb Index."
As a Customer Service rep, the half of your daily shift not spent on the
telephone is consumed by grinding out responses to customer e-mail inquiries.
These can range from requests for help in finding a particular out-of-print
title to suggestions that the company shove a particular policy up its
corporate ass. One of the first surprises you encounter on the job is that you
almost never respond to these queries from scratch. Instead you learn to troll
the Blurb Index--a roster of pat responses, or "blurbs"--designed to address
practically every conceivable scenario a customer might present. If a
genuinely new situation arises more than once, there will probably be a blurb
written for it.
As my trainer explained, the use of blurbs saves Customer Service reps time
and helps impose a consistent voice (in terms of both tone and policy matters)
on official interactions with customers. Naturally, we were encouraged to
tailor the blurb to fit the specific situation in question, as well as to
disguise the more obvious signs of blurbosity. But to respond to the
questioner as a person rather than simply a customer, to insert a genuinely
personal--much less quirky, off-beat, or engagingly eccentric--tone into the
transaction was deemed to be crossing the line and was emphatically
discouraged.
I soon discovered that there was an unwritten three-strike rule where this
category of violation was concerned. During my initial feedback session with
Lisa at the end of my fourth day in the queue, her usual tone of overbearing
enthusiasm dropped a notch when she pulled out a handful of my "problematic"
responses to e-mail questions. Evidently--at least according to her feedback
that day--it violated department protocol to provide extemporaneous
suggestions about topics and titles that the rep found relevant to the
customer's topic of interest. If someone expressed interest in historical
fiction about the Civil War period, for instance, and mentioned James
Michener's Centennial, it was apparently out of our purview to suggest that
perhaps Gore Vidal's Lincoln might better suit her purposes--even though this
is precisely the kind of helpful human input expected of employees in any
quality bookstore.
The preferred way to handle such a situation, I was advised, was simply to
tell the customer how to locate and order Centennial (even if you knew that it
had precious little to do with the Civil War), then include a blurb from the
index suggesting he or she sign up for "Eyes," the programmed topical referral
service that harangues signees from now till eternity with "helpful" future
purchasing suggestions.
Despite its legitimate and useful purposes, the Blurb Index eventually came to
symbolize for me a corporate management obsessed with enforcing a blandly
conventional zone of contact between its agents and customers. This seemed
shockingly at odds with the hip-literati Amazon.com image promoted both within
the actual workplace and in the company's ad campaigns. How different was
working here, I began to wonder, from toiling at Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or the
vile Barnes & Noble? After all, our customer service department's policies
seemed (ungenerously) to presume a client base of faceless ciphers who crave
the cookie-cutter mediocrity of a mall bookstore over the more adventurous
atmosphere of, say, an Elliott Bay Book Co. This latter class of book
retailer, unlike Amazon.com, intuitively understands that excellence and
eccentricity are not mutually exclusive in the bookselling business, and that
mass-market pandering is in large part responsible for the dumbing-down of the
publishing industry and the demise of independent bookstores across the
country.
Not long after Lisa's critique, I was approached by one of our department's
earnest young "old-timers," who took it upon herself to reassure me that
Amazon.com was a great organization and that this was the best job she'd ever
had, a "truly life-changing" experience. This was only the first of several
unsolicited testimonies I was to receive over the next week or so, and
eventually I got to wondering whether I was being singled out for such pep-
talk treatment. I finally approached a fellow trainee, one of the more
irreverent-seeming people in the class, and mentioned it to her. "Oh, I know,"
she replied, somewhat reassuringly. "I've gotten a couple of those too, only
my friend warned me in advance that working here was sort of like being in The
Stepford Wives, so I've more or less taken it in stride."
While the Stepford Wives analogy might be going a bit overboard, it did seem
that management employed an almost Skinnerian system of psychological rewards
and punishments in training its new devotees... er, employees. In this vein,
if the overly insistent smiles and breathless words of encouragement
functioned as reward, then the punishment consisted precisely in the
withdrawal of these signs of recognition and approval. That is, once I'd begun
to fall out of favor with my trainers (for asking too many "dumb" questions;
for my failure to sufficiently toe the homogeny line in the phone and e-mail
queues; for displaying insufficient enthusiasm over being part of the Amazon
team), I realized that the wellspring of affirmations I'd become accustomed to
had abruptly gone dry. This was driven home one afternoon during what turned
out to be my final week with the company. One of my class's trainers (a young,
self-styled hipster I'll call Biff) was strolling through my "quad" and right
down my aisle, displaying his usual exuberant charisma to those he deemed
worthy. I noticed that he'd gotten his hair cut so that instead of his
trademark ponytail, he now had sidewalls above his ears and a shiny, exposed
neckline. So I threw out a line of banter that a week before would have surely
drawn a genial response: "Hey Biff, like your haircut." Now, however, he
barely glanced my way and without breaking stride responded only with a
muffled "Thanks."
Of course, by this point Biff had not only weathered my "obtuseness" in the
training sessions, but had also been part of the supervisory group that
listened in on our telephone interactions with customers--this as part of the
company's drive to impose order and standards. I learned of this during my
termination session with Lisa; as she was explaining management's rationale
for the bad news she had to give me, she alluded to the "continuing issues"
(or some such pop officialese) that she and other formally sanctioned
eavesdroppers had with the tone and style of my conversations with customers,
and with my judgment over when and under what circumstances to escalate a call
to the next level of "order specialist."
Speaking of escalating, there's a more pervasive issue here--of which
Amazon.com is more symptom than cause. I recognized it one day while pondering
how a company that enjoys the backing of Silicon Valley's premier venture
capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and touts itself as the
harbinger of the "next big thing"--serious online profiteering from a product
other than pornography--can get away with paying the bulk of its employees
essentially unlivable wages, here in trendsetting Seattle of all places. I
mean, aren't the local and national media constantly sounding the drumbeat
about the overheated economy we have here in the Puget Sound region, how
there's a dearth of qualified workers, how it's a job seeker's market, how
area businesses (particularly technology-related ones) are forced to engage in
bidding wars with each other for scarce labor resources? To the extent that I,
a new arrival to the area, had ingested all this economic boosterism, I felt
embarrassed over having been reduced to taking a $10-an-hour job in this, one
of the "hottest" regional economies in the nation.
"But what about those vaunted stock options?" you wonder. So did I. After
hearing a decidedly vague and breezy overview on the topic early in the
training session, I quizzed Lisa for specifics. She explained that a new
employee has the option to purchase "up to 100" shares of common stock over a
five-year period, for the price it held on the day you were made a permanent
employee. Now granted, certain stock-option packages can indeed be quite
lucrative: Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, has become a
multibillionaire due to the recent run-up in the company's stock price (he
holds a modest 19.8 million shares). A paltry 100 shares, however, almost
certainly won't make any of his overworked customer service minions wealthy.
Even those fortunate few who got in on the ground floor and have seen their
holdings, say, quintuple in value since Amazon's IPO are tallying profits in
the neighborhood of perhaps $10,000-$12,000 thus far--a welcome payback for
all those underpaid hours of phone-queue drudgery, no doubt, but hardly the
stuff of Microsoft-millionaire fables.
Don't get me wrong: Even an optionless $10 an hour isn't too bad for some
random, no-account temp position (although in Seattle's overblown housing
market, you're hard-pressed to pay your share of the rent on such a wage, much
less even entertain the requisite fantasy of a sport-utility vehicle with cell
phone). But to find yourself competing for a job within a company that demands
as much of your loyalty, commitment, and zeal as Amazon.com does, and which
then pays you back a poverty-line wage--that signals the real issue: American
workers' lack of leverage in the face of globalizing labor markets,
deregulation, merger mania, and a stock-market-driven impulse to maximize
short-term corporate profits at all costs.
I can't help but recall here author and filmmaker Michael Moore's comments
about another ostensibly progressive book retailer he sparred with while on
tour last year promoting his surprise best seller, Downsize This! A number of
his engagements took place in Borders bookstores, and at one outlet in Iowa,
disgruntled employees covertly briefed him on the company's union-busting
response to their unionization attempt. As Moore puts it, Borders "seem[s] to
think they can require their employees to be highly educated and take a test
on the great works of literature and then pay them slightly more than minimum
wage. People should be able to have the basic needs of life taken care
of--transportation, raising a family, getting adequate housing--and you can't
do that on $6.25 an hour." By the same token, Amazon.com likes to boast about
how many of its entry-level customer service employees sport graduate degrees,
thereby qualifying them for the privilege of toiling at a wage that, based on
the local cost of living, roughly compares to $6.25 an hour in Iowa; it's also
about the same money you could earn for a generic data-entry or clerical job
through any number of area temp agencies.
April 15, 1998
In the four months since I worked at Amazon.com, something will occasionally
draw my attention back to "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." I read somewhere that
Barnes & Noble filed suit last year to prevent Amazon.com from falsely staking
claim to that title. Just as well; I understand Amazon is now on the verge of
a big push into CD music titles, and that movies on video and laser disc might
soon follow, not to mention plans to open a warehouse and command center in
Germany--all as part of a master plan to become something on the order of
earth's largest "content" purveyor.
Speaking of grandiose, I've been working as a contractor since the end of
January out at Microsoft, for one of the more worthy and endangered providers
of A&E content within that company's once-ambitious online-content campaign.
And given the reputation of "Earth's largest software company," I've been
pleasantly surprised at how much looser and less pretentious the atmosphere is
around here than at Amazon.com. I suppose there are any number of reasons for
this shocker. The one that makes the most sense to me is that, for all the
well-intentioned idealism around Amazon, a sense of humor was in strikingly
short supply there; people were too busy taking themselves and their corporate
mission oh-so-seriously. Adding to this tone of quasi-religiosity was the
unspoken taboo against any speech or expression (including gallows humor) that
betrayed your lack of commitment to the long-term success of the enterprise;
if you weren't prepared to stoically endure the present purgatory of low
wages, long hours, and sweatshop working conditions for a shot at a blissful
future of profitability and soaring stock prices, then you were best advised
to head back out into the world of cynics and naysayers where you belonged.
All of which would make sense if the outside world held little in the way of
viable employment alternatives. But again--at least according to the
mainstream media--the opposite is the case: A gushing article in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer the other day reported that the job market for this year's
college graduates is so torqued up that "even English majors are looking at
average offers of $28,129, up 18 percent from last year's average."
Obviously, there is a major disjunction between myth and reality where the
brave new information economy is concerned, at least here in Seattle. I mean,
I've got an advanced degree in English, serviceable technology skills, and
nine months' experience grappling with this region's job market. If there were
some cornucopia of $28K-$30K entry-level jobs with benefits out there just
waiting to be plundered, I'd know about it.
Just recently, I've watched a couple of fellow contractors leave Microsoft for
jobs at Amazon.com. (They each were offered editorial positions, presumably
with decent pay and a degree of respect.) And while one of them later confided
to me that the atmosphere there is indeed a bit boot-campish, his outlook for
both his own prospects and the company's eventual profitability remains high.
But having been on the receiving end of Amazon's micromanagement
compulsion--watching it expend all sorts of energy making sure its lowly
functionaries toe the line, while Barnes & Noble continued to extend and
tighten its stranglehold over the book-retailing industry--I remain far less
optimistic than he.
Still, Amazon's management team could care less about inspiring my confidence
as long as it maintains Wall Street's. And reports like the one I read just
yesterday about the company's '97 sales figures, showing a ninefold increase
over the previous year to somewhere in the $150 million neighborhood, are
likely to pull that off. So if Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' initial time frame
for profitability has been quietly revised backward, no one at the company is
worried so long as investors remain bullish and the stock market continues its
record-breaking ascent. As long as that remains the case, Seattle-area job
seekers will continue to be seduced by the cleverly worded classified ad
designed to induce fits of digital envy in its target audience: "Customer
Service Tier 1: Lame Title--Cool Job... Internet concepts... incentive stock
options... " Virtual poetry for a high-tech, low-wage, post-industrial
marketplace.
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