THE BUTTERFLY

Death of the Worker's Paradise

The final planks of The Butterfly of Dark Love were drifting into place, and he was in no hurry to complete the job. As any journalist could tell you, fear of the unknown, or the unpublished, was far more effective than a problem which could be solved. Or worked around. Or denied. But when they didn't know what you were doing, didn't know how vividly their dishonesty and treachery would be portrayed, that's when they went through the exquisite torments of the guilty. Let them rot. Or as he was once fond of saying, let them hang them selves.

There was a proxy of the Thai Tourist Police, our little barrel chested Commando, not just participating in the somewhat esoteric crime of intellectual property theft, but of bullying and harassing a foreign visitor and threatening to destroy their business with vexatious claims. Caught cold. There wasn't much use having a Tourist Police if they couldn't be relied upon to protect tourists, rather than to bully, harass and intimidate them. 

While the Thai Police peddled ice at the Monkey Club and argued between themselves which gang was going to take the fall for the latest pseudo-enquiry the Tourist Police were meant to be above the local garbage. They clearly weren't.

That they had done nothing to stop the fraud they must have known was being perpetrated under their nose indicated how far they had drifted from their original purpose. How truly pointless they were. Recently caught in media glare for an ATM skimming scam which surprised Michael not in the least, there was nothing to be done but watch them circling endlessly towards carrion flesh, besmirched of soul, dishonest of heart.

Luckily for him, the fraud and the threats now lay fully exposed, but it was dismal, cold comfort. He would have rather none of it had happened in the first place. And so for one long, obliquely disturbed afternoon, with time running backwards and pre-cognition in overdrive, he sat on a verandah in a backyard where he had been previously, looking down the South Coast towards Bass Point, the inlets, Illawara Lake. It wasn't surprising he had been in these strategically located properties before, but he couldn't remember the exact circumstance, or exact story. A local politician caught with an under-age prostitute on the Port Kembla strip. He remembered interviewing the older working girls, mums most of them, who hadn't liked the compeititon and didn't like the attention, but were decent enough. Or just another in the line of the endless stupid property stories. Or sometimes equally stupid one night stands. He didn't know now where any of the flow came from; and just sat there, eternally on the periphery of other people's lives. 

He couldn't wait to be back on the road again, back inside himself.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Le Monde Diplomatique

Amazon's warehouses are run like colonial enterprises - the staff are treated with contempt, paid badly, disciplined brutally, and set in competition against each other, often as temporary workers or on short-term contracts.

Irmgard Schulz of Ver.di, Germany's united service union, told a weekly meeting of Amazon employees in Bad Hersfeld, Germany: "In Japan, Amazon has taken on goats to graze in the grounds of one of their warehouses. It has issued them with the same ID passes we wear around our necks − complete with names, photos and barcodes." Schulz was summing up the philosophy of the online multinational which enables customers to purchase everything from a scrubbing brush to the works of Marcel Proust with one click, and have it delivered within 48 hours.
Worldwide, Amazon employs 100,000 people in 89 warehouses, with a total area of nearly seven million square metres. In less than 20 years, Amazon has fought its way to the forefront of the digital economy, alongside Apple, Google and Facebook. Since its flotation on the stock market in 1997, its turnover has increased by a factor of 420 to reach $62bn in 2012. Its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is profiled by journalists with even more flattery since he spent around 1 % his personal fortune ($250m) this August to buy the Washington Post; his financial success is more mainstream newsworthy thanAmazon's labour conditions, although there have been several in-depth US local paper investigations into brutal and medically unsafe warehouse working conditions. (Amazon was not willing to give an interview for this article.)
Amazon chose Germany as its European bridgehead. It has eight distribution centres there and is building a ninth. In the town of Bad Hersfeld, the local authorities have subsidised Amazon's start-up costs by more than €7m ($9.5m), and named a roadAmazon Strasse (1). As we drove down that road, Sonia Rudolf, a former Amazon employee, pointed to the warehouse, a huge expanse of grey sheet metal behind barbed wire fences. "On the third floor of FRA-1 (2), there are no windows, no openings, no air conditioning. In summer the temperature can reach more than 40ºC and people are often taken ill. One day - I'll always remember this - when I was working as a picker, I came across a girl lying on the floor throwing up. Her face was blue. I really thought she was going to die. Because we didn't have a stretcher, the manager told us to go and get a wooden pallet so we could carry her to the ambulance."
Multiple similar or worse cases have been reported in the US (3). In France, cold affected employees in the Montélimar warehouse in 2011; they had to work in parkas, gloves and hats until a dozen of them went on strike and got the heating turned on. The griefs of underpaid workers don't register on theAmazon share price; Bezos is the 19th wealthiest person on the planet (4).
Amazon is different because it allows other traders to offer their products for sale, in direct competition with its own merchandise, on its site through its Marketplace scheme. This increases turnover and the "long tail" effect - whereby a lot of small orders for low-demand products with low warehousing costs aggregate to big business - which lies at the heart of its success. This system, which works well for the customer, draws booksellers into the promotion of the giant, which ultimately cannibalises their sales and destroys their businesses.
The French Booksellers' Association estimates that, on a like-for-like comparison of turnover, a local bookseller employs 18 times more people than Amazon. In 2012 alone, the American Booksellers' Association reckoned that 42,000 American retailing jobs had been destroyed by Amazon, and that every $10m of Amazon turnover represents 33 lost jobs in local bookselling.

Out-of-town retail factories

The jobs that have vanished are different from those created in distribution centres. The old, long-term jobs needed qualifications and had variety; they were located in town centres and involved human interaction. Amazon jobs are in out-of-town retail factories, where the round-the-clock dispatch of packages is carried out by an unqualified workforce, hired solely because they are still cheaper than robots. (But since its purchase of the robotics company Kiva Systems in 2012 for $775m, Amazonhas been getting ready for a robot roll-out: Kiva's squat machines are 30cm high and can slide under a shelf to pick up a load with a maximum weight of 1,300kg.)
The objective is to reduce the time between a customer's order and its dispatch to just 20 minutes, since Bezos has long wanted to deliver any product on the same day that it is ordered. Since the outset, Amazon has invested enormous sums in its servers and has increased its ability to use algorithms to improve its logistical effectiveness and retailing opportunities. Amazon keeps offering new products to customers thanks to complex analysis of their personal data and buying habits: data is also rented to third parties through the Amazon Web Service business (5).
Irrespective of their location, Amazon's distribution centres have similar architecture and working practices. They are near motorway junctions in areas where the unemployment rate is above the national average and assiduously surveilled by security firms. The giant metal boxes sometimes extend over more than 100,000 square metres, nearly 14 football pitches. Trucks come and go constantly: every three minutes Amazon fills an articulated lorry with packages. In the US, the company sold 300 items every second during the 2012 Christmas season.
The vast selection of products on offer to Amazon's 152 million customers is housed on endless metal shelves. Employees must work in silence. They are all considered potential thieves and searched by security guards: they go through a security check at the end of their shift and before breaks, so their free time is reduced by long queues. Amazon refuses to allow employees to clock in before security checks, so workers in its warehouses in Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington State in the US have brought lawsuits to claim payment for unpaid waiting time, which they estimate at 40 minutes a week.

Radical systems

Amazon's stock management is a computer-controlled "chaotic storage" system: items are stored on the shelves in random order. Chaotic storage is more flexible than conventional methods: there is no need to reserve space for each product to accommodate fluctuations in supply and demand. Each shelving unit has several levels, and each level several bins; in these, the works of Antonio Gramsci might wait besides a packet of men's underpants, a teddy bear and barbecue sauce.
In the Goods In department, workers known as reachers unload pallets from trucks and log the goods. Then stowers put the goods wherever they can on the shelves, in locations that only WiFi-enabled bar-code scanners can identify. To cope with the miles of shelves, state-of-the-art technology guides, controls and measures the productivity of workers as they carry out exhausting and repetitive tasks. In the "production" department, pickers guided by scanners go up and down the aisles with trolleys. They walk more than 20km per shift; that is the official figure from the temp agencies, but the unions say it is too low.
As soon as an item is picked, a countdown is activated on the scanner, and the employee has to set off in search of the next item. The picker's route is determined by computer to maximise efficiency. When their trolleys are full, the pickers take them to the packers. Parcels are put on huge computer-controlled conveyor belts that weigh the boxes bearing Amazon's trademark smile, attach address labels, then sort them according to delivery method.
"There's a smile on the parcel, but we're not smiling," said Jens Brumma, 38, who has been a stower since 2003. For the first seven years he alternated between unemployment and temp work at Amazon, but since 2010 he has had a succession of short-term contracts; the management won't give him permanency. Like every other Amazon employee in the world, his contract forbids him from talking about his work to his family, friends or journalists. "We're obliged to keep quiet but it's not to protect industrial secrets. We don't have access to those. It's to keep us from talking about how dreadful our working conditions are."
In the busiest period of each year, Quarter Four (Q4), night shift teams are put together and every distribution centre has to take on many temporary workers for Christmas orders. "At this time," said Heiner Reimann, a specialist sent by Ver.di in 2010 to set up union activities, "the number of workers for the two warehouses rises suddenly from 3,000 to over 8,000. Temp workers from all over Europe come to Bad Hersfeld and live in terrible conditions. To handle the thousands of temporary contracts, Amazon took on Chinese secretaries last year. They worked in a big empty hall without furniture and piled up the contracts on the floor. It was surreal." Coachloads of the unemployed recruited by temp agencies arrived from Spain, Greece, Poland, Ukraine and Portugal.

Forty-four nationalities

"The managers boast about the international workforce and hold it up as a source of pride," said Brumma. "At a company party I was asked to put up the flag of each country represented - there were 44 of them. The Spanish were the most numerous. Some of them were very highly qualified: there was a historian, sociologists, dentists, lawyers, doctors. They were out of work, so they came here on short-term contracts."
Norbert Faltin, a former German IT worker who lost his job in 2010, worked as a temporary picker at Bad Hersfeld. "In the middle of winter, I spent three months with five foreigners in a bungalow used for summer lets. It had no heating. I've never been so cold in my life. We were all adults and we had to take it in turns to sleep in a child's bed." Most workers want a chance to sign an open-ended contract after a series of short-term ones, but in the meantime, they would be unwise to join the union or strike. The arrival of a huge temporary and foreign workforce before Christmas undermines the effect of Ver.di-initiated strikes in the short period during which Amazon is uniquely vulnerable - it generates 700f its annual turnover in Q4.
Amazon's slogan, "Work hard, have fun, make history", is on the walls of all its warehouses around the world. But it monitors employees with a rigorous management technique, "5S", inspired by Japanese car plants, and organises paternalistic events during the working day and after. "In Q4, the managers play music full blast, around the clock, to keep us moving," said Rudolf. "One day during the Christmas period, they put on rock music at top volume to make us work faster. It was so loud that it gave me a headache and palpitations. When I asked the manager to turn it down, he laughed at me because I'm over 50, and said that this was a young person's company. Despite my age, I was expected to have the same picking rate as a 25-year-old. But after my husband died, I had no choice. I had to take this job."
Some Bad Hersfeld workers remember seeing Bezos whenAmazon's first German warehouse opened in 2000. He arrived by helicopter in the staff car park and left his palm prints in paint on a commemorative plaque. "Everything at Amazon is in English. The workers are called hands," said Schulz. "Jeff Bezos held up his hands and told us we were all hands like him, and that we were his associates because we would have the chance to buy shares in the company after we had worked here for a number of years. Back then, he told us we were all part of one big family. After that, he phoned up from time to time and his voice was broadcast on loudspeakers in the warehouse to motivate us. And it worked. We were proud of Amazon. For us, it was the American dream. But it quickly became a nightmare. That's why I now take part in strikes."
After the union meeting I attended, the members of the afternoon shift quickly got up from a table covered in leaflets, badges, legal documents and press cuttings about the latest strike, to clock in. "It was really hard when I arrived. The workers were terrified at the thought of speaking to us or taking a leaflet," said union organiser Heiner Reimann, while we waited for the members of the morning shift to show up for the next meeting.
After more than a decade at Ikea and with a solid grounding in social law, he began his campaign for Ver.di in 2010. He realised how depoliticised most of the Amazon workers were and how alien union culture was to them, and adapted his approach. He is slowly getting results thanks to activities organised by a small core group.
Since 2011, activists have been putting up little stickers all over the German warehouses, each with an anonymous question highlighting a breach of employment law, injustice or management failure. The examples are chosen by the workers, who get family members to write them out so that the handwriting cannot be identified. Thousands of stickers have been put up; they don't damage the fabric of the workplace, but they have alarmed management. After discussion in the weekly union meetings in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig, which are open to all, demands are now coming from the workforce.

Where is the negotiated rate?

In Leipzig, no one is paid the rate negotiated by Ver.di for workers in the distribution sector. Wage agreements for Germany's eastern Länder stipulate a minimum rate of €10.66 an hour, but Amazon pays €9.30. In Bad Hersfeld there is a similar discrepancy between the collectively negotiated rate (€12.18) and Amazon's rate (€9.83). Two-and-a-half years after the first Ver.di meetings, nearly 600 German employees regularly picket to demand the negotiated rate (Tarifvertrag). Now union members and their supporters wear a red wristband to work, with the words "Work hard, have fun, make Tarifvertrag".
Rudolf has noticed that when she meets former colleagues "the attitude to the union has changed a lot. People are less and less afraid of joining, and it becomes almost a reflex action when they suffer a humiliation. They want to take action to defend their rights and their dignity."
In France on 10 June this year, around 100 union members atAmazon's Saran warehouse heeded a strike call from the CGT union. The following day they were all summoned individually by management. "Because I'm a union member, they tried to subject me to arbitrary searches during my shift," said Clément Jamin. "I refused. So they told me to sit on a chair, ostensibly to wait for the police to arrive. I was sitting there in full view of everyone for six hours and the police never came. They tried the same thing the next day and the day after that. The CGT have lodged a complaint." Amazon managers are hostile to unions and try to humiliate them. Recently I saw a parody video made in-house, in which two HR managers at Saran dressed up as union members waving a CGT flag.
"The pace of work is relentless," said a worker at Saran, who wanted to remain anonymous. "And what do we get? 'Have fun': raffles during our breaks, handouts of chocolate and sweets. But I don't go for the idea of unloading a lorry dressed as a clown." Employees are regularly asked to come to work in fancy dress according to a theme chosen by management. "Even so, our productivity is still monitored by computer," he said. "They ask us to be 'top performers', to do better, to keep beating our own productivity records. Since June the managers have been making us do group warm-up and stretching exercises before our shift."
Staff rules demand that each employee's productivity increases constantly. Real-time recording of performance allows supervisors to pinpoint where workers are in the warehouse at any time, to get a detailed record of their output, and organise competition between them. Heiner Reimann has recently discovered that this personal data "is sent every day from the German warehouses to Seattle, where it is stored. That's completely illegal." Ben Sihamdi, a former Amazon manager who went on company training courses in Luxembourg, confirmed this practice, which most employees are unaware of: "All their productivity data is recorded, then sent to Seattle."

'Everyone's watching everyone else'

Besides competing with each other, employees are also encouraged to report "anomalies". "That might be a box left blocking a doorway," my anonymous source said, "but it could also be a colleague chatting. If you see someone doing that, you're supposed to report them. That helps you get promoted and become a 'lead'." Sihamdi said that "a colleague asked me what I thought about Jeff Bezos's personal fortune, and I said it made me sick. He reported me and I was disciplined for criticising the Amazon spirit. The working environment isn't good. Everyone's watching everyone else. And the temp workers are treated like cattle, which I hate. I know the world of industry, especially car manufacturing. But my experience atAmazon is easily the most brutal in my career."
There are many accidents at Amazon: falls, illness, finger injuries from the conveyor belt, exhaustion. But press coverage about stock market performance, Bezos's latest activities or the construction of distribution centres is far more plentiful than investigative reporting. Three new centres that will soon open in Poland worry German workers, who fear their jobs may be undercut by lower-paid Polish workers. The press reaction is enthusiasm for the creation of precarious jobs that will cause a net shrinkage of employment in the local economy.
German journalist Günter Wallraff, a supporter of the Ver.di-led strikes, is following Amazon's rise carefully: "When I found out about working conditions there, I immediately called for a boycott and asked my publisher to take my books off the site. That was a problem: Amazon accounts for 150f their sales. After wrestling with my request, the publisher eventually agreed. But now Amazon is sourcing stock from wholesalers and still selling my books. And I can't stop them. So people say: 'You're all talk, because your books are still on sale on Amazon.' In reality, it's not possible to fight this business individually. It's a multinational organised according to a well-defined ideology. Its system doesn't just pose a neutral question about whether we want to shop on its site or not; it raises political questions about what sort of society we want to belong to."

Not paying the tax

A book bought from Amazon in Spain or a vacuum cleaner in France will both be billed in Luxembourg byAmazon EU. This company, which has only 235 employees, had a turnover of almost $10bn in 2012, but thanks to clever financial arrangements, recorded profits of just $20.4m. It controls the national operations in Europe that carry out the work: logistics, marketing, supplier relations. At the top of a pyramid of holding companies is the financial reserve, Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS, which is itself held by three entities based in Delaware in the US.
At the heart of this fiscal network, Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS, also based in Luxembourg, handles the flow of cash: at the end of 2011 it had accumulated reserves of €1.9bn and no recorded employees. This complex system of tax avoidance enables the multinational to sidestep tax in the countries where it operates and where it generates vast turnover. Since Andrew Cecil, Amazon's director of public policy, appeared before the UK parliament's Public Accounts Committee in 2012, the turnover in France has been public knowledge: €889m in 2011. The French subsidiary declared a significantly lower figure to the tax authorities, and is due a tax readjustment of €198m.
Amazon's French operation, which employs over a thousand people, declared a turnover of €75m and profits of €3.2m in 2012. The company benefited from public subsidies when it set up its third French distribution centre in Chalon-sur-Saône, with the backing of the minister for economic regeneration, Arnaud Montebourg. Besides subsidies from the state and the department of Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy's regional council, run by Socialist François Patriar, also contributed €1.125m to helpAmazon hire 250 employees on open-ended contracts. "The worst thing," said former Amazon manager Ben Sihamdi, "is that politicians ignore the fact that Amazon is investing hugely in robots. There's no way that those jobs are going to last."

Translated by George Miller

(1) There are streets named after the company in Graben, Pforzheim and Kobern-Gondorf in Germany, and two in France in Sevrey and Lauwin-Planque.
(2) Amazon warehouses all have names consisting of three letters and a number that match the nearest international airport, in this case Frankfurt (FRA).
(3) Spencer Soper, "Inside Amazon's warehouse",The Morning Call, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 18 September 2011.
(4) In 2012 Jeff Bezos was named business person of the year by the American magazine Forbes.
(5) Amazon has also set up a market in online work, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which invites people to complete microtasks for micropayments. See Pierre Lazuly, "Artificial artificial intelligence",Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2006.
Jean-Baptiste Malet is the author of En Amazonie: Infiltré dans le Meilleur des Mondes (In Amazonia: Under Cover in the Best of all Possible Worlds), Fayard, Paris, 2013, which he wrote after working in an Amazon warehouse.