Amazon’s projects for future automation contribute to anxieties about the marginalization of living labor in warehousing. Yet, a systematic analysis of patents owned by Amazon suggests that workers are not about to disappear from the warehouse floor. Many patents portray machines that increase worker surveillance and work rhythms. Others aim at incorporating workers’ activities into machinery to rationalize the labor process in an ever more pervasive form of digital Taylorism. Patents materialize the company’s desire for a technological future in which workers act and sense on behalf of machinery, becoming its living and sensing appendages. In this new relationship, humans extend machinery and its reach. Through the work-in-progress process of reaching increasing levels of automation, Amazon develops new technical foundations that consolidate its power in the digital workplace.

As a useful concept in the study of the low level image class structure, we introduce the notion of a structure element -'stel. '

There is a growing consensus that emerging forms of flexibilized platform labor (e.g., Upwork, Uber) necessitate new forms of mobilization to resist exploitation, given workers' atomization and lack of statutory rights. However, Euro-American concerns about radical reductions in labor security are countered by workforces in the "near South," where precarious, unprotected work has long been the norm. I explore incrementalist organization in motorcycle taxi (ojek) drivers' resistance to the flexible labor regime of Go-Jek, an Indonesian ride-hailing app. I examine ojek pangkalan (older-style informal-sector drivers) and Himpunan Driver Bandung Raya (HDBR, a grassroots app-based driver association) in the city of Bandung. Although antagonistic toward each other, ojek pangkalan and HDBR employ similar improvisatory strategies, notably micro-territorial basecamps and grassroots social security, to establish claims to their working lives. Incrementalist strategies in Indonesia are thus highly flexible in helping workers manage precarity across formal and informal contexts. By examining organization repertoires among app-based and older-style ojek drivers, this paper contributes to discussions about how the precarity of platform labor is produced and managed in a global context.

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