The median annual pay for Amazon’s 560,000 employees is $28,446. It’s $240,430 for Facebook Inc—but that company only employs 25,105 people, many of whom do not have very much contact with the world of hard and heavy things (merchandise). Facebook is pure froth. Amazon is not. Its froth is mostly in Seattle, where the median pay for its “more than 45,000 employees” is over $110,000. Other cities would do anything for this action, this bubbling of money. But most of the people who work for this e-commerce giant—which is valued by the market to be worth over $700 Billion (its stock has mostly recovered from the Trump mauling in the early days of this month), and is now boasting 100 million Prime members worldwide—are paid low wages to move things into the world of actual things (merchandise).
Apparently, it’s still cheaper for people do this work than robots. That could change in the future. The struggle to raise wages, which is inevitable because they are not adjusted to inflation (costs of living), will force labor costs up as the cost of machines falls. This pattern is not new at all. It was even described in 1821 by David Ricardo in the 31st chapter, “On Machinery,” of Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
Ricardo wrote that though the “reduction of price could not fail to be the consequence of the employment of machinery [in production],” he was “convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour… is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.” Back in the day, the truth could occasionally come out of a bourgeois economist because they were foolish (or even naive) enough to actually examine reality. These days, almost no truth can break the abstruse formulations and market hypotheses of orthodox economists, who only calculate the movement of prices and interest rates.
But my point is, nothing has really changed. If Amazon introduces robots, this would not be in any way revolutionary. This has been the tendency of capitalism from the get-go. The rise of the organic composition of capital (the ratio of constant capital—machines, plants, equipment, and what have you—to labor costs or variable capital) was fully theorized more than 150 years ago. There were no robots then. But the idea was by no means science fictional. Structurally speaking, there is little about Amazon that would surprise David Ricardo if he were to return from the dead and walk into its cashier-less convenience store on 7th Avenue.
