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By: Matt Wolfinger
With Flock and Axon cameras on every corner, commuting to work for the average American means becoming an unwilling participant in a nationwide web of mass surveillance. Even clocking at work won’t protect them from the all-seeing AI – workplace surveillance systems can track them with even more precision, collecting data on the speed of their work, who they talk to and most importantly, if they’re planning to unionize.
Labor organizing in the United States is growing more popular. A 2025 poll from Gallup found that nearly 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, while recent polling shows labor unions have reached a near-historic high of 72%. Despite their popularity, only 10 percent of workers in the U.S. are union members. This isn’t for lack of trying, as workers across the country fight tooth and nail to unionize their workplace.
But innovations in AI and surveillance technology have made it easier than ever to keep tabs on workers and curtail any union activity — no more so than innovator and supervillain corporation Amazon.
New Frontiers in Exploitation
Workers at e-commerce behemoth Amazon are no stranger to union drives. Numerous warehouses have attempted to unionize but only one – JFK8 in Staten Island, New York – has won its union election. More than four years later, Amazon still refuses to come to the bargaining table.
The independent Amazon Labor Union at JFK8, now affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), faced fierce opposition from a company infamous for its brutal union-busting campaigns. There’s a seemingly inhuman ability for Amazon to get ahead of union efforts, before most employees are even aware of them, because their methods are inhuman: company-wide mass surveillance tracking workers both on and off the clock.
In 2020, Business Insider uncovered Amazon’s use of algorithm-driven “heat maps” to track which Whole Foods locations were at the highest risk of unionizing, tracking “risk-factors” like local unemployment rates, average wages and the racial diversity of employees.
Amazon makes use of “bossware” tech like cameras, handheld scanners and biometric trackers to monitor each worker’s location, how fast they’re working, and the lengths of their bathroom breaks.
The data collected on each employee gets fed into an algorithm tasked with optimizing efficiency. Internal documents obtained by Vice in 2022 reveal exactly how the algorithm functions. The aforementioned surveillance tech tallies each employee’s daily “time off task” (TOT).
Talk to your coworker on the clock? That’s time off task. Walk to the wrong floor? Also time off task. Take a bathroom break longer than 10 minutes? Unsurprisingly, that’s more time off task. Those 10 minutes include the walk to the bathroom, even if it’s on the other side of the warehouse, placing pregnant and disabled workers at a clear disadvantage.
Whoever accumulates the most TOT that day is crowned the “top offender” and called into an office to be grilled by their manager. If a worker can’t recall what they were doing during a stretch in time, that’s more TOT.
Accumulate more than 120 minutes of TOT in one day, or 30 minutes over 3 days in a single year and the algorithm fires you on the spot, no human oversight needed. The algorithm will auto-trigger warnings and terminations if employees fall behind on their quotas, which are also determined by the algorithm. Bossware lets employers automate the hiring process, generate schedules, conduct layoffs and write performance reviews.
Amazon has touted its advancements in AI, and its implementation stretches far beyond its fulfillment centers.
Amazon delivery vans come fashioned with AI-powered cameras that track the van’s speed, location, and the driver’s biometric data, even as they contract out to third-party vendors who legally operate as separate employers (Delivery Service Partner (DSP)) even though routes and hours are set by Amazon. Small facial expressions, like a driver yawning or looking in the side mirror get flagged and shared with their supervisor. Although done under the pretense of increased safety, drivers under surveillance report feeling pressured to drive more recklessly to keep up with their quotas. The company endangers its communities.
A 2019 investigation from ProPublica found more than 60 DSP-involved accidents occurred over a 4-year span, ten resulting in deaths. Amazon argued that since those drivers are subcontractors, they can’t be held liable for their actions.
The Antiunion Arsenal, Assembled
In 2018, Amazon debuted their new “Just Walk Out” technology at convenience stores, later expanding to Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The company claimed that customers could enter the store, select their items, then walk out the door without stopping at check out – the advanced AI system would simply track what items they left with and bill them later.
This tech, if implemented, would reduce the number of employees required to run each location, an obvious test run for Amazon’s hundreds of Whole Foods locations.
Reporting from The Information uncovered that this system was largely overseen by underpaid workers in India, who manually reviewed over 70 percent of transactions.
A similar system is used in Amazon’s warehouses. When the AI-powered cameras that track the stowing of packages fail, the footage is sent to thousands of workers in Costa Rica and India to review. They’re also required to report any rulebreaking, training the AI to identify these behaviors in the process. Those workers told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that their quotas are so grueling they try to blink as little as possible, afraid they’ll miss a minute detail or fall behind pace and be punished – watched just as closely as the workers they’re paid to surveil.
Amazon workers who know they’re being watched often feel pressured to work faster, leading to increased rates of burnout and workplace injury, according to a study from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed report taking unpaid time off to recover from constant pain and exhaustion.
Even if workers aren’t under constant surveillance, just knowing it’s possible is enough to instill an overwhelming sense of fear and paranoia. Employees worried that the slightest misstep will cost them their jobs (in the midst of a cost of living crisis) may feel more inclined to keep any prounion opinions to themselves. Throw in steep quotas and your employees have no time to think of anything else, like how a union could improve their working conditions.
Not even off the clock conversations go unseen. Vice obtained documents in late 2020 revealing Amazon had been using a social media surveillance team to infiltrate dozens of private Facebook groups and scan websites, subreddits and Twitter threads to collect intel on employee complaints and “planning for any strike or protest against Amazon.”
The largest amount of Amazon’s antiunion spending comes in the form of “union avoidance” attorneys and consultants, who can earn upwards of $10,000 per day to persuade employees against unionizing. A recent report from LaborLab and the Economic Policy Institute found that U.S. employers spend around $1.7 billion each year on union avoidance consultants and law firms.
Multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon have more than enough money to burn, spending over $26 million on consultants last year. The amount is likely higher, as companies are only required to disclose spending on consultants who directly interact with employees.
“Amazon’s MO is to lean on consultants pretty hard,” Teke Wiggin, strategic coordinator at LaborLab and a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University researching union-busting told Working Mass. They employ consultants and an in-house “employee relations team” of union busters to collect intel and plant antiunion propaganda in their conversations with workers. Wiggin said:
This all has to be done very subtly, because soliciting grievances, for example, explicitly is illegal. So it’s all done indirectly. It makes workers feel listened to, but they’re also gauging the union support of all these individual employees.
The attorneys, explained Wiggin, help formulate talking points – cherry picking lines from a union’s constitution that sound unfavorable out of context for consultants to parrot at workers on-site.
Wiggin is the author of Weaponizing the Workplace, a study detailing Amazon’s use of “algorithmic management,” automating human relations tasks through algorithms, to disrupt the company’s first ever union election in Bessemer, Alabama.
The 2021 union drive in Bessemer ultimately failed, with roughly 70 percent of workers voting no. Some who began as prounion but switched sides later expressed regret to Wiggin, saying they’d been misled or intimidated by Amazon.
The tactics used in Bessemer became the blueprint for Amazon’s unionbusting efforts moving forward, building what Wiggin calls the “antiunion arsenal.”
Companies like Amazon make employees reliant on in-house apps that automate human resource management. Employees are required to use the company’s A to Z app daily to keep track of their schedule, request time off and view pay stubs. Management exploits this reliance to send employees multiple text blasts per day with the classic antiunion lies: unions are scams, they impede any real progress, employees will lose their benefits, and they’ll drive a wedge between you and the architects of your suffering.
They’ve found a way to circumvent the need for illegal in-person “captive audience” meetings (though Amazon holds those, too) to smother employees with antiunion propaganda at every hour of the day. Bessemer employees reported going to bed thinking they had the next day off, then waking up to find they’d be scheduled for a 7am shift while sleeping. Employees are punished for not refreshing the app 24/7, allowing Amazon to build a case of infractions as pretense for layoffs.
Leading up to the election, Amazon pulled out all the stops to bust the union – literally.
Union organizers would speak to employees at the intersection outside the Bessemer warehouse, making use of the down time at red lights to build a connection and inform them of their right to organize. To retaliate, Amazon asked the county to shorten the duration of red lights at the intersection, making it impossible for anyone to get a word in. This led to at least one car crash that narrowly missed an organizer canvassing outside.
Preemptive Moves and Pinkertons, Back Again
Another tool in the antiunion arsenal is “algorithmic slack-cutting,” where companies improve working conditions ahead of union elections to win back disgruntled employees.
Ahead of Bessemer’s election, management relaxed enforcement of TOT and decreased the volume of packages brought through the warehouse to give workers the impression their demands were being heard. This led some who were prounion to switch sides, believing it was no longer necessary. After the vote failed, Amazon reinstated those policies.
For employees already working in dehumanizing conditions, the slightest improvement can feel like a massive change. “Amazon has more room than traditional employers to rapidly improve working conditions,” said Wiggin, “and because they can rapidly improve working conditions through algorithmic slack-cutting, they have more capacity to sway voters in their direction.”
Amazon has already hired the Pinkertons (yes, those Pinkertons) to collect intel on workers deemed “labor organizing threats.” Although times have changed, their methods have stayed the same – infiltrate the rank-and-file and gather intel the employer can use to their advantage.
Even when workers win their elections, antiunion law firms will stall negotiations for as long as possible by constantly filing appeals on behalf of employers. More than four years after the Staten Island warehouse won their union election, the NLRB only recently ordered Amazon to finally start negotiating. Amazon plans to appeal that decision as well, holding it up in the courts and pushing negotiations back even further.
Workers at Amazon warehouse DCB8 in Bellingham, Massachusetts have been attempting to unionize through the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) for two years. Since then, Amazon has rolled out the same union-busting strategies they used to crush the union in Bessemer.
Bellingham workers announced their intention to unionize in May 2024 by wearing shirts on the floor featuring Amazon’s smile logo and “Union” in bright orange text. Within two hours, management had plastered antiunion messaging in every break room, bathroom and on every TV. The messaging started out as general antiunion talking points, but eventually named the APWU directly.
Amazon’s pervasive antiunion strategy has made it difficult for DCB8 organizers to convince some workers to join the cause. Laurie Masteron, a former DCB8 worker and lead organizer, shared on APWU’s podcast:
It has a huge impact, because when you have a conversation with someone who is new or has been there for a very short span of time, they parrot exactly what they see in here. It’s having that same conversation every single day, banging your head against the wall in hopes of breaking through that.
Management closely surveilled those wearing union shirts to write them up for minor infractions, like forgetting to wear their ring scanner. “It’s a way of intimidating fellow employees into not wearing their shirts and not standing loud and proud,” Masterson explained.
Masterson was fired by Amazon in December after returning from time off she’d taken to recover from a shoulder injury sustained on-site. The company cited moving her hand to unclog a jam on the conveyor belt (which caused the injury) as a fireable offense, a rule Masterson had never heard about. The APWU and AFL-CIO have filed a lawsuit through the NLRB over the firing, one of many Unfair Labor Practice (ULP_ lawsuits brought against Amazon on DCB8’s behalf.
The APWU did not respond to multiple requests for an interview with a representative or DCB8 organizer.
Borrowing Tactics from the Hotel Industry
In June, Business Insider revealed Amazon is testing a new program called “Right Station Link,” taking the form of wearable trackers that “automatically capture check-in and labor-hours data for ‘indirect’ support roles, such as equipment maintenance, safety coordination, and floor management, that have historically been harder to track.” The goal is to increase efficiency and reduce idle time. Unlike the handheld scanners used to track stationary employees, support workers are constantly moving and manually check in throughout their shift. Right Station Link would automate that process.
Amazon plans to implement the program in every North American warehouse by the 2026 holiday season.
A spokesperson for Amazon told Business Insider that the system is similar to those used by hotel workers to log their progress and receive assignments. Although unintentional, it’s a very revealing comparison given the history hospitality workers have with this technology.
Striking Marriott workers in Philadelphia shared in 2018 that these devices, which assigned each cleaner to specific rooms instead of letting them clean each one in order, led to less efficient and more exhausting routes as cleaners jumped randomly from room to room. This also increased the volume of complaints from guests, who assumed their rooms had been skipped.
In 2023, California hotel owners responded to strikes by mass-hiring scabs through the Instawork hiring app. When the temporary workers who unknowingly signed up to cross the picket line decided to join it instead, Instawork automatically slashed their hours and wages to retaliate.
Beyond opinions on unions, bossware gives employers tools to influence and mobilize their workers for their own political gain. Uber and Lyft flooded employers and riders with in-app reminders to vote “Yes” on Proposition 22 in California, permanently classifying all gig workers as independent contractors, the same loophole barring Amazon’s DSP drivers from unionizing or receiving benefits.
Managers at Amazon’s warehouses have been butting heads with an algorithm progressively given more decision making power, and reducing the ability for human managers to override it, even when the AI makes decisions based on incorrect or out-of-date information.
When the algorithm couldn’t account for managers needing more workers for specific sections of the warehouse, they’d manually reassign them then modify the timesheets to accommodate it. Amazon has since reduced the ability for managers to override the algorithm, despite its many flaws.
Long-term, letting AI take over responsibilities and make decisions in the workplace lessens our ability to think for ourselves and become experts in the field. If we become over-reliant on AI, we’ll grow rusty and “deskilling” will erode our ability to perform tasks, understand the nature of our work and actively problem solve when issues arise.
Workers are provided with little transparency on what data employers collect on them and what it’s used for. There’s an overreliance on AI, a technology infamous for hallucinating false information, to remove humans from the decision-making process. The powers-that-be at Amazon would rather double down and punish those who dare to exercise their own judgment.
These advancements in tech have put the working class in a chokehold, unable to work without engaging with the tools employers exploit to exert their own influence. Clyde, a union activist who spoke to Wiggin, put it in Marxist terms:
New forms of production enable data and attentional captivity [of workers]. If [workers] weren’t as attentive to their monitors and scanners as they are, their workplace would be a lot less efficient and union drives would be a lot easier . . . . The means of production are the means of communication.
As long as the managerial class has access to unregulated AI and algorithmic management tools they pose an existential threat to the working class, whether eliminating jobs through automation or helping suppress unions. The world survived and thrived long before AI, and we can do so again.
Placing guardrails on AI in the workplace and providing transparency on how algorithms work, (removing them from the “black box”) is a good first step to protect the privacy of workers. Long-term, bossware should be excised from the labor market completely, giving unions a fighting chance against the oligarchs who’ve gone all in on technology designed to isolate, exploit and destroy them.
Matt Wolfinger is a data journalist, Northeastern University graduate, and a contributing writer to Working Mass.
The post The Amazonopticon and the Antiunion Arsenal appeared first on Working Mass.
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