Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 168

improve their welfare, they say, laborers will become more and more
willing to take action themselves. “Workers will organize more,”
Peng predicts. “All the workers should be united.” (Schuman 2013)
It is not only the base of the global supply chains created by major
cloud companies that can create disruptions. Chains of resistance can
also form in the advanced nations of the West where the labor process is
certainly better than in Chinese electronic assembly plants but very far
from what applies in the headquarters of these companies. Resistance
can arise from how management uses the cloud to monitor and control
the minutest actions of its workforce, including those in white-collar
occupations. According to one analyst, “As Big Data becomes a ixture of
ofice life, companies are turning to tracking devices to gather real-time
information on how teams of employees work and interact. Sensors, worn
on lanyards or placed on ofice furniture, record how often staffers get up
from their desks, consult other teams and hold meetings” (R. Silverman
2013). Today's technology enables employers to control workers in ways
that Frederic Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientiic management,” could
only dream about. Whereas once an employer could only systematically
monitor workers when they punched their time cards at the beginning
and end of the workday, today they can measure practically every activity
of workers employed in call centers and logistics operations. As a special-
ist in workplace surveillance comments, “If you have a plentiful supply of
labor and don't need to worry about quality, the temptation is to nail your
workers for every minute of the day” (Gapper 2013a; see also Neff 2012).
While sensors raise signiicant privacy issues, a more ominous portent
comes from Amazon, which is fundamentally challenging the rights that
workers in the West secured over years of struggle and organizing. One
hot spot for labor tensions is Germany, where the company has estab-
lished eight distribution centers employing 8,000 workers. Germany is
important for the company as the source of 14 percent of its revenues
(Wingield and Eddy 2013). The country has not received a great deal of
attention in struggles over global supply chains, but it has a long history
of battles with Walmart, which abandoned Germany in 2006 rather than
bend its worldwide labor standards to meet the expectations of German
workers and especially their union Ver.di, which represents over 2 mil-
lion employees in the service sector. German workers and their unions