Peer2Politics

Amazon and Walmart are prime examples of how in the early twenty-first century, state-of-the-art information technologies can be used to re-create the harsh, driven capitalism of the pre–New Deal era. With their reliance on tens of thousands of workers to shift goods in stores and warehouses, the two corporations depend heavily on a steady supply of unskilled labor very much in the manner of early-twentieth-century industrial sweatshops. But in their capacity to track employee performance, to speed it up, to measure it against targets, managers at Walmart and Amazon are empowered in ways that their predecessors of a century ago could only dream of.