In May, the ACLU published an article revealing a deep collaboration between retail and tech giant Amazon and U.S. law enforcement. The article specifically detailed how Amazon has leveraged its facial recognition software “Rekognition” with law enforcement agencies across the country, and that those agencies are now building facial recognition databases for their own purposes.
In response, employees at Amazon have struck back with a campaign for worker control of the products they create. Circulating an internal petition (read the petition here) with the hashtag #wewontbuildit, “Amazonians” have issued a letter with three demands to Amazon’s management: a complete ban on the use of Amazon’s facial recognition software by law enforcement; a ban on all contracts with Palantir (Peter Thiel’s law enforcement focused data mining company) “and other Amazon partners who enable ICE;” as well as a demand for transparency and accountability to the workers on all law enforcement use of other Amazon services. These demands have two common themes: that the workers who build the technology ought to control how it is used and for what purpose, and that the U.S. state has proven that it will use technology against the people.
Amazon’s management is not new to the workplace struggle. Despite more than a dozen recorded attempts, no union has managed to establish a foothold within the company since its founding in 1994. Attempts to organize an Amazon workplace are met with suspiciously targeted layoffs or anti-union propaganda from the bosses. On the tech side of the business, the company’s attitude to workplace organizing has apparently benefitted from reactionary cultural attitudes among tech workers, who often consider themselves separate from the rest of the U.S. workforce. This attitude is reflected by the fact that Amazon’s tech workforce (like the tech industry more generally) has until now made few if any serious attempts at organization. Still, Amazon isn’t leaving anything to chance. Speaking in regards to the We Wont Build It campaign at a recent organizing conference, several Amazonians revealed that their primary concern was fear of reprisal, in addition to revealing a corporate culture that includes discouragement of political debate, pressure tactics and open surveillance of internal communications and social media. Given Amazon’s history, such concerns are well warranted.
The ACLU’s findings may have prompted this campaign, and it is in some ways a product of the national outrage over ICE’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, a policy enacted by and associated with the Trump administration. The petition letter specifically names these policies, portraying the petition and demands as a moral call to action. Yet the list of demands was not restricted to either ICE or a single political party. A complete ban on selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement represents not only only one political issue but all of the concern and fear tech workers have when faced with the applications of what they build. The letter goes on to reference the role IBM technology played in enacting the Holocaust, showing both an understanding of the political nature of technology, as well as the fact that Amazon employees have no desire to be collaborators or to see history repeat itself.
As of this writing, the We Wont Build It petition has almost 400 signatures, with organizers continuing to agitate and raise awareness of the campaign. Although undoubtedly aware of the difficulties and risks of organizing at a reactionary behemoth like Amazon, employees continue to push for their voices to be heard and for control over the use of the products they make, in order that they should not be coerced into building the tools of their own repression or be complicit in the racist treatment of refugees and migrants at the U.S. border. Ultimately this workplace struggle, however fierce, is only one of the battlegrounds of the class struggle, and tech workers who wish to exercise control over what they create must understand that all of these issues are linked.
The interests of the working class are in contradiction with the interests of the ruling class. The ruling class needs a repressive surveillance apparatus, but working people do not. The ruling class needs racist border laws, but working people do not. Only by uniting these struggles together and fighting for our common interests as workers and building socialism can we really hope to live free of oppression, racism and xenophobia.
Jeff Bezos take note: at Amazon, #techwontbuildit!
