This is the future of work, it’s not about replacing people, it is about augmenting people so they know what to do and then capture what they’ve done to make the next person more efficient.”

“We believe we’ve reached a peak in how much you can make out of machines so the last big nut to crack is around people in the human environment, how can you optimise them?”

These are quotes from two separate platform developers in the US who spoke anonymously to The Future of Work institute for their new report ‘The Amazonian Era – the Gigification of work‘. The UK-based think-tank has found a massive acceleration in the use of digital technology at work during the covid-19 pandemic. A third of USDAW union members (who generally work in retail, supermarkets and warehouses) said their role had been “extremely” changed by new technology since covid-19.

Many of these changes have ostensibly been brought in to deal with Covid specific issues, like ensuring health and safety compliance on the ground. But these changes are unquestionably permanent, as bosses seek to exert greater control over the work process through what the report calls “the human data cycle”: first information is gathered, measured and recorded to create a representation of the work, then a set of standard performance objectives defines, plans and schedules the work algorithmically, and finally penalties and incentives are created to ensure that the worker meets the set standards “such as being rewarded with Amazon vouchers for conducting more than your scheduled tasks, or…being prohibited from accessing more hours, or securing a better contract”.

Importantly, this model of algorithmic control is available for managers to download from the app store at the click of a button, so is easily re-produced throughout the economy. One manager said: “There were loads of apps I tried from the app store, I contacted them, got a Zoom meeting, and it went from there. I didn’t read much into them, I was more interested in just getting stuck in”.

Not every job will be gigified in the same way as a food delivery courier, but that’s largely beside the point: companies like Amazon decide whether a non-standard or standard contractual arrangement is preferable based on what is most effective at maximising productivity while keeping labour costs as low as possible. Under either contractual arrangement, the worker is subordinate to the boss in a more exacting way than was ever possible before the algorithm. This momentous change taking place in the world of work has gone almost completely unregulated – the ‘Amazonian era’ report proposes a host of reforms to ensure data-driven technologies are “designed and deployed to be human-centred, clearly aimed at making work better”. But are our politicians even paying attention?