Star investigative reporter Brendan Kennedy’s undercover gig work doing Amazon deliveries was caffeinated public service journalism, just the thing for Amazon customers like me at this hyper-acquisitive time of year.

Who are these men carefully concealing packages on my porch to prevent theft, simultaneously taking a photo as proof, and already back in the van as I open the door? Now I know. They are low-paid workers in the gig economy, working as temps for delivery companies — some large, some tiny — with Amazon contracts, surveilled online by their hand-held “Rabbit” devices every second of the day. Their injury rates are much higher than those of courier company employees as they deliver a million packages a day in the GTA.

It’s an easy come, easy go job, the kind of temp work done by 10 per cent of Canadian workers in 2016, Statistics Canada says, and the number is higher now. Workers at the massive warehouses Amazon calls “fulfilment centres” have a notoriously difficult workday under equal surveillance but they’re not slipping in ice and snow.

The gig economy is monstrous. It’s not just self-perpetuating, it is self-expanding because the frantic lives of Canadians with jobs is increasingly dependent on outsourcing “life admin” — organizing daily life — to gig workers, of whom more than half have wages and salaries from another job.

As Kennedy reveals, the gig economy is placing Canadian workers on a giant hamster wheel (Amazon calls its system “the flywheel,” but I wish to describe an animal level of suffering).

In particular, exhausted women with children in Toronto, with its lousy transit and street congestion, can stay in the workforce, because labour once done personally is now outsourced to digital networks: shopping for groceries, clothing and housewares, home repair, cooking, gardening and more. We worship the god of cheap, and cheap helps.

Jeff Bezos, the American who invented Amazon and became the world’s richest human, is devoted to making the wheel turn faster by making it cheaper all the time. Amazon used to do its own deliveries. Some senior managers left after warning that outsourcing one- and two-day delivery would lead to bad drivers and bad deliveries, meaning delays, injuries and death.

It’s easy to imagine that fear is why drivers cut corners on safety. Ikea delivery is terrible; maybe that’s because outsourced gig workers aren’t as scared ultimately of Ikea as they are of Amazon, which can presumably cancel delivery contracts that don’t meet its high standards.

I do see the rationale for this; fear is what makes me meet deadlines. But fear is also what makes people order from Amazon. There are increasingly fewer ways to cope with hyper middle-class life.

In the past quarter, I moved house, a process that I have already described at tedious length, and began ordering much more from Amazon than when I became a customer in 2002. (Amazon doesn’t discount or stock books as much as it used to but having killed bookstores, leaves us unable to buy books.) I placed both feet on the hamster wheel.

My Amazon Prime order history became a bulging diary of banality: printer ink, glue, gifts, TV wall mount, outdoor motion sensor lights, polyurethane, carpet tape, air conditioning system cover, cable label tags, plastic cartons, LED lights, coat hooks, rug underlay, wireless doorbell, curtain rods, barbecue cover, washi tape, light bulbs, motion-sensor pest repeller ... you get the picture.

These purchases (minus the ones of lousy quality, as Bezos now permits) made my life not only safer and more pleasant, but also possible without frequent long car trips to suburban big-box stores.

By voting, we get the government we deserve. By working nine-to-five jobs, we get the life we deserve. By using Amazon to help keep those jobs, we get the Canada we deserve. We close local stores, drive prices down, clog the streets, pollute the air, endanger exhausted delivery drivers and keep the huge hamster wheel spinning.

One way to slow it down would be unionizing delivery drivers who, despite corporate claims, do actually work for Amazon, Uber, Foodora and all the other outsourcers (billionaires) who hire gig employers (small delivery firms) of gig workers (millions of Kennedys).

It is very difficult for gig workers to unionize but unionize they must. Then their lives will improve, goods will be more expensive for people like me to order online, delivery times will be longer and the scales will be tipped in favour of human beings, as opposed to hamsters, the thin, mangy and glassy-eyed creatures who keep the Amazon deal going.

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It would be easy for Amazon to agree to do this, but its profits would be merely huge, not massive, and that would not suit this second Golden Age of global capitalism.

Amazon’s business plan depends on the supremely well-organized and speedy supply chain that began in Bezos’s garage in 1995. But there is always a weak link. Human beings, including Bezos, never know when to stop. If the supply chain stretches too far, it will snap. There may be a rough justice in that.

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