As anyone with a TV will know, Amazon’s Christmas ad campaign is built around a surreal fantasia in which its delivery boxes acquire voices and become a global choir, belting out the Jacksons’ 1980 hit Can You Feel It. It’s pretty clear why Amazon chose the song: the music conveys euphoric optimism, while its lyrics evoke a feelgood creed to which everyone could sign up: “If you look around / The whole world’s coming together now … All the colours of the world should be / Lovin’ each other wholeheartedly.”

While Jeff Bezos’s company pushes its workers through the frenzy of Christmas, some are trying to make that promise of human unity and universal hope a little more specific. In New York, employees at a “fulfilment centre” in Staten Island have announced that they want to break through the company’s longstanding hostility to organised labour, and collectively unionise. On Black Friday there were strikes and protests by Amazon workers in Spain, Germany, France, Italy and the UK against low wages and “inhuman conditions”. In Australia, where the company has been operating for only a year, two unions have combined to try and organise Amazon workers after one activist was sacked from his agency job at a fulfilment centre in Sydney.

A fascinating story is being played out in Minneapolis, where a group of Somalia-born workers has pushed Amazon to accept a very limited form of collective representation. The details of the story include the company’s decision to increase packing targets from 160 items an hour to 230, and workers’ insistence that demands should slacken as people fast over Ramadan. There is still a long way to go, but Amazon has at least changed some management practices at the warehouse and agreed to meet workers four times a year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Changing management practices … Demonstrators outside Amazon in Minnesota on Friday. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

In terms of PR, the company has one dependable card to play: thanks partly to pressure from US senator and former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, it has raised its minimum hourly wage in the US from $11 to $15 (£12) and its lowest British rate from £8 to £9.50. At the same time, however, Amazon has done away with share and incentive schemes, whose loss will reportedly cost some UK workers up to £1,500 a year. In any case, anyone with even a passing interest knows what defines work at Amazon’s sharp end, no matter what the going rate: frantic working under constant scrutiny, a culture in which basic human demands too often come second to increased efficiency, and questions about wellbeing and safety that will not go away.

Here, when the GMB union recently put in a freedom of information request about Amazon’s vast fulfilment centre in the former coal town of Rugeley, Staffordshire, it found that ambulances had been called there 115 times in three years, with three incidents “relating to pregnancy or maternity problems and three for major trauma”. When I spoke this week to a union organiser who focuses on Rugeley, they went through a range of other issues: mandatory productivity rates seemingly based on the “fastest, fittest workers”; breathing problems that reportedly come from dust around mountains of cardboard; and workers peeing in plastic bottles for fear of toilet breaks dropping their output.

Union representatives can represent individual workers in disciplinary proceedings and apparently go into the warehouse three or four times a week, but collective negotiating is a nonstarter. “We’ve shifted some things for individuals,” said the organiser. “But overall, Amazon is not changing the way it does things.”

Or maybe it is, but in the worst possible way. Many Amazon warehouse workers carry handheld computers that monitor and control their movement and the rate at which they complete their tasks. But soon enough that kind of technology may be superseded by “augmented reality”. Workers in a host of occupations will soon be wearing headsets and goggles that combine their view of immediate surroundings with instructions that may repeatedly flash in front of their eyes. Amazon patented its version of this technology – which it calls “augmented reality user interface facilitating fulfilment” – in 2017. To quote one report, the device can “detect where a person is at all times and when they have stopped moving”. Most importantly, it also means that the demands of efficiency can be beamed direct into people’s heads. Who would want to work like that?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A GMB representative during a Black Friday protest in Swansea last month. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

Given Bezos’s incredible wealth and his company’s pretty much unchallenged dominance of online retailing, why does Amazon seemingly treat so many of its workers so badly? At the risk of sounding hopelessly naive, instead of him looking like a caricatured capitalist from an old Soviet propaganda poster (albeit one who wears futuristic casual wear), why not behave better?

One answer is blunt: that the idea of meaningfully philanthropic capitalism, along with a role at the heart of business for trade unions, began to wither around the time the postwar welfarist dream breathed its last, in the early 1980s. Three decades on, one of the most depressing aspects of Amazon’s rise is the way public authorities who jostle to bring offices and warehouses to their areas blithely hand out tax breaks but never seem to insist on the most basic labour standards. And neither, of course, do the rest of us – it’s one of the benefits of a model of consumerism in which people remotely click away and never see the systems that service their wants.

Up close, the development of the tech Amazon has used over the last two decades confirms something glaringly obvious. Last year, I was invited inside the company’s cutting-edge fulfilment centre near Manchester airport, where robot “drives” scuttle around bringing items to pickers, and the speed at which orders are processed is flatly surreal. Most human workers were really only placeholders.

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Across so-called logistics, no end of research and development work is now focused on machines aimed at replacing human hands. In that sense, a cold and clinical corporate mind might come to a simple conclusion: why worry about the predicament of mere workers when they soon won’t be needed? Contrary to the optimistic stuff we hear about automation, it looks like the path to some imagined workless economy– (which, obviously, may well be a nightmare) involves the realities of many people’s employment conditions getting steadily worse. It’s a two-step process: you eventually lose your job to a robot, but the first thing you surrender is your self-respect.

The valiant union activists who are starting to challenge what all this means deserve nothing but praise: soon enough, their example will be followed in many other places. The rest of us would do well to realise that behind all that Christmas clicking lies a burgeoning dystopia. As the song goes, can you feel it?

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist