Amazon Employees for Climate Justice

The group’s organizers say they are in touch with several hundred Amazon employees on a regular basis and that the workers increasingly discuss the stress of using A.I. on the job, in addition to the effect that the technology has on the climate.

The complaints have centered around “what their careers are going to look like,” said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who is a spokeswoman for the group. “And not just their careers, but the quality of the work.”

While there is no rush to form a union for coders at Amazon, such a move would not be unheard-of. When workers at General Motors went on strike in 1936 to demand recognition of their union, the United Automobile Workers, it was the dreaded speed up that spurred them on.

The typical worker felt “that he was not free, as perhaps he had been on some previous job, to set the pace of his work,” the historian Sidney Fine wrote, “and to determine the manner in which it was to be performed.”