By JONATHAN COHN Issue Date: 02.19.01 Post Date: 02.09.01
SEATTLE When i first encountered Alan Barclay, he still believed in Amazon.com. It was mid-January, and we met at a downtown Seattle pub to discuss his efforts to help organize Amazon's customer service staff into a union--and thus give organized labor its first foothold in the Internet economy. Barclay, 39, was an unlikely rabble-rouser: He has a bachelor's degree in anthropology and, with his thin goatee, looks more bohemian than blue-collar. But he was a key figure in the campaign, having spent the last few months sending e-mail messages to co-workers, drafting union propaganda, and quietly arranging meetings in co-workers' basements. He could even claim some credit for the campaign's name, "Day 2"--a play on Amazon's unofficial corporate motto that it is always "day one" at the fledgling Internet retailer. In Barclay's mind, the drive to form a union wasn't an act of disloyalty but an act of faith--not just a campaign for financial security but an effort to return the company to the values it had once embodied. Barclay considered himself an "Amazonian." He wanted to bring the company back to its early, heady days when philosophy majors eagerly manned the phones and managers worked hand in hand with frontline employees. Barclay didn't just consider Amazon's recent turn toward corporate hierarchy, rigid work rules, and outsourcing a personal betrayal; he considered it a betrayal of the company itself. "Day 2," said Barclay, "would restore what I once felt I had at Amazon." A week later, Barclay, a telecommuter, received an e-mail message at home from Bill Price, Amazon's vice president of customer service: Amazon was terminating nearly all of its Seattle customer service workforce--some 400 employees in all, Barclay among them. Although rumors about downsizing had been circulating for weeks, the move came as a shock; Price had assured nervous employees just six weeks earlier that the company had no immediate plans for layoffs. What's more, the doomed Seattle division included some of Amazon's most senior employees--people like Barclay, a company old-timer at 33 months--whose institutional knowledge and superior skills supposedly made them indispensable to Amazon's mission of becoming the "earth's most customer-centric company." Of course, those same qualities also made them some of Amazon's most expensive, and demanding, employees. And that, apparently, made them expendable after all. "I want you to know that this was a very difficult decision for the company to make, but the unfortunate reality is that it is simply a matter of economics," read Price's e-mail message. "Seattle is our least cost-effective location, in both labor and real estate costs, and we need to consolidate our operations across the US." After absorbing the news, Barclay started typing. His job at Amazon had included corresponding with disgruntled customers. Now he fired off an angry e-mail message of his own. "As an employee," he wrote me, "any illusions I might have had about the nobility of Amazon.com have been shattered." Was barclay hopelessly naïve? Perhaps. But he wasn't alone. Only last year, the vision he embraced, about Amazon in particular and the new economy in general, was widely peddled by management gurus, business magazines, and Washington politicos. You remember the story line. The new, information-age economy required workers with greater skills than, say, your typical stock boy or secretary. To attract such people, companies would offer lavish benefits and unparalleled creative freedom. The regimented, top-down management structure of yesteryear would disappear, replaced by a new paradigm of fluid, democratic workplaces where even frontline workers received autonomy, high wages, and partial ownership of the company via stock options. If workers changed jobs frequently, as seemed likely, it would be on their own terms--and for their own benefit. "The new economy," wrote Alan Webber, founder of the business magazine Fast Company, "would celebrate individuality, workplace democracy and creativity over the old economy mind-set that put a premium on the organization man, corporatism and sheer size. In the new economy, one individual could make a very big difference.... And, for that effort, that person would receive not just a salary--the old economy's fair day's pay for a fair day's work--but also a share in the value created by his or her ingenuity, intelligence and innovation."
http://www.tnr.com/021901/cohn021901_print.html