Amazon Flex delivery service joins the "on-demand economy"
Amazon is officially taking on the likes of Uber and Postmates with a new delivery service, Amazon Flex, launching in Seattle. According to the website, Amazon Flex is advertising for drivers who will be paid﻿ $18–25 per hour for ﻿delivering packages to users of Amazon Prime Now, using their own cars and phones. Drivers can sign up for to work in two, four, or eight hour shifts via a mobile app. This is interesting as the model is very similar to Postmates, which Amazon looked at buying earlier this year, but apparently decided to build its own service and directly compete. The service is currently only available in Seattle, but the plan is to roll it out in other﻿ American cities soon.
It will be interesting to see how Amazon copes with the ongoing backlash against the sharing economy, whose workers do not usually receive full-time employee status and benefits such as paid leave and health care. Amazon Flex workers will be classified as contractors, and thus, Amazon will be opening itself up to the criticism, and legal dramas, as ﻿experienced by Uber and others.

Amazon has made its first serious foray into the so-called “gig economy”, advertising for part-time delivery drivers in Seattle as part of a programme called “Amazon Flex”.

The drivers, who will be delivering packages ordered through its same-hour delivery product Amazon Prime Now, will be paid between $18-$25 an hour to work for the company, but they have to provide their own car and Android phone.

Amazon advertises the role to potential workers “be your own boss: deliver when you want, as much as you want”.

“You can choose any available 2, 4, and 8-hour blocks of time to work the same day, or set availability for up to 12 hours per day for the future. You can work as much or as little as you want,” the company explained in an FAQ.

The job advert plunges Amazon into the middle of an ongoing debate about the nature of work in a connected economy. Frequently referred to as the “sharing economy”, a reference to the fact that service providers at firms such as Uber or AirBnB are “sharing” their assets, such as their car or house, the new model has led to lawsuits in a number of countries.

Uber, in particular, has been repeatedly sued by former drivers arguing that they were in fact employees of the firm, rather than simple third-party contractors. That distinction has led to an alternative name for the trend, the “1099 economy”, after the US tax form which reports the pay of an independent contractor. But both “sharing” and “1099” economy fail to capture the evolution of the model; the latter ignores the fact that it exists outside the US, while the former emphasises who owns the assets being used, rather than who is doing the labour. One term becoming more commonly used to to refer to firms such as TaskRabbit, AirBnB and Amazon Flex is the “gig economy”, as it highlights the short-term, tenuous nature of the employment.

This move isn’t Amazon’s first foray into that world. The company was actually a trendsetter in the field, with its Mechanical Turk service allowing people to earn a small amount of money for completing simple tasks which are easy for people but hard for computers. According to one report, the average “hourly wage” for a Mechanical Turk worker was between $1 and $5 in 2013.