Netflix Employees "Tear, Slap, and Clack" Through Essay

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Netflix employees "tear, slap, and clack" through a day's work can be easily understood within a classic sociological framework, using either a Marxist or a Durkheim lens. Both Marx and Durkheim would have noted that the Netflix model represents quintessential division of labor. The employees perform one task with maximum efficiency. While Durkheim would focus primarily on the social contracts and organization of the employees within the Netflix organization, Marx would critique the means by which the Netflix associates are distanced from the owners of the means of production, their labor artificially devalued and exploited, especially given the employees come from developing countries in Africa and Asia. However, the way Sheehan describes the Netflix operation shows that Durkheim's concepts of social solidarity, specialization, and interdependence are indeed requisite to human survival and are inescapable, as the sociologists affirms in his dissertation on the function of the division of labor.

Whereas Marx focuses on conflict and division, Durkheim emphasizes bonding and collaboration. The Netflix case, as Sheehan describes it, fits Durkheim's model better than Marx's because there is a lack of conflict embedded in the analysis. In fact, the employees of Netflix are called "associates," in a deliberate attempt to include the women in the company. The term associate connotes partner in the way employee does not. By calling the employees associates, the Netflix company affirms a commitment to social solidarity and group membership. While the associates only make $9/hour and are far removed from what Marx called the means of production, the women from Asia and Africa are empowered to a degree. They work as fast as they would like, for example. They also receive free membership and movies, which further entrenches them into the system and connects them directly to the work they do. One woman described by Sheehan notes that she observes which film titles pass through her hands the most each day, and has learned about movies and television shows through her job. The process of unpacking and then stuffing the Netflix envelopes might represent the division of labor, but it does not necessarily represent the division of social classes.

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Thus, Marx's theory does not fit the Netflix example as well as Durkheim's. Marx would certainly be correct in pointing out that Netflix is a capitalist institution and that the laborers are not directly connected to the means of production. The women stuffing envelopes are not shareholders in the company. Likewise, a degree of commodity fetishism also takes place in the Netflix model. Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which he outlines in Das Capital, holds that things are valued more than people in a capitalist society. The readers of the Sheehan article will recognize their own participation in commodity fetishism when they realize that it seemed like magic that a DVD had suddenly appeared on their doorstop. After all, Sheehan had to actually explain to readers how their movies arrived in the mail; the human being had never been included in the Netflix description of their services. In other words, the human factor had been thoroughly removed from the rental and exchange system.

In Das Capital, Marx outlines the role that wage workers play in the exploitative system. Yet Marx's theory falls short of explaining the role that temp agencies play in the labor market. When Marx wrote Das Capital and The Communist Manifesto, the labor market did not have what are now known as temp agencies, and also did not permit as free a flow of human resources as can be seen today in a fully globalized market. Moreover, Sheehan notes that the employees in the Netflix warehouse are primarily women, which are the most systematically oppressed and subjugated demographic….....

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