“Jeff Bezos and his crew of techies and quants simply did what robber barons have always done: Raise, spend and sometimes lose other people’s money, dodge taxes, swindle suppliers and avoid unions,” Kim Moody writes in the essay collection, The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy. Bezos took advantage of the new and unregulated terrain of e-commerce to behave as ruthlessly as those titans of yore. Rockefeller or building cars for Henry Ford, Amazon workers are up against a titan of industry: Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world.
Like the 19 th-century workers forging steel for Andrew Carnegie, refining oil for John D. Through the alchemy of supply chain management, the goods sold through Amazon - everything from PlayStations to yoga pants - travel via cargo vans, airplanes and ships across a global infrastructure of roads, skies and oceans on their voyage to customers’ doorsteps. These ground logistics leave behind more than just pixel dust, wreaking devastating environmental havoc: a carbon footprint in the millions of metric tons, rivaling roughly the annual emissions of Norway. What is particularly novel about Amazon, as Joe DeManuelle-Hall writes in the movement publication Labor Notes, is how it brings together productivity innovations to create a regime of terror on the shop floor, with pressures that infamously force workers to pee in bottles rather than take breaks.Īmazon, along with Walmart, its fiercest competitor, is the 21 st century’s quintessential factory floor.īlue-collar Amazon workers keep the cascade of goods around the world flowing they are the muscle that fulfills consumer desire as it barrels down the arterial lanes of Amazon.com. At the company’s warehouses, workers use hand-held devices that track their every move and assess their speed and accuracy. But Amazon’s minute surveillance of workers - who, at the Bessemer facility, are mostly Black and women - would make the Stasi blush. Since the dawn of capitalism, bosses have found innovations to oversee and extract more work from the overstressed bodies of their labor force. Strikes by Amazon workers in Italy, Germany and India are coalescing into an international struggle against the world’s fourth-most valuable company and its grueling working conditions and intensive surveillance.
But the historic campaign nabbed global headlines and added fuel to ongoing workers’ revolts across the world. The union drive at Amazon’s 885, 000-square-foot warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed.
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