Sudheer Chava, Alexander Oettl, Manpreet Singh, and Linghang Zeng, “The Dark Side of Technological Progress? Impact of Ecommerce on Employees at Brick-and-mortar Retailers,” Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business Research Paper, 2018, pp. 18–23. 29th Annual Conference on Financial Economics & Accounting. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3197326. Accessed April 20, 2020.
70. Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017).
71. Beth Gutelius and Nik Theodore, “The Future of Warehouse Work: Technological Change in the U.S. Logistics Industry,” UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2019, http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/future-of-warehouse-work/. Accessed April 20, 2020.
72. Some workers might earn more if they work overtime while others might earn less if employed part-time or only part of the year.
73. Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns. Too Big To Govern: Public Balance Sheet for the World’s Largest Store. Los Angeles: Economic Roundtable, 2019. Available at: https://economicrt.org/publication/too-big-to-govern/; This is consistent with larger patterns in warehouse employment (see Jason Struna, 2015, “Handling Globalization: Labor, Capital, and Class in the Globalized Warehouse and Distribution Center, “ Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Riverside. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3c35641d#main).
74. Will Evans, “Behind the Smiles: Amazon’s Internal Injury Records Expose the True Toll of its Relentless Drive for Speed,” Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting, November 25, 2019, www.revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/. Accessed April 20, 2020.
75. See Chapters 4, 7, 8, 13, and 15 in this volume.
76. See DCH1 Amazonian United’s Chapter 17 in this volume.
77. Gutelius and Theodore, “The Future of Warehouse Work.”
78. Brian Heater, “Amazon Says It Has Deployed More Than 200,000 Robotic Drives Globally,” TechCrunch, June 5 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/05/amazon-says-it-has-deployed-more-than-200000-robotic-drives-globally/. Accessed April 20, 2020.
79. Will Evans, “Behind the Smiles: Amazon’s Internal Injury Records Expose the True Toll of its Relentless Drive For Speed,” Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting, 25 November 2019, www.revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/
80. Gutelius and Theodore, “The Future of Warehouse Work.”
81. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
82. Richard L. Brandt, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com (London: Portfolio, 2012).
83. Greg Jameson, Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets: How to Use the Power of Others to Market and Sell for You (New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2014).
84. Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: Harper Business, 2002); Nick Statt “Amazon Warehouse Workers are Striking Across Europe on Prime Day.” The Verge, July 16, 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17577348/amazon-warehouse-worker-strike-europe-prime-day.
85. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2013). www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-18/amazon-battles-walmart-in-indian-e-commerce-market-it-created. Accessed April 20, 2020.
86. Transnational Social Strike Platform, “Strike the Giant! Transnational Organization Against Amazon,” TSS Journal, 2019, www.transnational-strike.info/2019/11/29/pdf-strike-the-giant-transnational-organization-against-amazon-tss-journal/?fbclid=IwAR2g9ALU7LIhcAw-I9qUITcslN4NqGCmz1ChjSNlniMglCTXNA7XkfDxrzc. Accessed April 20, 2020.
87. Athena, 2019. Athena Coalition, https://athenaforall.org/#s2.
1
Amazon: Context, Structure and Vulnerability
Kim Moody
Amazon the corporate chameleon claims to be the world’s largest online retailer. According to CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, it is actually a tech company.1 While it is both of these, New York University business school analyst Scott Galloway notes that “Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history.”2 Two business consultants in their analysis of Amazon concluded that as it entered its third decade, “Amazon is already a major global logistics player.”3 The U.S. trucking industry journal Transport Topics more recently asked “Should Amazon.com be considered one of the largest logistics companies in North America? The answer, according to most industry observers,” the journal replied, “is yes.”4
Including its technological capabilities, it is this logistics infrastructure that has propelled Amazon into its leading position in a highly competitive industry. And it is this efficiency and the costs of moving goods at high speeds in the maelstrom of global competition that has brought enormous pressures on the workers in its expanding network of sortation and fulfillment centers, Prime Now hubs, delivery stations, and data centers, as well as those working in the many forms of transportation that connect these and the ultimate customers. This chapter focuses on the expanding configuration of Amazon’s logistics infrastructure, its place in the emerging global network of transportation and forces of competition in a world of shifting economic power, their impact on Amazon’s workforce, and the vulnerability of Amazon to worker resistance.
Contrary to much mythology surrounding Amazon’s success, 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. Amazon had the good fortune to be born in the midst of the great dot.com boom of the 1990s when venture capital was cheap and investors were searching for innovative startups. In the heat of the boom, Amazon
