evolution of Amazon, its customer focus, and the brilliance and persistence of Jeff Bezos. Here our concern is with its current structure, operations, and their impact on the 647,500 full-time and part-time workers employed globally by Amazon by the end of 2018.29 For this reason, we will look at Amazon’s global structure, investments, expenses, and employment. Virtually all of Amazon’s international and even most of its U.S. facilities have been built within the last few years. With some notable exceptions such as its Whole Foods stores acquired in 2017 and its new brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon’s properties are all part of its logistics system. Amazon’s expanding global empire, in short, is brand new, despite its founding as an online book distributor in 1994. As the table below shows, while almost half of all of its 1093 facilities are still located in the U.S., more than half are now scattered across Asia (where India accounts for 331 facilities), Europe, and the Middle East, along with Canada and Australia. Furthermore, recently about a third of its revenues comes from outside the U.S.30
Table 1.1 Amazon’s global facilities as of June 2019*
| Global | 1093 |
| United States | 477 |
| Asia | 358 |
| Europe | 230 |
| Middle East | 5 |
| Latin America | 4 |
| Canada | 14 |
| Australia | 5 |
*Brick-and-mortar stores not included.
Source: MWPVL International, Amazon Global Fulfillment Center Network, January 2020, www.mwpvl.com/html/amazon_com.html.
Looking more closely at Amazon’s U.S. operations, we see that as of mid-2019 it had 10 inbound sortation centers, 166 fulfillment and return centers, 47 outbound sortation centers, 53 Prime Now hubs, 12 Whole Foods distribution centers, 21 Pantry Fresh Food fulfillment centers, 162 delivery stations, and 6 airport hubs.31 By mid-2019, Amazon employed a highly diverse and racialized workforce of 350,000 in their U.S. facilities, not including the 100,000 or so temporary workers taken on at the peak holiday season.32 The sortation centers are a new development in which goods are moved from fulfillment centers to the outbound sortation centers where they are organized by zip code and sent to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to be forwarded to customers. The Whole Foods distribution centers and Fresh Food fulfillment centers are also new since Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods was its first major entry into brick-and-mortar stores.33
Missing from the MWPVL tally are Amazon’s data centers (or data warehouses) about which the company is highly secretive. They are nevertheless the operational centers of Amazon Web Services, which both provides “cloud” services for other business customers and the artificial intelligence that drives its Alexa “voice assistant”, as well as for its own massive “number-crunching capacity and standardized, automated computing infrastructure.”34 While Amazon does not provide detailed information on their number or location, Datacenters.com puts those in the US at 36, with 29 concentrated in northern Virginia, three in Ohio, three in eastern Oregon, and just one in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle. According to this count, these data centers employ some 10,000 people in the 36 U.S. facilities and three in Ireland.35 As an article about Amazon’s data centers in The Atlantic points out, northern Virginia is the birthplace and “heart of the internet,” but also of “spook country”— that is, the epicenter of the national security state’s data and surveillance operations. Amazon’s lines to the national security state are also direct. The CIA is reported to have a $600 million contract with AWS.36 Finally, along with the miles of fiber-optic cable, these data centers are just as material as its fulfillment centers and are run and maintained by workers.
It is also humans in trucks, vans, and now airplanes that connect Amazon’s facilities along its supply chains to the final consumer. In logistics industry jargon, this involves the “first mile” (from manufacturer or third-party merchant to an Amazon facility), the middle (between Amazon facilities), and the “last mile” (delivery to customers). As Amazon stated in its 2018 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 10-K report, “We rely on a limited number of shipping companies to deliver inventory to us and completed orders to our customers.”37 For the “first mile,” these are a small number of well-known trucking firms, while UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Post Office cover the “last mile.” More recently, however, Amazon has begun to build last-mile capacity to eventually replace or minimize dependence on UPS and FedEx. Amazon Logistics now owns 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans which are leased to contractors (“partners”) who are tied to Amazon via its Amazon Flex, Uber-style app. This allows Amazon to maintain a high degree of control over these drivers, while avoiding the costs and responsibilities of calling them employees.38
In addition, as Berg and Knights note, “Amazon and its rivals … are increasingly going after the middle and first mile of the fulfillment supply chain.” For example, Amazon has established “Fulfillment By Amazon” to move goods the “first mile” from third-party merchants to Amazon facilities. Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) controls its transportation contractors by requiring them “to meet their strict shipping and delivery timelines.” Amazon also deploys a fleet of 32 Boeing 767s from its own U.S. airfields to move goods to and from its logistics system.39
The picture is more or less completed by its internal, middle, movement of goods between cross-dock and other sortation centers, fulfillment centers, and Prime Now hubs, on to delivery stations, and its new self-service lockers. To accomplish this, over the years in the U.S., Amazon has purchased thousands of truck-trailers, though only about 300 “power units” or tractor cabs that pull the trailers. Once again, Amazon relies on contract drivers to haul these trailers; the company uses an Amazon app to direct and supervise the drivers, so that, while some may work for small trucking firms, most are Amazon employees in all but name—or cost.40 Given the importance of these drivers to the Amazon supply chain, it is worth noting that their situation is similar to the Los Angeles port truckers who have been organizing through the Teamsters and fighting, with some successes, to be recognized as employees rather contractors.41 This is a possible example for Amazon’s many truck and van drivers who move around within the company’s logistics system and can potentially play an important role in organizing Amazon’s as yet almost totally non-union workforce.
Amazon’s relentless efforts to tighten, speed up and cheapen its “just-in-time” transportation systems, of course, mean more pressure on the workers in its facilities to pick, prepare, pack, and/or sort the incoming and outgoing traffic at each facility in “real time.” Whether this pace is driven by algorithms, handheld computers and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, Kiva robots, conveyor belts, or close supervision in Amazon’s facilities, it is the entire system of goods movement and external competition that ultimately pushes work intensification. One result is a culture of injury. Warehousing in general has a higher rate of injuries and illness at 5.1 incidents per 100 full-time employees (FTEs), while trucking also has a high rate at 4.2, compared to construction at 3.1, and manufacturing at 3.5.42 While we don’t have comparable figures for all Amazon facilities, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal website shows injury rates well above the national average for warehousing, ranging from 6.07 to 25.87 per 100 employees for Amazon warehouses across the U.S.43 Furthermore, exposés by The
