of campaigns to organize Walmart workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers accepted defeat in 2015. That bruising experience, along with other setbacks for U.S. organized labor in recent years, help explain the lack of any major union resource commitments to Amazon organizing in the company’s home country.
Nevertheless, a few notable efforts have emerged. The first breakthrough was a 2018 work stoppage at an Amazon warehouse in Minneapolis, led by Somali workers demanding Muslim prayer rights. Its success helped stimulate the formation of Athena, a national coalition coordinating Amazon-focused organizing across the nation. Separately, New York City unionists’ insistence that Amazon maintain neutrality vis-à-vis future union organizing efforts in that city contributed to the collapse of the controversial plan to locate an Amazon “HQ2” in Long Island City in 2019. That same year, Amazon’s tech workers, led by progressive Millennials, staged a walkout demanding that the company aggressively combat climate change and stop providing services facilitating federal immigration enforcement. Finally, against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers protested the lack of personal protective equipment at Amazon warehouses in walkouts across the U.S. in the spring of 2020.
So far, these efforts have had little impact on the Amazon juggernaut, which continues to gain momentum in the United States and worldwide. But for those who hope to change that, the probing studies by labor and urban scholars collected in this book provide an invaluable resource.
Introduction: Amazon Capitalism
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Juliann Allison, and Ellen Reese
Among the world’s most powerful corporations, Amazon’s recent growth has been unparalleled. Initially founded in 1995 as an electronic book vendor, Amazon became the world’s second “trillion-dollar corporation” (after Apple) in 2018, a feat underscoring its immense size and economic influence.1 The following year, Amazon overtook Google and Apple to become the world’s most valuable corporation on the planet in terms of market value.2 By April 2020, the corporation’s market cap increased even further, to $1.14 trillion as demand for its services surged amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.3 That same month, as COVID-19 cases were spreading across its global workforce and the first U.S. warehouse worker death from the disease was reported, the personal wealth of the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Bezos, the richest person in world history, climbed to $138 billion.4 Amazon would emerge from the global pandemic even stronger. The meteoric rise of this corporation represents a significant shift in the global political economy, that we identify as Amazon capitalism. By naming this phenomenon, we seek to draw attention to the concentration of corporate power manifest in the scale and magnitude of Amazon’s influence in the world’s economy and to highlight the true costs of its “free shipping” for workers, communities, and the environment.
Amazon’s rise illuminates a pivotal moment in global capitalism that demands naming, interrogating, and resisting. Amazon, the corporation, is not simply a “bad apple,” nor is its peculiar business and labor practices the product of the individual greed and maniacal impulses of its founder, Jeff Bezos, and other top executives. All corporations share one fundamental objective: to maximize profit. Indeed, the problems associated with Amazon capitalism are systemic within our global capitalist system, which is embedded and interacts with other social and political relations of domination that operate at multiple scales, from the local to the global. Amazon’s rise in power reflects, and makes visible, the larger global trend of the increasing influence of finance capitalism, neoliberal politics and policies, and corporate power. Indeed, the world’s leading transnational corporations today continue to accrue revenues far ahead of most nation states. Of the world’s top 200 economic entities, 157 are corporations and 43 are governments.5 Even back in 2019, Amazon’s market capitalization was slightly more than the combined GDP of nine Latin American countries combined.6
Together, the chapters in this volume provide empirically grounded and critical case studies of the dynamic and multiscalar development of the Amazon corporation, and the emerging networks of community and labor activists that are resisting its practices. Our contributors thus deepen our understanding of what Jamie Peck and Nik Theodor call the “variegated” nature of capitalism; variegated capitalism takes plural forms over time and across multiple spaces, places, and geographic scales.7 Extending these insights, we argue that there are distinct types of capitalism that are emblematic of, and promoted by, the world’s largest transnational corporations, such as Amazon, that are of enormous significance and worthy of investigation; their scope and influence are multifaceted, dynamic, and extend far beyond the workplace, leaving their footprints on our communities, politics, and environment. Just as the operations of Amazon, and other large transnational corporations, occur at multiple scales and sites—transnational, regional, national, and local—so do our investigations cover multiple scales, from global and regional patterns to differences across local and national contexts.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the key features of Amazon capitalism. First, we review the significance of Amazon in terms of its rising but uneven influence globally and its role in promoting both one-click consumerism and surveillance capitalism.8 After describing the increasingly diverse nature of goods and services Amazon produces and sells, we discuss its rising monopoly power and exploitation of third-party sellers. We then examine how the rise of Amazon has reshaped logistics and retail, and negatively affected workers, communities, and the environment.
THE RISE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF AMAZON CAPITALISM
Amazon’s influence in the global economy is uneven, reflecting regional patterns of global trade and global inequities that characterize the imperialist and capitalist world economy. Although many of the consumer goods bought and sold through Amazon’s shopping platform are manufactured in the Global South, they are mostly consumed in the Global North, particularly North America and Europe, where much of the world’s relatively affluent consumers reside. Amazon’s growing market dominance has been especially pronounced in the United States, where it has become the nation’s second largest seller of clothing.9 In addition, Amazon is the fastest growing logistics provider; the biggest seller of toys, books, shoes, and countless other consumer products; and, since its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, the fifth largest grocery retailer in the United States.10 Meanwhile, “Over the past decade, Amazon has paid less than three percent of its US$27 billion in profits for federal income tax.”11
Amazon’s reach extends well beyond the U.S.,12 especially with respect to cloud computing, provision of Kindle content, and management of fulfillment centers that service cross-border shopping.13 Despite challenges by Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba,14 Amazon made headlines in summer 2019 for owning fully half of the world’s public cloud infrastructure market, valued at more than US$32 billion.15 In terms of retail sales, Amazon has invested heavily in shipping lines and warehouses that facilitate sales and services in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Revenue from Amazon’s businesses abroad represented 28 percent of its total for 2018.16 Yet it remains unclear that Amazon’s success in the U.S. will be duplicated abroad.17 Amazon’s retail market share in Western Europe was 8 percent in 2018, according to Eurobarometer, compared to 35 percent in the United States.18 Despite Amazon’s significant e-commerce inroads in Europe, European consumers’ demands for products that are difficult to market online and increasing preference for “experiences” rather than “things” has been challenging for the corporation.19 Amazon has also found increasing government scrutiny of, and organized resistance to, its negative impacts, including reducing brick-and-mortar retail—the “Amazon effect”— and air pollution, and bad working conditions.20
Amazon’s economic influence elsewhere outside the U.S. is weaker than in Europe. In China, Japan,
