Nevertheless, in 2019 Amazon boasted that it had placed more than 200,000 robotic drives worldwide.78 Although warehouse automation could reduce some of the physical strains associated with the job, it increases the pressure on workers to work even more quickly, further increasing the risk of injury.79 Over the long run, automation also threatens to displace workers and weaken labor unions.80 Even so, human beings are found at every key point across Amazon’s logistics network, keeping it vulnerable to worker actions. Of course, many of Amazon’s various profit-maximizing techniques and strategies were not invented by this corporation, but simply more effectively implemented and combined. In the context of neoliberal global capitalism and the rise of finance capitalism, Amazon combines and intensifies various borrowed techniques of labor exploitation and market expansion with “one-click” consumerism and “surveillance capitalism”81 in a distinct way that has contributed to its rapid rise in power, and made the company a trend-setter for other corporations around the world. As the contributors to this edited volume make clear, Amazon’s “free shipping” and other practices are not free; they create enormous costs for workers, communities, and the environment.
OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK
This volume provides a rich and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays by scholars, workers, journalists, and labor and community organizers that interrogate the global significance of Amazon’s rise and the growing popular resistance to it across the United States, Europe, and India. Other books on Amazon—such as Brandt’s One Click,82 Jameson’s Amazon’s Dirty Little Secret, and Marcus’s Amazonia,83 Spector’s Get Big Fast,84—have either focused uncritically on Jeff Bezos’s and his company’s financial success, or critiqued it from a narrow business, managerial, and marketing perspective. In contrast, this volume seeks to assess the true costs of free shipping and Amazon’s business model on labor and communities. In the spirit of Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,85 this book offers thoroughly researched, critical examinations of Amazon’s strategic expansion and everyday operations but goes beyond a mere critique of Amazon’s business model. It explores the broader economic, political and ecological significance of the rise of, and growing popular resistance to, Amazon capitalism, and does so with a global perspective.
Part I (Amazon’s Rise in Global Power) examines the factors that have contributed to the rapid rise of Amazon and explores how it has reshaped the global economy, especially in terms of retail, logistics, and the internet, with particular attention to the United States, Europe, and South Asia. Part II (Exploitation and Resistance Across Amazon’s Global Empire) examines what Amazon means for the future of work. It reveals how the Amazonification of the global economy exploits workers in the United States and Europe, adapting to different labor relations systems and laws, and documents its particular impacts on women workers, immigrants, and people of color. It also shows how Amazon’s labor relations and practices vary across nations and regions around the world, as well as how Amazon employees—especially warehouse workers—are organizing to improve their working conditions. Part III (Communities Confronting the E-Commerce Giant) examines how the rise of Amazon has worsened traffic congestion, increased air pollution, has cost state and local government millions of dollars worth of public subsidies as well as significant losses in public tax revenues. It provides case studies of how social justice and environmental activists in Southern California, Long Island, and Seattle are fighting back to protect the environment, their communities, and local politics from corporate influence. Part IV (Struggling to Win Against Amazon) explores strategies—both actual and possible—for further resisting and transforming Amazon capitalism in the global economy.
Amazon capitalism is representative of many of the destructive forces inherent in capitalism, including: the exploitation and dehumanization of workers; corporate welfare and tax avoidance; extreme wealth inequality; nativism, racism, and sexism; an obsessive mass-consumer culture; surveillance; the erosion of privacy; monopolistic practices; neoliberalism and the public subsidization of corporations; and the assault on the ecological integrity of the earth. While the power and influence of Amazon capitalism grows, so too does popular discontent with it. The rise of Amazon capitalism sows the seeds for new waves of popular rebellion; it provides a strategic new target that could inspire activists to further collaborate across movements, cities, and nations. Transnational links between anti-Amazon activists, in particular, have so far mostly been concentrated within Europe, but they are beginning to grow between the U.S. and Europe,86 as are national links among activists in the United States through Amazonians United and the Athena network.87 As activists around the world are demonstrating, Amazon provides a key site for building alliances among activists not only across space, but also across different types of movements, including movements for economic and social justice, democracy, and environmental justice.
NOTES
1. David Streitfeld, “Amazon Hits $1,000,000.00 in Value, Following Apple,” New York Times, September 4, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/amazon-stock-price-1-trillion-value.html. Accessed October 15, 2019.
2. Mary Hanbury, “Amazon Overtakes Google and Apple to Become the World’s Most Valuable Brand,” Business Insider, June 11, 2019, www.businessinsider.com/amazon-overtakes-google-apple-worlds-most-valuable-brand-2019-6. Accessed January 14, 2020. See also, Paul La Monica, “Amazon is Now the Most Valuable Company on the Planet,” CNN, January 8, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/01/08/investing/amazon-most-valuable-company-microsoftgoogle-apple/index.html. Accessed December 20, 2019.
3. Lauren Feiner, “Amazon Stock Hits A New All-Time High As It Sees Unprecedented Demand,” CNBC.com, April 14, www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-stock-hits-a-new-all-time-high.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar. Accessed April 20, 2020.
4. Isobel Asher Hamilton, “Jeff Bezos is Wealthier by $24 billion in 2020, as Amazon Reports at least 74 COVID-19 Cases and its First Death,” Business Insider, April 15, www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-net-worth-jumps-23-billion-during-coronavirus-crisis-2020-4. Accessed April 20, 2020.
5. Global Justice Now, “69 of the Richest 100 Entities on the Planet are Corporations, Not Governments, Figures Show,” Global Justice Now, October 17, 2018, www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2018/oct/17/69-richest-100-entities-planet-are-corporations-not-governments-figures-show. Accessed December 20, 2019.
6. Howmuch.net. 2019, “Who is More Powerful-Countries or Companies?” https://howmuch.net/articles/putting-companies-power-into-perspective. Accessed April 15, 2020.
7. Jamie Peck and Nik Theodor, “Variegated Capitalism,” Progress in Human Geography 31(6) (2007): 731–772.
8. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019).
