Episode 37: Amazon’s Racial Capitalism: The Cost of Free Shipping

“Amazon is contributing to the racialization of labor within the logistics sector, where workers of color are disproportionately employed in the hardest, most backbreaking jobs for the lowest pay and the highest turnover rate, and absorbing the environmental impacts of these facilities in communities of color. We have to connect labor, racial justice, worker rights with environmental justice.”

Dr. Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Labor Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on gender, race, and class, welfare state development, social movements, and poverty and work. She is author of They Say Cutback; We Say Fightback! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment (2011, American Sociological Association’s Rose Series) and Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present (2005, University of California Press). She is also co-author of The World Social Forums and the Challenges of Global Democracy (2007, Paradigm Publishers) and co-editor of The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty (2007, Paradigm Publishers) and A Handbook of World Social Forum Activism (2012, Paradigm Publishers). ellen.reese@ucr.edu

Dr. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is a Professor of Sociology at California State University at Long Beach. His research explores the ways that racism and labor exploitation intersect. He is particularly interested in the global logistics industry and the workers who move goods around the world. His current research examines the impact of e-commerce (i.e. Amazon) on work and labor. His newest co-edited (with Ellen Reese) book, The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, was released in 2020 by Pluto Press (Wildcat Series). This book provides a rich and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays by scholars, activists, and labor and community organizers that interrogates the global significance of Amazon’s rise and the growing popular resistance to it around the world. jake.wilson@csulb.edu

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Episode #37 Notes

1:35- How has Amazon changed the logistics game, especially during COVID?

4:40 - What are the working conditions really like in Amazon fulfillment centers?

8:00 - Who is working on the ground at Amazon?

11:45 - How do race and gender overlay labor issues at Amazon?

15:15 - Surveillance of Amazon workers and implications.

20:15 - What happens to communities when Amazon comes to town?

24:45 - Amazon in Seattle and New York.

29:30 - How Amazon fails it’s workers during COVID-19.

34:45 - How have workers and communities been organizing against Amazon?

40:15 - More on organizing efforts at Amazon.

46:00 - How to resist Amazon.

49:00 - Suggested readings!

The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, Jake Alimohmed-Wilson and Ellen Reese

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff

Hammer and Hoe, Robin D. G. Kelly

Building Power from Below, Carolina Bank Munoz

Ours to Master Ours to Own, Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini