The Cost of Free Shipping. Группа авторов
delivery companies, its packages, particularly Amazon Prime packages, are increasingly delivered by two main contingent groups of third-party Amazon workers: Amazon Flex drivers and Amazon’s Delivery Service Partners (DSPs).61 Amazon Flex drivers are gig workers, legally classified as independent contractors, who are paid per completion of a delivery route, or “block,” by the hour. Amazon Flex drivers use their own personal vehicles (or rented vans) to make deliveries. Similar to other gig-economy platform jobs, such as Lyft, Uber, Postmates, and Doordash, Flex drivers must pay for all expenses related to their vehicle, road tolls, parking, insurance, vehicle maintenance, among other expenses; in addition, these workers receive no overtime pay, benefits, union representation, or minimum wages. DSPs are small subcontracted “independent” parcel delivery firms with approximately 20–40 delivery vans that exclusively deliver packages for Amazon, mostly Prime. DSP fleets are limited to 40 vans to avoid unionization efforts and to increase Amazon’s flexibility and power over the price paid per delivery. By 2019, Amazon’s own delivery network surpassed the U.S. Postal Service as the carrier delivering the plurality of its packages.62
As Amazon’s promise of one-day shipping expanded, the company invested in its air cargo division: Amazon Air. These subcontracted pilots complain of being overworked and are among the lowest paid in the air cargo industry.63 Other skilled workers employed by Amazon also express concerns about their labor conditions. Among software engineers at Amazon, turnover rates remain very high, with the average duration lasting one year.64 Online outsourcing services, manifest in crowd or “ghost” work, arguably represent the worst-case scenario in this sense.65 Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing marketplace connects employers with a global pool of independent workers willing to do specialized or repetitive tasks for competitively low wages.66 Amazon employs vulnerable workers like these to augment the information available digitally, via Alexa Voice Services, to its Alexa personal virtual assistant.67
Other research shows how Amazon and other online service providers have contributed to the decimation of shopping centers and other retail markets.68 Grocery stores, many of which are unionized and offer decent salaries and benefits to its commercial workers in the Global North, are also closing up shop as they face growing competition from Amazon. As small businesses and brick-and-mortar retailers close in response to the rapid growth in e-commerce,69 many panicked cities and governments are losing tax revenue and turning increasingly to logistics and warehousing to attract jobs, which are far from ideal.
Today’s massive logistics and warehousing complexes are mostly located on the outskirts of major urban metropolitan areas and depend on large concentrations of low-paid labor, particularly workers of color.70 Typical e-commerce warehouse employees in the United States, disproportionately black and Latinx,71 toil long hours (often 10 hours or more per day among full-time workers and more than 40 hours per week) for low pay. In 2020, entry-level wages for Amazon warehouse workers were $15 per hour, or about $31,000 annually for workers employed full-time all year.72 Many of these non-supervisory blue-collar warehouse workers, known as “warehouse associates,” are precariously employed, either as temporary or seasonal workers.73 Amazon associates’ work is grueling. They quickly pick, pack, and load and unload goods in large warehouses, sometimes the size of 17 football fields. Full-time pickers, who store and retrieve items, sometimes walk for miles, while packers must stand on their feet for long hours and engage in highly repetitive motions that leave their muscles sore and injured. Workers’ motions are closely monitored through electronic scanning devices. Managers and supervisors pressure them to “make rate,” in order to locate, pack, and move items quickly, while minimizing their errors and “time off task.” Pressure to work fast and “make rate” increases the risk of workplace injury in an industry already known to be injury-prone. An investigation of Amazon’s injury records from 23 of its 110 fulfillment centers in the United States showed their rate of serious injuries (9.6 per 100 full-time workers) was about double the national industry average.74 Research on Amazon’s warehouse workers in other nations suggests that they share similar concerns regarding their low pay, employment security, pressure to work too fast, and lack of regard for workplace safety.75 Workers’ concerns about the corporation’s failure to protect their health and safety intensified during the COVID-19 outbreak, especially as the corporation failed to report potential cases, close facilities, and provide paid time out to its workers in a timely fashion.76
Seeking to minimize its labor costs and improve workplace speed and accuracy, Amazon has been on the forefront of warehouse automation, investing heavily in research and development of robots, digital scanners, automated conveyor belts, labeling machines, and other machinery. Reliance on subcontractors, sunk costs in traditional warehouses not suited for robotic equipment and other forms of mechanization, as well as difficulties in automating particular kinds of warehouse tasks could constrain the pace of warehouse automation.77 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