Big Technology

The Uneasy Amazon Coalition

Amazon delivery drivers and liberal city dwellers vote together. But for how long?

In his new book, Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis writes of an Amazon distribution center in Sparrows Point, Maryland that sits on land once occupied by a Bethlehem Steel plant. The story underscores how dramatically the U.S. economy has transformed in recent years. Instead of making things, many of our biggest companies now distribute things made elsewhere. We’ve moved from an economy of production to one of dispersion.

The shift from factory to fulfillment work is core to the American story right now. For the American worker, a factory job like one at Bethlehem Steel was dangerous, but it paid $30 to $40 per hour, and many stuck with it for life. At an Amazon Fulfillment Center, pay starts at $15 per hour, algorithms monitor your performance, and many workers leave soon after joining. “There’s 100% turnover in the warehouses,” MacGillis told me this week. “100% every single year.”

Some blame the move to fulfillment work entirely on Amazon, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. American politicians helped it along by signing trade deals like NAFTA and enthusiastically welcoming China into the World Trade Organization — and doing so without sufficient safeguards…