We’ve always had richer and poorer places, but the gaps have gotten so much bigger. It started as a book about our growing regional disparities. This book didn’t start as a book about Amazon. So I’ll start there: Which parts of the country have gained, and which parts have lost? Alec MacGillis Your book is about how Amazon has essentially altered the geography of the country in terms of both wealth and power. (Amazon hasn’t responded to MacGillis’s book, but the company has consistently defended its working conditions and emphasized its role as a job creator - although it was forced to apologize last week after falsely denying allegations that workers are occasionally made to urinate in bottles.)Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Many of us use Amazon every day, and we’re content to look the other way in exchange for what MacGillis calls “one-click satisfaction.” If nothing else, this exchange is a chance to reflect on what that says about our world and what we might do to improve it. This is a conversation about the consequences of Amazon’s dominance, but it’s also a conversation about my complicity and yours. (The unionization vote was held after this conversation, and it would appear that Amazon won, though the results are likely to be contested.)
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I reached out to MacGillis, who’s also a veteran reporter at ProPublica, to talk about the rise of Amazon and how it’s altered the geography of the country, how Amazon bullies employees and strong-arms local governments, and if he’s encouraged by the recent efforts of Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, to unionize. Instead, it’s a book about what Amazon has done to the country, about the many ways it has transformed our economy and accelerated its most destructive tendencies. It’s not a book about the inner workings of the company or the peculiarities of its mega-billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos. These are the kinds of stories you encounter in Alec MacGillis’s new book about Amazon called Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
#LAID IN AMERICA AMAZON DRIVER#
At 69 years old, he was forced to take a job as a forklift driver at an Amazon warehouse, located in the same place the old steel mill used to sit, where he was paid roughly $12 an hour, a steep drop from his previous wage of $35 an hour.
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Bodani’s pension was eventually slashed from $3,000 to $1,600 a month. Not too long after that, Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and was finally dissolved in 2003. spent most of his adult life working at Bethlehem Steel, just outside Baltimore.Īround the year 2000, an injury on the job forced him into early retirement in his mid-50s.