Title: Fulfillment
Rating: 4 Stars
Although the book was focused on Amazon, it really told the tale of two Americas. There is the tale of those enjoying a technical career in successful cities like New York, Washington DC, Austen, San Francisco, and Seattle. Lavishly paid and working in fancy offices with nice benefits, they live a life of relative splendor.
For those not living in these mega cities, life is much more grim. Globalization, among other factors, has hollowed out the manufacturing that smaller cities and towns had relied upon. Now working minimal wage jobs with no benefits, for many it is a struggle to survive. For those that have essentially given up hope or have been injured working on the dangerous jobs that are allotted them, many succumb to opioid addiction.
Amazon didn’t invent these two Americas. However, its business practices are solidifying these states.
Amazon doesn’t really have an interest in creating high tech centers anywhere that there isn’t the infrastructure already supporting it. This was best seen when it was looking for its second headquarters. Of the many government entities that submitted bids, several of them were cities (such as Baltimore or Columbus) that had fallen on hard manufacturing times and were grasping at this lifeline to reinvigorate themselves. Unsurprisingly, the first down select eliminated nearly all of them. The final two candidates were New York and Washington DC. Both are already huge high tech areas. The rich just kept getting richer.
Amazon doesn’t ignore these smaller locales. Instead of giving them opportunities for high tech wage growth, Amazon offered to build fulfillment warehouses or data centers. Data centers consume huge amounts of energy and employ relatively few workers.
The warehouses employ more workers, but at minimum wage with little benefits. The work is physically demanding and dangerous. Accidents at Amazon occur at much higher rates than other warehouses. Work is driven by automated quotas. If an employee does not meet their quota, they will be warned, and if performance does not improve, they will be terminated automatically. An employee is given a maximum amount of time for bathroom breaks. Exceeding that limit can lead to termination. If a supervisor gets even a whiff of an employee’s interest in unions, they will be immediately terminated. Wages are so low that a significant percentage of Amazon workers receive government assistance like food stamps (ie SNAP).
For these low paying, low quality jobs, Amazon expects significant governmental concessions. For instance, they expect to pay no property taxes for many years. They force governments to negotiate in absolute secrecy with no public notice. These governments, desperate for any revenue or job growth, feel that they have no choice but to acquiesce. This turns out to be a losing proposition for the governments when the warehouses end up consuming governmental services (eg emergency services) without paying for them via taxes.
Amazon’s chicanery does not stop there. There are many small businesses that have, over time, found their niche market. Amazon comes to them and basically say, come join our market place if you want any chance to survive. Small businesses, when faced with the giant monolith of Amazon, feel compelled to join. Amazon takes a fifteen percent commission off every sale. With profit margins often less than that, these businesses cannot survive. Even those businesses that clear that gate, Amazon, in their role of running the market place, collects sales data. For those products that are successful, Amazon will create their own Amazon branded version of the product and price it much cheaper, effectively destroying the small business. Even if that is not enough, unethical companies will start offering cheaper, counterfeit products. Amazon makes limited efforts to remove counterfeit products.
The fix is in.
Even in the successful cities, Amazon throws its weight around. Seattle, Amazon’s first corporate headquarters and even now home to some 50,000 highly paid employees, finds itself stymied by Amazon. The surge of high wage employees (a problem so many other cities would love to have) has resulted in a severe shortage of housing of all kinds. Median home prices in Seattle near a million dollars. Lower income housing has been razed so that new high rise apartments and condos can be built for the affluent. As a result, Seattle is experiencing one of the worst homeless crises in the country.
Amazon, since its birth, has been resistant to pay any kind of tax at all. For many years, as the scrappy underdog upstart, it avoided paying sales taxes. Now a trillion dollar Goliath, it can no longer make that argument, but its allergy to taxes continues. A head count tax passed by Seattle to directly address Seattle’s homeless problems was passed and then almost immediately repealed when Amazon threatened to stop expanding in Seattle. Amazon has such an out sized presence in Seattle that local leaders quake at even token threats. Meanwhile, ever more homeless are living in the streets outside million dollar condos.
We truly are living in a new gilded age. If anything, this age is even more gilded than the last. The wealth gap has never been this wide. Is there any wonder that tens of millions of Americans, living in a world in which the game appears to be rigged and in which is no hope to escape, let themselves be seduced by a bombastic grifter, who if nothing else, allowed them to vent their rage at the elites that seemingly look down upon them? The Democrats’ obsequious courting of the tech elite has caused them to lose all credibility with those that used to be the bedrock of their party.
This book, if nothing else, really called out to me the dangerous times in which we live.
dorkenstein 