![]() ![]() Almost all of these temps are let go when the surge in sales recedes. During these periods, Amazon’s already immense workforce cannot keep up with surging demand, so the company brings in armies of “ seasonal associates,” temporary workers who enlist for quick cash - $15 an hour, Amazon’s starting wage, is below the average for the warehousing industry, but it’s still a hell of a lot more than our $7.25 federal minimum wage. Doing away with interviews or much conversation at all between potential employer and potential employee enables the company to beef up during “peak,” which consists of the holiday season as well as the time around Prime Day, the company’s holiday that exists to break up the summer lull. Amazon’s application process is, often, perfunctory. Here’s how it plays out in many communities near one of the warehouses. Such unevenness is of further importance given that the warehouse worker is neither seen nor heard by the customer at least at Walmart, you go to a store and you see the workers - you know they exist. The extreme geographic bifurcation of Amazon’s operations complicates the matter: some communities are vacuumed up almost completely by Amazon, while in others, people don’t know anyone who works for the company. Whether Amazon is really the major space of socialization, or merely a major one, is less important than grasping the degree to which Amazon is operating as a near force of nature in working-class life. It is happening in the parking lots outside, where people smoke and linger and chat and dread. If class is a social relation and the working class is made and remade daily, that formation is increasingly happening inside the massive structures that house Amazon’s warehouses, where workers face capital embodied in the whir of machinery and barking managers and the beeps of the scanner in their hands, prodding them to pick up the pace. “If you look at the consciousness of Amazon workers, it’s a guide to where the working class is as a whole,” says Sawant. Tammy Kim, follows Cox’s quote with a congruent assertion from socialist Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant. The author of the Times article, labor reporter E. It has a broader importance.” This comes courtesy of organizer and geographer Spencer Cox, quoted in the New York Times. So even if you’re building a tenant union or a political party, this is a major social space. A thesis: Amazon’s warehouse zones are “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization. ![]()
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