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Amazon Union Battle in Alabama Puts Focus on Reshaped Labor Market
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March 30, 2021
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8:24Now PlayingIn his new book Fulfillment, investigative journalist Alec MacGillis chronicles the seismic economic impact that the e-commerce giant has had on U.S. cities.
The richest 1% in the U.S. had a great year in 2020, adding $4 trillion to their already considerable wealth. But it’s possible that no one had a better 2020 than Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who picked up $75 billion.
As Covid-19 forced people in cities around the world to stay home, the company saw its fortunes skyrocket. Amazon hired an additional 425,000 workers globally at the peak of the pandemic to aid the surge in demand, opening 100 new buildings in September of 2020 alone.
Those impressive stats come from Baltimore-based ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis, who watched Amazon grow to be the third-largest employer in the world — after only Walmart and China’s state oil company — with a mixture of awe and apprehension (but mostly the latter). His new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing on One-Click America, traces the e-commerce company’s enormous economic impact on U.S. cities and labor markets in recent years. At the heart of MacGillis’s story is Sparrows Point, home of a mammoth steel mill outside Baltimore that closed in the early 21st century, only to be replaced by a comparably gargantuan Amazon fulfillment center.
The book was almost done when the pandemic hit, but MacGillis knew that a new epilogue about the company’s outrageous 2020 growth would be needed to cap his chronicle of how Bezos helped reshape America.
Fulfillment takes readers on a tour of the Amazonified United States, from cities buoyed by Amazon-related prosperity like Seattle and Washington, D.C., to the desperate rural towns and industrial cities that have gained little from the new economic order that the company ushered in. CityLab spoke with MacGillis about the dangers of heroizing the industrial economy, Amazon’s grip on local politicians, and the union drive the company is facing in Alabama.
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