Has Amazon's rapid expansion come at the expense of America's democratic institutions? In some cases, the answer might be yes.
As we've said many times on this show, democracy is long and slow, which is the exact opposite of the ethos that Amazon has pushed into our culture through quick shipping, easily accessible entertainment, its takeover of cloud computing, and more.
Amazon's expansion across America, from distribution facilities to data centers, is exacerbating regional inequities and contributing to the unraveling of America's social fabric. Not only that, cities competing for Amazon's new facilities offer tax breaks that prevent funding from going to basic government services. And, the company's takeover of government procurement has taken lucrative contracts away from local businesses.
Alec MacGillis, a senior reporter at ProPublica, chronicles these trends in new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. The book chronicles how Amazon contributed to the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions, and how its workplace practices foster isolation and competition, rather than camaraderie and shared goals.
Was Amazon deliberately trying to undermine democracy? Or using the existing system to its benefit? We talk with MacGillis about founder Jeff Bezos's political philosophy and how it's impacted the company's decision-making over the years. We also discuss what we as democratic citizens can do to push back against some of these forces.
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Can corporations be democratic citizens?
Reimagining citizenship in a consumer world
Chris Beem 00:03
From McCourtney Institute for Democracy and Penn State University, I'm Chris beam.
Candis Watts Smith 00:09
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle 00:11
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking about Amazon. And our guest is Alec MacGillis, a senior reporter for ProPublica and author of the book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One Click America. And this book stood out to me, because it talks about a lot of the things we already know about Amazon. But it also introduces some bigger questions about Amazon's relationship to the government and its workers and just looks at them in a in a new way. So before we get to all that, Chris, why don't you start us off just by reminding us of some of the things that we already know about Amazon? And how they sort of fit into the context of what we talked about on this show?
Chris Beem 01:02
Yeah, okay. I mean, the first thing, you know, I think the first thing we all know, we need to say is that Amazon is an incredibly successful business model, and has grown exponentially, in, what, 2030 years. Last year, in 2020, Amazon hired almost a half a million people. I mean, there's just nothing like that in human history. And you know, and they were just so well positioned for this pandemic, and took advantage of it, and they give people what they want. And so they're very, very successful. On the other hand, the other thing that most of us know is that Amazon is is not a great place to work, they have incredibly high turnover 3% a week, 150% annually, which is twice as high as its peers. It was also cited by OSHA as being one of the Dirty Dozen, as far as worker safety, they have time bathroom breaks, a lot of times you don't have any interaction with your with your peers, and you're even fired by text, your your time according to some algorithm in terms of how much you're expected to do. And our
Candis Watts Smith 02:24
Amazon is our frenemy. It's the company that we love to hate. And it's also the company and companies like it are the companies that Facebook I think is kind of a similar situation that we both wish were not there and also depend on heavily. And you know, the thing about Amazon, and companies like Amazon, I think that's important to say, and companies like Amazon is that their CEOs are some of the richest people alive in there. The people who work for them are often people who are also on public assistance, it's important for us to kind of tie together these business practices with how there are ramifications for how our government runs, and even larger ramifications for how democracy runs. And workers if people aren't well cared for even, you know, like, after they work 40 hours a week, are they still able to pay for their children's food and supplies? But also are they able to really participate in democracy? Do they have the time? Do they have the wherewithal>
Chris Beem 03:37
You know, before Amazon, the the frenemy, or what am maybe even more less friend, less friend, part of the enemy was Walmart, because Walmart was, you know, came into these rural communities and almost single handedly destroyed the Main Street, right? And Starbucks comes in, and everybody, everybody has a Starbucks. And so now, you know, many of these local coffee shops that have existed for decades are put out of business. I mean, I don't see that as a, you know, as a sign of corporate evil. You know, I mean, people, you know, no one put a gun to anybody's head and said, You must now shop at Walmart. It was because if you were going into town, and you hear was this one stop shop or you could get everything, and it was cheap, and people just chose that model. And Starbucks started because most of American coffee was not very good.
Candis Watts Smith 04:44
So it's absolutely right on that. I think the issue and I think what Alex book really highlights is that government helps. large corporations do the things that they do. So for example, there is no income tax in some states, right? And so then that means that businesses are going to want to come there, and they take advantage of that, or that cities will, you know, give all of these subsidies to these large corporations,
Chris Beem 05:16
Right. And that is why it makes sense for us to talk about it in in this context, within the context of democracy, the government is cowed at minimum and controlled at maximum by these same corporations. And so, despite the fact that that labor, and people have power, through unions, and through democracy, and through politics, in fact, they cannot use that power, they cannot employ that power, because it's not a fair fight. And I think that is pretty fundamental in terms of what we are talking about here, and and what we are genuinely able to achieve through democratic politics.
Jenna Spinelle 06:11
All right. Well, I think that that is, you know, both of you provided some very important context here for the issues at stake. And Alec will expand on these fundamental questions a lot more and fill in some of the details with the reporting from his book. So let's go now to the interview with Alec MacGillis
Jenna Spinelle06:37
Alec MacGillis, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Alec MacGillis06:42
Thanks for having me.
Jenna Spinelle 06:43
So your book fulfillments is a fascinating look at how Amazon has impacted the institutions that comprise our democracy and also reshaped some of America's social fabric perhaps, to set the stage for all of that, can you talk a little bit about Jeff Bezos, his political philosophy, and how that impacts the way that Amazon does business?
Alec MacGillis 07:13
Sure, and I think the best way to describe him really, as a kind of a classic libertarian tech libertarian, and with a fairly extreme form of fat with a, with very little, very little regard concern for sort of the the nation as a whole society as a whole democracy as a whole. There's a one kind of remarkable moment, as I was reporting this book, I want to speak with Nick Hanauer, who is this early investor in Amazon, who was, you know, became, was wealth increased greatly through that early investment, but has since turned on the company quite strongly. And I was meeting with him at his office way up overlooking Elliott Bay in Seattle, and a couple years ago, and it was just as Amazon had announced the top 20 finalists for its second headquarters. And that list included virtually none of the cities that could really have used a boost, by getting that second headquarters, all their all these cities, you know, in the middle of the country, struggling cities that had applied for the second headquarters, and it would have been a great opportunity for the, for the company in one fell swoop to really kind of rebalance some of the, these economic disparities that we have around the country with that second headquarters, which is really kind of the main concern of my book, that that racial inequality that Amazon has exacerbated. And they could have done such a such a big difference by putting the company the second headquarters in like a St. Louis, or Detroit or Cleveland. And I asked a camera about that, and why they hadn't done that. And there wasn't even a finalist list, you know, and, and he started laughing kind of maniacally, and he said, You don't understand Jeff Bezos at all, do you? And I said, What do you mean, he said, he doesn't care about that sort of thing at all. Like that is simply not a concern to him, that that kind of notion of what might be best for the country, or society is of no concern. It's strictly strictly what is best for, for the company, the company's bottom line. So a very extreme form of that bottom line, shareholder mentality, and, and that that moment really stuck with me and and it's quoted at length in even more sort of color.
Jenna Spinelle 09:30
In the boo, you also spend some time in the book, sort of contrasting that that approach or just describing what the Amazon with kind of a previous era of industry writing about, you know, Bethlehem Steel and and, you know, people like like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who were, you know, much has been written about sort of their, you know, pros and cons of who they were and you know, how they approach business and philanthropy and whatnot. So they're, you know, certainly not saints, but I think that there is a contract has to be had between, like their approach to the, you know, relationship between business civil society and the public good. And, you know what we're seeing now with with Amazon. Can you talk a little bit more about that that contrast?
Alec MacGillis 10:14
Sure. I think we have to be careful here, of course, because at one level, all philanthropy is not ideal, right. And it's, it's really, you know, to have this small handful of insanely wealthy men, and they're mostly men, deciding how to spend the zillions, instead of, instead of paying the fair share of taxes, where we all as citizens, through our elected government, decide what we're going to invest in that kind of large scale philanthropy is, is, you know, is fundamentally flawed in that regard. And there's a, there's a thought a really wonderful articulation of that in the book, in the chapter on Seattle, where Amazon had fought off attacks in Seattle, that was going to pay for more housing and homelessness services in Seattle. And then after they successfully killed this new tax, they threw some fairly modest money, philanthropic dollars toward that cause. And a local activist said, you know, this is not I'm not impressed by this, this is not how it's supposed to work. But even if when that accepts philanthropy, large scale philanthropy as as a reality, it is striking, the contrast between Bezos and and the titans of the Gilded Age certainly is striking that I mean, there were sort of commentary on this this week after pesos took off for the for outer space. And, you know, the contrast between him going on his on his joy ride, his loving minute joy ride, and the company that's been costing him I guess, about a billion dollars a year. And, and then the, the, you know, the all the kind of investments that were made by, by by the Gilded Age, plutocrats, all the Carnegie libraries and all the rest. And, you know, a very, very stark stark contrast there. The as you mentioned, Ben steel, actually, one of the striking things I found when I was doing my chapter on on bethlem steel, and its huge steel mill in Baltimore, that is now a bunch of Amazon warehouses was that that company, actually, its its leadership, actually, I found very reminiscent of Bezos, in their, in the extremity of their, of their plutocracy, that the head of that Charles Schwab was the head of the company back in the teens and 20s. And he, you know, had the largest mansion in New York City then built for himself entire French peasant village in western Pennsylvania. The company strongly discouraged their executives against getting involved in local civic affairs, just didn't see that it's worth their time. And it reminds me very much of sort of how Amazon has existed in Seattle, where there's been a similar kind of weird kind of separation from from the city and civic life, that city in the company, the mayor of Seattle for in the early the second decade of the century, never met Jeff Bezos once, which is pretty striking fact.
Jenna Spinelle 13:10
us, we'll talk about the Seattle City Council being unable to really deal with some of these these issues surrounding taxes and, and housing and, and, and homelessness that has, you know, sprung up in the wake of of Amazon's expansion. I mean, it's what happened with the the, the City Council and just kind of that that breakdown of really the the governing structure not not being equipped to, to deal with everything that that Amazon brought to the city.
Alec MacGillis 13:40
Yeah, it was just an incredible episode when this is in the spring of 2018. And the city is as developed one of the very worst homelessness problems in the country, really, basically a second only to, to the Bay Area. And, and they and you've got progressive members of the city council, along with activists who want to do something about this. They they come up with the idea of attacks on the city's largest employers, notably Amazon, but also some others, especially a per employee tax, and the company is not happy about it. He was not happy about this, but manages to negotiate the size of the tax down quite a bit. they negotiate with the city's fairly centrist mayor, business friendly mayor, and they get it down to the point where it's just it's really just, you know, loose change for Amazon in terms of in the broader scheme of things. And so they agreed to this compromise. The the tax passed at City Council, the mayor signed into law, and just a day or two after the mayor signs into law, the company launches, starts funding a huge push to repeal the tax by referendum on that false ballot. it spends a lot of money on this repeal effort. And, and it's clearly resonating. There's not just because they're spending so much on it, but because the company manages to tap in This really kind of look kind of, you know, unpleasant strain kind of toxic strain in the local politics, a city that's, you know, superficially super liberal, you know, 90 92% vote against Trump in 2016. But a lot of voters who are people who are, who are not happy about the homelessness crisis are not happy about the prospect of, of new shelters being built in their neighborhood or new affordable housing being built in their neighborhood, a real strong kind of NIMBY strain. And, and then also a real sense of protectiveness around Amazon. Is this this fence that, yes, Amazon is huge and kind of scary. And they've brought us all this traffic and town and made our city kind of crazy. But on the other hand, they're also the reason why my little arts and crafts bungalow that I got for 200 grand a decade or two ago is now worth a million bucks. And, and do we really want to kill the golden goose? And, and, you know, yes, they're big, scary giant, but they're our giant and and so Amazon tapped into all that. And the city council saw that this referendum push was had a lot of steam behind it. And they were very worried about a broken kind of a broader kind of conservative reactionary backlash on that false ballot and other races. And they decided to repeal the very tax that they had passed just a month after they passed it it was this really kind of humiliating moment for the council all but two members of the council voted to repeal the tax.
Jenna Spinelle 16:30
And we of course see you know, cities across the country. I know bending over backwards it seems to both both that the the HQ to search of course, but but even just in in competing for you know, other other Amazon, you know, warehouses or other facilities that that kind of tech corridor, sort of their their their tech infrastructure, is it just sort of a foregone conclusion at this point that, you know, we're going to continue to see places across the country offering big tax breaks because of the the jobs that Amazon can bring to their their regions.
Alec MacGillis 17:09
Well, I think it's important, first of all, to focus on what we're talking about in these situations, there's, there's two, there's kind of two different levels of this, there's the there was the unseemly sweepstakes for their second headquarters, which was this crazy Bonanza that promised a real just huge prize of initially 50,000 jobs, 30,000 high paid jobs, and just billions and investment in a whole new big corporate campus. And that ended up being one by the already the wealthiest metro area in the country, Washington DC. And and you know, that all was revealed to have been just kind of a big joke, because they ended up going with the most obvious candidates in the end. But then there's this Oh, other much more prevalent game of the warehouses and the data centers and where they've got where they're going to put those. And it has just been incredible to watch just all these towns and cities, throwing subsidies at the company for those. And it's incredible because the the warehouse jobs, of course, are not high paying. They the warehouses bring all sorts of additional burdens on public public services, like the all the trucks on the roads, the data centers barely employ anyone, they employ just a few dozen people per per data center. And in itself, these are especially confounding because because the session with the warehouses, the company really needs to have them just about everywhere now, with their they're so huge. We're buying so much stuff from them, where they have the promise of two and a one day delivery, they have to be everywhere. So it's not like if a given place says no, we're not going to give you this subsidy, that, that they can just go to the next state over it. No, they have to be where you are. And so you actually have more leverage than you realize. But nonetheless, they're just yes, these these communities keep throwing the subsidies at them. Just Just last month, I was speaking to the Dayton Rotary Club in Dayton, Ohio city that features very much in the book. And, and unbeknownst to me, that the city was about to announce the company's wealth announced that they were building a new fulfillment center, just outside day in at the airport there. And this one was gonna be getting a whole new swath of just automatically swath of subsidies from mainly from the state, state Economic Development Agency. And so it just keeps going on and on and on. That said, I have seen just recently a few places where there's starting to be pushback. There's a fight going on now in western Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. There's another one down south that I heard about recently. So there are some places where you have residents starting to realize wake up to this problem, realize that it's that it's not a good deal for all sorts of reasons and bringing more scrutiny to this.
Jenna Spinelle19:52
Yeah, yeah. That That really is is a fascinating story you tell about the the employee who sort of works these, you know, this This progression of jobs it's to pay less than last. And also, I think it seems to be to be more and more sort of demoralizing kind of work. You know, I couldn't help but think about as I was reading some of those stories about the the warehouse workers and whatnot, think about my grandmother who worked in a textile factory for most of her life. And it was, you know, hard back breaking work, but the sense I always got from her was that they were kind of in it together, you know, they would help each other out and go out for breakfast after they finished the third shift and, and hang out on the weekends. I don't want to overly romanticize that by any means. But it does seem again, that you know, Amazon makes some deliberate steps as you describe to seem to discourage that that type of behavior to really focus on individual worker before performance. Can you talk about what what some of those things are?
Alec MacGillis 20:56
Sure. Your you describe it very well, that the shift and in what the work, sort of mass working class employment looks like now that we've gotten moved from the mills and the factory, to the to the warehouse, and I really tried to bring that across. Most of all, in this chapter I on on the steel mill in Baltimore used to be the biggest steel mill in the world. And it's now the now just this massive logistics hub. With just all these different warehouses, including health, they've three Amazon warehouses on this one, in this one business park, can keep up with it. The other one has been opening up now. And and so when I focus on this one worker who who worked at the steel mill for 30 years, and then after went bankrupt, he went in his late 60s to work at Amazon driving a forklift. And his work at the steel mill was so dangerous, so strenuous, he got injured a couple times. But nonetheless, he so preferred it to the work at the warehouse, because it paid much more, of course, was union job. But he's just found it's so much more meaningful, he was actually making something he was making steel. And he had all this camaraderie with his fellow workers. I met him actually at a luncheon for retirees monthly luncheon, that still happens every month, and all these guys get together still, and, and that's the status doesn't exist in the warehouses. I mean, it's just this incredibly atomized, isolating kind of work. You're You're all kind of scattered about your different stations on the conveyor belt or in the year you're in a sense, you're interacting more with with robots than with each other. If you're a picker now, pickers used to you know, roam the corridors, looking for items, all the stuff that we demanded. And now you just stand there at the conveyor belt, and the robot brings the stack of stuff to you, and you take the item out of the shelves and drop it in the box. And then comes another robot. So you're really kind of working, you're working with a robot at the behest of the robots. And now there's very little opportunity for interaction, the digit actually even less now during the pandemic, because one of the measures they took to try to reduce the spread of COVID was to take jobs that used to have a couple people working together, like say, loading a truck, and they turn those into one person jobs. So what little interaction that what did happen, is even less likely now. There's another worker, former worker at the steel mill that I spoke with recently, who still lives nearby. And he, he said it was so striking that when workers leave the warehouse now, they go screaming out of there, like high speeds up, surely the engines roaring, and there's desperate to get the hell out of there, I get home, and they the company that owns the house, this whole business park now has had to put in huge speed bumps to try to deal with this problem of the speeding. And such a contrast with back in the day when he would just roll out of work with his co workers, they all knew each other, you'd roll into the bar the diner, depending on the time of day. And I brought this up with another Amazon worker in New York recently, and, and he sees he laughed. He said, Yeah, there's no way I'm going to go have a beer with Joe after work. I don't even know who Joe is.
Jenna Spinelle 24:15
The other thing that I found fascinating was just the sheer scale of government contracts that Amazon has procured at the expense of small businesses in many places. What can you How did that sort of starts and and how has it expanded over time, you know, in terms of how Amazon interacts with the federal government and maybe other organizations related to it, like schools, colleges, etc.
Alec MacGillis 24:47
Sure, and this is really kind of happening at a couple different levels at the federal level, Amazon has gotten just massive contracts for mostly for the cloud. So you It has this incredibly lucrative arm Amazon Web Services, where, you know, all the all these data centers, that that were Amazon's essentially, you know, offering companies and the government, its its servers, you know, just to keep so that you the government or smaller business don't have to deal with that on your own. And so it's gotten massive con contracts from the federal government for for that. There's one big huge one 500 million, I think, from the CIA a few years ago. And they're still in the running now for this really big 110 billion dollar contract from the Pentagon, to put the entire Pentagon in the cloud. But then, at this sort of more local level, Amazon has also gotten very much into the business of procurement of government procurement. And we said, recognizes just how much money is spent on that, you know, all the all the stuff that local state, and federal governments and school districts, all sorts of public sector, entities spend on on all their supplies, you know, whether it's office supplies, or just furniture, all the rest. And, and so Amazon has made a big push in that direction. And their basic pitch to, to say a local government, city government or school district is, look, why don't you just buy your stuff from us direct from the website, just the way you would at home with all your personal stuff, it just as you know, it's so easy, it's so convenient. And don't worry, if you're if you're worried about not supporting your local local supplier, the local office supplier dealer say that local Dunder Mifflin that's been that you've been working with, you can still buy from them on Amazon will have like a little marker that says local supplier, and then they go to the office supply company, and they say, hey, look, your clients are, are all moving to the Amazon. So why don't you start selling on Amazon too, it'll be fine. And you can sell to the whole world too. And what that leaves out, of course, is that Amazon now as middleman is going to be collecting a huge cut of that commerce, the sweet direct local commerce and now you know, someone's going to collect anywhere from 15 to 30% of that commerce and it's going to be really it's going to eat deeply into that that local businesses margins and and that money is that so much that revenue with business essentially going to just kind of sucked out of the local community, into Seattle into Washington into these insanely hyper prosperous cities were so much more wealth is now based, that is how this problem is happening. That is how these regional disparities are happening, and how we're ending up with this incredibly unhealthy auto whack situation that the book that is at route with the book is about, which is this incredibly unhealthy regional disparity, we have some cities that are just insanely expensive, and have just utter displacement and homelessness and loss of character, and then a whole bunch of other cities that are just really struggling and seeing their, their basic wealth and commerce being sucked out of them. And, and, and this and that, that procurement games is one part of that. I focus that that that tail in El Paso, Texas, in the book, but it's happening everywhere.
Jenna Spinelle 28:08
So as you said, this is sort of like a big existential problem facing the country. And I think about in thinking about you know, what do we do about this walk it in individuals do I just I wonder if there's a parallel here to the argument that some people make about climate change where Yes, you know, we as individuals can take action to reduce our you know, to drive less to buy a plug in car to buy an energy efficient appliances, etc, etc. You know, we can all make decisions to buy less from Amazon or perhaps not at all but I just I wonder if that's kind of futile in in light of some of these massive things that are happening I just just said such a such a much larger scale.
Alec MacGillis 29:00
So I think there are a few things that we can do, I think there's kind of three prongs one prong is we've already kind of touched on which is the workers and so just you know, anything that one can do to to support them in their in their ongoing organizing fight because that's gonna be going on for years now. It's gonna take a very long time. But that so that's that's one prong. The worker conditions in the warehouses. second prong is any probably more promising one in the short term is this whole fight now in Washington and around antitrust, there's really a whole lot more momentum now recognition around the fact that that one reason that we've got this really unhealthy concentration of wealth in certain parts of this country and in our in our economy is that or commies has gotten so concentrated in certain companies and, and that we're really back at sort of a gilded age moment with with with corporate concentration, and so for the That's an issue that can seem scary abstract. And you know, anti trust is such a sort of abstract kind of cold word. But But I think for voters to really start thinking more about that issue as something that they prioritize and care about the way they do health care, or education or or other kind of core issues, because there are going to be major fights around that in these next couple of years that Biden, named to the Federal Trade Commission, this young woman who you're just a few years ago, as a law student wrote this iconic paper on Amazon and monopoly. She's now the chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission at age 32. It's really pretty extraordinary. But then there's also a lot of legislation going through Congress now. And we big, big fights over it about breaking up the company somehow reining them in so to as a citizen to care about that fight, I think is another thing that that we can do, and to vote on it. Then the third, you know, is what you've you've touched on is the consumer aspect. And I do believe we have agency in this regard. I'm not I've not been advocating a boycott. But the fact is that, that the reason the company got so vastly bigger and more powerful this past year, 40% increase in sales, $60 billion, gain in businesses, personal wealth, all these additional warehouses, stock almost doubling, that was all us, that was us. That was us bracing with extraordinary alacrity. The one click life this past year, arguably even in excess of what the public health conditions demanded. And so I do think it's important, if we care about all things, even talking about this hour, that we moderate that, and that we somehow return, we break out of that habit to some degree, it's not about cold turkey, necessarily, it was about moderation and about, about returning to the physical spaces around us, not just as shoppers and consumers, but you know, going back to the theater, going back to the, to the movies, going back to the restaurants, getting breaking out of that hunker down, atomized laptop life, and where you don't, where you have zero interaction whatsoever. As a consumer, you're not even going to lift your head probably when the guy drops off your box on your doorstep. And, and so to break out of that, I think is very important. I think we actually do have more impact in this regard, even than climate change. Where because it's, there's there's something a bit more direct here, this, this really it's us as consumers who have who have been driving this the extraordinary growth of this company, this company, we do, in fact, still have agency.
Jenna Spinelle 32:50
So Alec, I know that many of our our listeners are involved or passionate about grassroots causes and organizations on everything from ending gerrymandering, to advocating for for ranked choice voting, etc, etc. are there organizations in that vein that that exist or are cropping up around some of these issues related to Amazon, we've been talking about
Alec MacGillis 33:17
Two groups that I would mention in this regard. One is a really pretty extraordinary group called the Institute for local self reliance, that has been around for years now. And they are doing a lot of work in this whole realm on supporting local business supporting local communities and supporting local government really. And so that's that's one to look at. And they are now part of a broader coalition that sprung up just in the past couple of years, that is basically, you know, a broad anti Amazon coalition that's called the Athena coalition. And you can find out more about them online Athena has as the goddess and so those would be two places to start. But then there's also I think, just generally, there are the these local efforts that are springing up now around around the the the additional warehouses, so just to keep an eye out for those in your area, because there will be more warehouses coming there. If we if we keep buying as much as we're buying from them, they're going to have to keep building more warehouses. So you're gonna have more of these warehouse deals. So that's one more thing to look for on the horizon.
Jenna Spinelle 34:23
All right. Well, we will we will leave it there. Alec, thank you for for your your work on this topic. I highly encourage listeners to check out your book fulfillments, which we will link to in the show notes. And thank you for taking the time to join us today.
Alec MacGillis 34:36
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Chris Beem 34:46
So Candace, we talked about how Amazon is one of these major dramatic developments at incredibly successful, incredibly powerful and What a, you know how difficult it is to organize labor? under any circumstances in the United States, I just want to maybe start by saying that it is still not great, but it is better now than it has been in I mean, you know, since reagan, for sure, and maybe since like LBJ, which goes back a long time, 60 or 70 years, this has always been kind of a back and forth in American politics, and American society. But, you know, you get the sense that enough of these stories are are, you know, leaking out into the public, that, you know, people are more open to the idea of not just helping workers in terms of bathroom breaks and efficiency demands, but also in terms of checking the power of organizations like Amazon.
Candis Watts Smith 36:00
Yeah, I mean, ostensibly, public opinion matters, but it's, you know, policy is going to matter to and how many states are now Right to Work states, right. Um, and, you know, I think also, local dynamics matters so much here. So thinking about, for example, a lot of, you know, here I am in North Carolina, we're all like, cheering for people in Alabama to get a union. But we don't live there. And we're not within that space in that town, navigating the situation there, which, on the one hand, you know, from the Amazon side, right, there's reports of intimidation. Amazon, has been, you know, reported to ensure that its workers don't have a sense of social cohesion, they barely know each other. And then there's the issue of what is the alternative for good work in that space for, you know, for decent paying jobs in that area. And so that also matters that if Amazon is the best that you have, are you going to do anything that you think is going to go against it,
Chris Beem 37:20
it reminds me of the situation that, that Alec talked about with regards to Seattle credibly progressive area, but when they when it came down to Amazon saying, Well, if you do this, if you let in these kind of, if we change these standards, and bring in these new housing ideas, you might lose some of this incredible real estate windfall that you've received, in part because of the role of Amazon in the community. And so this very progressive place said, Well, you know, maybe maybe we don't want that so much, just because, you know, self interest is a is an incredibly powerful thing.
Candis Watts Smith 38:06
If I'm not mistaken. Alec calls them superficially progressive. And so far, right, like you're saying is that they're kind of like, Hey, you know, we should have fairness, and we should have egalitarianism. But we also want to have our very high return on our home investments. And, you know, it does make for strange bedfellows.
Chris Beem 38:29
As you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, that you are, what you were describing is is something again, that is fundamental to our democratic politics, and that is this bifurcation associated with class, and with urban rural, and my goodness, this sounds so much like, what just happened with why we had a 20 year war in Afghanistan? Because the people who were there were not a lot of people like us didn't know anybody who was in that war, and didn't have reason to think about that war. And we're very happy to say thank you for your service. Yeah. But when it became when, when there was some issue of more, if their effort or if the issue require more effort on their part, they're caught. Yeah, no, no, I think I'm pretty good. I'm good. And and so there is this, you know, kind of damning assessment of, of elites, people like us in terms of how much we really are willing to walk the walk.
Candis Watts Smith 39:48
Just to go back to this thing about regional inequality and rural and urban. I think it's a point worth just kind of illuminating A bit more, because, and I'm not making an economic anxiety argument around Trump. But I do think that there's something to be said about what happens when opportunities are clustered in certain areas, and there's no opportunity in other areas, how people respond to that in their kind of everyday life, right, how people respond to unemployment, poverty, it's, it's, it's almost right, like people respond as, as anybody would respond across racial groups, right? And what that does to democracy, that people who that when opportunities are clustered in some areas and devoid in other areas, that is also going to have political ramifications. And it's not something that that these areas would be bending over backwards to get if it weren't for the fact that there were very few other opportunities out there to get right.
Chris Beem 41:10
But I do want to say that I think it's something I just want to reiterate something I mentioned before about how I just think this labor just needs to up its game here. This is a new, this is not a lunch bucket, manufacturing union job that needs organizing here, it's distinctive, it's different, and their corporate enemy is very, very smart.
Candis Watts Smith 41:42
Well, okay, just to be sure that there is some calibrating of our timescales that we might need to do here. Right, a failure invest summer on the first go round is not a failure. Right? I mean, these organizing labor happens over years, not in a couple of months, or even in a year or two. Right? these are, these kinds of changes often take a long time.
Chris Beem 42:09
Now, I actually agree with that. I just think that, you know, it's unlikely that the, the climate of opportunity is going to be much better than it is right now, for American labor. And so now is the time for them to to grasp this very difficult challenge and try to move it forward.
Chris Beem 42:37
Do you agree with that?
Candis Watts Smith 42:39
No.
Chris Beem4 2:39
Why not?
Candis Watts Smith 42:41
I don't think that most Americans are ready to give up whatever small goodies they're gonna get as consumers. When the rubber hits the road, that is a cultural change that has to happen among Americans, that we are willing to give up something for ourselves. for the greater good. We should all be more mindful of where we're shopping and the decisions that we're making. The people that we interact with, who do the labor, that helps us like get our day going right and moving. And that would be a major change. I think even for us as individuals just on a day to day basis to be more conscientious about those things.
Chris Beem 43:33
Democracy makes demands on us, as citizens and as consumers. And we all can do better at that. And we can all benefit from a reminder that that is the case, and that I agree with. I knew we would get there sooner or later. This book is really chock full of a lot of really infuriating stories. But it's, you know, it is also really interesting in terms of kind of account, accounting of where we are as a nation right now. And if what we just said is true, then that's the kind of thing that all that all of us need and that we should consider ourself in his debt for having given up for democracy works. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith 44:23
And I'm Candis Watts Smith Thanks for listening.