Anew book edited by UC Riverside sociology professor Ellen Reese and Cal State Long Beach professor of sociology Jake Alimahomed-Wilson examines Amazon as an architect of “surveillance capitalism” and how workers and communities in the Inland Empire and around the world resist the online commerce juggernaut. 

“The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy” is a collection essays that maintain Amazon’s meteoric rise represents a shift in the global political economy that the authors call “Amazon capitalism.” Amazon capitalism combines convenient one-click online retailing, control over how products are stored and shipped, surveillance tools to control the workforce, and economic and political influence in every corner of the world. 

Amazon has reshaped not only the economies but also the geographies of economically disadvantaged regions such as Southern California’s Inland Empire, consisting of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, about 60 miles southeast of the Port of Los Angeles. With abundant vacant land and city leaders eager for the opportunities they envision with warehouses, the Inland Empire quickly became one the largest Amazon logistics hubs and employment centers in the nation, with 16 warehouses, fulfillment centers, and other large-scale facilities. These imagined opportunities, however, come with heavy social and economic costs.

Reese and Jason Struna, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Puget Sound, make the case that electronic surveillance of workers enables Amazon to control and discipline workers who do not work quickly or steadily enough. This surveillance also provides useful information to further automate work tasks. 

Reese supervised an undergraduate student team that interviewed 47 current and former Amazon warehouse workers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties between 2018 and 2019. Latinos comprised 67% of their sample, reflecting the predominance of Latinos in the region’s labor force generally and warehouse workers in particular.

READ MORE HERE