The Checkout

Episode 37: Amazon’s Racial Capitalism: The Cost of Free Shipping


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“Amazon is contributing to the racialization of labor within the logistics sector, where workers of color are disproportionately employed in the hardest, most backbreaking jobs for the lowest pay and the highest turnover rate, and absorbing the environmental impacts of these facilities in communities of color. We have to connect labor, racial justice, worker rights with environmental justice.” -Jake Wilson
Dr. Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Labor Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on gender, race, and class, welfare state development, social movements, and poverty and work. She is author of They Say Cutback; We Say Fightback! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment (2011, American Sociological Association’s Rose Series) and Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present (2005, University of California Press). She is also co-author of The World Social Forums and the Challenges of Global Democracy (2007, Paradigm Publishers) and co-editor of The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty (2007, Paradigm Publishers) and A Handbook of World Social Forum Activism (2012, Paradigm Publishers). [email protected]
Dr. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is a Professor of Sociology at California State University at Long Beach. His research explores the ways that racism and labor exploitation intersect. He is particularly interested in the global logistics industry and the workers who move goods around the world. His current research examines the impact of e-commerce (i.e. Amazon) on work and labor. His newest co-edited (with Ellen Reese) book, The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, was released in 2020 by Pluto Press (Wildcat Series). This book provides a rich and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays by scholars, activists, and labor and community organizers that interrogates the global significance of Amazon’s rise and the growing popular resistance to it around the world. [email protected]
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The CheckoutBy Errol Schweizer and Evan Driscoll

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