In a fascinating report published yesterday, the New York Times aims to spotlight “the human cost of Amazon’s employment machine.”  Based on interviews with hundreds of current and former warehouse workers, the article describes the company’s overriding fixation on productivity and efficiency and dystopian reliance on robotics, metrics, and algorithmic systems to carefully monitor and track virtually every aspect of employee lives.  Amazon’s business model rests, by design, on intensive, systematic turnover, the piece explains.  The company has cycled through hundreds of thousands of people in recent years, exhausting the labor supply with such ferocity that management has begun expressing concern that it may struggle to sustain its sprawling operations in some segments of the country.

To end on a more encouraging note, let me highlight a couple organizing victories.  This morning hundreds of staffers at Oxford University Press in New York City announced that they have voted the join the News Guild.  Yesterday, workers at software firm Mapbox revealed that nearly two-thirds of the company’s employees have signed cards to join the CWA.  And in Minneapolis on Monday, the country’s first Black-owned distillery voluntarily recognized its employees’ independent union.  Hopefully these modest successes signal that the broader organizing surge which the pandemic inspired continues to metastasize.