In an article published yesterday, the New York Times aims to expose “the human cost of Amazon’s employment machine.” Based on interviews with hundreds of current and former Amazon warehouse workers, the piece describes the company’s intense fixation on productivity and efficiency and spotlights its dystopian reliance on robotics, metrics, and algorithmic systems to carefully monitor and track nearly every facet of its employees’ work lives.

The piece details that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos devised a business model that relies systematically on employee churn — while Amazon has hired hundreds of thousands of employees in recent years, most have been cycled out of its warehouses nearly as quickly as their replacements can be supplied. In fact, the article reveals that Amazon depletes labor markets with such intensity that its management team has begun expressing concern that it may struggle to secure enough labor to continue to sustain its sprawling operations in wide swaths of the country.

In more uplifting news, the organizing surge spurred by the precarity and dislocation the pandemic unleashed continues to metastasize across a wide range of industries. Hundreds of staffers at Oxford University Press in New York City announced this morning that they have joined the NewsGuild. Dozens of workers at software firm Mapbox announced yesterday that nearly two-thirds of the company’s U.S. employees have signed cards to join the CWA. And the country’s first Black-owned distillery, located in Minneapolis, voluntarily recognized its employees’ independent union on Monday.