The New York Times aims to spotlight “the human cost of Amazon’s employment machine” in a fascinating report published yesterday. Based on interviews with hundreds of current and former warehouse workers, the piece describes the company’s overriding fixation on productivity and efficiency and dystopian reliance on robotics, metrics, and algorithmic systems to carefully monitor and track nearly every aspect of employees’ work lives. It explains that the company’s business model rests, by design, on systematic employee attrition. In fact, the NYT reports that Amazon has exhausted the labor supply with such voracious ferocity in recent years that some manager have begun expressing concern that it may not be able to sustain its sprawling logistics machine in some regions of the country.

Let’s turn to a handful of organizing victories, to end on a more encouraging note. This morning. hundreds of staffers at Oxford University Press in New York City announced that they have voted the join the News Guild. Workers at software firm Mapbox revealed yesterday that nearly two-thirds of the company’s employees have signed cards to join the CWA. And on Monday in Minneapolis, the country’s first Black-owned distillery voluntarily recognized its employees’ independent union. While relatively modest, hopefully these victories indicate that the broader surge of labor organizing and militancy inspired by the pandemic continues to gain steam.