“As recently as 1980, there were only a few parts of the country — mostly in Appalachia and the Deep South — that had median incomes more than 20 percent below the average, and then you had a small number of places that were 20 percent above the average, like DC and the New York suburbs, for example. But now whole swaths of the country are 20 percent below the average and it includes basically the entire Midwest, while huge strips of the coast are now above the 20 percent above the average.”
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“a two-step process: Amazon upends all of these brick-and-mortar retail businesses and then swoops into the areas where the laid-off employees live and hires them as underpaid bodies in their warehouses.”
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“We talk about coal miners getting laid off, but countless more retail workers have been laid off. The professional retail clerk took more losses than any other in recent years.
To put it simply, what you have now are the sort of jobs that once allowed a 55-year-old woman in Elmira, New York, to manage a jewelry counter at a department store being replaced by a warehouse job that pays less, involves much more strenuous working conditions, is far more socially isolating, and that same 55-year-old woman will have a much harder time hacking it.”
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“We’re talking about intensely rote and inhuman work. We’re talking about a company that uses algorithms to track productivity and bathroom breaks.”
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“These are really grueling jobs. There’s a reason why the turnover is so high. And if anything, the jobs have only gotten more rote and more repetitive and more isolated as the robots at the warehouses have gotten more automated.”
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“The company’s demands of local governments are extraordinarily aggressive. It seeks large reductions on its future tax bills, on the property taxes owed for the warehouse or data center, and sometimes also on the payroll taxes owed on the workers.”
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“if you’ve had your manufacturing base wiped out in Baltimore or southwest Ohio or wherever it might be, and then along comes this company that’s going to hire 2,000 people at a warehouse, it’s hard to say no.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22339827/amazon-bessemer-alabama-alec-macgillis-fulfillment