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accelerated. By the twenty-first century, time itself became a leading factor in competition as “lead-time”—that is, the time from production to the market—was shortened as much as possible in order to gain advantage over rivals. Hence “Time-Based Competition” increased demands on the methods, technology, infrastructure, and workforce of logistics.23
By building its logistics and digital capacity and infrastructure, Amazon would become the master of what Marx called, “the annihilation of space by time.”24 By the time Amazon had moved beyond just books and its first few warehouses to see its sales soar from $6.9 billion in 2004 to $232.9 billion in 2018,25 much of the groundwork for a new type of retail, tech, and logistics operation had been laid. In the process, while until recently bypassing brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon has become a deeply embedded capital-intensive company whose gross global property and equipment almost reached the $100 billion ($95.8 billion) mark by 2018.26
AMAZON’S STRUCTURE, THE MOVEMENT OF GOODS, AND THE PRESSURES ON THE WORKFORCE
First, it is important to establish just where Amazon and its workforce fit into the capitalist system today. Is Amazon really just a retailer or a tech outfit? The argument here, as suggested in the beginning of this chapter, is that given the nature of Amazon’s physical infrastructure and the movement of goods from manufacturers to its own internal system of movement as well as directly to consumers, it is primarily a logistics, that is, a strategically oriented transportation operation and, hence, part of the total production process. From a Marxist perspective, the movement of materials from raw materials through the manufacturing process and on to the market are all part of production. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “Economically considered, the spatial condition, the bringing the product to the market belongs to the production process.”27 Very few products are made in one location or plant, hence the capital employed in the spatial movement of materials is part of production. In Volume II of Capital, Marx stated, “The productive capital invested in this industry [transportation] thus adds value to the products transported, partly through the value added by the work of transport.” 28 Thus, the vast majority of workers laboring in Amazon’s global internal logistics systems and its $100 billion material facilities are producers of value; that is, they (not its consumers) are the source of the incredible wealth of this capitalist giant and its multi-billionaire boss Jeff Bezos. And it is, of course, the interaction of Amazon’s infrastructure, the speed at which goods move through it, and the rate at which these workers produce this value (their rate of exploitation) that are at the heart of this company’s efforts to constantly increase the intensity of work and lower the cost of this labor.
Much has been written about the evolution of Amazon, its customer focus, and the brilliance and persistence of Jeff Bezos. Here our concern is with its current structure, operations, and their impact on the 647,500 full-time and part-time workers employed globally by Amazon by the end of 2018.29 For this reason, we will look at Amazon’s global structure, investments, expenses, and employment. Virtually all of Amazon’s international and even most of its U.S. facilities have been built within the last few years. With some notable exceptions such as its Whole Foods stores acquired in 2017 and its new brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon’s properties are all part of its logistics system. Amazon’s expanding global empire, in short, is brand new, despite its founding as an online book distributor in 1994. As the table below shows, while almost half of all of its 1093 facilities are still located in the U.S., more than half are now scattered across Asia (where India accounts for 331 facilities), Europe, and the Middle East, along with Canada and Australia. Furthermore, recently about a third of its revenues comes from outside the U.S.30
Table 1.1 Amazon’s global facilities as of June 2019*
| Global | 1093 |
| United States | 477 |
| Asia | 358 |
| Europe | 230 |
| Middle East | 5 |
| Latin America | 4 |
| Canada | 14 |
| Australia | 5 |
*Brick-and-mortar stores not included.
Source: MWPVL International, Amazon Global Fulfillment Center Network, January 2020, www.mwpvl.com/html/amazon_com.html.
Looking more closely at Amazon’s U.S. operations, we see that as of mid-2019 it had 10 inbound sortation centers, 166 fulfillment and return centers, 47 outbound sortation centers, 53 Prime Now hubs, 12 Whole Foods distribution centers, 21 Pantry Fresh Food fulfillment centers, 162 delivery stations, and 6 airport hubs.31 By mid-2019, Amazon employed a highly diverse and racialized workforce of 350,000 in their U.S. facilities, not including the 100,000 or so temporary workers taken on at the peak holiday season.32 The sortation centers are a new development in which goods are moved from fulfillment centers to the outbound sortation centers where they are organized by zip code and sent to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to be forwarded to customers. The Whole Foods distribution centers and Fresh Food fulfillment centers are also new since Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods was its first major entry into brick-and-mortar stores.33
Missing from the MWPVL tally are Amazon’s data centers (or data warehouses) about which the company is highly secretive. They are nevertheless the operational centers of Amazon Web Services, which both provides “cloud” services for other business customers and the artificial intelligence that drives its Alexa “voice assistant”, as well as for its own massive “number-crunching capacity and standardized, automated computing infrastructure.”34 While Amazon does not provide detailed information on their number or location, Datacenters.com puts those in the US at 36, with 29 concentrated in northern Virginia, three in Ohio, three in eastern Oregon, and just one in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle. According to this count, these data centers employ some 10,000 people in the 36 U.S. facilities and three in Ireland.35 As an article about Amazon’s data centers in The Atlantic points out, northern Virginia is the birthplace and “heart of the internet,” but also of “spook country”— that is, the epicenter of the national security state’s data and surveillance operations. Amazon’s lines to the national security state are also direct. The CIA is reported to have a $600 million contract with AWS.36 Finally, along with the miles of fiber-optic cable, these data centers are just as material as its fulfillment centers and are run and maintained by workers.
It is also humans in trucks, vans, and now airplanes that connect Amazon’s facilities along its supply chains to the final consumer. In logistics industry jargon, this involves the “first mile” (from manufacturer or third-party merchant to an Amazon facility), the middle (between Amazon facilities), and the “last mile” (delivery to customers). As Amazon stated in its 2018 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 10-K report, “We rely on a limited number of shipping companies to deliver inventory to us and completed orders to our customers.”37 For the “first mile,” these are a small number of well-known trucking firms, while UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Post Office cover the “last mile.” More recently, however, Amazon has begun to build last-mile capacity to eventually replace or minimize dependence on UPS and FedEx. Amazon Logistics now owns 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans which are leased to contractors (“partners”) who are tied to Amazon via its Amazon Flex, Uber-style app. This allows Amazon to maintain a high degree of control over these drivers, while avoiding the costs and responsibilities of calling them employees.38