Amazon Monopolizes Neighborhoods, Too?

Amazon’s rampant reach goes further than we think.

In his July 2021 article from Jacobin Magazine entitled “Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States,” Alex Press writes that “some communities are vacuumed up almost completely by Amazon, while in others, people don’t know anyone who works for the company.” The phrase “company towns” is used in the very headline — and multiple times in the article — denoting the working-class communities consumed by a singular employer who exploits its workforce for profit. Decreases in industrially-related safety measures and a significant lack of corporate regulation as a whole has led Amazon to varied sources of commercial success, allowing Amazon to function in the same way that “company towns” of the past faced little-to-no systemic and government intervention on their presence.

Communities that are swept up in Amazon’s net of employment are required to sacrifice their time, effort, and labor. They do not have the ability to comfortably distance themselves from their line of work, something basic and fundamental to the life of, say, Jeff Bezos. Rather, workers who live in an Amazon “company town” — and Amazon workers as a whole — often skip breaks or endure injuries, all in the name of a scan of around 300 items per hour. Such information is in significant contrast to what is advertised directly on Amazon’s job opening website for a position as a Warehouse Associate: “Health and safety are a top priority with all of our roles and sites.” But efficiency, productivity, and expendability remain in the top three of Amazon’s most prioritized goals. The words “health” and “safety” implies even an inclination to address basic needs; if Amazon held this sentiment, health and safety for workers would have already been enacted. 

The Inland Empire is a semi-local exemplifier of how Amazon monopolizes neighborhoods. As the “largest private employer in the region…[Amazon] is so enmeshed in the community that it can simultaneously be a TV channel, grocery store, home security system, boss, personal data collector, high school career [tracker], internet cloud provider and personal assistant,” details New York Times writer Erika Hayasaki. Those endeavors aren’t hypothetical, either. There is already an existence — and a prevalence — of Amazon Prime as a streaming service, Amazon Fresh as a site for produce, and Cajon High School in San Bernardino, as a place where there are courses available in the career track of Amazon Logistics and Business Management Pathways. The latter is what Press describes as a “behemoth…[where Amazon is] producing not only profit but people, too.”

Cajon High serves as a microcosm for the ways in which corporations are able to feed at the trough of available workers before they even reach a legal age of employment. The mere idea of a Business Management Pathway or a classroom designed to look like an Amazon facility is no longer (if it ever was) “shocking,” or “dystopian,” but rather a marker of society’s collective present and futures to come.

Hayasaki’s description of Cajon High’s classroom shows the lengths that Amazon is willing to go to immerse students in its workplace atmosphere:

“On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words ‘CUSTOMER OBSESSION’ and ‘DELIVER RESULTS’ were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words ‘Logistics Final Project,’ and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s ‘14 Leadership Principles.’ Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.”

Amazon’s “company town” strategies work hand-in-hand with the practices implemented at Cajon High. Both seek to engulf those in the area — working-class adults and youth — and provide them with beneath the minimum levels of workplace safety and care. Of course, no corporation can ever fulfill such needs, and Amazon has never been known for its equitable labor practices, be they through the predatory nature of Business Management Pathways or through conditions that allow for rampant injury given during the workday. That does not take away from the fact that those targeted by Amazon are continuously deprived — truly, no “reform” is ever enough to achieve equity for workers.

Those working as a Warehouse Associate in Rialto, for instance, are paid up to $21 an hour, and this is not the time to dismiss the company’s maximum pay as above California’s “minimum” wage, or to preach that workers should merely “be grateful” just because they are employed. The standards for “safe” and equitable working conditions are overwhelmingly low, enabling Amazon’s conduct to couple with the capitalistic notion that workers must “earn” their basic necessities, fueling the system to function as efficiently as possible. In reality, telling workers to feel “grateful” — whether or not they are themselves, with a 150% turnover rate per year for hourly workers in their own right — does not fix labor exploitation and a lack of wealth distribution. Even when workers do not have a say in their conditions, gratitude for employment should only be held by those working in their positions; ruling-class platitudes offer no substantive alternative to corporations enacting harm.

Workers can secure a position as a Rialto warehouse associate once they turn 18, and as long as they have graduated from high school; Cajon High is less than 20 minutes away, granting students immediate access to any potential job opportunities. Hayasaki writes that the school has implemented field trips to tour the Rialto location, with a corporate emphasis that Inland Empire students should stay in their locale. This is proposed as an encouragement to avoid the competitive and pre-saturated market of Los Angeles — or so the concept appears, until layers are peeled to understand that students are encouraged to work wherever Amazon can extract the most profit.

It’s not new that corporations are using tactics such as targeting youths through their school environment and working-class adults in the areas that they live in. Company towns held prevalence during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly targeting those willing to do industrial work; institutionally-created career pathways have existed in educational curricula prior to Amazon’s involvement at Cajon High. A focus on industrial work is intentional; while valid in its own right, industrial labor is specifically targeted by institutions due to its expendability, as corporations are able to find and replace workers without a single commitment to their humanity. This is not to say that industrial workers are not “important,” but rather that the broadness of the field itself uses those workers as means to an end.

If Amazon ceased to exist, it’s not to say that the corporate pathways at Cajon High or the prominence of a singular employer in primarily working-class areas would diminish. Amazon is pervasive in what it does, and that can’t be ignored. And, as always, issues of labor practices must be addressed with the full economic context in mind, which means that capitalism — the economic system permitting Amazon’s tactics, which place people into poverty by limiting wages and boxing them into warehouse job opportunities — is equally responsible for putting workers at risk.

Corporate regulation has not proved itself to be a viable method of abolishing exploitative labor practices — practices such as zooming in on communities and restricting the choices of job opportunities to one. There is no way to “regulate” a system that was built to support Amazon’s very behavior — and that of many other corporations like it. Beyond abolition, there is no way out of capitalistic endeavors, no matter how many standards of “improvement” are imposed.