The Uneasy Amazon Coalition, With Fulfillment Author Alec MacGillis

ProPublica senior reporter Alec MacGillis highlights the growing economic divide in the U. S. — through the lens of Amazon — in his new book, Fulfillment. MacGillis joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the state of the union push inside Amazon, how labor has changed more broadly in the U. S., and the uneasy political coalition between those packing and delivering Amazon packages and those receiving them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, Alec.

• 1:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hi.

• 1:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  How's it going? I have your book right here. I've really enjoyed it and I'm thrilled that you're on the show. Okay, I will hit play on the ad. We have a new sponsor, Main Street, and then we can jump right into the conversation.

• 1:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Alec MacGillis is the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, a terrific, terrific new book about Amazon's impact on our economy and society, and more broadly about how our society concentrates power and wealth in the hands of the few and makes it extremely difficult for others to break through. He is also a senior reporter at ProPublica. Alec, welcome to the show.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so why don't we start with the news? So Amazon's been flailing a bit with its PR strategy. On Twitter, it was taunting the members of the Senate and a member of the Congress, and basically said to one of them, "You don't believe our workers really pee in bottles, do you?" Amazon workers were like, "Yeah, we do," and they were sending pictures of those bottles to Vice, and then they leaked a memo of a manager reprimanding them for leaving... for pooping in bags and leaving them in the vans. And they leaked that to The Intercept, and Amazon looked pretty stupid. And this all stems from a union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, where a massive fulfillment center is.

• 2:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  In the midst of a drive, they've actually already voted to unionize. And I imagine we'll find out the outcome of what's going on there any day now. But I'd love to hear from your perspective. You know, your book is about fulfillment. You know, no coincidence, Amazon calls their warehouses fulfillment centers. And this is what I think is the biggest attempt to unionize one of those to date, or the most serious one. But yeah, I'm going to turn it over to you. What's going on there?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it's just, I mean, it's an extraordinary moment, really, that... And I, you know, you always wish when you're writing a book about that somewhat contemporary, that it would go to press a little later. In this case, I really wish the book had gone to press after this development closed right before this news came out, this extraordinary news, that a union had managed to get enough support to hold an election. First time we've ever had an election at a full Amazon warehouse. And it's incredible that it's happening in the deep south, although not as incredible as people, I think, maybe think, that Alabama is actually, as deep southern states go,

• 3:55Speaker 02

  has somewhat more history of union organizing than other, than its neighboring states. And of course, had the history of the steel industry there. And Bessemer itself is, of course, named after the man who invented the modern steelmaking process, Henry Bessemer. And so we have this election there, and... First time ever for Amazon that we've got to this point. And it's still, it's gonna be incredibly tough. I mean, I think there's been a lot of excitement around this, understandably.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  That I think some of the excitement has somewhat overlooked the, how stiff the odds still were for these organizers there. You have Amazon pulling out all the stops to block this thing, including a crucial fact that gets, I think, often missed is that the number of people voting in this election is really quite large. It's, you know, it's 5,800 or so eligible.

• 5:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Five thousand plus, yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, which, which, you know, that that number is so big because Amazon has fought to make it that big. And has fought to include a whole swath of workers that, you know, that are arguably basically more sort of supervisor types. But have, they've kind of gotten them into that pool, which of course makes it harder for the union to get a majority. Because the more you grow that denominator, the harder it is to get a majority. But it's, but we'll see.

• 5:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would just say before we get into how Amazon's gonna fight it. The interesting thing is like what they're actually unionizing for inside this fulfillment center. So typically, when you think of a union drive, the union will push for higher wages. And maybe that's part of it, but Amazon's minimum wage is double the federal minimum wage, $15 compared to, I think, $7.25. And what the push is actually going on here is that they want better working conditions. They want a little bit more flexibility, maybe more break time, if I'm reading it right. Isn't that kind of fascinating that that's what the union, union drives have moved to with Amazon? Why do you think that's necessary?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's necessary because these jobs are just so incredibly demanding. And the, um, and I, we, we should note that pay is definitely still a part of what they're fighting for. Um, they, workers, Amazon workers across the country are upset that they, that they lost the $2 bump that they got, um, at the start of the pandemic, the first couple of months of the pandemic, Amazon gave, gave them $2 extra, so they were up to 17. And then that was taken away very quickly. Um, and, and so workers look at, at the company making just extraordinary profits. This past year, um, Jesus' personal wealth just up 50, 60 billion and they, and, and they're back to the same wage that they were at, you

• 6:53Speaker 02

  know, a couple of years ago. So that, that, that definitely is part of it. But, but yes, they're also fighting for better conditions. They're fighting to just basically have more say in how the job is done in these warehouses. Um, you have, the jobs are, there was a really good quote in the Times today from someone who used to work in the, in the Amazon warehouse. And is now writing a dissertation on it for his, um, doctorate in Minnesota. And you just talk about how they're completely different. They've replaced retail jobs, but they're completely different than retail jobs. They're, they're sort of physically taxing and relentless in a way that, that retail jobs were not. And they really are more like factory jobs.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And, but they're not paid like factory jobs. And, or they're certainly not paid like factory jobs, um, used to be. And, and so that, that's really, you know, what's at stake here is that you have this new kind of work. It's a work, kind of work that, that's, we've never had at the scale, that warehouse work, fulfillment work, um, at this enormous scale that Amazon has now kind of created. And sort of how, what that work is going to be like, just how, just how physically relentlessly demanding, um, it's going to be, how, how much you're going to be under the constant thumb of, of really high performance quotas or, and then on top of that, just incredibly high kind of surveillance of your performance,

• 8:15Speaker 02

  um, minute by minute. And, and then, and how, how you're going to be compensated for it is, that's sort of what we're fighting over now. It's this new kind of mass work and, and what it's going to look like and, and what it's actually going to be like on a, you know, uh, day to day basis for these, for these workers.

• 8:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  You live in Baltimore, pretty close to where one of these Bethlehem Steel plants has not been taken down and a fulfillment center has gone up on the same land. So what about your, your personal experience made you interested in writing a book like this, really taking a look at, and we're going to get into a little bit more in terms of like what these jobs are like. And I mean, I think there's a pretty good understanding about what the jobs are like, but really what, what it means for our economy that these are like, you know, the, I imagine the fastest growing job category in the country. Amazon's added like what, a million, a million workers in the last 10 years. But before we get into that, what about your personal experience? What about your viewpoint of

• 9:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  the world made you feel like this was something that was worth locking in on and writing a book about?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Well, it really had nothing to do with Amazon at the start. It was my upset, my anger really over, over, over simply seeing the gaps in wealth that were being created around the country. And it's regional inequality, regional disparities between places that were growing bigger than we've ever really had before. We've always had richer, poorer places in the country, but not, not at the level that we have now. And, and for me, a lot of it did have to do with Baltimore. It had to do with seeing, moving back and forth between Baltimore and Washington quite a bit these last 20 years that I've been in that region. And, and now being back in Baltimore for the past eight years as a

• 10:06Speaker 02

  resident and, and watching this, this incredible divide grow with Washington just 40 miles down the road, where we're now to travel between the two of them is just utterly disorienting. They're just so wildly disparate in their prosperity and prospects. And, and then wanting to write about those, those divides, which I felt so viscerally and felt, felt were just so terrible for the country, because they're bad for both people in both sorts of places. And then settling on Amazon as the sort of framework was to tell that story. And, and Amazon, of course, is just so, was also so.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Really so close to the Baltimore Washington story in the sense that so infused in it. Because it, of course, chose, has chosen Washington to be its second headquarters. This massive investment of high-paid jobs and capital investment in Washington. That'll make a wealthy city even wealthier and more expensive. And then meanwhile, just up the road, the company has built several warehouses. In extraordinarily symbolic, historically charged locations. The one, first of which was in a former GM plant. And the second, which, second and now third of which were at the, what used to be, yes, the largest, largest steel plant, steel mill in the world.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And that's sort of, that place, that the fact that we've now, in this exact same piece of land. Gone from this massive steelworks where you had workers doing really tough but well-paid work. To now, in that exact, in that exact same spit of land, working in a warehouse. To me, just was so, so emblematic of a certain transformation of work and of, and of really kind of just daily existence in our country. And so, it all kind of, it all started there, in Washington, in Baltimore, Washington.

• 12:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and let's pull back a little bit. I mean, you talked about how you were mad about the regional divides, the divides in income inequality. Can you set the stage and talk a little bit more about what that means? Like, what that actually looks like in the US right now?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Sure, I mean, we've always had gaps. Of course, you've always had places that were poorer, wealthier. But now, I mean, the numbers are very clear. It's, it's very, it's.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Similar to how the gaps are grown on the income ladder, the 1%, 99% and all that. We've had similar spreading out happening, polarizing effect happening in geography. So recently, as 1980, only small parts of the country were poorer, had median incomes that were 20% below the average, or lower than 20% below. So only the deep south and Appalachia were sort of fell below that line. And only really small parts of the country had incomes that were 20% above the average or more. So DC, some of New York suburbs kind of fell above that line.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Now, just, you know, 40 years later, I've had massive growth at the extremes. Entire swaths of the country, including almost the whole Midwest, a lot of the Great Plains, have incomes that are 20% below the average, or poorer. And then, and then basically entire coasts now have incomes that are 20% above or higher and places that were already wealthy before like DC are now just off the charts. Like DC's median income is, Metro DC's median income is something like 50 or 70% above the average. And so you've had this spreading out of fact there.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  And then, and then, and then so much also has to do with where the wealth is that you used to have in the 60s, you had the wealthiest cities in the country in the 60s, the 25, you know, wealthiest city by median income were, many of them were in the Midwest. The list is really kind of astonishing. It's like Cleveland, Milwaukee. Um, Des Moines and Rockford, Illinois were on that list. Now, there's only a couple uh non-coastal cities on the list of the top twenty five. So um so you've the regional gaps have just gotten a lot bigger and in in my.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  You know, and the the reason I I settled on Amazon as the frame to tell the story is that it is. It is that is that the the tech economy, big tech, has played a a not insignificant role in in that in those growing regional disparities.

• 15:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and your your uh chapter on the way that wealth has accumulated to Washington was particularly eye opening to me. The rise of lobby firms and the rise of contractor, like contracting companies that have now, you know, made tons and tons of money uh basically working for the Department of Defense or other agencies. You mentioned there was somebody in a Washington suburb who had built a mansion that was uh styled off of Versailles. I mean, how is government money ending up in situations like that? It's crazy to me.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, what's I mean, I was I was I lived in Washington from two thousand five to to to thirteen and and to see, I just so I was there throughout those great recession years and to see the city get, if anything, the city got even wealthier during the Great Recession. It was just stunning to watch. It was partly because a lot of the stimulus money, um, the Obama stimulus money kind of stayed in Washington because it you know, it was a lot of it was basically awarded to those big Beltway-handed contractors like Booze Allen and those guys. They actually administered a lot of the a lot of that spending for the government and they just kind of took their cut off the top. And so a lot of the money stayed right there in those those

• 16:30Speaker 02

  those glass cubes that you see when you're driving around the Beltway or you're driving out the Dulles Toll Road. You see just these, you know, those those cubes with those

• 16:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Middlemen. It's a middleman economy.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And right. And and so and what?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  What's happened in Washington is just incredible. You have this place that was always that we sort of deliberately created it to be deliberately created to be not a to be sort of just the capital. It's supposed to be this place that we had our sort of our merchant or glittering merchant cities already by that point, but Washington was not going to be that. It was going to be a place that that would have, you know, the government buildings to sort of administer administer the our new our new federal government, but it was not supposed to be sort of a there's a reason we made it its own thing. It was it was it was just supposed to be this thing for the whole country that sort of represented us and did our business,

• 17:31Speaker 02

  our government business, and that was that. And and now, but it's it's been transformed by by two main dynamics these last few decades, incredible growth in the influence industry, the lobbying industry, and then the incredible growth of the homeland security apparatus after nine eleven, where you just this sprawl of of of contractors and large and small. And then, and then, of course, that in turn further fueled the influence industry because you have to pay for the influence to get the contracts. And and so now you have DC as this extraordinarily wealthy place with five or six of the ten richest counties in the country in the metro DC area,

• 18:16Speaker 02

  and just all the all the trappings of of extreme wealth. The one that I think might be my favorite is the there's a restaurant in DC where where children, when you come with your kids, wealthy family, come with your kids, they can they can, you know, pick non-alcoholic cocktails off of a cocktail cart. The waiter brings by, you know, a cocktail cart for the kids.

• 18:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And it's like twelve dollars.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And this is a point I think we should seize on because I think oftentimes, you know, what's lost in this conversation about big tech, of course, and we'll spend time talking about, of course, the tech companies have done what they do, but also they're existing in a political system that, you know, is I don't know, fairly corrupt and has created the economic conditions that have incentivized this bigness and allowed this bigness to happen. You know, there was an interesting thing that, just reading through your book, talking about how Amazon fulfillment centers are now on the land that Bethlehem Steel was. And it struck me that we're talking about fulfillment versus production. And it's not industry, it's, you know, not US industry, it's our, our, our big companies

• 19:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  are now just shipping out products that are made in other countries. And what, so what happened in, in the US that made Amazon and made fulfillment become this critical employer versus production? And corollary to that, you know, I, I, the, the steel jobs that you write about, places like in Bethlehem Steel, you know, people are getting killed often, you know, even one of your main characters got his arm burned off pretty much. So, so I, I, you know, I'd like to know how we shifted from industry to fulfillment as like what we think of as the top US companies. And then also like, are these jobs actually that much worse than, than the dangerous jobs that were here before?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  I, just as a quick aside, the, the fact that we're now, that these warehouses now on the same piece of land, just basically packing things are made elsewhere. I was struck when I came to the, one time when I visited the warehouse at Spurrow's Point, where the Bethlehem Steel plant used to be. And they were sitting in the, this big kind of swampy piece of land alongside the warehouse. Was just this random massive shipping container, like, and it said on it, you know, it was almost one that says like China shipping. Forget what, you know, which, which, you know, shipping line that is. But it was just sitting there all by itself, this massive, you know, one of those enormous

• 20:55Speaker 02

  steel containers, like straight off, straight off a ship, just kind of ruined and, and the swamp there. It's kind of eerie. But no, I mean, the, the story of how, of course, there are many, many others have told the story. Of how we lost that manufacturing base and lost those those kind of jobs. I tell that part of the story in the book, both through both through what happened at Beth Steel and also what happened in the auto manufacturing sector in in southwest Ohio, where where in that in the Dayton area, you just had this incredible supply chain of of auto parts manufacturing.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Dayton was the basically the second largest auto industry town after Detroit. And you had this, you know, all this traffic kind of going up and down the I-75 corridor from Flint all the way down through Detroit, down to Dayton, and then Toledo. All those, all these manufacturers, large and small, that kind of fed that supply chain. And and, you know, there's all of course, there's a lot of talk about NAFTA still and anger about NAFTA. And a lot of those jobs did move down to Mexico. But but but you talk to the economists and they really, they they think of anything

• 22:24Speaker 02

  the effect of China joining the WTO in in 2000, 2001 was even bigger in these communities. And there's, you know, it's been well documented by guys like David Autor at MIT. Just what an incredibly devastating effect that that admission of China to the WTO had on places like Dayton and just how disproportionate the effect was on places that were relied heavily on manufacturing. And you look at the numbers of what happened in southwest Ohio and

• 22:59Speaker 02

  in the first decade of the century, the the job losses are stunning. I mean, you can track it in job losses, you can track it in the the reduction in simply the use of power in Ohio was that you could like track just how much less industrial power, like electricity was being used because they simply didn't need it anymore. All these things are just shut down and. And one of my, I don't get into this in the book, but I I interviewed recently, a couple of years ago, I interviewed that guy who's, a lot of people know him from the documentary, American Factory, about the Chinese auto glass plant that's now coming to the former

• 23:43Speaker 02

  GM plant outside Dayton. And there's this Chinese billionaire who owns this company now in Dayton, and I interviewed him also for a documentary that I did, helped out with, and he was just kind of mocking us as a country for having let our manufacturing base wither, and he was kind of laughing, cackling about it. It was an extraordinary moment in this documentary. And basically saying, look, you just, that's why we're here, because you let it all go. So, you know, that brings us to the jobs themselves. The, you know, I take pains in the book not to glorify that industrial work, go into

• 24:24Speaker 02

  great detail about just how treacherous the work was, describe a lot of these different injuries. And, and yet, the man that I focus on, Bill Budani, has endured several injuries himself, and one of which basically finally leads to his retirement. But, but I do think that, you talk to these men, and mostly men, of course, and you talk to them about their own experiences, their own work, and you hear from all these guys still in Baltimore, they're often on the radio, you know, kind of reminiscing. And it's just really striking to hear that while they talk about how hot and dirty and

• 25:08Speaker 02

  difficult, often dangerous the work was, that they still found, took incredible pride in it, and found immense value in it, both in the work itself, the fact that they were making something, they were running steel, and, and the fact that, and a sort of...

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Fellowship and camaraderie they felt with with the other guys on the job. And and so and then of course, on top of that, they were being paid very well for it. And and that that combination of of being paid a living middle class wage of thirty thirty or forty dollars an hour of good benefits and having a real say on the job and and then actually making something, taking pride in what you're in in in the the the actual work you're doing, having something to show for at the end of the day. And and then and then actually having having some kind of real social um uh fellowship in the workplace.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Those are all things that are missing now in in in the warehouse work. So the warehouse work is less is certainly less treacherous. It's physically taxing, but less treacherous. Um, but there's just much less uh much less meaning and and value to it. And there's a reason. So there's a reason why people there's a hundred percent turnover in the warehouses, one hundred percent every single year. And and me whereas um, you know, guys that spent years working, working in a a place like Beth Steel, and that's that's not an accident.

• 26:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. A and I think that this is a moment where we sort of take a step back and ask what's happening to our political system itself. You know, it seems like it's no wonder to me that um lots of people in this country feel sold out by the political establishment. You look at Washington, we talked about Washington. It's because you what do you say, six or ten of the wealthiest counties in the U. S. are there? You have both, you have the debt, you know, Republicans' party of business, the Democrats, extremely cozy with these tech companies, Clinton signed NAFTA, you know, um we got close, we yeah, the WTO deal for for sure, revolving door between uh the Obama administration and

• 27:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  these tech companies, Jay Carney, Biden, and then Obama spokesperson going to Amazon, David Plouffe going to Uber, which just, you know, was behind Prop twenty two, which rolled back or or prevented, you know, some some serious worker rights from being granted to delivery drivers and and. And and Uber drivers and Lisa Jackson.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Sheryl Samberg going to Facebook. I forgot. I didn't mention her in the book.

• 27:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, who was also in the Clinton White House. And then Lisa Jackson, EPA going to Apple. I mean, unbelievable. And then there's another one we're going to talk about in a bit and rung. But let's put, let's pause on that for a moment. But yeah, I don't, you know, I imagine if you had one of these jobs where you were working in industry, making thirty, forty an hour. And now you look at the federal government, you know, it's minimum wage is seven dollars and twenty five cents, which to me is unbelievably ridiculous in this day and age. And then, you know, you have, and then you have these politicians sending trade deals. And then you have all their cronies getting rich.

• 28:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it just, to me, it's unbelievable. And of course, it's going to lead to a sense of displacement among people. What do you think about that?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, and of course, of course, it plays a role in the two thousand, twenty sixteen election. I mean, you see, if you're, if you're a former, you know, working class, white, working class Democrat, you see, you see what's happened to your, to your job, your town and your community in Southwest Ohio, or wherever it is. And then you see these dazzling cities that are now full of, to quote Democrat, the Democrats are now the party of those dazzling places of the Washington DCs and the Silicon Valleys and the Seattle's and the Boston's, where, where things are just going incredibly well, going well to, to, to, almost to a fault.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  And, and, and you, you, it makes you angry, it makes you feel alienated. It makes you, and it certainly makes you feel like that, that's no longer your party. Because those people, I mean, like the Jay Carneys, like they have nothing to do with you. And, and then you, you see them, they might come to your town, you know, with, with a candidate, as, as, you know, as the, you'll see these, these kind of hangers-on come to your town. And I always think of it as like the fancy glasses rule. Like you see these people coming to town with these, these stylish glasses, you know, and whether it's media or, or, or political people. And you're like, who are those people? I have nothing to do with them. They're like from, they're completely different.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  You know, you feel this gulf between you and them. I just remember still, I always think back to watching that 2016 Democratic Convention. When Hillary was nominated and this extraordinary triumphalism around that convention where of just all these things we'd accomplished. We, you know, Obama kind of ticking off all this, you know, we, everything was going great. We, you know, we legalized same-sex marriage, we, you know, sort of broadened equality in all these ways. And, and all these, you know, these things were, things going great in these cities. And, and we were back. And if you're, what it was like, I kept thinking, what's it like if you're watching this from Scranton?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  What's it like if you're watching this from Dayton? And, and you're looking at this and you're thinking,

• 30:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  We found out.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  This is not, this is not how things are where I am.

• 31:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned this on the realignment show. I'd like to get into it a little bit. Can we talk about the Democratic Coalition? Because you, you mentioned it's sort of an Amazon Coalition in a sense, right? You have people in urban cities who are going to vote blue, who are using Amazon to get packages delivered to them. And then you're going to have, you know, the workers in the fulfillment centers who are supposed to be their natural allies. You know, where, and the drivers, right? Who are working their asses off. And, you know, some people having to pee in bottles to get these packages. And, you know, it just strikes me that, oh, these folks are supposed to be natural political allies.

• 31:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it seems like there's some tension there, something that doesn't fully connect.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, it's, it, it is, it does not seem like a very sustainable coalition. It seems terribly awkward. And it's, but it is essentially what the Democratic Party is now becoming. And you have, you have parties now being incredibly strong with, with the highly educated kind of metro voter. The parties are sorting out more and more by education, even more than by, you know, by, by income now, or sort of by education levels. And as, as more and more of these kind of Romney Republicans have moved over to the party, you just have.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  The Democratic Party incredibly strong with exactly the demographic that Amazon is very strong with. Amazon is popular, you know, obviously across the board, but it's, but it does best with the middle of our upper middle class metro consumer. Walmart still holds its own, you know, out in the Maryland, but, but Amazon is just, it's just crushing it in, in, in the big blue cities. And, and so, um, so you have that consumer who's now the, the sort of the, the dominant demographic in Democratic Party. And then alongside the, Democratic Party still does like, just still, still does have a working class base of black

• 33:15Speaker 02

  and brown voters, black and Latino voters. And, um, and those, a lot of those voters populate the Amazon workforce in the cities, in, in the fulfillment centers and, and the trucks. And so you have, that's why I call it the Amazon Coalition. You have a party made above the Amazon consumer who is just one clicking everything, uh, whether it's from Amazon or from food delivery or Uber or whatever. They've just kind of gone whole, whole hog into that kind of life. And then you have the people who are, who are doing the work for them, the driving and the packing. And, and that, of course, that, that the awkwardness

• 33:57Speaker 02

  of that coalition, that coalition grew even more awkward this past year, um, when, when you had the, the consumer go even more fully into that existence and the risk of the work being done by the packers and the drivers, uh, was, was greater. And so

• 34:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  During the pandemic.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  It was already, it was already an awkward class coalition, but now you had this real kind of, um, awkwardness around the risk being accepted by, by the deliverers. And you just wonder how long this, this can, this can last.

• 34:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So let's talk about like the people that, that, like the end users of Amazon, you know, people that are living that one click life, as you, as you call it. Yeah, let's talk about them because.

• 34:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it, you know, their embrace of these services? I mean, I'm myself a member of Amazon Prime, right? I think we have more people that are members of Amazon Prime than our, you know, cable subscribers in the US right now, more than go to church.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  More Amazon Prime than vote in midterm elections.

• 34:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Than vote in elections, right? So the folks that are so enthusiastically embracing the one-click lifestyle, is it like hypocrisy where it's like, I care about worker rights, but I'm also gonna use Amazon? Is it suspension of disbelief? What's going on there? Like, it seems like some sort of cognitive dissonance. Maybe you could help me understand myself a little better by answering this one.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  I mean, this is the, you know, this is a question that goes beyond my book, to be honest. This is a question that's, you know, this is a question for our novelists, too. This is a question for David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. Like, how did the American, yes, how did the American consumer become so incredibly attached to sort of, you know, kind of instant gratification and cheap consumer lifestyle? Where we're seeing the low price and the promise of rapid delivery lights something up in your, in the brain? I mean.

• 35:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but you've been watching it, so.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I was just saying that it's, this is.

• 35:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You must have some thoughts on it.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  I do have thoughts on it, and, but there, I have to be careful how I say it, because it's, you know, you don't want to come off, you know, as sort of moralizing and righteous bias. I'm always careful to, you know, say that I'm not, it's not about absolutism or boycotts or anything like that, but it is about like some kind of moderation and scale. I mean, what happened this past year was just off the charts. I mean, the degree to which, the degree to which, you know, this, the one-click life was embraced was just extraordinary. There were these, the numbers, their growth was off the charts. Like, they were already big, and they have sales then go up 40 or 50% as they did.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  That, you know, that was, that was all of us, in a way, like, doing that. And even, you know, arguably in excess even of what was sort of.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Kind of required by the public health ethics.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  The the degree to which um, a whole lot of us decided just to completely go whole hog that route and just without even, you know, just it it's as soon as we had the permission to do it, kind of, that we felt that we had the epidemiological permission to do it, we just with with what a lack of we we embraced it and and and you do see a lot of people now talking about the fact that they don't want to give it up, like that they really have just, you know, even now, as it grows less necessary, that they've just really kind of um become wedded to to that that kind of existence and

• 37:39Speaker 02

  and so, yes, I don't know if you if it's hypocrisy or if it's just um a lack of imagination, not not not wanting to to think about the consequences at all. And it's not, it's not just the consequences of, you know, that worker and who's who's doing all your dirty work for you. Oh, that that's a big part of it. It's also the consequences to, you know, to all to all the all the businesses in in the place where you live, the landscape in the place where you live, the vacancies, the tax base that's being eroded, um, you know, by by by by this kind of living, the um it's just it's just a complete kind of

• 38:20Speaker 02

  blocking that all out. And and this book is partly an an appeal to to that person to to this to to think a little harder, more broadly, and and commit and connect, make connections. It's all about making connections. It's about connecting our actions with with consequences. And so I I really like, I just, I I really do hope that that coming out of this moment that we are able to

• 38:49Speaker 02

  To somehow reengage with the world around us and not just with our shopping, but.

• 38:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, yeah, I'm not here to moralize, definitely not the goal of the show. It's not, but I also think part of what we want to do on this podcast is ask some of those tougher questions that people that we do dance around because they're uncomfortable. And that certainly seems like one of them. And

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 39:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  The, the growing, and I don't blame, I mean, I think it's been clear in this conversation. I don't personally blame Amazon. You know, Amazon was made the villain, but Amazon operates in a system. And the system is governed by political choices.

• 39:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, obviously it takes two to tango, but it just does seem that eventually this, you know, this stuff all ends with, ends up with politics. And, you know, I wonder if, you know, you talked about how this democratic coalition isn't sustainable because, you know, I, I mean, or it might not be sustainable. You know, given, given what the workers are experiencing. And it does like every time I think about this, I just say, okay, does this end in revolt in some way? Like, it just doesn't seem like a very sustainable place for a society to be where you have, you know, where you have this situation where, where, you know, folks are in these grueling

• 40:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  conditions and, and they don't seem to have like a, a group in politics that are actually looking out for them in a meaningful way.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  No, I mean, but, but, you know, arguably we already had a revolt. You know, it's

• 40:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt. But like, does, where, you know, I guess suppose that, you know, the revolt, I think, I imagine you're talking about the Trump election.

• 40:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I don't think that's an endpoint in time.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  This, the problem isn't solved now that, now that we're past that point in history.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And then the next big political question really is, is in a sense, whether that, whether you're going to see what's going to happen. We talked about the awkwardness of this, unsustainable, sustainability of this coalition. Is it, is it unsustainable to the point where you actually are going to see?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Be some of these black and Latino workers who populate the warehouses and the trucks grow so resentful of the people that they're that they're bringing this stuff to that they actually start to to to move the other way. And and there were some signs last fall that that was starting to happen.

• 41:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, the Republican Party increased this.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  With Trump doing better, surprisingly well with with Latino voters and even some black black men. I see just as likely as that as that kind of shift, I I would say would be that a lot of these those workers just kind of express their resentment by dropping out and.

• 41:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not showing up to the polls.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Right, becoming just fully kind of alienated from the whole from the system. But but that is that really it is something that that that Democrats need to worry about. So this is is the the signs that the Republicans incredibly, you know, if you think about where sort of what they stand for and where they've come from, that they that they might be able to to over time, amass some kind of a multiracial working class coalition.

• 42:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, that's definitely after after 2020, that's what they were heralding. And it is seems like a product of of a society where, you know, we seem to have elite checking the elite, wanting saying they want the system to change, but not really wanting the system to change. Actually, you know, I didn't expect this, but I ended up seeing your book as kind of one in a continuum of others that I've read with similar messaging. And I'm talking about Winners Take All by Anand Gurdas, which talks about how like, you know, the biggest charitable organizations are like, we're going to help. And of course, it's important to give charity, but like, you know, their preference to do it to change society through charity that keeps the system in place versus.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Change the system. And then the meritocracy trap, which I also saw as like, we talk about a meritocracy, but education, the investment in education makes a big difference and there's it's so disproportionate.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then you oh, and sorry, then you look at the I just watched the college admissions scandal documentary on Netflix.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it all seems to be. Sort of tying into this whole thing where like, you know, we're talk, what we're talking about here is really the American dream.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's seeming to many to, you know, there, there'd be cracks in it and it's seeming like the country in some ways. I mean, obviously more even than probably almost anywhere else in the world. Great, great entrepreneurial environment here, but it's also seeming to be more of a two-class system. Uh, than, than, I don't know. I mean, obviously like it was like this in the past and there was never a perfect America, but, um. But man, it's just, it just hits you in the face when you look at what's happening right now.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. I know. I see those. I absolutely see the books. Those books all, all tied together. I, I actually participated in a, I was in a, um. Kind of a workshop session for the meritocracy trap when it was, when, when Dan was, Daniel was writing it.

• 44:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Daniel Markovitz, who wrote meritocracy trap. Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and I see them all connected probably because it's all about, it's all, so much of it is about. You know, this new class of sort of high, super highly educated, middle, upper middle class, mostly white liberals. Um, not only, you know, sort of, um, detaching in terms of, um. Just their, their income, their prospects, but also just physically detaching like the, the extent to which.

• 44:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  That we've kind of sealed ourselves off and, and where we live and where our kids go to school and, and, um. You know, I talked about this in, in fulfillment that there's, that, that there's now much more soaring. Upper middle class people are now much more likely to live amongst other upper middle class people than used to be the case. There used to be much more of a willingness to live in more mixed income neighborhoods and now we are, we are clustering ourselves. Around her own to extraordinary degree and then you add on top of that the the one click kind of life where you don't even have to go out to to interact with with people at the store or otherwise and and you are so you are

• 45:30Speaker 02

  whatever minimal interaction you might have been once in a while having with people unlike yourself or is even less likely now is really is just that driver who is who's pulling up and maybe you acknowledge him, maybe you don't. As you're sitting there at your laptop and he's and he's coming up the walk. And that is it now and it's it's so it's so unhealthy.

• 45:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay, I know we're running out of time. I want to end, uh, you know, on one story about about this back and forth between government and these big tech companies. And I use the word corruption earlier and I don't use that word lightly. But it sure seems like that's what it is. And can you just close telling us the story of Obama's former head of procurement, Anne Rung, and how she went to Amazon Business and basically rigged the system to get Amazon all these big, big contracts?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, it's just it's extraordinary how how blatant this this this story is. You know, this this person, Anne Rung, who worked her way up the ladder in government was incredibly competent, capable

• 46:42Speaker 02

  person toiling in this, you know, very kind of obscure world of of government procurement that the the people who who buy all the the office supplies and desks and and real estate space and everything that's needed to to make a government run. She started out in in Pennsylvania State Government, toiled there in obscurity for years under Governor Governor Rendell. And then she was she came to Washington when Obama was elected and she worked her way up in the federal government to the point where she was finally, you know, just really pretty much at the top of

• 47:20Speaker 02

  of the federal government procurement process in the White House. And overseeing just billions of acquisitions and every year and

• 47:30Speaker 02

  You know, very much admired, you know, was managing to trying to make things more efficient and reduce costs in various ways. And really seen as sort of a, you know, kind of a star as much as one can be in such a kind of gray kind of realm of government. And, and then all of a sudden, just like that, she announced that she was leaving to go, uh, this is about a year before, last year, the Obama administration, she announces that she's leaving to go work for Amazon. And going, goes to Seattle and is, and goes to work for exactly the, um, this new part

• 48:13Speaker 02

  of Amazon that had been set up to, to get, um, to get big government procurement contracts to, to sell to the public sector at all, at all levels of the public sector from, from federal down to, to local. Um, and Amazon just saw this as a, as a big new market, um, essentially to get people to, to get government officials at all levels to, to do one click purchasing, just the way they would at home, you know, for their, for their home needs to start doing all their government buying that way as well. And, um, in using her, and it was especially crucial to have her there because they, because

• 48:54Speaker 02

  they were in the midst, Amazon was in the midst of basically making a move on, um, an actual sort of lobbying move to, to get the federal government to shift over to that kind of approach to, to buying and, and, and did so through the, was through the, um, one of the big defense authorization bills that they were, um, that we, you know, have every couple of years to authorize or billions of spending on, on the military. And in one of, in one of those defense authorization bills, there was a fight to, to slip in language, basically creating, um, a new, a new, new option to buy.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Tons of stuff from, simply from Amazon, instead of going through sort of the usual procurement process. And she was in contact with people in the government, you know, seemingly in violation of the rules about officials having to have a cooling off period after they leave the government before re-establishing contact with their former colleagues. And I reached, should be clear, I reached out to her, of course, for the book. I even, gosh, I emailed her, I even wrote her at home, just to make every effort to reach her, try to reach her through the company, and never was able to speak to her about her role.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  And, but this is, yeah, this is a huge thing for the company. And then I described this incredible scene in El Paso where a bunch of executives at Amazon, not Anne Runge, but some people just below her, come to El Paso to basically pressure a bunch of office supply dealers in El Paso to sell through the marketplace, through Amazon marketplace, in their attempt to basically get the local governments there to start doing their buying through Amazon. And one of those people, actually, those executives who came to Amazon, to El Paso to pressure the office supply dealers, was the former head of procurement for all of

• 51:00Speaker 02

  King County in Seattle. So there's just all these people who have been kind of coming from government into Amazon to sort of help grow that big part of the business.

• 51:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, in the past, there might have been office supply companies that sold directly to government, actually, you know.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sold at a fair price. Now, Amazon is hiring procurement people from the government, basically.

• 51:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Helping them win custom made RFPs or customer proposals to be the government's official suppliers. And then co-opting the office supply folks who used to have these contracts and taking 15% off the top, which is essentially their margin, money goes to Amazon. Then these, these small and medium sized businesses who depended on this stuff end up, you know, either collapsing or, or losing the margin that they were making.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. And there's less, less tax to local tax base and, and basically just sucks that money to Seattle.

• 52:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And you wonder why the middle class and small business is struggling in the country. And Amazon is a one point, something trillion dollar company and it doesn't happen by accident. I mean, of course, like I've wrote in my book, Always Day One, there's definitely some business innovation, a lot of business innovation that happens there. But there's an uglier side to it as well. And I think it's important that you explored it, Alec.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 52:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. The book is Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One Click America. It's a great book. You should pick it up. I saw that you guys were advertising on Amazon, by the way. So even you are part of, Amazon has you guys in your, in its grip as well.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I ordered from them just as a test and my, but the, the book came a week late. It was very mysterious.

• 52:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm. Wonder what's going on there. Well, I enjoyed it. Thanks again for, for joining Alec. Great to talk to you about it. I wish you a lot of luck, you know, in this, in this environment. And yeah, I want to say thank you to Nate Guatney, who's going to edit this in a very quick turnaround. Thank you, Nate. Thanks to Red Circle for hosting and selling ads. And thanks to all of you for listening every week here, Wednesdays. If this is your first time here, please subscribe. We have new conversations with insiders, tech insiders and outside agitators. And if you're a long time listener, rating goes a long way. So I would appreciate if you could do that. And yeah, and thanks again to Alec. We will see you all next Wednesday. Have a good one. And until then, wishing you well.

• 53:43Speaker 03

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