In the past decade, a burgeoning literary genre—one the Amazon ouroboros itself might mercenarily market as #LaborLit—has emerged, focusing on the experiences of Amazon workers. Following in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), Studs Terkel’s Working (1974) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), these books detail the inner workings of the online marketplace’s human-last, profit-first practices.
Emily Guendelsberger’s On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How it Drives America Insane (2019) includes an account of the author’s experience working at a fulfillment center in Kentucky, where her item scanner also conveniently serves as a countdown timer, clocking to the second the time she “wastes” as an employee. Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland (2017) documents the CamperForce program in Texas, an Amazon initiative that reinterprets the completely unproblematic labor camp model to offer low-paying, seasonal jobs to mostly older Americans who live in RVs and vans. Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2018), published by Semiotext(e), tells the story (based on Geissler’s own experiences) of an Amazon “flex” employee working the holiday season at a fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany. In the book, it is noted that the labor conditions Amazon invents and enforces reveal that their inconveniently human employees are “nothing but a placeholder for machines that have already been invented but aren’t yet profitable enough to permanently replace you and your workmates.” This year, the publication of co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union Chris Smalls’ memoir, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class, has been viewed as a mixed blessing, with praise for Smalls’ big-picture thinking and criticism of what is seen as an ego-driven desire for fame.
Amazon is not just any employer. It is a tech company that has succeeded in disrupting retail businesses and destroying shopping malls, the very same ones that destroyed Main St., U.S.A., all the while managing near monopoly on cloud storage and cloud computing in the United States and beyond. Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) demonstrates that Amazon has also reshaped urban policy to its image, extracting financial concessions from budget battered city governments and urban planning departments with the promise of jobs. Its domination of retail and cloud computing has made it a modern day Leviathan, linking political power to Silicon Valley money through Amazon itself: Jay Carney, press secretary of the Obama administration, went on to become vice president of Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon and is now an executive at Airbnb. Jeff Bezos contributed to Trump’s inauguration fund. The sweat of Amazon workers pays for his wife’s (Lauren Sanchez Bezos) Mar-A-Lago face.
The piece that follows describes the life of one worker in a typical Amazon fulfillment center: a million square feet of storage space, populated by a work force that barely knows each other, supervised by managers whose New Age language adds spiritual injury to physical exploitation.
In his 1929 autobiography, founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Big Bill Haywood credits American labor union leader and socialist politician David C. Coates for suggesting a slogan for the IWW: “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This slogan continues to be used to this day by many labor organizers, and reflects a core ideal that ought to be at the heart of any workplace: no human life is replaceable or expendable, and no amount of profit can excuse or justify the pain and suffering of even one individual—especially one who must work to live. In the spirit of this slogan, CLiuAnon presents Life, Death and Quotas at PDX9, written by an anonymous worker at Amazon’s Troutdale, Oregon facility.
“Work” is a special section of CLiuAnon: we will publish appropriate submissions from members of the CLiuAnon community. The series styles itself after Studs Terkel’s Working. If necessary, we will work to guarantee anonymity, but we also encourage authors with unique and particular work experience to take the risk of writing autofiction of the working day.
To encourage those who should have readers, the Palm Springs School for Social Research has established the Emerging Writers Fund, a fellowship with a modest financial award that provides mentoring and editorial guidance from the CLiuAnon and PSSSR staff. Aimee Walleston, Tara Heffernan and I will work with emerging writers whose voices are not amplified or even “centered” by the present gatekeepers. We don’t think we can as yet change the financial and political structures of academic and mainstream publishing, but we can reach writers who are doing the work of recording and analyzing the political, cultural and economic turmoil of our times. This is one of the most important tasks of building a real institution for critical theory. We are taking applications until August 20.
By Anonymous Number
My name is ******, but my name isn’t important. Only my login is important. I’m a Tier 1 Amazon FC (Fulfillment Center) Associate. I work at PDX9, in Troutdale, Oregon. Tier 1 means that they pay me fairly well for the simple tasks I’m hired to do, and it seems as if I have job security for the foreseeable future, possibly until 55 or older (I’m 45 now).
Before each shift, I face a computer monitor upon which survey questions appear: “How is (so-and-so middle manager) at making work-related decisions?” or “When it is busy, does management place productivity before safety?” You know, horseshit like that.
Occasionally, I am asked, “Do you ever feel you are treated like just a number?” After rolling my eyes, I always answer appropriately. And the appropriate answer is always: “No.” I answer this way because I understand what Amazon is investigating when they ask this. They are not probing us to determine why or if we all feel dissatisfied with being relegated to “just a number.” They are, instead, attempting to quantify with some degree of accuracy the threat of an organized worker response to such feelings of alienation.
The insidious arm of Amazon Intel insists on probing and mining for hints of workplace discontent, and even further, for “suitable” data, which always makes it difficult to determine precisely what the aim of the data collection is for. “Suitable data” could be interpreted as verification of our satisfaction in the workplace. As an example, I was recently prompted by the monitor to answer this query, “Do you find your work meaningful?” From this, I suppose I’m expected to feel that Amazon is concerned with our mental and emotional well being, as well as our physical safety.
I wish I were certain of Amazon’s aims; but the problem is, I’m not clear on it at all, since management is not much help if you ask them anything directly. As far as management is concerned, it is through surveys that the company evaluates them. And admittedly, many of the questions are related to management’s performance. Much of the work of these technocrats seems to be to erect a safe, fluffy space for workers to find respite from the stress of life. It all fits nicely together: Amazon provides an environment that approximates a fictional high school experience, with fun activities such as calls to wear your favorite city’s baseball jersey, or dress as your favorite superhero character. There are funny hat days, leisure wear days (which is everyday for a lot of the younger people). There are enormous break rooms with Whole Foods products in every cooler, climate controlled temperatures, areas of rest and rejuvenation called “AmaZen Wellness Rooms,” secluded quiet areas for prayer, and strange pods marketed as “Mamavee” or something, which is a private space for lactating mothers needing to express that excess breastmilk. Above it all, over the main doors of the facility, is the imperative to “Work hard, have fun, make history!” Arbeit macht frei?
If you take the honest, brash approach and answer in the affirmative—”Yes, I feel like I’m just a number”—you’re then barraged with half a dozen insipid follow-up questions for the experts to analyze further, such as: “What would improve your workday?” or “How can Amazon help you be your best self at work?” That sort of drivel. It always feels like more of a move to protect the company from liability, which of course everyone suspiciously assumes it is. I don’t talk with many people at Amazon who I would characterize as confident in the company’s good intentions toward them.
And what’s most irritating of all is that the answers to the follow-up questions to these prompts are just a cascade of more prompts—not requests for detailed, personal stories or experiences. Meaning: you cannot exhibit any free thought that hasn’t already been deemed acceptable by the algorithm. Amazon would rather you take up grievances with your handheld device via the VOA (Voice of the Associate). The VOA is the app on our work website where you can voice a work related issue openly for the entire facility to read in real time. Management generally responds to associates twice a day, and there are monitors in the main lobby where you can read concerns rolling along.
To be honest, I could care less about the mindlessness and soullessness of my job. It’s a job at Amazon, for chrissakes. And, in my opinion, it’s not any more or less mindless and soulless than any position in the company, let alone in the rest of the capitalist economy—and in particular tech. Which is strange, since techie people are always portrayed in popular culture as so sharp and edgy, even brilliant. Tech is supposed to be a place where people are successful because they are “passionate” and smart. As it turns out, you only need to be slightly clever, and passionate about making a lot of money.
I do care about the people who work with me, and who share the same small indignities that I do. On the morning of April 6th, 2026, a 46-year-old man named James Wetmore probably answered all these inane questions before he collapsed and died at PDX9 hours later, at approximately 1:44pm.
I should mention here that PDX9 is enormous, and there are up to 2,000 people in the 1,000,000-square foot facility at any given time. The frenetic, staggering pace and scope of the place can often be dizzying, particularly for new hires. They shuffle uncertainly about gaping in shock at the 1⁄4-mile-long corridors they’re forced to endure; always in a sheepish stupor, always searching for the bathroom.
The reason Wetmore collapsed is unclear, but in falling he struck his head on any one of the many thousand concussion-inducing threats situated about every square foot within a million square feet. I heard he had remained on the floor, blood pooling about his head, for an hour or more. I was told that an employee began performing CPR, and when another employee offered to help and relieve the first employee, who was tiring, they were told by a manager standing nearby: “Just don’t look, EMT’s are coming, please go back to work.”
I learned this all on April 15th, Tax Day. Everything reported here was provided to me second-hand, from another coworker. He did not have a lot of information. At that point, he didn’t even know Wetmore’s name.
COWORKER X: “They kept the guy dead in the elevator for three hours. Managers were guarding the doors on all four floors.”
ANONYMOUS NUMBER: “What? Why’d they wanna do that?”
COWORKER X: “So no one could take pictures with their damn phones! It seemed like they were tryin’ to sneak the body out before anyone realized he was dead!”
ANONYMOUS NUMBER: “You don’t know who it was who died?”
COWORKER X: “Naw, I wasn’t down there. It happened on the west side, on the second floor.”
ANONYMOUS NUMBER: “Jesus Christ!”
Upon arriving home that evening, I looked up some information online about what happened to Wetmore at PDX9. There wasn’t much there—three articles. And what the three articles presented was sketchy at best. At that point, I mostly wanted to know the name of who had died—who was it? I was certain I knew the man who died. Then, I finally got a clue: the man who died (I still hadn’t found out his name) had been running totes when he collapsed.
Yup. Even though we had worked in different departments, I knew him. And it doesn’t matter if we rarely or ever spoke, because I knew him, and he knew me. I knew that man who fell and died on the concrete.
****
I have a marginally physical job at PDX9, but most of my time is actually spent in front of a computer monitor. I work in Inbound, meaning primarily Stow, which is where products for sale online are put into the system. I put the products into ten-foot-high pods, and after scanning each product, a description of the item appears on the monitor. This is to verify that what I’m physically stowing corresponds with what is being virtually stowed. With each product, a portion of the vendor’s rent is charged to said vendor. Tick tick tick goes the rentier’s insistent clock.
The rent is also determined by the weight and size of the product stowed into each bin. Think of the “bin” as a little apartment where the product lives until purchased online. Think of a “pod” as the building each apartment is contained within. These pods, full of bins, roll around on giant automated beetles that resemble Roomba robotic vacuums. Here’s the catch: Amazon could care less if the products in the pods are ever sold—the profit lies in the revenue generated by the rent charged to the vendors. I was informed of all this by an old fella who worked in Damages/Returns, which is a position that gives one access to technical processes in the facility. “Amazon doesn’t care if a product sits in the pod for 20 years, ‘cuz the rent just keeps going!”
I’ve argued with coworkers about this.. Many seem to believe Amazon is a retailer, like Walmart, but they’re not. They’re a tech company, and their main competition is not Target or Walmart, but Google, Apple, Facebook—those guys. Amazon encourages this ignorance amongst employees through misleading hiring banter and the cultivation of high worker turnover.
Amazon, like everything else in life now, is run by data. And until something like what happened to Wetmore occurs, it seems like we can just comfortably and without risk run things by relying solely on the best data garnered from a million metrics of scrambled and incomprehensible algorithms. This is problematic from a few vantage points. One of the troubling elements of this total capitulation to data-driven technologies and protocols is that they eventually crash. Obviously not simultaneously or entirely, but here’s a short example: Amazon Inc. recently experienced, in October 2025, a glitch in their cloud computing system that put much of the financial, military and technical sectors in the US into a daylong system-malfunctioning spiral. This cost, potentially and collectively, an estimated one billion dollars..
I’m personally familiar with our Troutdale facility being immobilized multiple times over the years due to technical issues. During these shutdowns, everyone sits around or scurries about, depending on age and temperament. My inscrutable, unflappable comrades, in a docile and resolute manner, scroll the web, text and yammer on phones, gab loudly and laugh and spit coffee all over the table as the custodian stands nearby scowling. We become stone-eyed prisoners because Operations has been ordered to pay us to sit in the break areas, rather than send us home.
We’re getting paid to smoke or chat and just sit around. This was not the intended outcome for these technologies obviously, nor the human labor the technologies ostensibly serve. Yet, this is the state to which they frequently malfunction, and no one can move, we’re trapped in limbo. It’s a long, boring day, but it’s wonderful because it’s labor free money, and, hey, we’re all screwing Bezos! But eventually as the hours of idleness drag on, it just feels like we’re too stupid to have the capability to work independently from the taskmaster of technology, and that, actually, this disempowerment of the worker has become the true aim. The worst thing to me is that no one cares in the least, and many even feel satisfaction about the situation. These shutdowns, or breakdowns, can also mean people die, and people shouldn’t die because a computer system has a malfunction, or a protocol must be adhered to at all costs.
****
Because we are all run by this system, I don’t blame anyone for Wetmore’s death. How could I? How could any of us? I don’t blame OSHA, who in a few hours after his death had already determined that “the death was unrelated to work or the conditions.” Good break for Amazon, huh?
Apparently, people had been complaining about the facility being too warm as of late. In the interests of the Associates’ sense of hearing, Operations were kind enough to erect some sort of sound barrier to block noise. Some people seem to think this sound barrier has caused a warming in the building, which inevitably led to Wetmore collapsing.
I don’t blame management, at least not for malicious callousness. Maybe for timid ineptitude and ignorance. And management did not help their image by being anonymously quoted in the press as saying, “Don’t look, just go back to work and let EMT’s and Safety handle it. Look the other way! I’m sorry, we have to let EMT’s and Safety handle it! please! Go back to work….” Some of those interviewed (in the articles I read) emphasized management’s callousness. Others mentioned being struck by the tears in the eyes of managers ordering them back to work. Amazon also sent everyone home with pay an hour early, and denied management ordered people back to work.
And let me be frank here: I truly believe that no one that I am in any contact with at PDX9, management or otherwise, would malevolently or flagrantly disregard a bleeding worker who was unconscious on the concrete floor. Not for money, not to follow orders, not to save their job, not for Amazon, not for the algorithm. The fact of the matter is most people want to act bravely and help.
And yet, it seems we all slide into this fearful reliance and rigid adherence to the policy and protocol of management experts. It makes animal sense: in a crisis, many do not want to be the one responsible for making the decision that could potentially lead to greater harm and crisis. This doesn’t strike me as inherently selfish or self-serving, though maybe fearful and unqualified, but that could be attributed to inexperience or improper crisis training.
I don’t blame OSHA, or management, or even Amazon for that brother’s death. I don’t wish to stridently accuse them of complicity in that death. Maybe because, in doing so, it would mean having to admit my own (as well as all of our) complicity. By which I mean: the participation of the working class in our own liquidation as a cohesive body is already abundantly clear. With the rise of identity and cultural politics in civil society, class consciousness and struggle have been horribly distorted if not brutally erased. This is quite clear in the attitudes of many, not all, but many of my coworkers—which is a very young workforce that includes many recent immigrants.
I would argue Amazon’s hiring practices have been engineered to hire young, vulnerable people, using them for a busy period, and dumping them. Mostly though, the working class has atrophied due to apathy. Working people, particularly those mentioned here, aren’t interested in “politics” at all. There is nothing for young people to plug into, no movement. The working class seems to have given all responsibility to the NLRB and Democrats. And I say, “Meh, you get what you get, then!” So, while I can’t blame Amazon, or any big company, for the contradictions and crises capitalism raises over and again, I also do not prescribe to following along with a corporate management mentality that is purely data-driven and specialist-endorsed. This is the mentality that, practically and pragmatically, helps keep in place the rule of capital accumulation over and above pressing human problems and diminishing wellbeing. I will only be strident now about the need, the real dire need, for workers to begin anew doing for ourselves in ways not reliant on the state and submitted to the rule of its technocrats and administrators.
Hopefully, the realization of the need for independent agency and autonomy is really only meaningful if we’re all working for this together, and not in isolation, or in the empty self-actualization and healing therapies of popular psychology. If we did for ourselves, together in shared struggle, strong in the knowledge we’re working side by side with another human being who loves like you, and suffers and strains and has joy and fun like you, would we have all known that dead man’s name? Would I have needed to go home that day wondering which of my brothers died on the job? Would I be wondering how, really, he died?
I knew Wetmore probably about as well as I know anyone who works at PDX9, meaning: he was a working comrade that suffered the same indignities and small humiliations all working people have to bear to a greater or lesser degree. And in that sense, he was my brother in deed and spirit, and this is my way of honoring him and that relationship.