2024
Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour processis interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.
This paper examines the role of labor and community left populist organizing in the Tax Amazon campaign based in Seattle, WA, USA. As a case study within a larger project that examines manifestations of both right-wing and left-wing populism in urban spaces, the paper presents a lens through which urban populism may be examined in relation to new forms of labor organizing, with a specific focus on the dynamics of left populist resistance. The Tax Amazon campaign is situated within a longer trajectory of contemporary left populist organizing in Seattle. Emerging from a previous campaign that resulted in Seattle City Council instituting a $15 minimum wage, the Tax Amazon campaign brought together labor and community organizations to pressure Seattle City Council to introduce a corporate tax to generate funding for affordable housing initiatives. The campaign was met with resistance from the local business community, as well as some local trade unions. Being a leading corporate figure in this opposition, Amazon emerged as a key target of the left populist campaign. Through this study, we ask, what role did labor-community coalitions play in shaping the emergence of a broader left populist politics at the municipal scale in Seattle? Building from the experience of the Tax Amazon campaign, the paper reflects on the dynamics of resistance to corporate power through labor- and community-based left populist organizing. Reflecting a shift in U.S. politics at the municipal scale, Seattle offers a key case through which to assess whether and how urban populism may give rise to new forms of labor organizing. The paper also considers the ways in which the simultaneity of the Tax Amazon campaign and the Movement for Black Lives to ‘Defund the Police’ expanded the scope of political demands in the context of Seattle’s racialized urban precarity. In its conclusion, the paper draws from the analysis to reflect on both the broader prospects and limitations of left populist organising.
The narrative of structural transformation, based on the experience of global North, posits that the process of development involves gradual ‘modernisation’ of the overall structure of the economy, where the traditional/low-productivity sectors give way to and support the modern/high-productivity sectors. However, much of the global South has not been able to experience this process along the anticipated lines, as a significant proportion of their workforce is still engaged in the low-productivity agriculture and non-agriculture informal sectors for their livelihood. We highlight that the dominant narrative does not take into account the importance of specific historical conditions, particularly the role of colonialism, that facilitated the process of structural transformation in the global North. The altered structural conditions in the post-colonial era, both at global and domestic level, question the possibilities of a similar process unfolding in the global South. In this regard, we analyse India’s development experience, both at macro and micro level, focusing on two villages of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, surveyed in 1994 and later in 2018. We illustrate that the process of labour and employment transition across sectors is highly complex and heterogeneous. Rather than being driven solely by productivity growth, the nature and direction of these changes are characterised by economic distress. We argue that the prevailing narrative, which presents a linear understanding focused on productivity differentials across sectors, is inadequate to understand the nature of this transition in the South. Instead, the process needs to be understood in the particular socio-economic and ecological context specific to a given space and time.