‘As a Black worker at Amazon you don’t get the opportunity as your white counterparts … My leadership didn’t fit their culture … their culture was to follow the rules and do what you’re told… the majority of the rules didn’t benefit the Black community … these corporations don’t stand with us’ – Chris Smalls, a former Amazon New York (JFK8) warehouse worker who was fired for his labor activism during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York The problems associated with Amazon’s increasing dominance over workers, consumers, economies and communities are linked to the broader global capitalist system, which is embedded and interacts with other social and political relations of domination – including systemic racism – that operate at multiple scales, from the local to the global. It has also propelled many novel features that currently animate the world’s economy that we discuss below. This new iteration of capitalism takes form in the concentration of corporate power seen in the sheer scale and magnitude of Amazon’s influence over the world’s economy. The meteoric rise of the corporation represents a significant shift in the global political economy, that we identify in our book The Cost of Free Shipping as ‘Amazon capitalism’. For the blue-collar workers in warehousing and delivery, the pandemic exacerbated Amazon’s ‘extreme high churn model’ – the continual replacement of workers in order to sustain dangerous and gruelling work-pace demands. While millions of workers were laid off across the world, Amazon hired nearly 400 thousand more workers since 2019, increasing its (directly employed) workforce to over 1 million workers. As the global death toll from the pandemic neared one million deaths, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, became the first person in world history to amass a personal net worth of over $200 billion, and the corporation doubled its net profit year over year to $5.2 billion. By mid-2020, its market cap increased to $1.58 trillion (surpassing Microsoft) as demand for its services surged during the pandemic. Amazon is now the world’s most powerful corporation. The Covid-19 pandemic produced the latest iteration of capitalist crisis and the reshuffling of corporate power which will have enormous consequences for the future of work and the global economy.

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