For those on the Point, the war was giving new purpose to work that, for many, was already more rewarding than such arduous labor might seem. Here’s how Mike Howard described working in the open-hearth furnace to Mark Reutter: “I felt good. When you’re in your prime, physical work is a challenge, and if you’re working with other people, there is a certain pride in being on top of the job. The demands of the work bred a kind of man who was fiercely committed to this work.” Howard distinguished between “brutalizing work” and “challenging work”: “In the open hearth, you had to cope with problems that involved metallurgy, that involved blacksmithing, that involved judgment. These were not guys who were a bunch of punch-drunk wrestlers. They were bright. There were split-second decisions that had to be made. There were a lot of challenges that kept you on your toes.” — 110: 1847-1855
But the union gains went beyond that. With more worker input in plant management, the Point had gotten less catastrophically dangerous than it had been in the early days. And there was something less tangible, too. “What the men themselves wanted the union for,” one retiree told Reutter in the 1980s, “was to have everyone respect your seniority and your ability, and not have these here bosses’ pets and brown-nosers get the best jobs. We got more money, that was important, sure, but we got respect more, that was number one.” — 112: 1883-1888
Economists suspected “monopsony,” the effect of having just one buyer of a good, as opposed to just one seller, a monopoly. In this case, the good being labor: the bigger Amazon got and the more it dominated local labor markets, the less competition it faced for workers, and the less it needed to pay to hire them. As recently as 2012, the company had had only 88,000 employees worldwide. But over the rest of the decade, it would grow with astonishing speed, making it the second-largest private-sector employer in the country after Walmart, and making monopsony a real prospect. By late 2019, it had more than 750,000 employees worldwide and 400,000 employees in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them in the company’s more than two hundred fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and other delivery facilities. In 2017 alone, the company grew by 130,000 worldwide; in the summer of 2019, it hired 97,000, nearly the entire workforce of Google. And this was before the hiring spree that would arrive with the global pandemic of the spring of 2020. Warehousing and distribution used to be considered somewhat higher-skilled jobs: one could make over $20 per hour and stay years at a time. At Amazon, it was a more fleeting existence. Workers tended to be younger. Turnover was exceedingly high. And the seasonal workforce was often literally transient, in the form of the CamperForce — 133: 2244-2254
As Keith saw it, this violated the maxim he’d read in a book by Daniel Boorstin, the historian and former librarian of Congress: “Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.” — 337: 5343-5345