Amazon’s Unfulfillment Centers

A Financial Timesarticle spotlights Amazon’s shipping warehouse in the former coal-mining town of Rugeley, England. John Brownlee follows up:

The issue at Rugeley is not that workers are ungrateful for the jobs Amazon has given them, or even that they find these jobs unpleasant. Most of Rugeley’s workers come from mining families, a stock not exactly known for its weak-livered dandyism. It doesn’t matter that these jobs are hard. It’s that they have no future. … The jobs in the Rugeley fulfillment center are almost always temporary positions handed out by agencies on zero-hour contracts. Nothing is guaranteed, and a fulfillment associate’s job can completely disappear between one day and the next. As such, the local economy is not recovering as locals hoped. Amazon is not investing in the town’s people; instead, it’s mechanizing them.

Brownlee talks to Ben Roberts, whose photo series Amazon Unpacked documents Rugeley’s “vast” and…