Unpacking Global Amazon

Positioning Amazon as a key actor reshaping business and labor paradigms in the digitized global economy, this book examines its relationship with labor markets and institutions worldwide. Tracing the company’s expansion over three-plus decades and controversies particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic based on fresh field work, expert contributors demonstrate how Amazon shapes, and is re-shaped by, its various locations through regulation, conflict and competition.

Leading scholars examine the complex interplay of Amazon’s encounters with markets, institutions and actors in national and subnational settings. They analyze the consequences of fast-paced, low-skilled labour mandates against the backdrop of fierce resistance from union and civil society campaigners and local competitors. Chapters contribute to key debates, evaluating Amazon’s history of anti-union behaviour and increasingly algorithmically driven management. Drawing on empirical research, the book assesses union and community efforts and regulatory initiatives that seek to contest and contain the social impacts of a warehousing and delivery system built on speed, worker exploitation and refashioning economic geographies around immediate one-click consumerism.

An essential resource for understanding the global infrastructure of increasingly digitized multinational tech corporations, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of business management, economics, political economy, human rights and labour policy. E-Commerce and NGO professionals as well as policymakers will similarly benefit from its timely and practical discussion of advocacy approaches and policy controversies.