From famously humble origins, Amazon has grown to become one of the most successful businesses in history. In its effort to provide its trademark fast and convenient "Prime" delivery, the company built a vast worldwide network of fulfillment centers and warehouses. Unsustainable looks inside the company's warehouses to reveal that the rise of Amazon is only made possible by the exploitation of workers' labor and communities' resources. Juliann Emmons Allison and Ellen Reese expose the real-world repercussions of these pernicious strategies through a chilling case study of the socioeconomic and environmental harms associated with the largely unchecked growth of warehousing in Inland Southern California, one of the nation's largest logistics hubs, where Amazon is the largest private-sector employer. Tracing the rise of grassroots resistance to the warehouse industry by workers and communities across this region, the country, and the globe, Unsustainable provides fresh insight into one of the most important and far-reaching struggles of our time.
Juliann Emmons Allison is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Director of Global Studies, and Faculty Chair of Sustainability at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Energy Politics.
Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Labor Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present and They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back: Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment and coeditor of The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy.
"Juliann Emmons Allison and Ellen Reese advance analysis through an intersectional feminist lens, reminding us that every subject is a feminist subject. Their perspective has the potential to reshape labor and community studies by unlocking relations of power and inequality that are raced, gendered, and classed—and furthermore connected to citizenship and place. In linking work to sustainability, they bring together components entwined in life but often studied apart."—Eileen Boris, Hull Chair in Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Unsustainable's analysis of the politics of exploitation both within and beyond Amazon and the warehouse industry provides a useful (and vivid) framework for analyzing labor market outcomes and regional environmental inequities. This incisive exposé will be of interest to scholarly and general audiences alike."—Nik Theodore, Professor of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago
356 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 b/w photographs, 8 tables, 2 maps
9780520388376$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Aug 2023