Afterword to the Paperback Edition
In May 2021, two months after this book’s publication, I held a discussion about it with the Rotary Club of Dayton, Ohio, during their monthly lunch meeting—on Zoom, alas. Several of the local boosters in attendance bridled slightly at my suggestion that the city once known for its manufacturing prowess was now increasingly defined as a logistics hub that packaged and transported things made elsewhere. It was a reaction for which I was prepared, and toward which I was not unsympathetic—it is no easy thing to receive harsh judgments from an outsider, even one who had spent as much time in the town as I had.
My gentle counter to such challenges would have been buttressed had I known then what I learned just a day later, when it was trumpeted in the local media: Amazon was building a new fulfillment center just outside Dayton, by the airport, where it would employ more than 1,500 people starting in 2022. This was in addition to the large fulfillment center down I-75 in Warren County—Project Big Daddy—and a smaller last-mile distribution center in Kettering, an inner suburb of Dayton.
I wished I had known about the warehouse at the airport before meeting with the Rotary, but the fact was, it was getting hard to keep up, so rapid was the company’s ongoing expansion more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic. In Baltimore, its second warehouse at Sparrows Point, the one specializing in oversized items, was already open when I visited just prior to the book’s release, and a few weeks later, I learned that the company was building a third warehouse on the Point, for a total of four in the Baltimore area. It was no surprise, then, that hiring ads became even more ubiquitous around town than they had been before: they were now on highway billboards, on the sides of buses, on the video clips that ran while you were pumping gas. Need a job? The answer was Amazon.
I’d come to the area around the Point to bring an advance copy of the book to Keith Taylor, the former steelworker who had committed himself to preserving Beth Steel history. He still lived close by, and as we sat on his patio overlooking the Back River inlet off of the Chesapeake Bay, he described another aspect of the Point’s transformation: how the workers leaving the warehouses at the end of their shifts were so eager to get out that the Point’s new overseers had been forced to add large speed bumps to the roads on the peninsula.
Keith couldn’t help but contrast this desperation to leave, each worker on their own, with the way so many Beth Steel workers had come and gone—entering with a camaraderie that at its best reminded him of a firefighting crew’s sense of purpose, and often leaving together, too, rolling from the Point into the bar or the diner, depending on the shift. I mentioned this contrast in a subsequent discussion of the book on a New York radio station and an Amazon worker called in to affirm the observation. “I’m not going to go have a beer with Joe, who works near me in the warehouse,” he said. “I don’t know even know who Joe is.”
I thought of that observation, too, as I watched the results flowing in from the union election at the fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, in April. The vote had drawn enormous interest around the country, and rightly so—it was the first-ever union election for an entire Amazon warehouse. Adding even more intrigue and resonance was the fact that it was being held in the Deep South, and in a suburb of Birmingham named for the engineer whose innovations had powered the earlier industry there; it was the southern cousin of the Point, a place that had gone from making steel to packing stuff. The Bessemer facility had opened only in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, but by fall enough workers had already wearied of the relentless demands of the warehouse, while the company raked in billions, to reach out to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, setting the organizing push in motion.
The stakes could hardly have been higher. Logistics employment was growing so rapidly in the one-click age that the warehouse was replacing the factory, the mill, and the shopping mall as the entry-level option for millions of American workers—this was where the fight for working-class conditions was now at. If the cycle of economic history had returned mass labor in the United States to where it had been a century earlier—with workers being driven to ever higher productivity demands by plutocratic overlords, for insufficient pay—then here was a major effort to push the wheel forward a few notches, to restore to workers the voice and middle-class wages that had been gained at Beth Steel at midcentury.
Amazon itself was well aware of the vote’s import and responded accordingly, pouring huge resources into the fight and combining the usual tactics, like mandatory employee meetings rife with anti-union messaging, with inventive new ones, like getting local officials to change the stoplight pattern to make it harder for organizers to talk with workers as they drove home. When the results were announced—with about 70 percent of votes in opposition to the union—commentators invoked all these tactics, and the employer-friendly labor laws that permitted them, which Democrats in Washington had for decades lacked the filibuster-proof Senate majority to reform.
That analysis was correct, and was reinforced a few months later by the findings of a National Labor Relations Board hearing officer that Amazon had improperly pressured workers and that a new election should be held. But I thought also of the observations of Keith Taylor and the Amazon worker in New York about the atomized nature of the warehouse work, and how difficult it would be to build solidarity in that environment. The Bessemer warehouse had been open barely a year and even in that time had experienced the extraordinarily high turnover that characterized so many Amazon warehouses—turnover that the company in fact encouraged, with exit bonuses and scarce opportunities for promotion, because it knew that workers were less likely to develop insurrectionary bonds if they just kept cycling through like nameless cogs. A member of the nationwide group Amazonians United—warehouse workers agitating for better conditions in advance of actual union recognition—told me that turnover is such a bar to solidarity that one of the group’s chief goals is simply to get workers to stay on the job. And it does this by encouraging them to get to know one another—by bringing in free enchiladas to make meal break a communal occasion or whatever else it might take—on the theory that people will be more likely to stay on longer if they form actual human connections.
It would be a long haul, organizing the warehouses, but then again, it had been so at the mills—half a century, to be exact, between the opening of the Point and the union’s arrival. In the summer of 2021, it was somewhat easier to envision nearer-term success on another front, the push to rein in or even break up Amazon and the other tech giants via legislation or antitrust enforcement actions in Washington, state capitals, and Europe. President Biden’s new administration was showing true resolve in confronting the threat presented by corporate concentration, most notably through Biden’s nomination to the Federal Trade Commission of Lina Khan, the thirty-two-year-old who had, as a law student just five years earlier, authored the seminal article articulating why Amazon was, in fact, a harmful monopoly. Immediately upon her confirmation for the post—with a sizable minority of Republican senators voting in favor—Biden named her as the commission’s chair; a week later, it emerged that the commission was scrutinizing Amazon’s bid to acquire the MGM film studio. Two weeks after that, Biden issued a wide-ranging executive order meant to promote market competition. “What we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back,” he said as he announced the order. “Rather than competing for consumers, [companies] are consuming their competitors. Rather than competing for workers, they’re finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor.” At last, the connection was being drawn between industry concentration and the plight of small businesses like Pencil Cup and El Paso Office Products, who were being told they had little choice but to sell through Amazon, and workers such as Bill Bodani, Jr., and Hector Torrez, who were left feeling as if they had little choice but to work there, for less than their worth. As for all those warehouse workers—now nearing one million in the United States alone—if there was any further need for evidence of just how grueling their work had become during the pandemic year, the latest data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration showed that the rate for serious workplace injuries at Amazon warehouses in 2020 was nearly double the rate at non-Amazon warehouses.
The case for attacking corporate concentration was also aided by new revelations by my news organization, ProPublica, of just how little the men sitting astride the giants had been paying in personal income taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, had paid no federal income taxes whatsoever in 2007 and 2011. Such revelations sat uncomfortably beside another recent disclosure—that he had ordered a 417-foot superyacht that came with a smaller yacht to be used as a landing vessel for the helicopter on which his girlfriend, a helicopter pilot, would often be arriving. The total price tag: $500 million.
But Bezos himself would not need to handle the nettlesome questions that would be coming from Congress and others over such revelations and the company’s ever-greater dominance across whole swaths of the economy. In late May, he announced that he was handing off the role of CEO to his longtime lieutenant Andy Jassy, who had for years been running the company’s highly lucrative cloud operations.
Bezos would retain the title of chairman and would maintain a large role in company operations. But he would not be the one responding to congressional subpoenas, and would be free to pursue other endeavors, notably his space exploration company, Blue Origin. On July 20, four days after the newspaper he owns noted that of the $13.5 trillion in U.S household wealth added in 2020, one third had accrued to the top 1 percent of Americans, Jeff Bezos strapped himself into a rocket and blasted to the edge of outer space.
Upon landing, he declared it his “best day ever.” But his post-flight commentary that drew the most notice was this candid accounting of the flight: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this.”
1.
Community
The hyper-prosperous city
SEATTLE
California did not let veterans leaving the service qualify for in-state university tuition, and Washington state did. It was as simple as that. So Milo Duke, discharged from the U.S. Navy in the Bay Area in 1971 after spending a couple years under an alfalfa field eavesdropping with the Naval Security Group, made his way to Seattle, to pursue a degree in oceanography at the University of Washington. His pursuit lasted all of one quarter, until he ran into differential equations. He had flailed before them once already, while getting his bachelor’s in history at the University of Nebraska. Milo thought he could handle them on a second try, but he was mistaken.
He made his way into a different line of work. Motivated by his own unpleasant experiences with the military bureaucracy, he started volunteering to help veterans who’d exited the service on poor terms achieve “discharge upgrades,” and soon enough was working for an organization dedicated to this task as a de facto paralegal, funded by a federal program. He and his wife, whom he had met at college in Nebraska, rented a two-bedroom apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood for $150, then found a larger one nearby for $120. He decided he would be more effective at his work if he had a law degree, and in 1975 enrolled at the University of Washington law school. Alas, two years later, President Carter issued his amnesty for draft dodgers, which had the side effect of drying up funding for organizations like the one Milo Duke worked for. The group disbanded, but Duke finished law school anyway, in 1978, and, after a short stint with the public defender’s office, got a job with a big criminal defense firm downtown.
By this point, he and his wife had two kids, and he had started making art. During law school, he and his wife had moved into a hippie commune in Madrona, along Lake Washington just east of the historically African American Central District. They lived in a home that one of the commune members had bought for $5,000. Milo and his wife bought their own house there in 1978, for $50,000. But Milo was growing rapidly disillusioned with his job at the firm, and more drawn to his art. When he would mention this inclination, the wife of one of the firm’s partners would joke that if he was serious he should go sell his work at Pike Place Market like the guy who made the linoleum woodcut prints of flowers that the firm’s attorneys all seemed to have in their bathrooms at home.
In 1980, Duke’s firm took on some of the twenty-six defendants in a racketeering case against the Carbone family. It was a huge case, the first time, he was told, that the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute had been used in the Ninth Circuit. One day, Milo Duke joined dozens of other lawyers working on the case in a large conference room. It occurred to him that in a few months he’d gone from being a public defender for the indigent to representing mafiosi. He thought, What the fuck am I doing here? He quit the next day and joined the artists at Pike Place Market. His marriage dissolved six months later. He took $200 for himself, left the rest of his money and the house to his wife, and ensconced himself in his new community at the market.
As a newcomer, he had been assigned one of the least desirable spots: the “slabs” at the northern end of the market, essentially a segment of sidewalk for which you paid $3 on weekdays and $5 on weekends, and where you were exposed to the weather, which in Seattle often meant rain. But on his very first day there, Milo Duke fell in with the adjacent artists, who sensed in each other a common mission—“we shared the same notion that we were going to take the art to the people,” he said later. Before long, they conspired to rig up a communal shelter over their half dozen slabs. This had the double benefit of keeping them dry and making their spot look like a sort of gallery, and thus making it more likely that the crowds of passersby might actually stop and look at their work. They even gave themselves a Kerouacian name: the Dharmic Engineers, from the Sanskrit dharma, meaning “that which holds up or supports.” This was the purpose of their collaboration in the most practical terms: to hold each other up.
Looking back later, Milo Duke thought of the city in the years leading up to this moment as the first of three Seattles he would live in. This Seattle was a relatively small city—its population had dropped under 500,000, not much more than St. Louis’s and Kansas City’s. The city’s economy was still dominated by Boeing and the shipyards and the port. It had evolved only so far since 1851, when it had started as a natural resource outpost. Dropped off by a coastal schooner, the original inhabitants built cabins and intended to develop farmland but eventually realized there was better business in harvesting logs for the docks in San Francisco. Soon enough, an entrepreneurial Ohioan named Henry Yesler arrived to build a sawmill on Puget Sound.
The boom came with the railroad. The Northern Pacific reached Tacoma in 1883, and the Great Northern Railway reached Seattle a decade later. Seattle’s population grew more than tenfold during the 1880s, surpassing 40,000. The Yukon Gold Rush of the late 1890s further fueled the young city’s fortunes—prospectors needed a supply post. In 1916, William Boeing co-built his first seaplane at Lake Union. Over the decades that followed, the city grew more or less on the course set by Yesler and Boeing. If Seattle of the 1970s was not exactly a factory town, it was hardly wealthier than cities that were factory towns: per capita income in the Seattle metro area in 1978 was barely higher than that in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee. “It still bore the marks of a raw settlement in a new territory,” said the British writer Jonathan Raban, describing his first impression of the city in that era.
Early in the ’70s, Boeing had in fact laid off tens of thousands, prompting the mounting of an iconic billboard: WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE—TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. The Economist reported that the city had “become a vast pawnshop, with families selling anything they can do without to get money to buy food and pay the rent.” The writer Charles D’Ambrosio, who grew up in Seattle in the ’70s, evoked the city’s lack of dynamism in that era, which was not without its melancholic charms. “There was Elliott Bay Book Company, which offered both a bookstore and a brick-walled garret in the basement. You could loiter without having to skulk. You could bring your empty cup to the register and ask for refills. And you could read,” he wrote later. “The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything—one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc.—and then an extravagant unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing.”
Elliott Bay Book Company was where the Dharmic Engineers would meet weekly to lounge and talk art. And then Milo Duke would return by ferry to Vashon Island in Puget Sound, where he lived on a bus. He had spent his first night after leaving home under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, but had soon found his way to the island, where a friend owned a farmhouse and welcomed others onto her land. Milo suggested another friend use the island to park an old school bus that was constantly being ticketed on the street. Milo lived for a while in the bus, one of the short ones, but after a year bought an old Continental Trailways coach and upgraded into that. “The cost of living was pretty reasonable,” he joked later. “I was a pioneer of the tiny house movement.”
* * *
For Patrinell Staten, Seattle began with a Continental Trailways bus, rather than led to it.
Her trip from Carthage, Texas, lasted three and a half days and she held it the whole way. She had to sit in the back of the bus, by the nasty bathroom, but she was not allowed to use said bathroom, nor was she allowed to use the bathrooms at the depots the bus stopped in as it made the endless traverse of Texas. For her, it had to be the outhouses down dark paths, and she, recently turned twenty, wasn’t going to walk those paths alone. So she held it, and limited fluids to make it easier to hold it even after the bus finally emerged from Jim Crow Texas into the Ambiguous West. By the time she arrived in Seattle, her system was a mess. “You look sick,” said her sister. She took her to a doctor, who was alarmed at how dehydrated Patrinell had become. “I don’t know how you did this for four days,” he said.
This was in 1964. In Carthage, Patrinell’s father was a pastor and her mother was a schoolteacher, and they owned thirty-five acres outside town. But even for the African American select, East Texas offered little relief from the thick climate of prejudice. One sister, Anna Laura, had stayed in Seattle after her husband was stationed there in the military, and another, Ora Lee, had joined her. After a couple years at Prairie View A&M, a Black college near Houston, Pat decided to follow—she went up to care for Ora Lee’s kids after Ora Lee divorced their father.
Their journey was typical of the Great Migration, which took a few decades to reach the farthest north and west big city of all—by the late 1930s, there were still fewer than 4,000 African Americans in Seattle. This small scale had allowed for a certain exceptionalism: from the start, Black men could vote without restrictions in Seattle, and after 1883, so could Black women—a tolerance that was not afforded to the Chinese or Native American minorities, who were already facing virulent discrimination in the city. “The small numbers of blacks in the city,” notes the historian Quintard Taylor, “allowed white Seattle to indulge in a racial toleration toward African Americans which, when compared with the segregationist policies sweeping the nation, led both blacks and whites to conclude that their city was fundamentally liberal and egalitarian.”
By 1950, the city’s Black population had jumped to more than 15,000, surpassing its large Asian communities. The increase had come, at last, with the Second World War and the surge of production at Boeing and the shipyards. And the population kept growing in the three decades that followed—there were jobs and there was, in the midst of the civil rights struggle spreading across the South, the appeal of a city removed from it.
Though not as removed as Pat Staten expected. On arriving in town, she had moved in with Ora Lee in Renton, a working-class suburb southeast of the city. She noticed on visits into downtown Seattle how few Black people were visible. She approached one of the few that she did see, a janitor.
“Where are you?” she asked.
He knew what she meant by “you.” “Oh, there’s a place called the Central District,” he said. “The Central Area.”
Early on, the few Black people who lived in Seattle had gravitated to two places. There was waterfront Yesler-Jackson, with its bars and bordellos; it became home to the more transient, the porters and shipboard crews—two of the primary occupations available to African American men amid widespread discrimination in the shipbuilding and longshoremen’s unions. And there was the wooded area out East Madison Street, where William Grose, the second African American to arrive in the city, had bought a twelve-acre farm, and where many of the more settled Black families had followed.
Over time, these two areas had fused into a reverse L. This was the Central District. And that fusing was not altogether natural. Racial covenants barring sales to Black people proliferated in other neighborhoods, and those seeking to rent apartments found that buildings tended to be full whenever they applied. So it would have to be the CD. By 1960, after a decade in which the city’s Black population had surged by more than 70 percent, three-quarters of its 26,901 Black residents lived in just four census tracts in the Central District.
Pat Staten would come into the city for church, at True Vine Missionary Baptist, and it was there that her good looks—her broad, dimpled smile had a knowing allure—caught the eye of Benny Wright. His family had come north earlier, from Arkansas. Pat and Benny dated for six months before he asked her to marry him. They rented an apartment on East Denny Way, on the northern edge of the Central District, then started looking for a house to buy. The real estate agent showed them houses only in the CD, which confounded Pat. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said later. “I was living in a northern ‘southern’ place, that the only place I could buy a house was right here.” They ended up on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, in a tidy three-bedroom brick house they purchased for $17,000.
Benny Wright became a history teacher, eventually at majority-Black Garfield High School in the Central District. Pat got a job at a bank, working the night shift as a proof operator, processing checks. This led to a job as a teller at Liberty Bank, the first Black-owned bank west of the Mississippi, after it opened in 1968 in the heart of the Central District. By then, she knew everyone in the neighborhood, or so it seemed, and she loved how people would stand in the longer line just to get to see her.
Though there were other moments, too. There were the men who would come in and say something to the effect of, “Oh, we got a nigger working in here!”
To which Pat Wright would answer, her eyes wide, “What the … anybody seen a nigger? Are some niggers around here? What do they look like?”
Like Milo Duke, Pat Wright began drifting toward her art, which in her case was a voice so resonant that she had sung in her father’s church from a very young age, led the teen choir, and later joined a high school trio called the Jivettes. Seattle, it turned out, was a mecca for Black music. The jazz clubs had sprouted in the ’30s, up and down Jackson Street and in adjacent blocks of the red-light district: the Black and Tan, Basin Street, the Black Elks, Ubangi. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington might stop by after playing at an establishment venue uptown; they might stay at the Black-owned Golden West, if the uptown hotels wouldn’t take them. The after-hours clubs—Rocking Chair, Doc Hamilton’s, Congo Club—drew white people, too: Washington banned serving hard liquor by the glass until 1949, but there was a “tolerance policy” toward Black clubs, greased with police kickbacks, allowing them to sell “setups”—glasses, ice, and mixers to accompany the liquor patrons brought in. The clubs grew even more happening in the ’40s with the wartime influx into the factories and shipyards and military bases.
That influx included the family of Ernestine Anderson, who arrived from Texas in 1944, at age sixteen, and was soon performing on Jackson Street; and the family of Quincy Jones, who arrived in 1943, when he was ten and his father took a job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard; and Al Hendrix, who arrived in 1940 and bore with his new wife, Lucille Jeter, a son they named Johnny Allen Hendrix but several years later renamed James Marshall Hendrix.
In 1970, Pat Wright sang at Jimi’s funeral. She had started her own gospel group, Patrinell Wright’s Inspirational Seven. She had put out a single with Sepia Records—“I Let a Good Man Go”/“Little Love Affair.” And she’d started singing in clubs—not only in Seattle, but down in Portland, Oregon, where the pay was higher.
Benny did not care for Pat’s playing out-of-town clubs. Years later, she would insist she hadn’t cared for it either. “I don’t like not being able to see your face,” she said. In 1970, she got word of a need at Franklin High, just south of the Central District. The Black student population had grown considerably and the music director invited Pat to start a gospel choir. The demand from students was overwhelming, and it didn’t take long for the outsized success of the choir to grate. The same music director who had invited in Wright said the choir was blurring church-state lines. So in 1973, Wright took it out of the school and into church, to Mount Zion Baptist on Nineteenth Avenue, and dozens of students followed, often joined by younger siblings—whoever was willing to live up to Pat Wright’s exacting standards. It would become a community fixture: the Total Experience Gospel Choir.
Copyright © 2022 by Stefan Alexander MacGillis