Welcome back to Primer, the podcast about all things Amazon. I'm your host Alex

Press joined us ever by my producer Sarah Hurd. This week I spoke with

Alec McGillis, the author of fulfillment, a book about Amazon that came out

earlier this year. Before we get to that, here's some housekeeping. As you've heard

me mention on previous episodes, I keep all of the episodes of Primer free, but to

compensate me for my time, I have a Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash

Primer podcast. If you sign up, you can listen to the episodes there, but you

also get show notes, which are brief annotated bibliographies of some key

sources I used for the week's episode. You can also watch video on there of some

of our interviews, and maybe most importantly, you get my infinite gratitude.

To the 70 people who have subscribed, thank you. Again, you can find that at patreon.com

forward slash Primer podcast.

As a way into my conversation with Alec, I want to discuss a recent article from

Harper's Magazine about the Union vote in Bessamer Alabama. The piece is by Daniel

Brooke, and it's a really good portrait of how the anti-union campaign played out

at Amazon's Bessamer warehouse. As well as of the broader forces at play in the

21st century United States, that might lead an Amazon worker in Alabama to vote

against unionizing. I mentioned it because in the wake of the Bessamer campaign,

that was the question I heard the most. How could these workers vote against

unionizing? Isn't work at Amazon terrible? Which was a frustrating question?

Because the truth is, it's miraculous when any workers do unionizing this

country with all the obstacles that stand in their way, and that would have been

...