Jessica Bruder wrote a cover story for WIRED about the Somali warehouse workers who are taking on Amazon.
It was 11 days before Christmas in 2018, and Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, was operating at full tilt. At the rear of the facility, waves of semi trucks backed up to a long row of loading docks, some disgorging crates of new merchandise and others filling up with outbound packages. Inside the warehouse, within dark, cyclone-fenced enclosures, thousands of shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet, ferrying towers of merchandise from one place to another. And throughout the cavernous interior, yellow bins brimming with customers’ orders zipped along more than 10 miles of conveyor belts, which clattered with a thunderous din.
Negotiating all the distances and tasks that fall between those pieces of machinery were the people. Like most of the 110-plus US facilities that Amazon calls fulfillment centers, the warehouse known as MSP1—named for its proximity to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport—employs more than a thousand workers, including hordes of temps brought in for the holidays. They power-walked (running was forbidden) across roughly 850,000 square feet of polished concrete, following green-taped paths on what amounted to a giant game of Pac-Man the size of 14 football fields.
