Unsustainable

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.