Notations From the Grid (Special Friday Edition): Out & About This Week

 We present some #RandomThoughts as we look forward to the opportunity to serve:

Amazon is creating company towns across the United States. Some communities are vacuumed up almost completely by Amazon. Here’s how it plays out in many communities near on of their warehouses: Amazon’s application process is, often, perfunctory. You apply, you get a job. Doing away with interviews or much conversation at all between potential employer and potential employee enables the company to beef up during “peak,” which consists of the holiday season as well as the time around Prime Day, the company’s holiday that exists to break up the summer lull. During these periods, Amazon’s already immense workforce cannot keep up with surging demand, so the company brings in armies of “seasonal associates,” temporary workers who enlist for quick cash — $15 an hour, Amazon’s starting wage, is below the average for the warehousing industry, but it’s still a hell of a lot more than our $7.25 federal minimum wage. Almost all of these temps are let go when the surge in sales recedes. This process has only intensified over the past year as Amazon, buoyed by increased sales during the pandemic, has gone on a hiring spree almost unprecedented in history, adding nearly five hundred thousand people to its payroll in a matter of months. The result is that whole communities are absorbed into the warehouse... Read more

Here's the latest... NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes in Jacobin about the meaning of the Milwaukee Bucks’ victory this year, and his own Bucks championship in 1971. Charter schools don’t improve education outcomes. But they do funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of unscrupulous — often criminal — school operators. It’s a national disgrace that needs to end. At the end of the day, Simone Biles is a worker. And she was right to put her mental health first, just as any worker should be able to stay home sick instead of pouring their life force into serving someone else.