Features

In Nomadland (2020), a drifter named Fern (played by Frances McDormand) works stints at Amazon warehouses while roaming the country by van. Searchlight Pictures
News

Fear and Loathing in the Fulfillment Center

The misery of the work in Amazon’s warehouses speaks to the hollowing out of the American dream.


In the twentieth century, the factory stood at the center of American life. Entire towns sprouted around them. Thanks to union-won wages, factory workers and their families could attain middle-class security. When I was writing a book about autoworkers, I kept hearing nostalgic stories of the way things used to be: however down on your luck you were, there was always a job waiting for you at the factory.

Creative Commons logoAfter decades of companies offshoring manufacturing employment, the factory is no longer the institution it once was. The Amazon fulfillment center has taken its place. They’re everywhere where the online retailer ships its goods—which is everywhere in the world. A third of the country’s warehouse workers—700,000 people—work at Amazon facilities preparing the company’s goods for delivery. After her plant closes, Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland does seasonal stints at Amazon warehouses while she roams the country by van. It’s become a cliché that Amazon is where you go if you want a job that pays more than the minimum, but that any able-bodied person can do.

That’s why it’s so troubling to read the research about how bad Amazon jobs have become. Take the findings of an academic survey released late last year, which drew from a nationally representative sample of Amazon warehouse workers. What comes across clearly is the true cost of getting your packages lightning fast. University of Illinois researchers found that four out of ten warehouse workers have been injured on the job. Half said they feel burnt out. And rather than lightening the load of its warehouse workforce, Amazon’s innovative use of technology appears to be at the root of these problems. Majorities of those reporting injuries or burnout said they felt a sense of pressure to work faster. Two-thirds said they had to take unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion in the past month—which the study’s researchers link to the company’s algorithm-intensified pace on the floor.

Continue reading Fear and Loathing in the Fulfillment Center →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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The Kingdom Centre building in Riyadh. Buen Viajero, via Flickr
Commentary

An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above

Experiencing firsthand the dramatic reforms that Saudi Arabia has made in the two decades since I lived there gives me hope for another Muslim nation held in thrall by fundamentalists.


In Riyadh for a business trip, I found myself with a couple of hours to kill. I decided to wander around Al Olaya, the Saudi capital’s commercial core and upscale shopping district. In a gleaming shopping mall surrounding my hotel, I saw familiar brand logos on either side, a glitzy array of high-end storefronts much like those you’d find in any major Western city—except for the stylized Arabic lettering. Eventually, I came across the garish window display of a Victoria’s Secret. There I stopped, amazed.

Creative Commons logoI had actually lived in Riyadh two decades earlier, having come to Saudi Arabia to work as a physician. At the time, there were no Victoria’s Secret stores to be found. The company’s website was even blocked by the religious authorities. Women could buy lingerie, but they had to do so in a general store—and all the shops back then were staffed exclusively by male attendants (women were not allowed to work in most public spaces). All these prohibitions had made shopping for intimate apparel a singularly humiliating experience.

So much had changed in Saudi Arabia, and it wasn’t just about the overt femininity of a lingerie store. I walked into another familiar Western store, a Louis Vuitton boutique. The fall collection was being displayed—luxury scarves, elegant handbags—much the same as it would be in New York City. The mannequins wore shorts and dresses with bare plastic legs. But what captured my attention were their heads—molded plastic, with detailed facial features. Two decades ago, that depiction of the female form was forbidden. The mannequins back then would have been headless.

I must have looked ever so slightly lunatic in that store, gawking at the mannequins. Soon enough, a store clerk approached me, and we began talking about my impressions of the new Saudi Arabia. A group of attendants—all of them, notably, women—began to gather, curious about my excited chatter. I explained to them that when I lived in Riyadh, the mall had a designated floor just for women, the only place in this mall where we were allowed to shop. Even having that women-only space had been an advance at the time; other malls would only let women shop during restricted hours when men would not be present.

As I told the women about their country’s recent past, I felt like a time traveler speaking of unimaginable sights. All the store clerks were young—not surprising in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty. While some of them wore headscarves, others did not. They seemed to find my enthusiasm infectious, and they asked many questions. We ended our impromptu chat with the conclusion that, yes, this was Islam: the freedom for a woman to choose how to observe, to choose how to be.

Since I’ve returned from my trip, I’ve thought often about how much Saudi Arabia has changed—and whether another Muslim country, Iran, might take a similar path. For several months beginning in September, Iran was paralyzed by massive protests unlike any the country had seen since the 1979 revolution. The spark of this explosive rage was the suspicious death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who had been detained by police for “improperly” wearing her hijab.

Continue reading An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above →

Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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A top-rated show in South Korea, the romantic drama Crash Landing on You drew millions of international viewers and won accolades from Western publications like Time, Variety, Elle, and the Guardian. Netflix
Oak Park, Illinois
Creative Commons / Reviews

Crash Landing on the U.S.

From thrillers like Squid Game to romantic comedies like Crash Landing on You, K-dramas have attracted large and loyal followings outside Korea. While problematic content occasionally crops up, I’ve found a welcome escape—and a welcoming fan community—through their relatable stories.


To put it bluntly, the past few years have been exhausting. That’s been all the more true for the African American community, which has suffered not only a disproportionate number of Covid deaths, but also high-profile killings at the hands of police and White nationalists. Since the pandemic began in 2020, I’ve found myself particularly isolated because of an autoimmune illness, which has made leaving home especially risky and taken away my ability to travel internationally—an outlet I’d relied upon in the past whenever anti-Black racism had gotten to me.

Creative Commons logo

When the lockdowns were at their worst, and Black death seemed everywhere, Hollywood didn’t offer much of a respite—shows and films like Lovecraft Country, Underground, and Antebellum still hit too close to home. Browsing on Netflix one night, I came across Chocolate, a Korean drama about a chef who falls in love with a neurosurgeon. As a child, the doctor dreamed of becoming a professional chef himself, and the two bond over their passion for cooking. At a time when Covid was raging unchecked across the country, this foreign-language tearjerker set in a hospice ward connected deeply with me, helping me to mourn the thousands dying every day. I was hooked. After that first taste, I dove deeply into the catalog of South Korean dramas now available on online streaming platforms. Since then, I’ve become a devoted fan.

In recent years, “K-dramas” have steadily gained a foothold among American audiences, riding a larger “Korean wave” of wildly popular K-pop musical groups like BTS and Blackpink and celebrated Korean filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho (director of the Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite). You can see this trend as yet another sign of globalization: the growing interconnectedness of the world’s markets and cultures. As singularly dominant as Hollywood has been over the past century, creators in other countries are increasingly able and eager to get their homegrown work shown widely in global media markets. The flow of blockbuster pop culture is no longer so one-way.

As someone tired of hearing the same stories from American shows and movies, I’ve found it refreshing to see Korean (and Nigerian and Brazilian) perspectives on TV. At the same time, the surging popularity of K-dramas has brought with it a host of concerns about representation and historical accuracy, as recent controversies underscore.

Continue reading Crash Landing on the U.S. →

Chinyere Osuji is the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, uses social science to understand how Blacks interact with ethnic and racial “others,” and has watched Something in the Rain five times. Site | Instagram | Twitter | Clubhouse

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The lone surviving "dragon pine" on the shore of Cape Iwai in Kesennuma.
Rikuzentakata, Japan
Commentary / Creative Commons

Deep Scars

Cycling around Japan’s post-tsunami peninsulas, eleven years after March 11, 2011.


I had my first glimpse of the tsunami’s destruction three years ago, when I rode my bike along the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island. Below a snaking seawall was a wide swath of barren fields and muddy marshes. The raw landscape was punctuated by the gutted remains of a five-story residential building. On its side was a red line that marked the highest level reached by the tsunami’s floodwaters: 14.5 meters (48 feet).

Japan’s 2011 tsunami killed some 20,000 people and left thousands more to dig their way out of the mud. Triggered by one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in modern times, the overpowering tidal wave devastated the country’s northeastern region of Tōhoku across three prefectures. It also caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Most of the deaths and damage occurred along the Sanriku Coast just to the north. When I first visited Rikuzentakata, one of Sanriku’s hardest-hit cities, I was shocked by how visible the scars still were.

At the end of last year, I returned to Rikuzentakata for the Tour de Sanriku, a bicycle ride along the Hirota peninsula that the city has put on since the summer of 2011. Japan has plenty of cycle routes that are more scenic and in much more accessible locations, but like so many others, I wanted to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 tsunami—commonly referred to as “3.11”—and see how the recovery was going.

Continue reading Deep Scars →

Cherise Fong is a bicycle traveler, writer, and journalist currently based in Japan.

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Masked young people in the neighborhood around Columbia University in New York. Susan Jane Golding, via Flickr
Richmond, Virginia
News

Inequalities on the Digital Campus

Class and race have shaped the realities of online learning in deep, sometimes unexpected ways.


When the pandemic struck in 2020 and classes went virtual, students scrambled to adjust. A twenty-two-year-old Filipina American psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) from a working-class background told us about the difficulties she faced attending her classes and getting her homework done. Her apartment’s unstable internet connection often booted her out of class, and she was stymied by the fact that she didn’t even have a desk at home. Because desks were sold out at many stores at the start of the pandemic, she built a wobbly makeshift one out of shelves she bought at a hardware store.

A year later, the challenges continued because of the condition of the small apartment she shared with a roommate. Her bedroom ceiling leaked whenever it rained. Her bed was ruined after a storm, and her landlord had yet to fix the problem (the bucket she used to catch the ceiling drips was visible during our Zoom interview). Along with the “paper-thin” walls of her apartment, these various at-home distractions made it hard to concentrate on academics, she said.

What impact did the shift to virtual learning have on the millions of college and graduate students forced to study—either partly or wholly—at home? Through research conducted at VCU in Richmond, we found that class and race shaped the realities of online learning in 2020 and 2021 in deep, sometimes unexpected ways that largely revolved around the family resources available to students.

Continue reading Inequalities on the Digital Campus →

Alice Quach is a sociologist based in Virginia Beach with degrees from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University.

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A local Afghan man in the Bala Murghab district in northwestern Afghanistan talks through an interpreter (right) to U.S. Army personnel as children gather on the hill. Kevin Wallace, via Flickr
Tarin Kot, Afghanistan
Interviews

‘Life Will Be Bitter for Us’: An Interview with an Afghan Interpreter

The U.S. evacuation left behind many Afghan interpreters who helped coalition forces over the course of the two-decade war, placing them in danger once again.


Over the past several weeks, the United States evacuated more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan, officially ending its two decades-long military presence there on Aug. 31. Only about half of those airlifted out of the country were Afghans. That means that a “majority” of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. military and applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) were left behind, according to a senior U.S. State Department official quoted by NBC News.

Many of these Afghans served as interpreters for U.S. forces. When I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, I taught an advanced English class for interpreters. I recorded the interview below with one of them, who has since become a friend. This Afghan man (who prefers not to use his real name, given the danger to his family) worked for the American, Dutch, and Australian militaries during their presence in the country. (The Dutch forces left Afghanistan in 2011, and the last of the Australian troops in 2013.) Fortunately, my friend was able to relocate to Australia after the Taliban seized control. But many of his fellow interpreters remain in Afghanistan and fear reprisals.

In this 2011 interview, my friend talks about the danger and distrust that interpreters regularly experienced on their patrols, and their worries about what would happen to them once foreign troops left. For their troubles, interpreters like him were paid 600 U.S. dollars a month—with the additional expectation that they would be taken care of in the event that the Taliban regained control of the country and sought to punish those who had assisted their adversaries.

Continue reading ‘Life Will Be Bitter for Us’: An Interview with an Afghan Interpreter →

Anna Chan is a writer based in Florida.

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Isla Mujeres, Mexico
Commentary

Letting Dogs Lie

Recalling a life-and-death decision on a deserted road.


It was decades ago, but I still remember the German guy. He could have ignored the pups, left them to die in the brush, but he didn’t. Instead, he biked into town and found the local police, but they just blew him off. So he went back. It was the compassionate thing to do, but it left him with an impossible choice: either let the pups die, or kill them.

My girlfriend Mardena and I had come to Cancún, Mexico, from a winter deep-freeze in the United States. We were staying in a little hotel on a downtown side street, a mile inland from the city’s glitzy beachfront hotel zone. Every morning I’d head out for an early run to beat the heat, but it never worked. Even at dawn, the heat and humidity were already draining. I remember one evening when Mardena and I were on the bus heading back to our hotel after a day on the beach. I looked out the window and saw the sun sinking into the horizon like a giant orange beach ball. It was the end of December, on one of the shortest days of winter, and it was still hot as blazes.

One morning we took a boat from the mainland over to Isla Mujeres, a skinny island a few miles east of Cancún. We planned to bicycle around the island and cool off in the turquoise waters at its north end. The day was heating up fast, so we stopped at the first bike shop we found, rented clunky one-speeders at two dollars apiece, and started out along a coastal road.

Continue reading Letting Dogs Lie →

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

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The Alberta Cooperative Grocery in Portland, Oregon. Old White Truck, via Flickr
Commentary

Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives

Cooperatives and other alternative enterprises can make economies more resilient to crises like Covid-19.


With customers staying at home during the pandemic, large numbers of businesses have shuttered permanently, unable to cover their payroll and rent. Emergency governmental assistance has sustained some businesses during this period of economic uncertainty, but the crisis has also stoked interest in a private sector remedy: cooperatives.

In Baltimore, a pizzeria that shut when the pandemic hit reopened as a worker cooperative, its ownership shared equally among its fourteen original employees. In Albuquerque, N.M., small farms pivoted from supporting restaurants and farmers markets, pooling their produce to sell directly to households. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a program to help struggling businesses reopen as employee-owned businesses.

As Congress deliberates how to safeguard the country from future crises, policymakers should consider recent research that shows how so-called alternative enterprises can make local economies more resilient. Sociologist Marc Schneiberg finds that counties with more cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, nonprofit organizations, and universities experienced fewer job losses during the Great Recession and greater job growth in its aftermath. This path-breaking finding suggests that such organizations are better able than their shareholder-owned counterparts to retain workforces when the economy falters—and more willing to invest in their communities when markets pick up again. 

Continue reading Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives →

Katherine K. Chen is an associate professor of sociology at the City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY. With Victor Tan Chen (no relation), she is the editor of the book Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities Through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (Emerald Publishing, 2021).

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Introvert, by Massimo Stefanoni, via Flickr
Honolulu
Commentary

The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home

When the lockdowns first began, I thought the introvert in me would thrive. Instead, I learned that, however bothersome, social interaction helps keep my personal demons at bay.


I hate meetings. Yes, everyone says that, but I am on the extreme end of the relevant bell curve here: I am introverted to such a degree that some people have confessed that they were unsure I had the ability to speak until months after we met. Therefore, in late March 2020, when stay-at-home orders began to go into force, schools began closing, and my workplace switched to telecommuting, my reaction was more sanguine than most. After all, introverts draw strength from within! Forced social interaction is what tires us most! With fewer meetings scheduled, surely my unpublished novel, a new personal best for pushups, and that foreign language I’d been meaning to learn would all be within my grasp.

Or so I thought.

There was one thing I had not factored into my calculations: depression. While these spells have been with me for much of my life, they increased in frequency after the pandemic began. After just a few weeks of staying at home, I began to notice that I was having more extreme reactions to even mild criticisms from my wife, from my colleagues, even from strangers on the internet. With fewer social interactions to distract me, I heard “I think you misunderstood the nature of this assignment,” “You didn’t use enough soap when you washed the dishes,” and “You might want to rethink your evaluation of this polling data” and understood “Your failure to accomplish small tasks means you are a failure in life and that you should stare at the ceiling.”

Continue reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home →

Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

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"Drugs," by WithoutFins, via Flickr
Ocoee, Tennessee
Commentary

Gateway Drug

When the pandemic hit, I started working at a head shop—and started getting into the heads of my customers.


Last March, I was working in Montana as a ski instructor at the Big Sky Resort. When the pandemic reached the United States and stores started shutting down, I remember meeting up with friends for a potluck dinner. We drank Coronas and joked about the toilet paper shortage.

Three days later, the resort closed—an unprecedented six weeks early—and we were all out of jobs. My friends and I threw an impromptu end-of-season party at the local dive bar. There was an edge to that evening, though. It seemed that no one could sit still or hold a calm conversation.

A week after the resort closed, my boyfriend, who lived in Tennessee, called. There were rumors that states were going to shut their borders to keep the virus from spreading. “I don’t want you to be stuck in Montana away from me,” he said.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“I want to come get you and move you back to Tennessee with me.”

I had intended to move in with my boyfriend after the ski season ended, but this would be two months earlier than planned. With some hesitation, I agreed. I didn’t want to leave my friends in Montana, but I didn’t want to have to deal with a pandemic on my own, either.

Once we got back to Tennessee, though, our plans began to unravel. That summer I was supposed to return to my seasonal job as a whitewater kayak instructor on the Ocoee River, but the state lockdown shut down that possibility. Instead, I sat by myself on the couch, day-drinking and watching Netflix. My boyfriend worked alone from morning till dark on various projects around his unfinished house.

At a certain point, I found myself surrounded by beer cans, watching American Hoggers, and realizing that I needed to get off the couch and out of my boyfriend’s house. When a friend called and said their mom needed help at the family store, I jumped at the opportunity—not thinking much about the fact that the “family store” was a head shop, a place that sells paraphernalia for using drugs. I’d worked as a line cook in plenty of restaurants and as a guide at rafting companies, I told myself. What could be so different about working at a head shop?

Continue reading Gateway Drug →

Lynn Barlow is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, whitewater kayaking, or playing fetch with her dog Urza. Instagram: @biggitygnar

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Hans Lange and Kate Rosenberg outside New York City Hall on their wedding day, August 30, 1941.
New York
Commentary

Distance from Home

Before the pandemic, the distances separating me from my cross-continental family seemed so small. But this freedom was never a birthright, as previous generations of my family knew all too well.


On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.

Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.

A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”

That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. Continue reading Distance from Home →

Ellen Friedrichs is a health educator and the author of Good Sexual Citizenship. Twitter | Instagram

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The view of Cerro Rico from the city of Potosí in May. fabian.kron, via Flickr
Potosí, Bolivia
News

Touring Bolivia’s Cerro Rico, the Mountain that Eats Men

The silver that made Potosí fabulously wealthy is now all but gone, but miners still toil in the Bolivian city’s nearby mines in search of minerals vital to global supply chains. In recent years, locals have promoted a kind of “danger tourism”—guided tours of the sprawling and still lethal Cerro Rico complex—as another employment option in a region with very few, but critics say it draws too many voyeurs and thrill-seekers.


It’s one of the most grueling, dangerous jobs on Earth. Workers at the Cerro Rico mines near Potosí, Bolivia, toil from dawn till dusk in constricted, dust-filled passages, knowing they might die at any moment and likely will never reach middle age. Now, Cerro Rico has become a leading tourist attraction—despite the risks, the plight of the miners, and the downward spiral of a community that has fallen far from past wealth and glory.

“It’s like going to the zoo, looking at animals,” said Julio Morales, an ex-miner turned mining tour operator turned activist, who believes the visits are getting out of hand. “The mines are not a game.”

Continue reading Touring Bolivia’s Cerro Rico, the Mountain that Eats Men →

Mark Dickinson has taught on three continents and traveled to more than seventy countries. Before beginning his career in the classroom eighteen years ago, he worked for almost a decade as both a television and newspaper reporter.

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