HOW A GROUP OF SOMALIS BECAME LEADERS IN THE FIGHT TO CHANGE A TECH BEHEMOTH

IT WAS 11 DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

- Jessica Bruder

IN 2018, and an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota, US, was operating at full tilt. Inside the warehouse, within dark, cyclon-efenced enclosures, thousands of shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet, ferrying towers of merchandise from one place to another. And throughout the huge space, yellow bins brimming with customers’ orders zipped along conveyor belts.

Negotiating all the distances and tasks that fall between those pieces of machinery were the people. They power-walked (running was forbidden) across roughly 259 000 square metres of polished concrete.

Among them was William Stolz, 24, who’d been at Amazon for a year and a half. As a “picker”, his job was to hover at the perimeter of a cyclone fence and fetch customers’ orders from the robot-borne storage pods that came to his station. He’d stoop, squat, or climb a small ladder to grab items and then rush to place them in one of the yellow bins that sped off to the packaging department. Stolz says pickers were expected to fetch more than 300 items every hour. And, according to workers, Amazon’s inventory-tracking system closely monitored whether they were hitting their marks.

Many of his colleagues endured pain as they strained to hit their hourly rate – which was one of the many reasons Stolz had decided to walk out of his job that afternoon, 14 December, at precisely 4pm.

Stolz and several colleagues of his had been planning the co-ordinated walkout for weeks. He’d been getting to know other workers as they’d discussed the conditions in the warehouse. Unlike him, most of his fellow strikers were Somali-Muslim immigrants. Many of their faces were framed by hijabs.

Stolz estimates that about 50 workers assembled at the front doors before they streamed out. (Amazon says the number was around 15.)