Online-only British supermarket Ocado has had to cancel some customers’ delivery orders after a Friday robot collision at one of its warehouses caused a fire, the company said.
The fire at the company’s Erith warehouse east of London “appears to have been caused by the collision of three bots on the grid,” the company said in a statement on Sunday. No one was injured, and the damage was limited to less than 1 percent of its grid, according to Ocado.
The grocer’s warehouses are populated with washing machine-sized robots that move products around on a grid system. The Verge’s James Vincent wrote about Ocado’s plans in a 2018 feature story. He described the process:
Deliveries are unpacked into crates; crates are placed onto conveyors; and conveyors carry the crates to shelves, where human “pickers” take what they need to fill customers’ orders. The new paradigm, though, is all about using space as efficiently as possible. Items are still placed in crates, but those crates are now stored in huge stacks, up to 17 boxes high. Their position in this stack seems to be at random — a box of razors next to cod fillets, for example — but it’s algorithmically decided; with frequently accessed items placed on the top and rarer purchases near the bottom. On top of this hoard, the robots do their work.
Robots at Ocado’s warehouses operate on grids. Three of the robots collided at its Erith warehouse on July 16th, causing a fire that has disrupted operations.
The company said Sunday that the Erith plant, which processes some 150,000 orders a week according to the Financial Times, should restart operations in the next few days. “While we expect some disruption to operations, we are working to restore normal service as soon as possible,” the company said. “We expect the facility to begin operating within the coming week and thank customers whose orders are affected for their patience.”
Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, were voting overwhelmingly against forming a union Thursday after a monthslong campaign in which labor had hoped to make inroads into the sprawling company.
As vote-tallying paused for the night, 1,100 employees had voted against unionizing, compared to 463 in favor. The tally presented a nearly insurmountable climb for union supporters to obtain the 1,608 votes needed to win.
If it is approved, the union would be the first for Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, in the United States.
While the vote has not been completed, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, the union seeking to represent the 5,800 workers in Bessemer, has already said it would challenge the vote by filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. It will allege that Amazon broke the law with some of its anti-union activity in the run-up to the election.
“Our system is broken, Amazon took full advantage of that, and we will be calling on the labor board to hold Amazon accountable for its illegal and egregious behavior during the campaign,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the RWDSU. “But make no mistake about it: This still represents an important moment for working people, and their voices will be heard.”
Amazon did not provide a statement after Thursday evening’s vote counting concluded.
After the seven-week window to vote by mail ended March 29, the NLRB spent two weeks checking the eligibility of ballots and counting them in a process observed by the union and Amazon. Out of 5,805 eligible voters, 3,215 ballots were cast, but “hundreds” were set aside as contested, mostly by Amazon, according to the union. Ballots can be contested by Amazon or the union based on factors like illegible signatures or questions about whether employees’ job titles entitle them to vote. Those ballots are counted only if the final margin is small enough.
Few surprises
Labor experts said the early predictions about the result are not a surprise, given the resources Amazon has invested in countering organizing.
“It’s so hard for workers to win in a situation like this,” said Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of management and labor relations at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “The most likely outcome in these situations is that the employer successfully busts the union by instilling fear and uncertainty into the workers, and even those workers that were initially in favor of organizing into a union get afraid and change their mind.”
The Bessemer warehouse, which opened in March 2020, is Amazon’s first fulfillment center in Alabama. Workers started organizing toward a union vote in August, hoping it would help improve their working conditions. Currently, it is difficult to go to the bathroom without being penalized, said Jennifer Bates, an Amazon worker in Bessemer, who said she was inspired to support the union effort after regularly having seen her colleagues walk out of work limping from the physical toll the job takes.
At the start of this year, Amazon launched what labor experts characterized as a classic, well-funded anti-union campaign at the warehouse.
Workers said they were required to attend multiple meetings during their shifts, in which Amazon representatives explained why a union was not, in their view, beneficial for workers. Posters all over the warehouse, some of them in bathroom stalls, encouraged workers to vote no. The company also distributed buttons and stickers for employees to wear, and it created a website and a hashtag, #DoItWithoutDues, highlighting how workers might have to pay $500 in annual dues to the union.
Amazon has a long history of thwarting unionization. In 1999, the Communication Workers of America started a campaign to unionize 400 customer service employees in Seattle. After months of anti-union campaigning, Amazon closed down the call center in 2000 in what the company said was a restructuring related to the dot-com bust.
In 2014, 21 equipment technicians at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware voted against organizing with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers following what the union spokesman described as “intense pressure from managers and anti-union consultants.”
Amazon spokeswoman Mary Osako told Time magazine at the time that the “no” vote against third-party representation showed that employees “prefer a direct connection with Amazon.”
Organizing fallout
Workers in Bessemer who opposed the union seemed to question its purpose.
LaVonette Stokes, who works as a labor organizer for the Alabama teachers union when she’s not working at Amazon, and her husband are have positions as mid-level process guides that earn $15 to $19 an hour. But she said that a union for unskilled labor in Bessemer makes no sense and that it would move too slowly. She and her husband spent $2,400 of their own money to print flyers that detailed Amazon’s benefits.
“We’re talking about a union that has made contracts where, yes, they got a raise, but it took them about five to seven years before they even got to that raise,” she said.
Her husband, William, said: “We’re not against unions. We’re against this particular union, and we’re against a union at this particular facility. Everything that this union is offering, we can do ourselves.”
Workers in favor of the union said they had hoped it would help improve their working conditions, providing better job security and benefits when Amazon is reporting record profits in part because of a pandemic-induced boom in online retail.
“I like my job. I give it 110 percent every day I go in there, regardless how hard it is, how stressful it is,” said Darryl Richardson, a worker at the Bessemer warehouse. “But I feel like employees deserve better and more for what they do.”
Richardson said he and other pro-union workers expect to be fired or forced to quit their jobs.
“I have to move on, and I hate it,” he said. “It’s sad that you do everything you can to try to make things better for the people and you feel like you are going to lose your job.”
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an email, “We respect all our employees’ right to join, form, or not to join a labor union or other lawful organization of their own selection, without fear of reprisal, intimidation, or harassment.”
Amazon spokesperson Leah Seay said that in Bessemer receive health care coverage and hourly pay of at least $15.30, which is well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Alabama has no minimum wage law.
Employees also get a retirement plan, Seay said.
Broader impact
The union drive drew global attention to conditions for Amazon’s warehouse workers and the lengths the company goes to prevent them from organizing, said Givan, the Rutgers professor.
“Workers around the country who have been watching what’s happening will be potentially inspired by what can happen if you do take action and get national attention,” she said.
Analysts said efforts to unionize at other Amazon warehouses in the U.S. are likely to continue, particularly in higher-cost states like New York and California. RWDSU spokesperson Chelsea Connor said the union received over a thousand inquiries about organizing from Amazon workers at other facilities since the organizing effort began.
“Amazon is already about the best-paying job a non-skilled laborer can get in Alabama,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. “But in higher-costs states, it’s barely a living wage.
“It will cut into profits,” he said. “But it’s a humane thing to do.”
The warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where a union vote will be tallied this week. Historically, the region had strong steel and coal unions, but industry died out in the late 20th century.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
For the first time in seven years, Amazon warehouse workers are deciding whether to unionize, which could give them more say in their hours, pay and working conditions. Union drives rarely make it to a vote in Amazon warehouses, and those that have, failed. Now employees in Alabama have the opportunity to break this pattern and become the first unionized Amazon warehouse workers in the US.
The 5,800 workers in Bessemer, a small industrial city outside of Birmingham, have been casting ballots in a union election for more than a month. The potentially historic outcome could be announced as early as this week. If it succeeds, it could kick off more Amazon warehouse unionization efforts around the country.
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Whether or not the workers certify the union, the vote itself is remarkable. Union advocates have long told stories of intense anti-union pressure from Amazon that snuffed out unionizing efforts before a vote, as well as interrogations of workers who protested working conditions. Additionally, the vote is taking place in the South, a region historically viewed as anti-union and a haven for corporations trying to avoid cooperation among their workers.
The vote also brings the story of warehouse workers to the fore as the coronavirus pandemic rages. Amazon’s warehouse employees, deemed essential workers, have made sure customers have toilet paper and other necessary items while working from home — a luxury the warehouse workers themselves don’t have. Instead, workers have faced possible COVID-19 infection and long hours fulfilling online orders. In the meantime, Amazon made hefty profits in 2020, which ended with the company growing its net sales 44% over the previous year, bringing in $125.6 billion in the fourth quarter.
On March 30, 2020, Amazon warehouse workers held a protest and walkout over conditions at the company’s Staten Island distribution facility, where a number of employees had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Amazon has tried to steer the conversation about working conditions at its warehouses by pushing in newspaper ads for a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage to match its own starting wage and by using public statements and conversations with reporters to highlight its benefits and tuition reimbursement programs. These are the benefits Amazon believes make a union unnecessary for its workers. At the start of the pandemic, it also temporarily increased worker wages by $2 per hour from their base pay — a short-lived policy that many workers want to return.
Amazon has long opposed unionization. The company espouses a theory of the flywheel, in which each of its services builds on its own momentum to generate increasing speed and power. The company’s international network of warehouses, or fulfillment centers as Amazon calls them, is arguably the linchpin in Amazon’s retail flywheel, ensuring fast, often free delivery. Unionization would loosen the company’s grip on this system, allowing an outside group to influence decisions about pay and working conditions. Amazon argues that workers don’t want to organize. Instead, they’d prefer to work directly with their managers, and they already have multiple ways to do so.
Union advocates point to a different picture of warehouse work. Amazon has a uniquely high turnover in an industry that already churns through workers, according to the Seattle Times. Counting all Amazon and Whole Foods employees, the company had to refill positions at a rate of more than 96% between March and mid-September in 2020.
Its warehouse employees report that the job involves intense physical exhaustion and the risk of injury, coupled with Amazon tracking their every move (That applies to delivery drivers too, who recently were required to consent to monitoring from AI-powered cameras in their vans.). Added to that is unpredictable scheduling and mandatory overtime.
The union advocates aim their efforts at these issues, arguing that union representation would give workers better job security and help them advocate for adequate rest and better safety measures. Workers who’ve spoken publicly against unionizing say they don’t want a third party involved in making decisions or getting between them and their managers. Bloomberg reported in February that opinions in the warehouse are divided.
Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee in March, Bessemer warehouse worker Jennifer Bates said the company seems “to think you are another machine.”
Amazon’s first US union could form in the South
The Bessemer warehouse workers are deciding whether to form a bargaining unit represented by the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union, which also speaks for workers at meat packing plants, cereal factories and department stores. The union would negotiate contracts with Amazon on the workers’ behalf and oversee a grievance process when workers want to dispute discipline against them.
The union would only include the 5,800 workers at the Bessemer warehouse, and none would be required to join or pay dues if the vote certifies the union. If people opt not to join, they still benefit from higher-pay negotiations or the grievance system, but they wouldn’t be able to vote on contracts or participate in union activities like choosing politicians to endorse or running for office within the union.
While Alabama, and Bessemer in particular, historically had strong steel and coal mining unions, organized labor generally lost its hold on the South after World War II. The fact that the largest unionizing effort at a US Amazon facility is in the South is “fascinating,” said Erik Gellman, a labor historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations made an ill-fated effort in “Operation Dixie” to organize southern workers, focusing on textile factories and other industrial worksites. Its failure is attributed to the union’s inability to bring white and Black workers together, pressures created by Jim Crow segregation and a lack of regional understanding from northern organizers, Gellman said. Afterward, several southern states passed laws that made union organizing much harder in the South.
Large corporations have used those difficulties to their advantage. Some have moved their workforces to the South — or at least threatened to do so — to weaken unionization efforts at facilities in union-friendly states. Boeing, for example, began moving its plane assembly operations to South Carolina in 2009. By 2013, Boeing had access to non-union labor in the South, and offered its unionized Washington workers a take-it-or-leave-it contract that cut wages and pension contributions.
Still, not everyone agrees with characterizations of Alabama as an anti-union state. Erica Iheme, a community organizer who grew up in Bessemer, is part of a coalition of local organizations supporting the Amazon workers’ union drive called Alabama for Community Benefits. The state has 8.7% union density, making it the most unionized southern state other than Kentucky (based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ definition of the South), where 9.4% of the workforce was represented by a union in 2020.
From her childhood, Iheme remembers when her school bus passed a unionized steel plant. “Alabama is a union state,” she said. “I remember seeing the steel workers picketing that plant growing up.”
Bessemer, which is named after a steel processing method created by Englishman Henry Bessemer, is full of people whose grandparents were in unions, Iheme said, adding that the Amazon vote could revive that trend. “That’s going to open the door for so many other workers across Alabama to think, ‘That could happen to us.'”
But it’s not just Alabama or the South at stake. Amazon’s business strategy requires it to have warehouses in every state, and a success in the South could mean unionization is possible anywhere, especially regions with labor-friendly laws.
Employers will always use the threat of closing down a facility to stop union efforts, but Amazon doesn’t appear poised to leave the Birmingham area, said George Davies, a labor lawyer who serves as lead counsel for the RWDSU effort in Bessemer. Amazon is slated to build another facility at the site of a shuttered mall in Birmingham.
Other protest and union efforts have failed and led to firings
Amazon isn’t treating the organizing drive as an idle threat. Bessemer employees and RWDSU representatives have said that Amazon put anti-union messages in the warehouse’s bathroom stalls, held mandatory anti-union trainings, sent anti-union messages through corporate apps and brought in corporate employees for one-on-one meetings to gauge their levels of union support. (Union organizers have called workers to persuade them to vote yes and stationed activists outside the Bessemer warehouse to send a pro-union message.)
The actions echo Amazon’s previously reported approaches to employee organizing. The last union vote at an Amazon warehouse took place in 2014. A small group of equipment maintenance and repair technicians at a Delaware warehouse voted overwhelmingly not to certify the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers as their union. Amazon said the vote made it clear the employees “want a direct connection with Amazon,” but the union blamed Amazon’s anti-union pressure for the outcome.
An Amazon Prime warehouse in Manhattan, back in 2015.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Shortly after, a machinist in a Virginia warehouse led a union drive in 2014 and 2015, and told The New York Times that he faced intense anti-union pressure from Amazon as a result. After a National Labor Relations Board investigation, Amazon agreed to post a notice saying it wouldn’t retaliate against employees who tried to organize a union and to rescind a warning to the machinist that he was on the verge of being fired, according to the Times. The machinist, Bill Hough Jr., was fired later that year.
The pandemic has ignited further protests over working conditions, especially the company’s COVID safety measures in March and April of 2020, when some employees said there weren’t sufficient masks. That’s when a small group of Staten Island warehouse workers walked out in protest after a co-worker tested positive for COVID-19.
Christian Smalls, one of the protest organizers who was exposed to a colleague with COVID-19, was subsequently fired for attending the protest at Amazon’s facility. Amazon later came under fire when a leaked memo showed that the company’s top legal executive David Zapolsky called Smalls, who is Black, “not smart or articulate.”
Last week, Vice reported that a worker who organized a March 2020 protest over COVID protections at a Queens, New York, warehouse was questioned for 90 minutes and disciplined for his role in planning the walkout, in seeming violation of US labor laws. Amazon confirmed a settlement with the NLRB over the incident and said it didn’t agree with the details of the complaint.
Exhausted warehouse workers
Amid the union drives and worker walkouts, Amazon warehouse employees have expressed a desire to slow down at work, for safety and to keep their bodies from breaking down. Working at an Amazon warehouse is like “a nine-hour intense workout every day,” Bates, the Bessemer warehouse worker, told federal lawmakers in March. Bates said she wants workers to get enough rest to recover from repetitive movements and extended physical exertion.
Amazon said it appreciated the feedback from Bates but that it didn’t think her views reflected those of most warehouse workers. The company added that 90% of her fulfillment center colleagues “say they’d recommend Amazon as a great place to work to friends and family.” Amazon spokesperson Heather Knox emphasized that employees receive two 30-minute breaks per 10-hour shift, as well as paid breaks to go to the bathroom or get a snack.
Iheme, the community organizer, said Amazon workers deserve to have enough energy to function outside of work. If warehouse employees aren’t “exhausted when they get off work,” or running off to a second job to make ends meet, they can be better parents. They might also get involved in the community and even take vacations to other parts of the state, she added, all of which would be good for Bessemer and the state’s economy.
“When you have that time to invest in your home,” she said, “you have that time to invest in your community.”
“Amazon brags it pays workers above the minimum wage. What they don’t tell you is what those jobs are really like,” said Jennifer Bates in her testimony.
“We have to keep up with the pace. My workday feels like a nine-hour intense workout every day. And they track our every move — if your computer isn’t scanning, you get charged with being time-off-task,” said Bates, a learning ambassador who helps train other workers at the facility and who has been a vocal organizer behind the union push. “From the onset, I learned that if I worked too slow or had too much time-off-task I could be disciplined or even fired.”
Bates was invited by Sen. Bernie Sanders to speak on the topic of “Income and Wealth Inequality Crisis in America.” Amazon’s outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos was also invited to speak but declined the offer. In a statement last week, an Amazon spokesperson said, “We fully endorse Senator Sanders’ efforts to reduce income inequality with legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers, like we did for ours in 2018.”
“We take employee feedback seriously, including Ms. Bates’, but we don’t believe her comments represent the more than 90% of her fulfillment center colleagues who say they’d recommend Amazon as a great place to work to friends and family,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. The spokesperson added that Amazon employees “earn at least $15 an hour, receive comprehensive healthcare and paid leave benefits.”
The company raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2018 following pushback from critics, including Sanders, that Amazon did not pay its workers enough. Amazon has been on a recent PR blitz on the topic, indicating its support for a $15 federal minimum wage.
The Amazon Bessemer union election — which began by mail on February 8 and runs through March 29 — has garnered national attention from prominent figures, including President Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams. Earlier this month, a Congressional delegation visited the Bessemer facility in support of the workers pushing to unionize. If successful, it would become Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.
Bates described 10-hour shifts with just two 30-minute breaks that are “not long enough to give you time to rest” given the facility’s expansive size.
“Just walking the long way to the bathroom and back eats up precious break time,” said Bates, who said that elevators in the facility had signage indicating they were for “material only, no riders.” “I couldn’t believe that they built a facility with so many elevators for materials and make the employees take the stairs on a huge four-flight facility.”
In an interview last month with CNN Business, Bates ticked off a list of issues that workers hope to improve with the help of union representation, including adequate break time, better procedures for filing and receiving responses to grievances, higher wages, and protection against Amazon wrongfully applying policies like social distancing to discipline workers.
As CNN Business has previously reported, Amazon has waged an aggressive anti-union campaign leading up to the vote. Workers were frequently informed of Amazon’s stance that a union is an unnecessary expense. Workers saw anti-union signage on the bathroom stalls; they were pulled into one-on-one meetings on the warehouse floor and were also required to attend group meetings every few shifts. The company sent out numerous text messages to workers and launched an anti-union website that warns against paying dues: “Don’t buy that dinner, don’t buy those school supplies, don’t buy those gifts because you won’t have that almost $500 you paid in dues.”
Bates addressed the anti-union efforts in her testimony. “The company would just hammer on different reasons why the union was bad. And we had to listen. If someone spoke up and disagreed with what the company was saying they would shut the meeting down and told people to go back to work. Then follow up with one-on-one meetings on the floor,” she said, calling it “upsetting” to see some coworkers “get confused by what was being said in the meetings.” (In a statement to CNN Business last month, Amazon spokesperson Heather Knox said Amazon has “provided education that helps employees understand the facts of joining a union.”)
“It’s frustrating that all we want is to make Amazon a better place to work. Yet Amazon is acting like they are under attack. Maybe if they spent less time – and money – trying to stop the union they would hear what we are saying. And maybe they would create a company that’s as good for workers and our community as it is for shareholders and executives,” said Bates.
While the pandemic has been a boon for Amazon’s business, it has also been a driving force behind a more general employee uprising. Amazon has been slowly peeling back some of its pandemic-related policies. The company discontinued its unlimited unpaid time off in May, as well as its $2 hourly wage bump and double overtime pay in June. It reinstated its “time-off-task” metric to track productivity of workers this fall. It also notified workers in February that it would soon resume daily “socially distanced small group stand-up meetings.”
Amazon has said it has made over 150 process updates to ensure the health and safety of its employees. The company, which continues to provide up to two weeks of paid time off for employees diagnosed with the coronavirus, has also given out two special bonuses to frontline workers since eliminating its pandemic-related wage bumps.
“Why can’t such a large and wealthy company do better for their workers?” Bates said. “Amazon even took away our essential worker pay in the middle of the pandemic. Meanwhile, Amazon has made tons of money during this crisis. Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. And now he’s even richer thanks to us workers.”
Frances McDormand as Fern in Nomadland. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures
When journalist Jessica Bruder began reporting her 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the foreclosures and vaporized investments of the Great Recession were pushing many seniors to hit the road. She met elderly Americans across the country who were living out of vehicles to save their meager Social Security benefits and performing grueling physical labor to survive — people like then-64-year-old Linda May. A seasonal worker at CamperForce, Amazon’s jobsprogram for van-dwelling retirees, she experienced dizziness during her shifts at the Amazonwarehouse that landed her in the emergency room and got a repetitive motion injury from using her scanner gun. Another CamperForce worker, 71-year-old Chuck Stout was knocked flat by a box that flew off the conveyor belt at Amazon, his head hitting the concrete floor with a thud; moments later, in-house medics had him back on his feet, declared he didn’t have a concussion, and sent him back to work.
The nomads didn’t get hurt only at Amazon. While working as a campground host in California, Linda May broke a rib while bear-proofing a dumpster; Charlene Swankie, 72, cracked three ribs while campground-hosting in the Rockies. While staffing an amusement park, Steve Booher, 68, fell from a loading platform and onto a conveyor belt, fracturing his skull. He died.
Bruder describes the nomads as “plug-and-play labor, the epitome of convenience for employers in search of seasonal staffing. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes … They aren’t around long enough to unionize. On jobs that are physically difficult, many are too tired even to socialize after their shifts.” As one 77-year-old worker told her: “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor.”
Reading Bruder, we understand that these “accidents” are the logical outcomes of an economic system that takes advantage of the country’s most vulnerable. So when 60-something protagonist Fern (Frances McDormand) rolls up in an old white van to work at a real Amazon warehouse in the first three minutes of Nomadland, director Chloé Zhao’s fictional film adaptation of Bruder’s book, we are tensed for class conflict. But Zhao’s adaptation, which follows Fern as she drives through majestic landscapes in the American west picking up temporary employment, is only superficially the same narrative.
Already an Oscar favorite, many critics have praised Nomadland as a portrait of modern America. The idea of authenticity has been core to Zhao’s previous films, which were developed around the real-life stories of her cast of mostly non-professional actors; she imports this technique to Nomadland, featuring actual nomads from Bruder’s book, including Linda May and Swankie. Fern, however, is a fictional character, sutured into the landscape by Zhao and McDormand to be our compassionate, dryly humorous, Shakespeare-reciting guide to the nomadic world. Crucially, unlike the subjects in the book, Fern has no complaints about her jobs—including her time at Amazon. And because the film is primarily a character study of her, it exchanges Bruder’s sharp indignation over capitalist exploitationfor a muddled message about individual freedom that downplays the real stakes of gig labor.
An Amazon warehouse, as seen in Nomadland. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures
According to the film’s backstory, Fern lost her job and house when the United States Gypsum Company shut down, and along with it shuttered the small company town of Empire, Nevada in 2011. Fern is the widow of a man who also worked at the gypsum plant before he died; they never had children. She’s haunted by her late husband’s memory, recalling a simpler, safer time when “there was nothing in our way.” She chooses the road, we learn, not because she has no other options, but so she can mourn, and recover a sense of possibility.
In McDormand’s recent Vogue cover story, she reveals Fern was an emanation of a fantasy she had in her 40s, telling her husband, filmmaker Joel Coen: “When I’m 65, I’m changing my name to Fern, I’m smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Wild Turkey, I’m getting an RV, and hitting the road.” It was McDormand, who after reading Bruder’s book, enlisted Zhao to bring that vision to life. In an interview during Nomadland’s film festival circuit, McDormand, an adoptee who still calls herself and her biological mother “white trash,” says she modeled Fern after her younger self as she struck out into the world. “There’s a childlike quality that we were really interested in for Fern… where I started at 17, she starts at 61.” This might explain why McDormand’s Fern is so insistent on self-reliance: she spurns offers of spare rooms from the financially secure suburbanites who care about her, preferring her Econoline to their beautiful, tidy homes. When she has to borrow money from her sister (Melissa Smith) to pay for van repairs, she repeatedly insists that she’ll pay her back. She may have to shit in a five-gallon bucket, but it’s all worth it, because she’s a free woman, not a victim, and she’s going to smoke those Lucky Strikes.
There’s nothing wrong with portraying disenfranchised folks as bold, resilient, people — most are — so long as we fully account for the structures aligned against them. It’s why it’s not enough to call essential workers “heroes”: we need to get them hazard pay, time off, and PPE. But this is where Nomadland stumbles, apparently deciding it wasn’t possible to both portray Fern as dignified and depict the grim truth of migrant labor. The rough edges have been sanded off: We see Fern saunter down the Amazon warehouse floor with a bin, shooting a grin at Linda May, who’s scanning packages nearby. We see heron lunch break with a table of smiling coworkers; their cheerful supervisor shows off song lyrics tattooed on their arm. After work, Fern runs into an old friend, who asks, how’s working at Amazon? “Great money,” Fern replies. And that’s the extent of the film’s insight about the e-commerce giant, which ends up disappearing blandly into Nomadland’s terrain. Zhao opts for a similar view from nowhere on Fern’s other gigs as a campground host, line cook, and sugar beet plant worker. These are cast as interchangeable backdrops, not specific challenges to overcome. It feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers’ reality.
In interviews, the filmmakers have given mixed answers about whether Nomadland is a “political” movie. Zhao told Indiewire last September that she wanted to avoid politics:“I tried to focus on the human experience and things that I feel go beyond political statements to be more universal — the loss of a loved one, searching for home.” She told Vulture’s Alison Willmore that politics were embedded into Nomadland’s every frame “if you look deeply… it’s just, yes, there’s the beautiful sunset behind it.” But in an interview with The Wrap earlier this month, Zhao’s partner and cinematographer Joshua James Richards said it was a “weird argument to say the movie is making a big critical statement” about Amazon. “I mean, we simply show Fern working there. We also show a Ford Econoline as well, but I don’t think we’re making a big critical statement about Ford. Obviously, you can find politics in anything.”
We get a bit more insight from McDormand, who has explained that she got permission to shoot in Amazon by sending an email to the company’s senior VP of business development, Jeff Blackburn. “It was right before they started giving people $15 an hour,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last fall. “This was a really smart move for them because … we are telling a story about a person who is benefiting from hard work, and working at the Amazon fulfillment center is hard work, but it pays a wage.” Of course, paying a wage would be considered the bare minimum. (And whether it’s a fair wage is far from a consensus among workers themselves.)
Linda May and Fern stretch before their warehouse shift. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures
What kind of film would Nomadland have been if the real nomads’ perspectives had been front and center? Amazon warehouse workers have reported walking up to twenty miles a day on concrete, carrying goods across massive warehouses while trying to beat a digital-countdown timer, with no benefits for CamperForce recruits besides a stipend to help cover campground fees. Near the end of Bruder’s book, Linda May offers a blistering take on Amazon, with a clarity that’s completely omitted from her performance in Zhao’s film: “I hate this fucking job,” she says, calling the company “probably the biggest slave owner in the world.” Another elderly CamperForce worker, Patty DiPino, confesses to Bruder that she tells her friends not to buy on Amazon. “I mean, the rich are getting richer while we’re sitting here getting poorer.” Bruder informs us that DiPino eventually dies of cancer. On DiPino’s Facebook page, a friend posts a memorial: “You are finally debt free and living in your forever home! No more freezing in the desert or in Kansas! No more cramped spaces … I will miss you dearly.”
These stories are blatantly absent from the film adaptation. By skipping over the mistreatment that circumscribes so many nomads’ final years, the filmmakers end up provincializing their experiences and diminishing them. It plays into platform capitalists’ favorite talking point: that temporary gig work, shorn of all rights and benefits, is what the workers want, because freedom! because flexibility! It portrays gig work as a refuge during hard times, when the truth is temporary jobs are often harder to find during crises like the pandemic — and only exacerbate workers’ uncertainty. By telling half the story, the film misses the core insight that made Bruder’s book so heart-wrenching: that there is no escape from the American economic system, and itpreys upon the nomads continuously. Not only by leaving them houseless, but by then exploiting their precarity to work them straight into the ground.
Over the last year, the inhumanity Bruder described has been made plain. Amazon bosses have gained astonishing wealth while throwing their workers into the path of a virus that has left nearly half a million Americans dead. As I write this, Amazon workers in Alabama are voting on a historic unionization effort. They are protesting unsafe working conditions on the pandemic’s front lines; they want to be able to eat lunch and take bathroom breaks without fear of getting fired. The company’s all-out efforts to quash the movement speak volumes.
Not every story about the present needs to be explicitly political. But why cast actual survivors in a drama about their struggle, then invent a new, less vulnerable character just to water it down? It feels like a missed opportunity, as if the filmmakers squeezed real life into a narrative they hoped would resonate more broadly — but left out precisely what made it so urgent. For too many people, there’s no driving into the sunset. There’s just the edge of breaking down, again and again.
