Latinx, Slavery and warehouses: How the industry has impacted this generation?

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There is the discussion about the political power of Latinx, their young leaders and the promising future of the impact they can have through education, the economy and culture.But there is also an economic culture, which is called racial capitalism, where large companies have focused their efforts to recruit a generation of Latinx by offering them low-paying jobs, depressing working conditions, and an unpromising future.

In new research Paul Apostolidis explores racial capitalism and the warehouse industry’s impact among Latinx communities in California’s Inland Empire region. He writes that among Latino workers and communities, racial capitalism not only involves insecurity, low pay, and workplace injury risks in warehouse employment, it also denies residents a safe, sanitary, and vibrant home life, undermining the essential basis for their lives to thrive and grow across generations.

“The idea of ‘racial capitalism’ has recently gained a heightened profile in academic circles and public debates. Beginning in 2020 protests led by Black Lives Matter in response to the murder of George Floyd, at the time of Black and other global majority workers’ disproportionate exposure to COVID-19 during the pandemic’s most lethal phase, brought new urgency to America’s ongoing struggles with race. Yet the term ‘racial capitalism’ signals something structural and long-lasting rather than containable within a brief episode of crisis. And given the complexity of racial experience and oppression in the US, understanding racial capitalism there requires looking both within and beyond Black communities”, said Apostolidis.

The Latinx Futures project, based at the University of California Riverside and supported by the Mellon Foundation, draws attention to an under-analysed region that has become pivotal to the world economy.

“One way to understand racial capitalism is to look at employment conditions for those who staff the warehouses. At Amazon’s western US warehouses, a mostly Latinx workforce sweats out its hours unloading containers and re-packing goods for transport to retail outlets through ‘just-in-time’ distribution systems. So, we could see ‘racial capitalism’ as naming how logistics operations and the corporations that pioneered them have become primary engines of 21st century capitalist growth and profitability, and how the labour processes on which such expansion depends feature working conditions for Latinx and other global majority workers that are not just unequal to those of whites but profoundly damaging and demoralizing”, said Apostolidis.

“Then there’s Amazon’s new ‘school-to-warehouse pipeline,’ built by recruiting workers in high schools and universities. Cynically tempting students and families dispirited by astronomical higher-education costs, this programme comprises yet another feature of racial capitalism in the IE. Again, it isn’t only about channelling Brown and Black bodies into badly paid and hazardous jobs”.

The Latinx Futures project is investigating these core aspects of racial capitalism that make Latinx working-class social reproduction more precarious.