![]() “I saw my brother doing the same type of work, but moneywise, he had better credit, he could afford more, while I was barely getting by,” Gabriel told me. Though Gabriel was doing the same type of work at Amazon, he had to shell out more money for health care, and made a lot less money. When his son was diagnosed with a rare form of anemia, his insurance covered everything. ![]() Jose Alvarado is able to support a wife and four children on his Stater Brothers salary. Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders-doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon-are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed. The 1,000 workers there are unionized and get full medical benefits, pensions, and retiree medical benefits. Meanwhile, Gabriel watched as his 39-year-old brother Jose worked across the street, doing the same type of job at a warehouse for the grocery chain Stater Brothers. (An Amazon spokeswoman, Nina Lindsey, told me that, like most companies, Amazon has performance expectations, but that it supports people not performing with dedicated coaches to help them improve.) Amazon proved a stressful place to work, with managers chewing out employees for not moving fast enough, he told me, which was tough to put up with for meager pay. He started working at Amazon’s San Bernardino distribution center in 2013, making $12 an hour, hoping that the job would help him support his new wife and two stepdaughters. The arrival of Amazon has been bittersweet for people like Gabriel Alvarado, 35. This poverty near Amazon facilities is not just an inland-California phenomenon-according to a report by the left-leaning group Policy Matters Ohio, one in 10 Amazon employees in Ohio is on food stamps.Īmazon’s San Bernardino fulfillment center in 2013 (Kevork Djansezian / Getty) The median household income in 2016, at $38,456, is 4 percent lower than it was in 2011. The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived. But as the experience of San Bernardino shows, Amazon can exacerbate the economic problems that city leaders had hoped it would solve. This often means battling each other to lure companies like Amazon, which is rapidly expanding its distribution centers across the country. San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job? These places, many located on the outskirts of major cities, have lost retail and manufacturing jobs and, in many cases, are still recovering from the recession and desperate to attract economic activity. “But it’s a lot better than where we would otherwise be,” he says. “It’s a step back from where we were,” says Pat Morris, now the former mayor, about the jobs that Amazon offers. Though the company does pay more than the minimum wage, and offers benefits such as tuition reimbursement, health care, and stock options, the nature of the work obviates many of those benefits, workers say. Some of the jobs Amazon creates are seasonal or temporary, thrusting workers into a precarious situation in which they don’t know how many hours they’ll work a week or what their schedule will be. Workers say the warehouse jobs are grueling and high stress, and that few people are able to stay in them long enough to reap the offered benefits, many of which don’t become available until people have been with the company a year or more. Yet in many ways, Amazon has not been a “rare and wonderful” opportunity for San Bernardino. In San Bernardino, the unemployment rate that was as high as 15 percent in 2012 is now 5 percent. This expansion provided a lifeline to the struggling region, creating jobs and contributing tax revenue to an area sorely in need of both. The company now employs more than 15,000 full-time workers in eight fulfillment centers (where goods are stored and then packed for shipment ) and one sortation center (where packages are organized by delivery area) in the Inland Empire, the desert region bordering Los Angeles that encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In the months and years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its footprint in and around San Bernardino, a city 60 miles east of Los Angeles. ![]() Amazon, the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000 people here.“This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris told a local newspaper at the time. SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.-This community was still reeling from the recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news.
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