“Despite the gulf between them, both Amazon and the Postal Service function as part of a much larger and much more insidious global supply chain... Beside its environmental costs, the system also depends on the exploitation of myriad workers, millions of them here in the United States and untold millions more overseas... If we wanted to change the way the logistics economy functions, we would have to attack the strange and vulnerable terrain of logistics itself — not the goods, but the network that moves them.“

This article was too many words about absolutely nothing. No new ideas are presented, just the same things you’ve heard 1000 times already.

Also, the bar for exploitation is so low for the author that it’s hard to imagine a modern day industry that isn’t “exploitative” by their definition.

> it’s hard to imagine a modern day industry that isn’t “exploitative”

I think that’s the general sentiment, at least among young people. The statement “if you define x as exploitative then everything is” is exactly indicative of a systems problem and the solution can’t be shrugging and doing nothing unless you’ve already accepted your lot in life.

The near impossibility of sourcing goods that aren’t the result of worker mistreatment everywhere in the supply chain is nuts. You can’t vote with your wallet and you can’t vote with your votes.

The problem here is that by their sentiment, there has never been a single industry, at any point in history, that hasn’t been “exploitative”.

This is what happens when your definition of “exploitative” is based on a relative metric. Exploitative literally means “having a life that’s worst than average”- which by definition means there’ll always be people who are exploited.

There was a time where exploitation meant literally chattel slavery, now it means working a sub-optimal job. You even hear of how Investment Bankers are “exploited” because they work long hours.

The term is frankly meaningless.