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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11Journalist Erika Hayasaki’s “Amazon’s Great Labor Awakening,” a February 2021 New York Times Magazine cover story, examined how Amazon’s growth was reshaping both the Inland Empire community where she lived and the lives of workers during the pandemic. In a February 27, 2021 GeekWire interview, she described the questions behind her reporting: what happens when a company becomes part of a region’s economy and culture, and what does that growth cost workers and local governments?
Why Hayasaki began looking at Amazon in the Inland Empire
Hayasaki said the reporting began with what she saw around her home in Southern California’s Inland Empire. “I started looking into Amazon and its presence in the Inland Empire about two years ago, just from being in the area and driving around,” she told GeekWire. She noticed Amazon trucks, planes, warehouses and products, and began asking why the company seemed to be everywhere.
For her, the question was not simply how many facilities Amazon had built. It was how a large company becomes woven into a place—and how residents, workers and local officials experience that change differently. The Inland Empire provided the community-level lens for a story that also considered workplace conditions and organizing.
What Amazon’s expansion meant for local communities
The interview highlighted Eastvale, California, as a place where Amazon’s presence raised both economic opportunities and municipal questions. Facilities and jobs could contribute to commerce, but local officials also had to consider whether tax revenue matched the costs of serving a growing industrial footprint.
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Former Eastvale mayor Todd Rigby characterized the concern as Amazon “utilizing our services but not necessarily paying its fair share,” as quoted in the interview. The issue was not resolved by the existence of jobs alone: cities also have to weigh infrastructure needs, including roads, and public-service demands such as law enforcement. The interview did not establish a definitive calculation of Amazon’s net fiscal impact on Eastvale.
Employment figures in the story’s period
Hayasaki said Amazon employed 20,000 people in the Inland Empire when she began reporting and 40,000 two years later. That is her account of growth over the reporting period, as reported in the 2021 interview—not a current headcount. GeekWire also cited nearly 1.3 million Amazon employees worldwide at the end of 2020, an increase of 500,000 during the preceding year, and more than 153,000 employees in California. Those figures describe the period around the story’s publication.
How the pandemic connected workplace safety and organizing
The workplace dimension of Hayasaki’s story concerned workers’ safety during Covid-19 and a growing willingness among some employees to speak up and organize. Hayasaki described the pandemic as a breaking point for workers who believed their safety—and potentially their lives—were being put at risk: “Some workers were no longer willing to make concessions to a company that they felt was jeopardizing their safety and potentially their lives.”
The GeekWire interview took place while an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, was still underway. That campaign supplied important context for the 2021 discussion, but it was geographically distinct from Hayasaki’s Inland Empire reporting. It should be understood as a contemporaneous example of organizing activity, not as a description of the vote’s outcome or of Amazon labor conditions today.
The central tension in “Amazon’s Great Labor Awakening”
Hayasaki’s story brought together two scales of change. In the Inland Empire, Amazon’s rapid physical expansion prompted questions about jobs, commerce, local revenue and the public costs of growth. Inside the workplace, the pandemic sharpened concerns about safety and contributed to some workers’ readiness to challenge the company. These perspectives are connected, but they are not interchangeable: a community may welcome employment while questioning who pays for added services, and workers may value jobs while seeking greater influence over their conditions.
The GeekWire interview and Hayasaki’s portfolio describe the feature as a portrait of that tension, rather than a settled balance sheet or a verdict on later labor outcomes. The story’s guiding question remains useful: what changes when a company becomes integral to a community, and who bears the costs as well as receiving the benefits?
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