October 11, 2011
NEW YORK: The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced today that Morning Call reporter Spencer Soper has won the October Sidney Award for "Inside Amazon's Warehouse," an exposé of brutal working conditions at Amazon.com's warehouse in Lehigh Valley, PA.
When the warehouse opened in 2010, workers felt lucky to get a job in this region of high unemployment. However, they quickly found the pace of work punishing and risked losing their jobs for failure to meet quotas. Workers described how they felt obligated to push themselves to the point of exhaustion and even collapse.
The following summer, the heat in the warehouse rose dangerously high, but many workers were afraid to take time off or seek medical attention because of penalties. At the height of a heat wave, Amazon hired an ambulance company to set up on site to treat sick workers and a local emergency room doctor complained to authorities about the influx of patients from the warehouse.
"The lesson I learned from people we interviewed for this story is that many people are desperate for work, and they are willing to tolerate treatment they consider unfair because they don't have other options," Soper told Lindsay Beyerstein for The Backstory, the Sidney Hillman Foundation's behind-the-scenes interview with the monthly Sidney winner. Soper describes how he discovered the darker side of what was billed as a boon for the local economy, on what this story can teach us about the national economy, and how he inspired Amazon customers across the country to take action.
Spencer Soper is a senior reporter on the business beat at the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, PA. He writes Valley Business Buzz, a daily digital business newsletter, and On The Cheap, a column about the clever and quirky things people do to save money. Soper joined the Morning Call in 2005 after reporting for papers in New York and California.
Spencer Soper
The Sidney Hillman Foundation honors excellence in journalism in service of the common good. Judges are Rose Arce, Hendrik Hertzberg, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Harold Meyerson, Susan Meiselas, and Lindsay Beyerstein.
The Sidney Award is
given once a month to an outstanding piece of socially-conscious
journalism, by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which also awards the
annual Hillman Prizes every spring. Winners of the Sidney receive a
certificate, a $500 honorarium and a bottle of union-made wine. However,
Soper declined the honorarium and the wine in accordance with his
paper's conflict of interest policy.
