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  • Exploring the Inland Empire:Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's Retail Fortress
  • Nicholas Allen (bio)

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The warehouse sprawl of Southern California's Inland Empire: a bird's-eye view.

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On a clear day, flying into Los Angeles from the East, if you glance down about twenty minutes before landing, the desert and mountains give way to the beginnings of the massive sprawl that stretches inland from the L.A. basin. Under a cloud of smog, curly subdivisions spread as far as the eye can see, ringed by mountains. Then a proliferation of large white squares and rectangles, clustered together at the intersections of three major freeways. The outsized checkerboard you are looking down upon is the heart of the Inland Empire, the largest concentration of warehouses and distribution centers on the planet. In these giant buildings, most of them one million square feet—seventeen football fields laid end-to-end—an army of low-wage workers sort and package a huge portion of the nation's consumer goods and send them on their way to the shelves of the big-box retailers where we shop. The Inland Empire, once an insignificant exurb,1 is now the pumping heart of the vascular system of the world's largest retail corporations: Home Depot, Target, and, most of all, Wal-Mart.

The Global Supply Chain

The workers who sort the goods in the warehouses of the Inland Empire—over one hundred thousand people in roughly three hundred buildings—are part of a vast supply chain that starts in Southeast Asia and extends to every town in America. Almost half of the goods we import—flat-screen TVs, dolls, garden tools, sneakers, iPods—gets put in forty-foot-long steel containers, piled on cargo ships, and sent across the ocean from seaports in China to the giant seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. From there, longshoremen put the steel boxes on trucks and trains that haul the boxes to the warehouses of the Inland Empire. [End Page 37] It is the logical place for these facilities to cluster: Los Angeles no longer has the space to accommodate the giant buildings, and the San Jacinto Mountains are a natural barrier beyond which trucks require much more fuel and time, as the mountain passes get blocked by snow while the containers must be delivered strictly on time to meet the requirements of a Just-In-Time supply chain.

The dynamic that created the cluster of giant white boxes that fill the valley east of Los Angeles—the steel container, the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and the opening of China, the digitization of commerce—is in many ways a marvel of technology and organization.2 Yet it is invisible to most Americans and ignored by people outside the industry of "goods movement," or logistics. The human beings who make it work are also largely invisible and ignored; and for them, the dynamic of the logistics industry has created conditions that are intolerable.

During the 1990s, as the current mega-conglomeration of warehouses in the Inland Empire was taking shape, hundreds of thousands of workers came to the region to look for jobs. They came from poor neighborhoods of L.A., from depressed areas of the rural Southwest, and from Mexico and Central America. They are a vital part of the richest corporations on the planet, yet their conditions are miserable and their prospects for achieving the American Dream are slim. Unlike the other workers who make the supply chain work, the seafarers and longshoremen, they were not part of the great union drives of the 1930s. They are not organized into unions, and their low wages and bad living conditions reflect that.

Who are these workers and what can they do to fight for better lives? For the past two years I have been a part of a team of labor unionists and community organizers working in the region to answer this question; following are some observations.

The Temp Grind

Life for the average warehouse worker in the Inland Empire is hard. Most warehouse workers do not have a regular job: they...

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