Seasonal Associate

How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center.

No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

“The recent wave of uprisings at Amazon fulfillment centers across Europe make this book even more timely than when it first appeared. But the reasons to read it will last well beyond this news cycle....Buy it — just not You Know Where.” Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love

“As Amazon, and corporations like it, continue to eat the world, this book pulls back the curtain and gives life to all our accursed questions and reflections about how things work (and don't work) behind the scenes. Truly a book for our age.” Jacob Wren, author of Authenticity Is a Feeling and Polyamorous Love Song

“In its broadest sense, it is a meditation on the psychological impact of precarious modern work, of how it can settle inside your bones and hollow out the things that make you human.” Ozy

“...Geissler is exploring questions of labor and identity in the twenty-first century and the ways in which work does and does not define us. If this book was simply a chronicle of her time working at Amazon, it would be compelling enough — but the narrative risks she takes pay off, making it so much more.” Words Without Borders