Apparently Dear Leader thinks endless speeches are the key to jumpstarting a floundering economy.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will visit an Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Tuesday as part of his national jobs tour, according to the White House. As he tries to sell his economic proposals to the American public, the president will deliver a speech at the massive, 2-year-old facility to outline his “better bargain for the middle class.” A leading theme of the speech will be high-paying jobs.

An Amazon fulfillment center is a logical venue for the president to talk about job growth. To meet growing demand, the company just announced that it would beadding 5,000 new jobs at its warehouses nationally, expanding on a current workforce of 20,000. But when it comes to the topic of job quality, any genuine discussion would require some scrutiny of the president’s host.

While there are middle-class jobs to be found inside retail warehouses like Amazon’s, lawsuits and recent investigative reports have shown that there’s a good deal of low-paying and highly unstable temporary jobs, too. Like other major retailers, including Walmart, Amazon relies on temp workers inside its warehouses to keep labor costs down. Now common throughout the logistics industry, this practice has helped create a two-tiered work system inside the U.S. retail supply chain.

0 Shares