Seasonal Associate

by Heike Geissler, Kevin Vennemann (Afterword), Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Germany, Biography, German Literature, Politics, Biography Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Heike Geißler studied American culture, Geography and Politics in Dresden, Germany from 1996-1998.

From 1998-2001 she studied German, Literature and Hispanic languages in Halle, Germany.

From 2003-2007 she studied German literature and Philosophy.

Reviews

[Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it super interesting that as of this date (3/10/2019) there are only two reviews listed for this book on Amazon and both are negative. Maybe it's not surprising as this memoir makes working at an Amazon fulfillment center feel like being in a dystopian nightmare. A place where everyone would rather be somewhere else and all the little human interactions that lend grace and make life bearable are stamped out in the demand to ship more things, more quickly, to more people.

Heike Geissler is a novelist and translator who fell upon lean times and in an effort to be responsible and pay her bills takes a job during the Christmas rush at an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany. Perhaps the experience was too deadening to tell as a straightforward memoir. She chooses to use both first and second person, making the reader (you/but also her earlier self) be the person having the experience. She lends encouragement and advice to this person and it takes a little time to get used to being told a story in this way.

I sorted of faded out mid-book as a reader. This is really depressing stuff to read and think about. (Next time I order last minute Christmas gifts off Amazon the poor person stuck in a chilly, cavernous warehouse sorting through pallets and scanning items in/out for minimum wage is going to weigh heavily on my mind.) I was pulled back in towards the end as she begins to put up some resistance to the mindlessness of her work. Small actions at first, then bigger ones.

I love that she was able to find a bit of human warmth when she was handling books and that she occasionally stopped to read the backs of them. One in particular reached her at the perfect moment after being bullied by a forklift driver:

In between the workbooks, a proper book shines through. You shove the workbooks aside and unearth more proper books. At last. Your attention is caught by a book with a bald man on the cover: Naughty by Marc Chester, a hooligan telling his story. "The shocking inside story of one of the most organized and violent soccer hooligan gangs currently active in Britain, the Naughty Forty. Written by one of the gang's central figures, it reveals the network of alliances and friendships between leading hooligans across Britain, and the explicit reasons they are so feared." You don't receive the book; instead you prop it up on the desk like a family portrait. It feels like you now have a thug with a provocative glare on your side ... You stand in front of the book and say, Marc, those people over there, they're bothering me. You know I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important to me. But those people over there are really bothering me right now and I don't think they'll stop bothering me. Marc Chester's answer: "And the first thing I would like to say is: We're Stoke City, we're the Naughty Forty, and we're game as fuck. So let's have it."
Of course the book you need at any moment always exists, and sometimes you're lucky enough to find it.

Heike then, in her role as storyteller, makes you pull a book out of the box, which doesn’t really exist there on that Amazon sorting desk, but is on her bookshelf at home, called Loose Associations by Ryan Gander and shares a bit that’s important to her. (She occasionally tweaks this memoir in a meta-fictional way when it suits her.)

There’s a university in Buffalo, in New York State. The campus there was relocated twenty years ago, so the architect could completely redesign it. He built the entire site but didn’t put any paths in … he just left it as gravel. There’s very heavy snowfall in New York State in winter, and as the campus began to be used students began to navigate around the campus, leaving paths in the snow, so if there were a lot of people walking the path, it would end up very wide, and the ones that weren’t used so much were narrower. The architect then sent a helicopter up to make an aerial photograph of the campus, then plotted all these desire lines on a map and built the paths is the same positions with the same widths as the desire lines. It’s an example of perfect planning of public space.

“Desire line, you think, a trodden path, a path most wished-for. A path that comes about when people want to get from one place to another and there isn’t yet a path.”

Heike's time at the Amazon fulfillment center may have been a time of wandering an intellectual wasteland, but her efforts to capture the experience feel like the makings of a path, a navigating of lifeless territory that reveals the cost of corporate flextime employment and points towards changes that need to be made.

[Megan O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

feels bad to review this on an Amazon platform 🙃 really amazing though! In the beginning I was kind of skeptical of the narrative format being her real life account of her time as an Amazon worker but telling it as if you are the one going through her motions in second person. But Giessler's writing and it's translation were really effective in communicating the feeling of distance between human and lesser than. If you ever feel like you're losing perspective on what it's like to be a low wage worker(peon)(I can say this because I am one) please read this! One day I will have Jeff's head.

[Sylwia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Czuję się nabrana. Tytuł jest clickbaitowy. To nie jest praca reporterska o tym jak autorka zatrudniła się w Amazonie i jak pracuje się w takim miejscu. To książka o tym, jak bohaterka przeżywa pewne rozterki życiowe pracując w Amazonie, przy czym równie dobrze mogłaby pracować w zieleniaku. Nie dowiadujesz się o tej pracy wiele.
Spodziewałam się czegoś takiego, jak tu: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You'll try over and over to view it differently, but even from the start, the experience forces you to your knees and down a social stratum, and that's the way it will stay. Yes, you'll start to see strata in society. If you don't already. You'll see the strata before your eyes as clearly as geologists see the structure of the ground where they've dug a deep pit."

Heike Geissler's translated novel/essay/treatise on her experience working on short-term contact at a German Amazon fulfillment center over the holiday rush was another gem found digging around for syllabi material. I've been thinking a lot about labor and identity lately, particularly in terms of attempts to program human workers as intelligent machines without a thought for the psychological consequences of doing so (for example, the many recent pieces about the PTSD and other mental effects on Facebook's minimum-wage moderators). This book, even with its lower stakes in terms of conditions and long-term effects, had an especially striking impact. Its formal structures force the reader to re-perform the experience of alienated labor, creating split personalities of "I" and "you" and placing you in the dehumanizing experiences of the latter at Amazon. Beyond this, however, it's threaded through with interesting reflections on the impact of work conditions more broadly, describing the small resistances of not grabbing the handrail on the staircase when instructed to, or opening up a book to briefly read it instead of mindlessly log it as a product. These are small seconds stolen from the company's regime of measuring productivity by the second, and Geissler shows how the energy to perform them fades and fluctuates throughout her time living under those panoptic structures.

Particularly unforgettable was a moment only tangentially related to her time at Amazon: her mother's experience in a workplace without sick days. When taken with a cold and forced to trek out to a healthcare facility to get a doctor's note, Geissler flashes back to her desire to perform sickness for her mother, as the days she was sick as a child were the only days her mother was ever allowed to take off from work. She wonders if she's performing her illness even as she experiences the symptoms. She notices how the structures of sick days figure her recovery as a loss for her company, as something that she's stolen from them, while at the same time figuring her own illness as a gain for her mother. This struck me as the greatest alienation of all, the ways we've allowed corporations to place their own rights above those of the people who make them possible, the ways we've come to measure everything, even involuntary bodily conditions, in terms of capitalistic exchange, loss, and gain. While I was expecting an expose of horrible working conditions, Geissler shows the reader how these small, ordinary moments--present in nearly every workplace, although made more visible by the dehumanizing nature of the job itself--have the most impact on the ways you might lose yourself in work.

[aga · Rating 5 out of 5]

“something inside you dreams ready-made dreams”

this book reminded me of when i was 16, new in japan with little to no japanese, and had a hard time looking for part-time work so i ended up working at a factory for suzuki. it was my first job ever so i thought doing everything they tell me is basically ok, until i got my left pointy finger smashed by a faulty machine. i was already soaking in blood when i called for help but instead of calling an ambulance they called my broker who in turn tells me to change to my regular clothes, brings me to the nearest hospital, and instructs me to tell the doctor that the accident didn’t happen at work. it was my first ever memory of truly understanding the brutalities of the working system and made me feel how little i was in this world.

this book sparked a lot of emotions in me, nodding to every agreeable passage, imagining my 16 year old self as another disposable associate in the amazon workforce aimlessly waiting for my shift to end.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the only good book i've ever read

[Szymon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spore rozczarowanie. Forma jest fatalna (to akurat subiektywne zdanie), natomiast (i to juz chyba mniej subiektywne) treść umyka pod tysiącem nic nieznaczących obserwacji, uwag, dygresji. Wątki są rwane, niepuentowane, wrzucane nie wiadomo czego.
Nie dowiedziałem sie w sumie z książki za wiele, poza tym, że to okropna, męcząca praca, z dziwnymi zasadami, które są przez kadrę kierowniczą łamane i nic w związku z tym sie nie dzieje. Czyli w sumie nic nowego.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

first time in ages that i loathed the main character so much i alllmost couldn't finish the book

[David Partikian · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the buzz accompanying the recent English translation of Heike Geiβlers Saisonarbeit, English translation, Seasonal Associate, one would expect a book comparable to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Such is not the case, and The Jungle isn’t even a very high bar.

Ms. Geiβler whines incessantly about her depersonalized temp job at an Amazon fulfillment center in the outskirts of Leipzig during the Christmas of 2010; hard up for money as a freelance translator, she answered an ad to scan random products for the atrocious behemoth synonymous with superficial ecommerce.

As a Seattle resident, union member, and bibliophile, I am certainly no fan of Amazon. Thus, I looked forward to a savage skewering of the Bezos ethos where drones can either be human or mechanical and where private citizens are complicit in just buying everything at the lowest price regardless ramifications to small communities. However, aside from one small section emphasizing the sad anecdote of a friend who tries on clothing at a local store and then orders the items through Amazon at discount, much to the detriment of the local economy, Geiβler spends almost the entire book stoically describing the frightfully cold weather, the drafty facility, the touchy-feely male supervisor who smells of too much cheap cologne, her scanner that often doesn’t read the bar code on whatever useless product (e.g. a stuffed animal) is in front of her, and—the complaint most close to my sympathies—her ill-fitting work vest. Geiβler describes rather than bemoans; however her prose is so mind-numbingly dull and dehumanizing that in merely describing the facility, the company policies—verbatim, unfortunately for the reader—and her tasks, she is implicitly and tacitly complaining.*

Geiβler has drawn accolades from various sources for her criticism of modern labor conditions and the cheap literary devise of distancing herself from the descriptive minutiae of her tasks by substituting “you” for “I” in her narration, as if the reader wants or needs to be complicit in her crappy temp job. While she does occasionally delve into the economic implications of Amazon with deeper observations, the book is just an extended description of a bad temp job, mercifully broken up in concise chapters allowing the reader to recover some respite to recover emotional well-being. The book is a slog with deliberately laconic, soporific prose indicative of a modern dehumanized laborer or cog that is little better than a somnambulist with a scanning device. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,” but for a Western laborer with enough food in her belly.

Ray Davies’ brilliant one-line refrain from Oklahoma, USA aptly and tersely sums up Geiβler’s entire thesis on modern alienation: “All life we work and work is a bore/ If life’s for living what’s living for?”

The photographed copy was ordered on-line thru ABE, ironically a subsidiary owned by Amazon, i.e. the independent site that specializes in quality used books that Amazon just had to buy out. There is virtually no other way to procure a modern book from Germany. Oh irony! Kudos for a cover design without author name or title and, instead, just a shopping cart.

*Her complaints fell on largely deaf ears since--while reading her book--I was trapped on a ship bridge like a rat in a cage answering random nuisance alarms, all in ill-fitting work boots.

[Bart Van Overmeire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like Amazon, but unfortunately, I didn't particularly like this book either.

[Aike · Rating 5 out of 5]

beklemmend, griezelig, schrijnend, grappig, soms herkenbaar, vooral: meesterlijk geschreven. de u/ik & het samenvallen dan weer uit elkaar vallen van deze u & ik vond ik echt een hele goede zet (en dat komt van iemand die niet de grootste fan is van tweede persoon enkelvoud als verteller) & hier denk ik ook wel dat een engelse vertaling tekort zou doen omdat de u wel een andere lading eraan geeft. een aantal passages raakten me diep: het moment dat de hoofdpersoon ziek op werk komt, vraagt om elders (uit de tocht) te werken en haar collega ziek aantrof, het moment dat ze verliefd wordt op een heftruckchauffeur, wanneer ze vertelt over de opluchting van haar moeder als ze ziek was omdat haar moeder dan niet naar werk hoeft, hoe opgelucht ze is als ze boeken mag 'receiven', wanneer ze reflecteert op hoe ze het verstrijken van de seizoenen opmerkt nu ze dagelijks naar werk moet. andere stukken vond ik dan weer grappig: vooral haar interacties met collega's & hoe ze haar trainingdag ervaart blijkbaar.
ik ga in elk geval nog meer twee keer nadenken voordat ik iets online bestel.

(& ook het bewijs dat biebabonnement mijn beste beslissing van het jaar was want ik heb dit boek op de gele kleur en achterflap meegenomen zonder dat ik er verder meer over wist.)

[Letterrausch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich würde dieses Buch als "literarisches Sachbuch" bezeichnen. Die Autorin, die hier von ihrer Erfahrung als Saisonkraft im Amazon-Logistikzentrum berichtet, ist eigentlich Schriftstellerin und Übersetzerin und das merkt man. Schon die Erzählhaltung ist eine Aufforderung ans Publikum: Man wird mit höflichem Sie angesprochen und soll sich in die Rolle von Heike Geißler hineinversetzen. Das heißt, ich bin für die Zeit der Lektüre Heike Geißler und Heike Geißler erklärt mir gleichzeitig, was mir gerade widerfährt. Auf solche Kniffe muss man auch erstmal kommen ... Ich konnte leider trotzdem nicht für mich entscheiden, ob ich das extrem cool oder letztlich doch etwas anstrengend finde.

Und dann geht es natürlich darum, wie schwachsinnig oftmals Erwerbsarbeit ist. Klar kann man sich einreden, dass es hier nur um Amazon ginge. Doch wer jemals angestellt war, wird vieles wiedererkennen, wenigstens in Abstufungen. Denn Amazon hat den Kapitalismus (und auch die Marktwirtschaft) nicht erfunden, sie treiben ihn höchstens auf die Spitze. Ich jedenfalls habe oft geschmunzelt und fand immer, dass Heike Geißler messerscharf beobachtet und interessante Schlüsse zieht. Unbedingt eine lohnende Lektüre!

[Anton Relin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I highly recommend reading this book, I found myself having difficulty finishing it. Perhaps it is because Geissler really does make you feel like you are working away at Amazon. The point of view and voice are unique and refreshing, a good read

[Kasia M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Każdej z nas czasem nie chce się wstać na ósmą.

[CB_Read · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so glad to have finally read this book after so long thinking about its premise: a writer who is out of work and in need of quick cash decides to work as a seasonal associate at an Amazon warehouse. I haven't worked at Amazon, but this situation is very relatable to me, and I imagine to many other people who long to support themselves via their creative output. My hope was that the author would write about her experience in this much-discussed work environment and turn her everyday experience into revealing insights on the pressure, anxiety, and malaise that impacts many laborers at this enormous international company.

This was indeed the novel I was expecting, and I'm grateful for the surprise that the author experimented with its form. The narrator speaks to the reader mostly in second person, compelling you to relive her time at the Amazon warehouse in a perfected way, in a way that she would have preferred herself to have acted in the moment. Another notable example is that the novel's English translator worked with the author to add her own additions to the story, making this in some sense a collaborative novel.

But as much as I welcome the story's innovations, I couldn't help being bothered by two aspects of it. The first, which the author/narrator repeatedly recognizes, is that she knows her time in poverty is temporary. She has a stack of unwritten invoices on her desk at home that she cannot will herself to write, and so she gets this job with a steady paycheck instead. I can't imagine that this is the situation for most of the other laborers in the warehouse; there is an air of privilege to the narrator's approach, but this can be forgiven if the narrator took the time to try and sympathize with her coworkers. This is not the case, as she resents and actively argues with nearly all of her colleagues. There is another woman, Melly, who for a week was the narrator's partner in crime and complaint. But when she disappears into the warehouse, the shy and bitter narrator returns.

The second aspect is that while the portrait of work life within an Amazon warehouse is bleak and uninteresting, so too is reading about it. The narrative can be particularly harsh because, as the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader, no matter who you are you are now living day-to-day as a woman, and that brings on its own pressure and harshness.

This novel satisfied my expectations, but it also reminded me that the content of what I was expecting--on life in an Amazon warehouse, the pains and anxieties of hard labor and constant supervision, and insights on contemporary work and labor-- are all pretty unpleasant. The novel is very good for the story it is telling. It's mostly a shame that this story is not a good one.

[Xavier Roelens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik ben aan het boek begonnen in het vooruitzicht meegesleurd te worden in de ervaring van te werken in een distributiecentrum van Amazon, maar interessant genoeg slaagt het boek er niet in om de gejaagde eentonigheid over te brengen. De auteur spreekt er wel over, vernoemt die ontmenselijking, maar ze zijn vooral de desondankse kiertjes van menselijkheid die ze vertelt: de vriendelijkheid van de opleider, de verliefdheid op een heftruckchauffeur, de kleine gesprekjes met collega's, de irritaties met anderen. De vertelwijze in de u-vorm is uitdagend: ze nodigt de lezer voortdurend aan om in haar plaats naar Amazon te gaan, laat de lezer ook soms zaken doen die de ik niet durfde. Ze legt ergens de dubbele moraal van het bedrijf bloot: een enthousiaste vriendelijkheid-onder-gelijken die de hiërarchische dwangmatigheid buiten beeld moet houden. Tegelijk is de slechtheid van Amazon een axioma waarvan de auteur het niet nodig vindt om die eerst te gaan bewijzen. En daardoor glijdt het geheel toch een beetje van me af.

[Luna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredibly dull book that felt self-involved and dragged on for way too long.

[Niina · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5

[Marit Frydenlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessant om moderne arbeidsliv i storkapitalistiske Amazon. Assosisasjoner til Marx teorier om fremmedgjøring. Note to self: unngå å handle på Amazon og andre svære selskaper som behandler ansatte som dritt og som utkonkurrerer alt med sjel og sjarm. Takknemlig for at jeg selv har en meningsfylt jobb! Noe ambivalent til andrepersonsforteller.

[Foks · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Das heutige Leistungssubjekt gleicht dem Hegelschen Knecht bis auf den Umstand, dass es nicht für den Herrn arbeitet, sondern sich selbst freiwillig ausbeutet. Als Unternehmer seiner selbst ist es Herr und Knecht zugleich“

Amazon gehört abgeschafft! Lohnarbeit als solches hinterfragt!

Sehr guter Stil, in seiner Schreibweise ganz eigenes Buch & lohnenswert, auch wenn du nicht weißt wie beschissen Saisonarbeit in der Lageristik ist.

[Beau Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Vlaamse vertaling van Hannelore Roth en de schrijfstijl maakten dit boek nieuw voor mij. Ik vond het vernieuwend om het gehele boek vanuit de jij-vorm te lezen.

Het boek is een bijzondere combinatie van cynisme, realisme en humorisme. Ik werd op sommige momenten in het boek enorm geconfronteerd met mijn eigen werk en ik kan het ook goed begrijpen dat Heike haar gedachtegangen op papier wilde zetten.

De boekverkoopster in Gent vertelde mij dat het om een ‘leuk’ boek ging, maar het is eerder interessant, maatschappij-kritisch en humoristisch.

[Natalia · Rating 3 out of 5]

*read for uni: Politics of the Contemporary

A rather privileged and whiny account that made me roll my eyes at some of the complaints the writer had and wonder why she didn't elaborate on the more serious problems of working for a global company's warehouse. Nicely written, though.

[jasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

read it on my Kindle. B+ for tragic metafiction

[Roe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is all this a matter of life and death? I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point, I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives. Or the fatal, that which kills us. To be precise: compared to that which kills us, death is nothing but an innocent waif. Or: death, compared to that which kills us, is a gentleman with good manners and a shy look in his eye. From now on, that which kills us is your constant companion; that much I can say. But first of all we’ll set out, because you have a job interview.

I’ve never worked at an Amazon warehouse, nor do I plan to; the protagonist didn’t plan to either. I have been working in sales for 50+ hours a week over the last two months, so I think I can relate.

The protagonist, unable to live off of freelance writing, finds work as a "seasonal associate" at an Amazon warehouse. Throughout her humiliating and grueling experiences there she internalizes the mechanisms of post-capitalist labor, one of them being alienation.

And Geissler drapes you in the alienation—particularly the dissociative aspects of work. The boredom that makes you wanna crawl out of your own skin and shuffle into bed. The desperate time neatly unaccounted for by your employer—the time right before you leave your own house and already mourn the desk you’re still standing next to. The out of body experiences you get doing the same, same, same, same hundreds of times.

Seasonal Associate is a largely self-reflexive novel and Geissler uses both first and second-person narration. Towards the beginning of the book, the narrator divides herself into two: I and you. I is her present self, the self who already has gone through her stint at Amazon; you is the former self, the self that has yet to work at Amazon and also the self that she explicitly invites you the reader to inhabit. This self-reflexive acknowledgement of the reader, or “breaking the fourth wall,” has been used to emphasize the distance between audience and author, often for comedic effect, but Geissler’s use of it carves out a uniquely intimate space between reader and narrator. Geissler blurs the boundary of you and invites us readers into her own experiences while also maintaining that she writes to herself.

Geissler’s division of self also illustrates the dissociation and depersonalization brought about by labor under capitalism. Scattered throughout the novel, this split narrator argues with herself about her reasons for working there, and the narrator sprinkles quotes and references to academic authors and theorists. All of this gave me the vocabulary to describe my own experiences while working.

If you want my example: I have a bubbly sales pitch that I’ve recited, re-articulated, reconfigured upwards of 800 times—words, smiles and nods chiseled down into the bones that aren’t really my own while I’m working. Because of this I can actually maintain fully separate, uninterrupted trains of thought while having a full-on conversation with a living, breathing person. And sometimes I get this uncanny feeling like I’m outside of my body looking at myself performing actions that aren’t mine. It’s a moment of self-awareness that’s disconcerting—there’s this panic that I’m actually performing a conversation. Sometimes it comes up as: Oh wow, I’m having this conversation and I don’t have to think about what I’m saying, so weird. And sometimes it’s a startled: Wait, how am I having a conversation that I’m not thinking about and the other person understands exactly what I’m saying? And then panicking: Wait, if I’m not thinking right now how do I know that I won’t mess up? The panic never quite boils over: I know I’m not going to slip up or anything because I’ve had the same conversation again, again and again, but that awareness is always simmering, festering.

From the afterword by Kevin Vennemann: “In capitalism, [Marx] notes, any encounter with ourselves outside ourselves is more likely due to our profound sense of alienation, one of the most pernicious outgrowths of the bourgeoisie glooming on to the means of production.”

Heike Geissler writes a perfect meditation on labor and self in the 21st century that I’m sure I’ll return to. I could say so much more, but it’d have to be in some sort of essay.

[Matt Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experimental look at the current state of work, Seasonal Associate is a fascinating account of what 21st century employment is, and it’s not pretty.

Part memoir/part second person narrative, the book documents Geissler’s time working as a temp at an Amazon Warehouse during Christmas. She does everything she can to put us in her position, saying “You” and adding bits of essential personality (“you prefer dealing with people who are what they do”) that make us live through the problems, as opposed to just telling us about them. A lot of those techniques annoyed me at first. Continuous explanations of motivation, second person narratives in general, the loose structure of what is happening to who. But gradually it became clear (and was confirmed in the book’s afterward) that what Geissler wants to show us is that work destroys everything that makes us human. In short, it destroys the soul.

What Amazon puts Geissler through is small when looked at individually, but collected together, you can see the effects. Her story and the one she places us in, eventually crash into each other getting more hectic and confusing. Suddenly you aren’t sure who you are, and her point is made.

Work, yes, can be soul crushing. But it also creates another you. It takes away everything that makes you a person and leaves in its place a worker who exists only to work. When you go home, you are another person there. If, like me, you have two jobs, you’re 3 people total. A job is like making a Horcrux: it splits your soul apart, and leaves a piece behind. You’re never fully human until you quit or are lucky to find something that you enjoy enough to not call work.

Geissler finds solace in books, eventually getting crates to check for quality. But eventually even that gets taken away because she takes too long looking at product rather than just pretending she did. It’s a quality check in name only. A lot of moments like this demonstrate the loss of language. Like in 1984, they take language and make it pointless, only adding to the soul crushing aspect. For a company that was built on selling books, it’s almost ironic if it wasn’t so depressing.

By the end, Giessler leaves early without notice, but is given a positive review. And is even asked to come back in a letter that finally uses her name again. She has regained her humanity. But she mentions (this was back in 2010) that soon those jobs will be automated. And in 2019, a lot of them already have.

The book goes beyond just Amazon, and explains (despite some lost in translation bits) that we are in the middle of an existential dilemma involving work. If our jobs are so easy a robot can do it, and eventually we are replaced by a robot, then what do we do? If work is inherently pointless and unnecessary, then why are we doing it to begin with? We’ve become the “Seasonal Associate,” just waiting for our jobs to end or be replaced by a machine. And we are not prepared to deal with the consequences.

[Nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

haben sie schon einmal bei amazon gearbeitet? falls nicht, empfehle ich "saisonarbeit" als neoliberal-linke lektüre, über das arbeiten bei einem global-agierenden riesen warenhaus aus der perspektive einer schriftstellerin aus leipzig.

[Georg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es ist ein Buch, welches jeder lesen sollte. Es ist ein ehrliches Buch, Heike Geissler gelingt es in genauer Sprache ihre Gedanken offenzulegen über ihre Saisonarbeit bei Amazon. Es ist aber mehr, es nimmt einen langen Anlauf und reüssiert in einer Art Kapitalismuskritiker oder vielleicht doch eher Gesellschaftskritik, Kritik an der Menschlichkeit, an jedem von uns?
Es ist kein schönes Buch, obwohl es in feiner Sprache erzählt. Das Buch sollte genau gelesen werden, es regt zum Denken an. Warum ist es kein schönes Buch: es verbreitet eine gewisse Melancholie, fast schon Depression, fast so etwas wir Resignation. Vielleicht wird dieses Gefühl verstärkt durch den Umstand, dass ich es während der Pandemie gelesen habe.
Wie bei kaum einem anderen Buch, welches in letzter Zeit gelesen habe, widerspreche ich der Autorin an vielen Stellen. Es provoziert mich und ich baue Gegenpositionen auf. Wünschte mir, mit der Autorin diskutieren zu können, mich auseinandersetzen zu können.
Ist das nicht toll: ein kleines Büchlein, eine Schatzkästchen voller Gedanken, in schöner Sprache geschrieben und dennoch nicht schön, aber provozierend und Diskurs erzwingend.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface, Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler (and translated from its original German by Katy Derbyshire) is a memoir about her time working at an Amazon warehouse in Eastern Germany. However, it’s dream-like quality and her use of the second person read more like a fictional narrative about the monotonous nature of capitalism. Her writing style (as it was translated) had a poetic simplicity that enhanced the nature of the work and stark environments she inhabited.

Her study of human behavior, and specifically how we are (or are NOT) defined by our work, were the most interesting parts of the novel. At first, she goes out of her way to repeatedly justify her decision to work at Amazon to the reader. She often views her interactions and laborious tasks as though she were in the audience of experimental theater, rather than an expendable employee. In an extremely limiting description, I would describe this book as ‘what if Sally Rooney had written the film Nomadland.’

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to pretend I am the narrator of Heike Gessler's Seasonal Associate at work. It was a strangely tripled reading experience - the narrator pulls the reader into the narrative, addresses you as if you are the one working her warehouse job. And so you are working while you read, but you are also not. Meanwhile, I often read this on breaks at my similarly low wage menial job, as an escape, but also as a pulling in, like quicksand. This book affirmed many of my complaints, which I think no longer become complaints when they are shared. I was looking for something exactly like this, and I'm glad it exists. I wish there was some more on how Gessler managed to write this while working. I want to know how writers find the time while working multiple jobs like this that leave you bone-tired at the end of the day, waking up early to write, writing on a long commute, during breaks, on pieces of torn up napkin or gift bags turned inside out, "stealing" time.

[Aarav Balsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read that showcases the alienation of a temporary Amazon FC (fulfillment center) worker. The book can be described as a summary of experiences rather than one cohesive narrative.

Con: it's a very disjointed stream-of-consciousness book. You won't have much fun if you're expecting a linear accounting of all the worker's woes at an Amazon FC. But I think this was a very human rendition of the author's experience, so I'm grateful for it.

Medium-length; finished in 2 days. Not super easy to read (stream-of-consciousness), but well-written.

Thanks to my good friend Lex for recommending this to me.