Geissler’s aim is to communicate that beneath this abstraction, however, laborers are individuals. In that sense, Seasonal Associate belongs to the long literary tradition of social-problem novels, which includes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—all of which attempt to reveal, in their careful, humanizing treatment of character, fully realized protagonists caught within stultifying and impersonal industrial mechanisms. In a contemporary case like Geissler’s, this kind of project is no less urgent.
To my knowledge, Geissler’s book is the first to present Amazon’s products as they appear in real time to the worker. Reading her lists made me nauseous, the way staring at a spinning compass needle might. These items do not relate to one another in any discernible way. There is no organizing consciousness. There is only an algorithm ... Like Seasonal Associate, Down and Out in Paris and London describes a specific warren of capitalism—Orwell’s 'Hotel X' is Geissler’s Amazon warehouse—and also attends closely to the humiliations of being poor. Geissler’s envy at seeing her friend’s book on her pallet correlates to Orwell’s shame at seeing a prosperous friend approaching on the street in Paris. (He hides in a café.) But Geissler’s challenge is different than Orwell’s, because her material is flatter ... To treat the Leipzig warehouse with the warmth and looseness of Orwell would be absurd; Amazon shears those shopworn tropes off the surface of reality, leaving only a fluorescent-lit Hades. The shades get a few minutes to tell their stories, then the forklift returns.
Alienation is the chief theme in Heike Geissler’s 2014 book Seasonal Associate, published in the U.S. for the first time this December ... Embedded into the very narrative structure of Seasonal Associate is Geissler’s awareness that the laborer under capitalism, bereft of control, splits into multiple selves who are alienated from each other. Who is the 'I' who works for Amazon, and why is she so quiet? Geissler presses down hard on the identity changes that take place inside the worker who does not see herself in her work, then sublimates that analysis into the texture of her account. This literary-political hyperawareness might sound intrusive or unhelpfully cerebral, but it actually reads as consolation ... In Seasonal Associate, Geissler finds the absolute limit of writing about labor, at the very moment that history seems to have hit the same point. The 'you' of Seasonal Associate is also, of course, the reader: This book is required reading for any consumer with a conscience. You won’t leave it without taking action.
Chillingly effective, not least for its accumulation of details, which seem both aggressively banal and freighted with an excess of symbolic meaning ... The ubiquitous linguistic debasement and corporate doublespeak is made strange and new again, the small humiliations and injustices pile up along with their psychological and social consequences.
...a portrait of self-estrangement, instability, and loneliness on the modern-day assembly line ... The focus on this tension—the clash between a worker’s individuality and the brute facts of life in the warehouse—is what drives the book. While several journalists have gone undercover at the e-commerce giant’s warehouses to expose its labor practices, Geissler’s account is about a person just trying to make ends meet. Seasonal Associate is also far more literary in style, as she turns to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Emil Cioran, and Mónica de la Torre to make sense of the tedium ... As with the other accounts, Geissler exposes many of the horrors of the job, but what her book reveals, above all else, is how working in a place like Amazon erodes one’s sense of self ... Given Amazon’s half-million employees worldwide, and with no signs of its growth slowing down ... We need all the material we can get to fight back. Geissler offers ammunition—and literature, too.
A compelling meditation on the psychological and physical harm of working for a large corporation in a society driven by neoliberal economic goals ... Geissler’s writing is so vivid that the reader is as likely to put herself in the place of the 'you' as she is to contemplate what is happening to the author ... Whether this challenge leads to resignation or ethical deliberation is up to the reader. Merely by issuing the challenge, Geissler does something her employer would never think of doing: she gives you back your agency.
It’s a blend of reportage and memoir, embellished with novelistic frills: the narrative voice alternates between first and second person, and is prone to introspective digressions. This diaristic mode of writing enables Geissler to move beyond journalese and into more subjective terrain, exploring the feelings of powerlessness and despair ... The result is a bleak meditation on 21st-century drudgery ... Seasonal Associate is told in a weary monotone, aptly evocative of the stultified torpor it describes ... Her portrayal of zoned-out apathy is perhaps a little too convincing: there is a listlessness about the prose. Relief—for author and reader alike—comes in intermittent moments of sardonic spikiness, as Geissler finds solace in gallows humor and flights of fancy.
