Worker Stories: Voices from the Frontlines, Amazon Worker Speaks on Working Women’s and Migrants Struggles in Miami

Before the sun rises over Miami, before the highways choke with traffic and the yachts bob gently in their docks, MC is already up. She moves carefully through the small two-bedroom apartment, stepping over sleeping bodies—her children, her sister’s kids, her disabled mother—trying not to wake anyone.

There are seven people in that apartment. Two bedrooms. One bathroom. No space, no quiet, no privacy. But it’s all they can afford in a city built for the rich and hostile to the poor.

MC is a pharmacy technician at Amazon Pharmacy. She used to be a delivery driver. She’s been with the company through early mornings, endless overtime, and the pressure to perform like a machine. On paper, she works 40 hours a week. In reality, it’s often 50 or 60 mandatory overtime hours.

“We don’t get to say no,” she says. If you refuse, you get penalized. You lose hours, you lose income, you risk losing the job altogether.

She’s a single mother of two—her sons seven and two years old, don’t see her much. She’s working constantly to keep them fed, clothed, ready for school. She leaves before they wake up, comes home after they’re asleep. She misses first steps, after-school stories, dinner at the table. She’s not absent by choice—she’s being stolen.

“I’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices,” she says. “Just so they can have what they need. Even then, it’s not enough.”

And that’s the sharpest truth of capitalism in Miami: even when you give everything, it gives nothing back.

Amazon is a trillion-dollar corporation. It has the resources to pay every worker a living wage, to offer safe schedules and housing stipends. But it doesn’t. It exploits working women like MC—mothers, migrants, caretakers, and cashiers—to generate obscene profit while those very workers can’t afford to live in the cities they hold together.

MC’s apartment is overcrowded because rent is unlivable. Her disabled mother isn’t working. Her sister is stretched thin. There is no safety net—only each other. The family has no choice but to pile in and survive how they can, while developers flip homes and hedge funds turn entire neighborhoods into luxury assets.

This is the violence of capitalism: MC does everything “right.” She works. She shows up. She sacrifices. But she’s still buried in exhaustion, poverty, and precarity.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We must stop treating these stories as exceptions—they are the rule.

We must stop accepting this as normal—it is engineered exploitation.

We must stop mourning alone—we must organize together.

MC’s struggle is not an isolated hardship—it’s a system functioning exactly as it was designed. And if the system is working, then the system is the problem.

She deserves better. All workers do.

We built this city.

We run its warehouses, its schools, its buses, its hospitals.

We feed it, clean it, deliver it.

We are the city.

So why can’t we live in it?

The answer is simple: we are not meant to under capitalism.

That’s why we fight. That’s why we rise. That’s why we organize. So the next generation—MC’s kids, your kids, ours—won’t have to sleep five to a room while their mother works endlessly for the billionaires.

Labor makes the city. Now it’s time we take it back.

Interview with MC by KP

KP: How many young ones do you have?

MC: I have two young children.

KP: How has it been working under the current administration?

MC: Well, I work for Amazon Pharmacy. I’m a pharmacy tech. How am I doing with this government? Its not working out. I have seen many cases of parents being separated from their family members. It makes me sad because I know that they are having problem with legal residents, that they’re not allowed to leave the country cause they’ll get arrest or deported.

KP: How many hours are you working right now?

MC: I work 40 hours. Sometimes—when its mandatory overtime—I do up to 60.

KP: What is mandatory overtime?

MC: Its when you are obligated to do the overtime, you don’t have the option to not do it.

KP: What happens if you refuse to work overtime?

MC: They take—we have hours that they give us. When we don’t wanna use our “personal time”, there’s what's called “UPT”, but if we go below 10 or 0 we get terminated.

KP: How is it like surviving in Miami?

MC: Horrible. The prices are going high—we can’t even talk about rent or food. People have to share an apartment to be able to survive.

KP: Is that your current situation?

MC: Yeah.

KP: What does it look like at home?

MC: We are sharing an apartment of two rooms with seven people.

KP: What would it take for these things to be better?

MC: By getting a new president [laughs]. Even the governor or the senators or from the Florida [state government], if the government could come back to the way it was where the rent wasn’t that high and the food wasn’t that expensive—to even survive here.

KP: You are a citizen and the majority of your family have different immigration statuses?

MC: Yes, I’m a citizen. Well in this case, my mom and my sister are legal residents and only my nephews, my children and I are citizens.

KP: Are you scared when you go to work for your family?

MC: Yes, because now they’re showing up randomly to your house to see who you have in there. This problem with the government, they’re even taking [legal] residents and even citizens.

KP: What sacrifices did you have to make to take care of your children?

MC: I don’t eat well enough. I only have time to make soup. Once I get home, I get home tired. With this traffic, it’s a complication to get home.

KP: What would you tell women in your same situation?

MC: As a single mom, it is really hard to be in this world. We’re not even allowed to be sick. If we’re sick we’re not even able to take care of our kids—especially when some dads are not even in the picture. I would tell them to be strong. You have to be strong and brave, like my son here right now.