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Amazon is an innovator: the company has invented some of the most sophisticated techniques ever seen to avoid taxation, the minimum wage, worker safety, and climate justice.
They pioneered worker misclassification, allowing them to treat their drivers as independent contractors or even subcontractors to independent contractors, even as they subjected those workers to supervision to rival the most invasive workplaces.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex
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They summoned into existence the "Mechanical Turks," among the lowest-paid pieceworkers in existence, mostly overseas, receiving pennies to backstop "AI" applications, proving that AI really stands for "absent Indians".
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
Amazon gets workers coming and going: not just denying bathroom breaks and other human necessities, nor merely wage-theft - it's also tip-theft, stealing the alms we guilty customers toss to its workers to assuage our shame.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-flex-drivers-stolen-tips.html
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But the most visible sign of Amazon labor exploitation is in its warehouse workers, a vast army of "reverse centaurs" who serve as the hands of remorseless, relentless robots. The more automated an Amazon warehouse is, the more workers it maims.
https://www.ft.com/content/087fce16-3924-4348-8390-235b435c53b2?shareType=nongift
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Amazon's incredible profitability during the lockdown was paid for with workers' lives. Its warehouses were the nexus of multiple covid outbreaks, and the company used racist smears to discredit workers who demanded basic safety precautions.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls
Amazon understands that warehouse organizing is the beginning of the end for its extraction of inhuman work for inhuman wages.
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That's why even its prized tech workers get fired for expressing solidarity with warehouse workers.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately
And it's why the project of organizing Amazon warehouse workers is so urgent. Amazon's plans for its warehouses are even more Dickensian than the current system. Take the "megacycle," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle
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It's a shift that any worker would suffer under, but it's especially hard on women workers, forcing them to leave behind their families, and to commute to work at an hour when public transit isn't running.
The megacycle isn't just a way to realize "efficiencies" (more work for less money), it's also a way to punish labor activists: it's being piloted at DCH1, the Chicago warehouse whose workers made national news by demanding safe work conditions during the lockdown.
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But Amazon's workers refuse to be intimidated. Warehouse workers continue to demand the right to organize and collectively bargain for a living wage and safe, humane working conditions.
In Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon warehouse workers are voting on union formation.
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Amazon has pulled out every stop to sabotage the union vote. They even got the city to change the timing of the traffic lights near its warehouse so that organizers couldn't use red lights to talk to workers on their way to the plant.
Statistically, you are probably an Amazon customer. So am I. They are nearly impossible to avoid.
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After all, not only has Amazon predated upon small businesses, eliminating choice - and what they didn't kill, private equity looters destroyed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/
My problem with Amazon isn't the ease of buying web hosting or compute time; it's not the convenience of having a lot of goods for sale in one place; it's not the utility of music streaming or the entertainment from TV shows.
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My problem with Amazon is its brutal labor policies, its tax evasion, its climate wreckage, its monopolistic predation, its union busting, its wage theft.
It's not like the company can't afford to end these crimes.
It made $20B in profits in 2020.
When we talk about a good Amazon, we're not talking about eliminating Amazon (though maybe we should break the company up). We're talking about shifting the disposition of that $20B, so it doesn't accrue solely to its shareholders.
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Much of that $20B is the result of exploiting workers, dodging taxes (or even getting tax *subsidies*), stealing from suppliers, externalizing the climate and other costs of its business onto the rest of the world.
We all have a stake in a fair Amazon - whether or not we're Amazon customers. The workers in Bessemer have faced an onslaught of propaganda, spying and intimidation from Amazon and its contractors, the Pinkertons (yes, the *literal* Pinkertons).
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#awu
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Many of us have recognized that the Bessemer workers deserve our solidarity. The Tech Workers Coalition, for example, has been running the #DoItWithRealPower campaign to counter Amazon's propaganda.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power
Today, we have the chance to *directly* support the workers in Bessemer. SupportAmazonWorkers.org has organized 40+ solidarity demonstrations in cities in the USA and Canada, which you can attend.
https://supportamazonworkers.org/march20/
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Amazon knows this fight matters and it doesn't just target @BAmazonUnion for propaganda. You're on the receiving end of those messages, too. That "news report" you watched about how cool an Amazon warehouse is? An ad disguised as news.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#quackspeak
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Amazon workers in Germany have already unionized. The company can certainly pay living wages and continue to operate. It's not fighting for its life - its fighting to maintain incredibly high levels of profitability, no matter what the cost to workers and the world.
eof/