When Amazon replaces its front page with a letter from Jeff Bezos, something’s up, like a new Kindle or a new service like Prime. Today, it’s a long letter touting the awesomeness of working in an Amazon warehouse, and how Amazon is starting a new scholarship program. Bezos repeats the claim that working at an Amazon warehouse is safer than working traditional retail, which has been debunked by media reports that Amazon’s contractors discouraged workers from reporting injuries.
Amazon’s also been making news with the air conditioners they’ve bought for warehouses. I thought for once a research analyst got it right:
“I would like to think there was an element of humanity to the decision but there’s nothing in Amazon’s history or in Jeff Bezos’ public persona that would lead me to think that was the driver of the decision. … Rarely has Amazon made any business decisions that didn’t affect the bottom line.”
This his how it’s going to be in a post-union world. When the working conditions are so bad that ambulances have to be lined up outside the plant to deal with the injuries, the corporation may decide to change things if enough of their customers make some noise.
gene108
I guess customers are the new union thugs…
Narcissus
That sounds like just the way the oligarchy wants it, to me.
More like Mission Accomplished.
c u n d gulag
“This his how it’s going to be in a post-union world. When the working conditions are so bad that ambulances have to be lined up outside the plant to deal with the injuries, the corporation may decide to change things if enough of their customers make some noise.”
What noise will there be if their customers DON’T know?
What if the MSM doesn’t notice?
Or is paid NOT to notice?
Then, employees can drop like flies, and no one outside of friends and family members will know.
And, if they decide to go to the MSM, they might be told, “Well, that’s the price of doing business, the company told us – to keep prices cheap for YOU. YOUR (son, daughter, sister, brother, friend, etc) didn’t have to work there. He/she could have worked somewhere else if they thought the conditions sucked.”
NonyNony
Why should they? It’s not like their customers know anyone who works in an Amazon warehouse.
WereBear
I did send an email to complain about the warehouses. So they are getting a/c? Nice. At last.
Also, I recently bought a pair of trekking poles… from a local outfitters. Yes, I paid more. Are they the same ones I saw on Amazon? I don’t really know.
If I bought them from Wal-Mart, I know they would be lower quality. Is the same happening at Amazon? I don’t know.
Under the circumstances, I decided to be a good liberal about it. And it felt good.
JPL
@NonyNony: Most customers want what they want and they want it now.
Even if they knew, some would not care.
JPL
@NonyNony: Most customers want what they want and they want it now.
Even if they knew, some would not care.
ArchTeryx
Yep. And once the cameras leave, those air conditioners will be turned off, and kept turned off.
My fiancee had to work in Macy’s in Wilmington, DE for a short time. They also don’t believe in air conditioning, even in 100+ degree heat. That the customers are driven out of the resulting oven is of no concern to them. Punishing the employees is paramount.
A business whose sole purpose is sadism. And it seems to be increasingly the norm in retail America.
PeakVT
Amazon began paying to have ambulances stationed in its parking lot on hot days.
I wonder went through the mind of the mid-level asshole who made the call to the ambulance service on those days. Mostly fear of being fired, I suppose.
Ash Can
The fact that there’s a front-page letter at all tells you everything you need to know. There shouldn’t have to be any such front-page letter at all.
MattF
@Ash Can: Right. The message is “This is a job that will suck so badly that we have to sell it as though someone actually wants it.”
smintheus
How widely were the horrific warehouse conditions reported in the media? The only report I’ve seen was in my local paper in PA on a warehouse a few miles away.
eric
The SINGLE greatest tool in the worker’s arsenal is still a dream, but is a dream closer to reality….the de-coupling of health insurance and employment. If, and by the glory of almighty yahweh i hope it is so, the health care exchanges get up and running, people will no longer feel compelled to stay someplace simply because the economics of health care demand it. If you give people more mobility, then there is a greater potential (by no means is it a guarantee) that people can leave these hell holes. In a down economy and in a depressed locale it is still going to be difficult. That is my biggest “hope” and I think the biggest boon of ACA.
Judge Crater
Our regression back to 19th century norms really is astounding. No facet of American life has escaped the “free market” luddites and privatization – government is not the solution, it’s the problem – ideologues who want to impose a regulation-free nirvana on the U.S.
We’re going third world, and fast. A century ago Americans worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, in fields and factories to survive. The social constructs of the the Progressive era and the New Deal are now being demolished in the name of economic freedom and the fear of “Socialism”.
If you’re under 30 years of age, pray that you make it into the 10 or 12 percent of the professional and managerial class (or the 1 percent). The future for the bottom 80 or 90 percent of Americans is bleak.
amk
cnn – all wins of penn state from 1998 to 2011 are gone.
deep
The planet is overpopulated anyway. So what if a few workers die, just dump their bodies outside the front entrance and keep working! Gotta keep the one percent’s bottom line going.
amk
AP
$60 million fine, loss of all Joe #Paterno wins from 1998-2011, 4-year bowl ban, loss of 20 scholarships per year over four years.
NonyNony
@JPL:
I’d even move that “some” to “most”. Most people don’t care about the working conditions of the workers who grow their food, manufacture their goods, or stock the shelves.
If it’s visible and they interact with it as a part of their community they get uncomfortable, but if they just “know” it because they saw it in a documentary or a news report or read it in an article in the NYT, then they’re a few steps removed from it and it doesn’t connect.
If you know some people who work on the farm, or in the mine, or in the warehouse – if they live in your community and your kids go to school with them – then it becomes hard to ignore stories about awful working conditions. But Amazon warehouses in rural Kentucky might as well be in China for as much as it impacts the customer base of Amazon.
Gin & Tonic
@amk: The word of the day is “retroactively”.
Seriously, what the fuck does this even mean? They won some football game. 10 years later the NCAA says no, they didn’t. Who the fuck cares? The game is over. Everybody who cares knows who won.
rlrr
@Gin & Tonic:
Retroactively – It’s the Romney solution…
eric
@Gin & Tonic: who cares? the family of paterno and the die hard penn state folks who still defend paterno. this was a massive eff u to those self serving folks living in a hurtful and diseased denial. I like this part the best because now there is nothing of paterno’s legacy to revere in the record books. look to whom this was directed to see its import.
eric
@Gin & Tonic: who cares? the family of paterno and the die hard penn state folks who still defend paterno. this was a massive eff u to those self serving folks living in a hurtful and diseased denial. I like this part the best because now there is nothing of paterno’s legacy to revere in the record books. look to whom this was directed to see its import.
Cassidy
@Gin & Tonic: It takes Paterno out of the record books.
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic: I think the idea is to punish the memory of Joe Paterno; a big part of his legend is the accumulated number of victories that he racked up, and this lops a large swath off that number.
Mainly symbolic, of course.
Maude
@ArchTeryx:
Most corporate retail is abusive in one way or the other to workers.
It’s now a big deal to speed up everything at the check out. Not only does the cashier get nervous, the customers get flustered.
Time to replace these large companies.
Michael57
And we see no connection from these appalling stories to the way Balloon Juice, TPM, Kos, BoingBoing, and every other lefty site link to Amazon exclusively? “Support our site, shop with these evil bastards.” We are supporting bad corporate behavior, my friends. It’s not just the working conditions. It’s the refusal to collect sales tax. It’s predatory pricing, it’s monopolistic behavior. It’s a million other reasons.
There are other links to make when books come up.
Full disclosure, I own a bookstore. We pay our taxes. And I don’t need to have ambulances parked outside. Although those paper cuts are murder.
NonyNony
@dmsilev:
Because somehow “he let a child rapist run wild for a decade” is less punishing to his memory than “he let a child rapist run wild for a decade and so the NCAA decided to retroactively take away all of his football teams wins”? I suppose in the minds of some sports fans that may be the case, but that’s kind of a twisted attitude. His memory is already in the shitter for anyone who has a working conscience and it isn’t like he’s still alive to give a damn about it or learn from what he did.
Culture of Truth
What doesn’t kill you makes stronger
aimai
@NonyNony:
I disagree, NonyNony, that the sanction is meaningless. Because I don’t think people’s minds and memories work that way. Even a few days ago you were still hearing people defending Paterno (and by extension other authority figures in their lives) because “he didn’t really know” and he “didn’t really interfere.” That started to shift when the Freeh report was more widely disseminated but that didn’t crack the shell of a lot of people’s thinking because the report wasn’t hitting them on a symbolic level.
I think that symbols of the authority like the statue and the winning games matter in that people have a hard time reconciling a changed status with the old visual and social cues.
In ten years without the statue and without the “wins” on the books a new geneartion will grow up who are able to see the child abuse scandal clearly, without the fog of “but he was a god like local figure.” All the “good works” associated with the Paterno (and Sandusky) name should be sandblasted and salted because those were all really in the service of child rape–like the character from Rudigore who commits his evil deed every day and then tries to make it right by doing one hihgly public good act.
aimai
eric
@aimai: as i stated upstream, i agree. but i will also add that the punishment is fitting in the sense that Paterno did what he did to “protect” his reputation and legacy and now his acts are the very vehicle of his own destruction. for someone that cared most about people’s perceptions of his godlike status, this is bold stroke — and i like it.
Culture of Truth
Removing the statute, the NCAA sanctions… it’s all too little, too late, but that doesn’t make them entirely meaningless, either. Symbolic actions still mean something and now the whole university has taken another hit, just to remind them how awful what happened really was.
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony:
It’s not even a matter of caring. It never, ever crosses their minds. I don’t think about it in that sense at all. I take the existence of that bag of Doritos for granted. The entire process of producing it never bothers my pretty little head. It’s not part of my life. We are so atomized as humans, we’re disconnected from so many things as a defense mechanism. If we think about all that, we’re overwhelmed with the information, regardless of the nature of it.
All we can do is hope that SOMEONE is attending to it. No one buying some crap at Wal-Mart thinks that it might have been put together by what amounts to slave labor in China.
mellowjohn
perhaps the cost of stand-by ambulances outstripped the cost of a/c.
united we bargain. divided we beg.
aimai
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, this is something I said to my (highly conservative) SIL when I saw the “I love shopping at wal mart” sign in her house. I said “you wouldn’t steal from someone would you? If you saw money in their wallet, or food on their plate, you wouldn’t take it, would you? Even if no one knew it was you and you could do it easily. So why would you give money to the wal mart family when they are essentially doing that to workers all around the world?”
John Weiss
@Culture of Truth: Oh, baloney! What doesn’t kill you mostly makes you angry.
Davis X. Machina
@mellowjohn:
There’s worse than begging.
We’ll be making real progress when we no longer hear ‘Well, they’re working, aren’t they?” from other working folks.
If I were in Congress, I’d put a bill in the hopper changing the Great Seal to feature a bucket of crabs instead of the bald eagle on our passports and currency.
I hate symbolic legislation, but hey, this is honest symbolic legislation.
liberal
@Michael57:
Actually, AFAICT Amazon and Wal-Mart also engage in a lot of monopsonistic behavior also.
liberal
@Maude:
AFAICT, the stats don’t support the idea that small businesses treat their workers wonderfully.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
They do it to their suppliers. WalMart has, though it’s predatory purchasing process, destroyed long established companies who were basically told that unless you sell it to us at this price, we won’t buy it. The company is up against the wall…if it sells to WalMart at WalMart’s price, it will lose money on the deal…unless they fuck over THEIR employees and suppliers the way WalMart does.
Some outfits, who don’t see money alone as the reason they exist, were destroyed by WalMart.
NonyNony
@aimai:
What did she say in response?
My conservative brother would remark that they’re not “stealing” they’re paying “fair market value” for the work being performed in China and that that people can live on a lot less in China than in the US so paying them less is completely justified. And if China decides to implement a minimum wage or allow their workers to unionize? Well then those businesses can just move to Africa or somewhere else to manufacture his cheap crap.
Of course he works in management. For a company that has been moving their production facilities into China. So he can justify a whole lotta things when he puts his mind to it.
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony:
“Fair market value” is a wonderful euphemism for “theft”.
Cassidy
@NonyNony: Let us know what his new song is when they finally outsource management.
Davis X. Machina
@Villago Delenda Est:
35 years ago I worked for a place who bought a lot of french fries from a company that annually turned down a request to bid for the contract to supply local McDonalds. It was well known then that if you landed the contract, you got all the business you could handle, and would hire more trucks, people, etc. to handle it, at which point McDonald’s would start to ratchet down their price, knowing you were on the hook for the expansion.
I think they’re out of business….
leo from Chicago
Following in the fine tradition of WalMart, next Amazon will be announcing something along the lines of:
“Wal-Mart to Offer Its Workers a College Program”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04walmart.html
Barry
As I write this there are Amazon ads on this page. What is the point of this post if this site is going to support Amazon? Full disclosure, I buy my bargain books at B&N and full price books at Indys. I only buy maybe one text book every other semester at Amazon because I’m not wealthy enough to turn down a $100 discount on a $200+ plus book.
mechwarrior online
@liberal:
Small business can be just as much of a mess. It’s much like government is. Small business can be screwed up and hilariously malicious, but it’s limited to key stone cops sort of antics. Corporate business on the other hand affects so many people that the abuses show.
And most people don’t care about this sort of thing. The reason is simple, the people being abused are below the consumer on the social food chain, often in another state, and it brings the price of goods down. Do you think some NYC hipster gives a fuck that his ipad was built by slave labor and shipped to him from a warehouse hell hole? Nope, not at all. And certainly not enough to pay a bit more for it to help some redneck box packer in Texas or some poor Chinese woman. He’ll he’s buying from Amazon also because “no taxes” is a bonus there and probably upset about his college bills and lack of service.
The best way to sum up American consumers is “fuck you I got mine, now live a little worse so I can buy a little more because fuck you”.
batgirl
@Michael57: Really good point. BJ and other websites can become an affiliate for independent bookstores through IndieBound. See this link: http://www.indiebound.org/spread-word
The Moar You Know
@Michael57: Everyone else on the fucking thread wants to talk about Penn State, it seems. Your truth is a bit inconvenient.
I find Amazon’s employee treatment to be appalling and I do not shop with them if there are any alternatives.
NonyNony
@mechwarrior online:
“Below the consumer on the social food chain” isn’t a requirement. If it were, Wal*Mart would have gone out of business a long time ago.
ETA:
This, on the other hand, is completely right. And since Americans now see themselves as consumers rather than as citizens, it also explains a helluva lot about our politics.
The Moar You Know
@NonyNony: Prolly last post of my morning but can’t let this go unaddressed. I used to do business in China, last time I went was 1997. Here’s the funny thing about China; nothing is cheaper there. A Coke is a buck here, it’s a buck in Shanghai and a buck 500 miles inland. Same with anything else.
So it’s not that the Chinese worker is living on $2 a day and that’s some kind of magic equivalent to $2,000/day there – they’re simply living on $2 a day the same way you or I would here.
How would you be doing if you were making $2/day?
Davis X. Machina
@The Moar You Know:
You’d never know — know how I’m doing, or even that I’m out here.
Because wireless costs money, and a 14-hour workday doesn’t leave much time for trips to the library to post.
And that’s the genius of it.
Brachiator
@mechwarrior online:
I’m curious. Where was the laptop or desktop you’re using manufactured and assembled? And do you really live in a special trade zone free of Chinese made products?
The last time I checked, China was the manufacturing and assembly hub for the world, not just for selfish Americans.
ktward
Call me crazy, but it looks to me like this is pretty much how things should work, union presence notwithstanding. To wit:
1. Certain working conditions prove dangerous to worker health.
2. Official complaints are filed with the proper regulatory authority (OSHA), and The Fourth Estate (The Morning Call) reports on it.
3. Within weeks, said Company takes steps to mitigate the problem temporarily and, consequently, invests serious millions to correct the problem permanently.
4. Problem solved.
Yet, that doesn’t stop y’all from a convenient lament over the “Evil Corporation” meme and, because it’s handy, let’s form a circle jerk of speculation over Bezos’s motivations because, after all, he’s just one more Corporate Asshole.
Christ. Get a fucking grip already.
To expect that any Corporation’s overriding concern isn’t its bottom line is like expecting a giraffe not to have a long neck. This is precisely why we need A) effective regulatory oversight, and B) a thriving Fourth Estate.
Look. Feel free to spend your own hard-earned dollars wherever you’d like for an easy self-righteous shot of endorphins. I shop locally too when I can.
But like it or not, corporations are here to stay. So I for one am pleased that Amazon responded to this problem responsibly. Sure, they’re making PR hay on their website, but what the hell else would you expect? Doesn’t everyone–politicians, corporations, charitable orgs, whatever–make PR hay when thay can?
*FTR, I’m an active union supporter, but the reality is that for a host of reasons (many of them indeed sordid) union presence has declined to a point where we must adjust our expectations of their influence and effect.
gluon1
Is it worth noting that AC was invented not to make people’s lives better but to improve the bottom line by keeping ink from drying out and paper from getting wet at a printing press? (Link to WP here.)
Is it even conceivable that anyone [not already on our/this side of the argument] will look at this as an explanation of why we need regulation, i.e., because even a company willing to make the change to humane conditions — no way to know Amazon is and not claiming they are — would be giving its competitors an advantage but enforced regulation would allow those who want to while forcing those who don’t to treat their workers like human being?
Walmartcashier
I am embarrassed to admit this, but due to choices within my control, and circumstances outside my control, I work at Wal-Mart. My salary from where I owned my business is now decreased by 2/3rds, but I just got a small lateral promotion to mostly the service desk with and now, I make an extra 25 dollars every two weeks. While I never thought $25 would make a difference, it actually does. I had a minor infection the other day that required some OTC meds, and was able to buy with the extra $25, thankful that I wouldn’t have to wait a week until my next pay period.
But enough whining! this comment struck me,
Here’s the thing, people don’t care about where their stuff comes from, I know, because on occasion after processing a return of the 21st plastic inflatable swimming pool because there is a hole in it, or the fifth pair of Danskin sneakers that have fallen apart after two weeks of normal wear(and yes, I am sure some Wal-mart Corporate PR Hack will say “but you don’t know what they do with the stuff they bring home!”, somehow I doubt the frail little elderly gentleman with the walker is running a marathon twice daily in his Dr. Scholl’s tennis shoes) I will say something like, well when ten year olds in Bangladesh make things, we can’t expect much.”* Then I will say “Oh did I say that out loud again?” The customer will laugh a little, perhaps uncomfortably, but since she’s getting what she wants, her money back, off she goes back into the bowels of Wal-mart to buy more stuff that wont’ hold together, or that is five cents cheaper than the local unionized grocery/sporting goods store because it’s there, and it’s convenient and we have a pretty generous return policy on most things. They dont’ care that Wal-mart won’t fix the air conditioning in our store, so our cashiers are passing out from the heat,(One refused to go to the doctor, or go home, no insurance, and wal-mart’s absence policy of three days sick days in a six month period means she would have been fired from her very needed job) the customers don’t care that we are underpaid, are forced to work when we are sick, that if we are lucky enough to qualify for wal-mart’s health insurance we pretty much can’t go to the doctor because of the obscenely high deductible. No, our customers, they only care about low prices and long lines. Now again, the argument could be made that we cater to the poor, but our store caters to a big technological community, a factory, and a wealthy summer community from the larger city. So, our customers are as a whole generally more wealthy than the average Wal-mart shopper in the rural South.
So, that’s where we are, until it affects a customer personally, such as having to wait 10 minutes in a cashier line, pointing out the realities of their neighbor’s abysmal work conditions much less speaking to the inhumane worker conditions in warehouses in Iowa, or further out, clothing factories in Bangladesh, just isn’t going to make a difference. They don’t think, and more importantly don’t want to think about these things, they just want their Kindle $1.00 cheaper than Target sells it for.
Jebediah
So my boycott of Amazon is starting to have an effect. Not nearly enough, but it’s a start.
ding dong
I avoid using amazon because jeff bezos is supposed to be a wingnut and it is a bit of a quandry for me because I know some bloggers live off amazon. Does google wallet work the same way? I did find out something interesting last year. I was ordering an office product. I use n online store that was out of stock so I did a search for the product thru. Google and amazon and my store that I normally go to showed up on amazon but the price was higher than what I normally paid for it when I went to the website directly. Hell for that I can do my price shopping directly. I do not need amazon doing it for me.
Jebediah
@ktward:
Fuck Amazon. If they were responsible, there never would have been a problem. If they were responsible, it would not have required public pressure to get them to make a change. Are you suggesting that they were unaware of working conditions? (If they were, it was because they wanted to be.)
Costco is a thriving business that treats its employees well enough that they have very low turnover and very low shrinkage.
JC
@ktward: Actually, Bezos is the Corporate Asshole squared, just so you know.
Anyone who has been at Amazon, has written about what a massive egotistical tyrannical jerk Bezos is, on a human level.
ktward
@Jebediah:
In your own teeny tiny little world maybe that’s how “problems” work, in that problems never actually manifest because everyone is on the ball enough to prevent them in the first place.
Meanwhile, most of us live in the real world where Shit Happens.
You, apparently, are content to revel in the joy of pointing fingers. Me, I’m happy when a problem is identified and then resolved, even if–no, especially if– it’s via pressure from institutional mechanisms designed specifically to identify problems.
Which explains why I am a Liberal.
I fully support unions and effective gov’t regulation and a thriving Fourth Estate because I know that politicians and corporations will reliably act on behalf of their own narrow interests.
Kudos to Costco, since you mentioned them, but they are an outlier. Does Costco fulfill all of your consumer needs? It doesn’t mine.
I can’t help but wonder: are you a Liberal? You sound more like some naive utopian-minded libertarian or anarchist to me, thinking all companies just “outta do the right thing” and “Fuck ’em” if they don’t.
pseudonymous in nc
@Judge Crater:
I’m reminded of the 19th-century industrialists who built cottages for workers with decent amenities, but also to make sure they didn’t walk more than a few minutes to the factory. And who often had a blind spot when it came to employing children. Pragmatic paternalism had its place, but the assumption was that it was superseded by an era of workplace regulation, collective bargaining power for conditions and a general consensus that “if you don’t like it, get another job” isn’t an acceptable response.
Except that in 2012 America, “suck it up or get another job” is increasingly the standard response, because, hey, people like cheap shit and free delivery. The bits of the economy where ordinary people can see that the price on the tag relates directly to someone’s living standard are now reduced to niches — craft fairs, farmers’ markets, Etsy listings, etc. — that, for better or worse, are regarded as elitist.
Nellcote
The Amazon letter sounds like they’re trying to build up some good will before they start collecting state taxes. I expect people are going to howl about that one but I’m glad they’re doing it.
Ksmiami
Fuck amazon… Their fulfillment is shit
Ruckus
It can all be tied together as well.
If you don’t make much then you can’t spend much so you have to find the lowest price. And of course you can justify that someone is working to fulfill that order. So what if they are making $10/hr, that’s the purchaser is making. It’s a death spiral of course, the less one makes the less they can buy, including food and shelter. So you have to keep cheapening stuff so it can be sold to people with less and less money. And even the middle class can’t afford the good stuff so they have to buy the cheap crap as well and figure if I have to buy cheap crap, might as well get the best deal.
Short sighted, next quarter thinking. It will kill the economy and the country, if it hasn’t already.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@ArchTeryx:
“American ‘Capitalism’: Monetizing Sadism since about 1980 or so.”
Jebediah
@ktward:
You’re a self-righteous moron. Go fuck yourself.
Call me whatever you want. I choose not to spend my money with a business that routinely and avoidably send its employees to the hospital.
Apologize for Amazon all you want, use them to save yourself a dollar here or there, but you are saving money on the backs of abused employees. I am surviving very well without spending a single dollar with Amazon.