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Jeff Bezos is stepping down at Amazon. The media presents its puff pieces, like the one from NBC News, a puff piece that portrays him in near heroic terms, touching only lightly on some of the anti-trust “concerns” in the US and EU. But buried beneath the departure of the richest man in the world are a couple of other things that have gotten minimal coverage.
Amazon is in trouble with the FTC. Per USA Today, statements alleged that they withheld tips from their Amazon Flex drivers, misrepresented the pay rates, and changed conditions on which drivers were paid tips without the drivers’ permissions. I remember an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where chef Gordon Ramsey went to a restaurant and the owner kept all of the waitstaff’s tips. It was a shady practice and the customers, when they heard that, were rightly outraged. The wiki entry for that episode is here. Ultimately, the more digging that was done, the more disturbing the restaurant became. No only were they keeping the employees’ tips, but they had fired over 100 staff members in the span of 18 months. There were allegations of assault, and Gordon Ramsey ultimately concluded that this restaurant couldn’t be helped.
Well, similar things can be said about Amazon. Not only are they jerking around their flex contractors on their tips, to the tune of 61.7 million dollars (which is what they agreed to), but they are also trying to block unionization efforts in Alabama. According to Reuters, Amazon has trained managers to spot unionization behaviors, have websites devoted to anti-union appeals, and offer competitive packages for wages and benefits.
Personally, I’m not a big union fan. I believe that they don’t advocate for the average worker, but instead protect the mediocre workers, and some union leaders abuse their positions of power and influence, especially during strikes. But hey, that’s life. I’m also not a fan of corporations shafting their workers, and if their behaviors lead to organizing efforts by the workers, then that’s the market for you.
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon, forced the shutdown of Parler, after signing a multi year deal with Twitter, in violation of their TOS (litigation is still pending). This is not an outlier, but rather a feature. Amazon has gotten too large. Their reach and ability to shut down competitors is near complete, and with this comes the sense of invulnerability that someone who believes they are “untouchable,” has.
Bezos is going on to many other things, space exploration, environmental concerns, helping the homeless, all seemingly good and normal things. But in his wake, he leaves a company that is beginning to run afoul of not only the common person on a regular basis, but now the government. The Biden campaign received 2.2 million in individual donations, per Open Secrets. And even AWS’s own website states that 6,500 government agencies use AWS, creating a conflict of interest for the federal government to give their support to unionization. I wouldn’t be surprised if the support of the Biden administration is tepid at best, and would dissolve if Amazon put any sort of pressure on them.
Folks, the growth of Amazon is detrimental to an open, free, and independent society. When companies like Amazon act less like service providers and more like quasi-government entities, we reach a place in which the government isn’t the only one we should be worried about infringing your rights to speech, assembly, religion, press, and petition. This parasitic relationship leaves only the common people holding the bag, facing censorship from the large corporations who line the pockets of the political elites, cementing themselves in as a neo-nobility in this digital age.
A Place 4Politics 