Amazon/ E-Commerce
===
see AMAZON 2
see BEZOS
capt 719
co, but also generic e-commerce
cf netchoice http://netchoice.org/iawful/ corp personhood? alec
see online cookie ad big data
its book ratings are gamed by right and // soc media boost amplify, note categories:
what do after view?
The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won't Hear From Al Gore--And Others
Joe Bastardi
4.6 out of 5 stars 631
American Marxism
Mark R. Levin
4.9 out of 5 stars 28,026
Hardcover
#1 Best Seller in Communism & Socialism
Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide
Miranda Devine
4.6 out of 5 stars 4,149
Hardcover
#1 Best Seller in Media & Internet in Politics
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change (The Politically Incorrect Guides)
Marc Morano
4.8 out of 5 stars 843
The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism
Glenn Beck
4.8 out of 5 stars 1,839
Hardcover
#1 Best Seller in United States Executive Government
Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
Peter Schweizer
4.8 out of 5 stars 1,466
Hardcover
#1 Best Seller in Political Corruption & Misconduct
documents reveal how Amazon risked lives to prioritize speed and explosive growth
==
https://truthout.org/video/as-amazon-continues-undercutting-rivals-workers-demand-fair-pay-and-conditions/
[over simple econ 101 invis hand?
... GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Democratic Congressmember David Cicilline of Rhode Island questioned the associate general counsel at Amazon, Nate Sutton.
REP. DAVID CICILLINE: I just want to give you an example of an entrepreneur in Rhode Island who creates a better set of headphones. She sells her product on Amazon, on the Marketplace. Sales soar, which is great for her, great for Amazon, because more people will become Amazon Prime customers to buy this great Rhode Island product.
But instead of seeing the fruits of her success, the next thing that happens is that this hard-working Rhode Islander discovers that Amazon has rolled out a direct replica of her product. And because Amazon controls the platform, Amazon gives itself top billing and demotes the entrepreneur to page three results, which most people will never see.
So, how would anyone — in light of that kind of sequence of events, how would any entrepreneur invest in this kind of environment where that can happen, where there’s no assurance it won’t?
NATE SUTTON: Our incentive is to help the seller succeed, because we rely on them. If we did that, we know they’d go elsewhere. They have many options. So we apply the same criteria to both, and we do not use their individual data when we’re making decisions to launch private brands.
AMY GOODMAN: Nate Sutton, the associate general counsel at Amazon, answering the questions of the Rhode Island Congressmember David Cicilline. Stacy Mitchell, your response?
STACY MITCHELL: Yeah, well, it’s simply not true that merchants have other options. Amazon’s one out of every two dollars spent online and a huge amount of shopping search. You know, the next biggest one is eBay, at about 6%. So it really drops off from there. You know, I interview, for our research, lots of sellers, and they consistently tell me Amazon is the main deal. There is really nowhere else. And increasingly, more and more over time, particularly as Prime memberships grow, as Alexa becomes the voice interface for a lot of homes, people are more and more defaulting to Amazon.
...
==
https://www.wired.com/story/house-antitrust-hearing-amazon-facebook/
TODAY’S YOUNGER, MORE tech-savvy breed of House Democrats may spend a lot of their time online, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy with the tech companies they rely on. In fact, it seems the more testimony they hear from top Silicon Valley executives, the louder their calls to regulate these behemoth technology firms become.
This was starkly on display Tuesday, as senior officials fromAmazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testifiedin front of a powerfulHouse Judiciary subcommittee as a part of an ongoing investigation into potential antitrust violations from the nation’s tech giants.
All the executives maintained that their companies face fierce competition at every turn, especially now with Chinese competitors like WeChat and TikTok eating into their global market share. But whenever Democrats pressed them about the details that are the foundation of those claims and their business practices, they rebuffed the questions and said they’d have to report back later.
“It is frustrating. It definitely is frustrating, which definitely means that we’re asking the right kinds of questions and that we recognize that this is an ongoing issue,” freshman representative Lucy McBath (D–Georgia) told WIRED as she was exiting the committee room. “We need to always make sure there’s always healthy competition, you know, more choices for consumers.”
While tech companies like Google have been investigated and fined overseas for anticompetitive practices (in fact, the European Union just opened a new investigation into Amazon this week), US lawmakers and regulators have traditionally been more laissez-faire on antitrust. That’s changed over the past few years, however, amid a wider reckoning with the size and power of these companies and their impacts on everything from consumer privacy to American democracy. Congress is watching Silicon Valley closely—three separate tech hearings took place across Capitol Hill on Tuesday alone. Some lawmakers, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have even proposed breaking up some of the companies.
At the antitrust hearing, Amazon and Facebook executives faced the brunt of lawmakers’ increasing annoyance with what many feel is Silicon Valley titans’ dismissive treatment of the political class in Washington.
“Is Facebook, in your view, a monopoly?” freshman representative Joe Neguse (D–Colorado) asked Matt Perault, Facebook's public policy director.
“No, congressman, it is not,” Perault replied.
That answer didn’t sit well with Neguse, who went on to press Perault about the scope of a company that also includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger—giving Facebook four of the top slots in today’s social media landscape.
“When a company owns four of the largest six entities measured by active users in the world in that industry, we have a word for that,” Neguse said. “And that’s monopoly.”
Still, Perault ended the hearing where he began, claiming Facebook has a number of business rivals in today’s marketplace. “Many of our competitors are sitting at this table with me,” he argued.
The tech firms did find some sympathetic ears on the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, including the top Republican on the panel. “Just because a business is big doesn’t mean it is bad,” representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R–Wisconsin) told his colleagues and the executives at one point.
Democrats weren’t arguing big is bad. They were arguing too big, too powerful, and too unregulated is bad for consumers, which is why a couple of lawmakers pressed Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel for competition, about its acquisition policies.
“When people sell products on your site, do you track which products are most successful and then do you sometimes create a product to compete with that product?” representative Pramila Jayapal (D–Washington) asked, a line of questioning she returned to again.
Throughout the hearing. Sutton maintained the company line: “We do not use individual seller data in order to compete with them.”
The chair of the antitrust subcommittee seemed to view that claim with skepticism, reminding Sutton twice that he was under oath. "You do collect enormous data about what products are popular, what’s selling, where they’re selling," representative David Cicilline (D–Rhode Island) told the witness. “You’re saying you don’t use that in any way to promote Amazon products? And I’d remind you, you’re under oath.”
“We use data to serve our customers,” Sutton replied.
That answer isn’t what Jayapal wanted to hear. She has been exploring setting up a board of experts to oversee and regulate these Silicon Valley firms.
“The argument they’re trying to make is: They don’t acquire competition; they acquire businesses that make their business better, and oh, if they happen to be competitors, well oops, that’s not why they acquired them,” she told WIRED after asking her questions. “I think that’s disingenuous.”
####
After the executives were dismissed, Cicilline vented to reporters outside the hearing room.
“I think we’re going to have to test some of the representations that were at this hearing to facts that we collect during the course of the investigation,” Cicilline said. “I don’t think there’s any question that we cannot expect them to regulate themselves. We’ve seen the total absence of any ability to regulate themselves, so I think it will absolutely require some action by Congress.”
Cicillinesays that action could come in the form of new laws, working with the relevant federal agencies to tighten regulations on their own, or through Congress providing more resources to antitrust agencies with the express purpose of keeping these companies on the perpetual hot seat—or even a combination of all three.
“The notion that they all see themselves in fierce competition I think strains credulity,” he said.
This was the antitrust subcommittee’s second hearing into what many call the monopolistic practices of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, and they’re not done.
“This was an important hearing to have, but we have a lot of work to do to continue to understand and collect evidence about the anti-competitive behavior or the absence of competition, about the practices of favoring their own services and products,” Cicilline said. “We have a lot more to do.”
==
medium
https://onezero.medium.com/amazon-is-watching
amazon is watching
==
Alex Emmons
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-new-digital-divide-is-between-people-who-opt-out-of-algorithms-and-people-who-dont/
...Researchers have long been concerned about algorithmic fairness. For instance, Amazon’s AI-based recruiting tool turned out to dismiss female candidates. Amazon’s system was selectively extracting implicitly gendered words – words that men are more likely to use in everyday speech, such as “executed” and “captured.”
Other studies have shown that judicial algorithms are racially biased, sentencing poor black defendants for longer than others.
==
==
Amazon employee suicide threats tied to ‘dehumanizing’ workplace conditions at warehouses
==
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are quietly helping Big Oil destroy the climate
So much for Google's slogan, "Don't be evil."
JOE ROMM
FEB 28, 2019, 11:59 AM
https://thinkprogress.org/amazon-google-microsoft-oil-climate-b8b1dd15f115/
A protest from Microsoft to use clean energy in cloud computing at Tel Aviv, April 22, 2012 . CREDIT: JACK GUEZ/AFP/GettyImages.
A PROTEST FROM MICROSOFT TO USE CLEAN ENERGY IN CLOUD COMPUTING AT TEL AVIV, APRIL 22, 2012 . CREDIT: JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTYIMAGES.
ExxonMobil and Microsoft announced last week that they are partnering in the “largest-ever oil and gas” deal to use cloud computing, which the corporations say will boost production up to 50,000 barrels of oil per day by 2025.
Microsoft likes to tout how it’s running its operations on 100 percent renewable energy and embracing the Paris climate agreement. The company’s founder, Bill Gates, also portrays himself as a champion of climate action.
But the tech giant is working overtime to close deals with the world’s biggest oil companies to help them boost fossil fuel production using the latest information technology, such as cloud computing, which enables companies to capture, store, and analyze vast amounts of data in real time.
And Microsoft isn’t alone. Many of the most well-known tech giants we think of as green and sustainable — including Amazon and Google — are helping the dirtiest polluters increase production of climate-destroying fossil fuels, as Gizmodo’s Brian Merchant has pointed out.
Lawmakers declare war on the biggest civil rights
problem you’ve probably never heard of
So while these tech giants tout their public support for the Paris climate agreement, they are working to undermine its central achievement — that the world’s nations unanimously agreed to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground. Preserving a livable climate requires heroic efforts to slash fossil fuel use, not cynical efforts to produce even more.
In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels]
“These actions by these so-called responsible actors on climate illustrate the futility in relying on corporations to act to address climate change,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle told ThinkProgress in an email. “Profitability, not any concern about the planet and its future, drives their actions.”
For instance, Google launched a new oil, gas, and energy division in 2018 “to court the oil and gas industry,” the Wall Street Journal reported last summer. It’s headed by Darryl Willis, who worked at BP for nearly three decades. And it has already made deals with oil giants like Anadarko Petroleum and France’s Total, and oilfield services companies like Schlumberger and Baker Hughes.
In September, Google announced a major deal with a Houston energy investment bank. The goal of this partnership is to “cut costs in the wake of the oil bust and remain competitive as electric vehicles and renewable power sources gain market share,” according to The Houston Chronicle.
In short, Google is helping dirty energy compete with clean energy.
“Google’s motto was once ‘Don’t Be Evil,'” leading climatologist Michael Manntold ThinkProgress in an email. “It appears they’ve dropped the ‘Don’t.’ It is time for them to cease and desist in serving as enablers of climate destruction.”
U.S. Companies Publicly Support Climate Action, Privately Fund Deniers
Ironically, when Google was criticized last month by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) for supporting a conference promoting climate science denial, a Google spokesperson replied, “Google has long been a leader in sustainability. Since 2007, we have operated as a carbon neutral company and in 2017, we reached 100 percent renewable energy for our global operations.”
Google clearly has a different definition of “leader in sustainability” and “carbon neutral company” if it includes helping Big Oil produce more climate-destroying, carbon-intensive fossil fuels.
Finally, Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud computing in the world, has its own “Oil & Gas” division. Amazon promises it can help Big Oil “unleash innovation to optimize production and profitability.” It already does work with GE’s oil business and oil giants like Royal Dutch Shell and BP.
Those hoping the tech giants would help lead the world into a carbon-free future based on their climate-friendly press releases and renewable energy purchases, will need to look elsewhere for true climate action leadership.
As Brulle put it, these companies care about profits more than the planet — they will never be the answer to our climate crisis. “To have real action on climate change requires strong government action to break our reliance on fossil fuels,” he said.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-a-failing-capitalist-system-is-allowing-amazon-to-cripple-america/
Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown.
:{
}:
Jeff Bezos said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” He might have added three capitalist practices familiar to his company: (1) Pay no taxes; (2) Drive competitors out of business; and (3) Exploit workers.
:{
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Anarcho-Capitalism: The Sordid Details of Amazon’s Tax Avoidance
In 2018, according to its own SEC filings, Amazon claimed a refund on its $11 billion in U.S. profits. It did the same on nearly $6 billion in profits in 2017. The company has reportedly positioned itself to avoid even more future taxes with unspecified tax credits.
In the most extreme form of capitalism taxes do not exist. This is called “anarcho-capitalism.” Among all corporations, Amazon may be the leading advocate of this philosophy. They haven’t paid federal income tax for the past two years. They set up headquarters in Luxembourg for tax breaks that are now being challenged. They claim minimal profits on hundreds of billions in revenue, resulting in one of the lowest profit margins among major corporations, and thus much less tax. Of course, Amazon claims to be using tax credits from past losses that stemmed from investment in research and development (R&D). But the company appears to overstate and obfuscate the R&D numbers. Its only ‘explanation’ of R&D in its annual report comes in an ambiguously all-encompassing section called “Technology and Content.” Plus, that’s no excuse to dodge taxes. Walmart and Google each spent nearly $12 billion on technology in 2018, almost as much as Amazon, but Walmart paid 28 percent in federal taxes, and Google 14 percent.
We learn much more at the state level. Amazon has played one state against another for tax breaks over the years, most recently negotiating an estimated $3 billion tax credit from the state of New York before residents rebelled — as well they should have. The Economic Policy Institute found that employment levels don’t significantly change in communities with new Amazon warehouses, and a recent study by The Economist concluded that the opening of a fulfillment center in a given community actually depresses warehouse wages. Furthermore, as an indication of the folly of wooing corporations with state subsidies, Upjohn research found that in the great majority of cases incentives are not even a part of a company’s decision to locate in a given area.
Most insidiously, Amazon’s seemingly fair-minded acceptance of state sales taxes likely has a dark side. For years the company fought the state tax as it built a competitive advantage over smaller firms. Now that it’s firmly established, online variety and convenience have replaced price as the primary incentives for most consumers, and so Amazon now supports a sales tax, very likely to discourage competition. Evidence comes from one study that found Walmart 34 percent cheaper than Amazon in four of five product categories.
Monopoly: Amazon and the Killing of Competition
Kiplinger compiled a remarkable list of 49 companies, many of them familiar to almost all Americans, that are in danger of being driven out of business by Amazon. One of them, Toys ‘r’ Us, has already succumbed. Sears is nearly gone. Others include Barnes & Noble, Kroger, Rite Aid, Best Buy, Etsy, Yelp, Pandora, and even stalwarts like Target and Trader Joe’s and UPS and Fedex and Office Depot and Staples. Investopedia agrees, adding Macy’s and even Walgreen’s and CVS and Costco.
In a summary of “The Myth of Capitalism,” by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, it is argued that “an increase in market concentration across the United States has resulted in a system that is not true capitalism, since freedom is being restricted…Amazon is crushing retailers…It can determine what products can and cannot sell on its platform, and it competes with any customer that encounters success.” Columbia University and UN economist Howard Steven Friedman adds, “Monopolies are one example of capitalism failing. Monopolies have virtually no competition and can dictate prices to their customers unless they are restricted by regulators.”
Of course, along the way Amazon has destroyed or dismantled or discouraged many smaller businesses. Like the jewelry store in New Mexico owned by Candelora Versace, who said her customers have started buying gems online, in part to avoid state taxes, and then visiting her store just for the settings. She considers the far-reaching effects of Amazon’s tax avoidance: “The roads don’t pay themselves. The schools don’t fund themselves…When they don’t want to pay the tax, it cheats us.”
Labor in Decline: The Economic and Physical Abuse of Amazon’s Workers
Amazon warehouse workers make about $13 per hour. That’s not a living wage for a U.S. family of four, and not even for a single person in many areas of the country. So the employees of this super-rich company turn to food stamps, letting U.S. taxpayers take care of them. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, one in ten Amazon workers were recently on SNAP. In Arizona, one in three. Along with the low pay comes intolerable working conditions, with overheated warehouses and employees using water bottles to avoid bathroom breaks in order to meet their schedules. And worse, employees have suffered workplace injuries that leave them homeless, disabled, or unable to earn an income. Employees are also forced to deal with constant surveillance, anti-union pressure, and the threat of losing their jobs. Much of Amazon’s over-hyped R&D spending is focused on the development of robots to replace human workers.
Capitalism has failed workers, and it has caused a surge in inequality that gets worse with each passing year. In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty showed that for 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, labor’s share of national income (wages and salaries) has declined. Stanford research reveals that “the declining labor share at the economy level is driven by the growth of large firms.” Like Amazon.
A Good Reason for Democratic Socialism
There may be no better argument for democratic socialism in America than the way individual state leaders have been falling over each other trying to lure corporations to their states with tax subsidies. We Americans have never been able to cooperate in ending this pointless waste of tax money that should be going to education and jobs and infrastructure.
Does Jeff Bezos have any sense of social responsibility for all the societal benefits heaped upon his company? Amazon has arguably benefited more than any other company from what The Economist calls the “game-changing breakthroughs” of the Internet, which was built with our tax money through the National Science Foundation since the 1980s, and before that by the taxpayer-funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fortune refers to Amazon’s actions as “extracting public money for its own enrichment.”
But perhaps the Amazon boss doesn’t care. According to The Atlantic, “Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on.” If that truly reflects the man’s attitude, it shows an incomprehensible ignorance or disdain on his part. Bezos himself said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel…I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”
Good work, Jeff. Benefit from seventy years of public inventiveness and productivity and funding, and then fly off to the skies before you have to pay for it.
===
AN
A photograph ran in newspapers throughout the U.S. last June portraying three guys in suits and ties shoveling dirt.
The three were Donald Trump, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics conglomerate. They were in a vacant lot in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, doing a PR groundbreaking of a new plant that Foxconn promised would hire thousands of blue-collar workers to make flat-screen televisions.
For Trump, the photo was proof that he was delivering on his campaign promise to ignite a made-in-the-USA manufacturing renaissance in the hard-hit upper Midwest. Actually, the renaissance was being ignited by a huge bundle of cash. Walker, who was up for re-election, was giving away a whopping $4 billion from Wisconsin’s tax fund to lure the wily Foxconn to the Badger State. But picky, picky. This was a day of celebration and self-congratulation among the three jolly guys in ties doing the PR photo-op. With typical modesty, Trump hailed the deal as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Less than a year later, though, it was revealed that the three had been shoveling BS. Oops. In January, Foxconn quietly backed away from its promise of all those factory jobs, declaring that “the global market environment … has changed.” A top assistant to Chairman Gou conceded: “In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S. We can’t compete (with cheap-labor Asian Corporations).” Having already pocketed much of Walker’s bribe money, Foxconn said it was downsizing its project from a mass production blue-collar factory to some sort of high-tech operation hiring an unspecified number of engineers and designers.
It turns out that the Taiwanese giant has a history of reneging on its grandiose schemes, including failing to deliver on a Pennsylvania factory it promised in 2013. Meanwhile, Foxconn is right that the environment has changed — Walker was defeated, Wisconsinites are in an uproar over both his extravagant giveaway and the corporation’s sudden back away, the new Democratic governor is asking pointed questions, and Trump’s slaphappy zigzags on tariffs has roiled the whole high-tech market.
When you see a picture of politicians shoveling the people’s tax dollars into corporate coffers, the only sure thing is that the people are being played for suckers.
The undisputed king of shoveling (aka scamming taxpayers) is the digital retail colossus of Amazon. But even the king can sometimes get a comeuppance from determined commoners, and a hardy band in New York is delivering an old-line message to the online power: Don’t count your subsidized chickens before they hatch.
For a couple of decades, CEO Jeff Bezos built Amazon’s monopolistic market might (and a $120 billion personal fortune for himself) by illegally dodging sales taxes that other retailers paid. A few years ago, though, the law was onto Bezos, so he switched from dodging local taxes to demanding that local governments subsidize his coast-to-coast expansion. His big coup was his HQ2 scheme — creating an embarrassing nationwide scramble by local and state officials to throw bundles of their taxpayers’ money at Bezos in hopes he’d choose their town as Amazon’s “second corporate headquarters.”
A “winner” in this corporate shakedown was New York, with the governor and New York City’s mayor promising to give $3 billion in taxpayer subsidies to one of the richest corporations in the world. An absurdly exultant Governor Andrew Cuomo gushed that “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes.”
So that was that — except it wasn’t! A grassroots rebellion, backed by key state senators and city council leaders, has dared to talk back to the Amazonians and politicos who cut the sweetheart giveaway, citing the giant retailer’s well-documented abuse of workers. The king was mightily offended to be questioned, dispatching Brian Huseman, the company’s vice president for public policy, to declare haughtily that “we want to invest in a community that wants us.” Hello … you’re asking the community to invest in you, with no promise of fair treatment for the community. Indeed, asked if Amazon would be neutral if its New York employees chose to unionize, the lobbyist barked: “No, sir.”
Billionaire Bezos is now resorting to the last refuge of corporate scoundrels: a PR campaign to convince New Yorkers that his behemoth is a sweetheart. As proof, he’s offering to hire 30 public housing residents to be customer service agents — 30. Out of 400,000 low-income New Yorkers living in public housing.
You can say some negative things about New Yorkers, but generally speaking they’re not going to be suckers for anyone — not even Bezos.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/zuckerberg-must-resign-outrage-surges-after-report-reveals-facebook-let-corporate
zuck must resign
Just hours after civil rights groups called on Facebook's top executives to step down from the company's board for allowing "viral propaganda" and "bigoted campaigns" to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after a bombshell New York Timesreportlate Tuesday detailed a "special arrangement" the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users' data and private messages without consent.
"An incredibly damning indictment of Facebook, every single paragraph," Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wroteof the Times report, which is the latest in a long line of recent revelations about Facebook's intrusive—and possibly illegal—data practices.
Citing hundreds of pages of internal company records and interviews with dozens of former employees, the Times reported that "Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent" and "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages."
Additionally, the Times found, Facebook "permitted Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends' posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier."
"Facebook is a public trust that has broken our trust," wrote author and NBCpolitical analyst Anand Giridharadas in response to the Times report. "Mark Zuckerberg must resign now."
The New Republic's Jeet Heer added, "Facebook is evil, folks."
It’s worse than you thought.
Facebook gave:
-Microsoft names of users’ friends without consent
-Netflix and Spotify got to read users’ private messages
-Amazon got user contact info via friends.
Big story from @gabrieldance @laforgia_@nickconfessorehttps://t.co/GLF60DYaEf
— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) December 19, 2018
This seems like the most explosive revelation here. People use Facebook messenger for all kinds of things they probably shouldn't, but the reality is that this likely exposed tons of people's super sensitive information. Info that could get people arrested, deported, stalked, etc https://t.co/wYxdW4Opbu
— Evan Greer (@evan_greer) December 19, 2018
In addition to being invasive, former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials to the Times that Facebook's data-sharing "partnerships" with other corporate giants may also violate federal law.
"This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it," said David Vladeck, former head of the FTC's consumer protection bureau. "I don't understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree."
Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, wholeheartedly agreed, declaring, "I don't believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user."
"No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model," McNamee concluded.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/corporate-bribery-lands-amazon-hq2-queens-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-says-new-york-community-outrage
After a year-long race-to-the-bottom competition to determine which city and state lawmakers would most subserviently grovel at its feet and offer the most generous taxpayer-funded gifts, Amazon on Monday reportedly chose Queens, New York and the Northern Virginia suburb of Crystal City as the split locations for its second headquarters, sparking anger among those who believe the online retailer will drive up already soaring housing prices and worsen unsustainable inequality.
"We've been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this," Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote in a Twitter thread late Monday. "The community's response? Outrage."
Highlighting Amazon's enormous size and wealth—the company recently reached a trillion dollars in market value—Ocasio-Cortez added that the "idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need more investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here."
Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families.
Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018
We need to focus on good healthcare, living wages, affordable rent. Corporations that offer none of those things should be met w/ skepticism.
It’s possible to establish economic partnerships w/ real opportunities for working families, instead of a race-to-the-bottom competition.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018
Lastly, this isn’t just about one company or one headquarters. It’s about cost of living, corps paying their fair share, etc.
It’s not about picking a fight, either. I was elected to advocate for our community’s interests - & they‘ve requested, clearly, to voice their concerns.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018
Amazon's search for a second home (HQ2) on top of its current headquarters in Seattle—where the company has successfully crushed efforts by city lawmakers to impose a small tax to fight homelessness—set off what the New York Times described as a "frenzied bidding war," which produced such debasing stunts as New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's suggestion that he would be willing change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" to secure the company's presence in his state.
In addition to the public pronouncements of city and state officials, lawmakers have also been negotiating with Amazon behind closed doors and offering tax incentives that have not faced public scrutiny.
Amazon—which is headed by Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man—is expected to officially announce the HQ2 locations on Tuesday, but it is unclear if any details of the deals with Queens and Crystal City will be made public.
According to one report, Cuomo offered Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars in state subsidies to set up shop in Queens.
"Citizens have no idea what their elected officials have promised to a company headed by the richest person on earth," Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, noted in a statement last week. "We don't know what special new subsidies have been promised that will require state or local enactments. We don't know if gentrification buffers—especially affordable housing—are included. We don't know if clawbacks or other safeguards are included. We don't know the cost per job. But we do know that both deals were negotiated in secret, without any public input."
Some of the taxpayer-funded incentive packages that were made public during the "bidding process" were eye-popping: According to the Washington Post, Maryland offered $8.5 billion and Newark offered $7 billion.
"We shouldn't be giving billions away to one of the biggest companies in the world when our schools are already at capacity and our transit crumbling across the region," Alex Howe of the Metro D.C. branch of the Democratic Socialists of America said in a statement. "We must hold a genuine process of community input and enact strict safeguards, such as a significant annual contribution toward a community land trust, to make sure HQ2 doesn't displace our existing communities and increase already rampant inequality."
It is likely that public education, transit, social services, &/or a variety of other public goods in New York & Virginia will suffer for years to come as a result of the corporate subsidies Democratic governors @andrewcuomo & @RalphNortham have excitedly promised to @amazon.
— Ben Spielberg (@BenSpielberg) November 13, 2018
Derek Thompson, staff writer for The Atlantic, argued on Monday that lawmakers' efforts to lure Amazon to their states constitutes a form of "corporate bribery" that is deeply harmful to the public and should be banned outright by Congress.
"Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. That's more than the federal government spends on housing, education, or infrastructure," Thompson notes. "And since cities and states can't print money or run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything local governments would otherwise pay for."
"Corporate America is getting all the help it doesn't need," Thompson concluded. "You and I may not like it. But executives such as Jeff Bezos have no reason to care. They are winning by the rules of a broken game."
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/04/cities-fail-disclose-tax-incentives-bids-amazons-hq2
10/18
45 min training video on early warning signs of union eg hang out, use words livable wage raplh nader radio
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Amazon’s Minimum Wage Hike Is Not What It Seems AN
$15/hr employees whole food, what about contractors? bernie BEZOS bill
amazon just hit 1 trillion value?
target by djt, drives down stock price; false cliam ripoff PO, same rates a trump biz 3/18
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https://www.alternet.org/labor/amazon-21st-century-digital-chain-gang
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pro publ
Just this week, we published an important story about how Amazon—one of the nation’s largest retailers—systematically favors its own interests over that of its customers.
That article, one of a series we are doing this year on the use and abuse of algorithms in our daily lives, took months to execute.
Last year, our reporting helped stem the tide toward big companies opting out of state workers’ comp plans....
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Your Netflix binges could soon be fueled by solar power, thanks to Amazon
Guilt-free "Orange is the New Black" marathons? Yes, please. 6/15 grist
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“Amazon.com, the e-commerce company based out of Seattle, Washington, has recently partnered up with the USPS to deliver packages on Sundays to its Amazon Prime customers.”
This rather benign sounding statement has been effusively thrown around the media circuit when discussing the arrangement that’s been made between these two organizations; oftentimes praising the USPS’s bravery in its time of embattlement, while also championing the cornering of another market (Sunday delivery) for Amazon.
But wait! There’s something missing from all these announcements! What has been ignored is the reality of what it means for the workers who are implementing this new, surprising arrangement.
See, I am a member of the USPS “underclass” that was created to help pave the way so deals such as Amazon Sunday delivery could be reached. I am a CCA, City Carrier Assistant, with the United States Postal Service. My hope here is to illuminate exactly what Amazon.com and the USPS’s program means for the cadre of employees who share this title; and more importantly what this means to the postal service as a whole.
Prepped for the Auction Floor
City Carrier Assistants are a brand new classification of employee within the postal ranks; we are the low-wage, non-career, complement workforce at the USPS. On January 11, 2013 this position was created by an arbitration board who settled the stalled labor negotiations between the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the USPS management. This set the terms for the National Agreement, which is in effect for the years 2011-2016.
CCAs weren’t always considered a low-wage workforce. Before the reclassification we were called Transitional Employees (TE) and made a respectable $23.52 hourly rate, only several dollars per hour less than what the average career employee made. But with the USPS management’s financial woes and the recently concocted, yet unused, Negotiated Service Agreements plan—discussed in the next section— a low-wage workforce was needed to help entice big business into choosing the postal service to partner up with. City Carrier Assistants now perform the same work they did when they were called a TE, but now they get to do that work for 31 percent less pay —TE’s who were reclassified as CCAs now make $16.68 per hour. What’s worse is that newly hired CCAs will make even less —starting at $15 per hour.
The stage was now set for postal management to undercut all other competitors and offer up the postal network —at a drastically reduced rate—to any takers.
Enter the Amazon deal.
The devil is in the details…if we could see them!
With the USPS being financially burdened by congressionally mandated pre-funding for retiree healthcare packages (paying 80 plus years in advance at 100% compensation —a burden no private company has had to nor could endure), it has looked to find different avenues to help increase its profitability and fight to stay viable in this ‘age of digital mail.’ To help combat this huge economic disadvantage —along with the decrease in first-class mail volumes— the USPS management has attempted to implement many different approaches to their problem. They’ve tried ending Saturday delivery, contemplated neighborhood cluster boxes, which would oust door-to-door delivery, and of course, there’s the tried and true elimination of positions, which the USPS has been engaged in since the unprecedented 2006 pre-funding mandate was established. Their latest solution is a relatively new business concept called the negotiated service agreement or NSA.
So what exactly is an NSA?...
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AlterNet [1] / By Janet Allon [2]
Paul Krugman Divulges Exactly Why Amazon Is So Evil and Dangerous
October 20, 2014 |
Sometimes Paul Krugman eases into his column by writing metaphorically, or giving some valuable background. In Monday's column [3], he just up and blurts out his point: "Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America."
He spends most of the rest of the column explaining why this is so, and why, while the online retailer is not quite "a monster [4]" intent on eating the whole economy, as some critics portray it to be, it is nonetheless a too-powerful company that is playing a deeply troubling role
It is in some way comparable to Standard Oil, which in its day had "too much power," Krugman writes, "and public action to curb that power was essential."
By way of illustration, Krugman recounts the dispute between Amazon and Hachette [5], a major publishing house, back in May.
Amazon had been demanding a larger cut of the price of Hachette books it sells; when Hachette balked, Amazon began disrupting the publisher’s sales. Hachette books weren’t banned outright from Amazon’s site, but Amazon began delaying their delivery, raising their prices, and/or steering customers to other publishers.
You might be tempted to say that this is just business — no different from Standard Oil, [6] back in the days before it was broken up, refusing to ship oil via railroads that refused to grant it special discounts. But that is, of course, the point: The robber baron era ended when we as a nation decided that some business tactics were out of line. And the question is whether we want to go back on that decision.
Does Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to books, definitely. Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book sales, with a market share comparable to Standard Oil’s share of the refined oil market when it was broken up in 1911. Even if you look at total book sales, Amazon is by far the largest player.
How Amazon differs from Standard Oil? Instead of being a monopolist, which Krugman defines as "a dominant seller with the power to raise prices," Amazon is being a monopsonist, "a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down." This is why consumers tend to love Amazon, especially when it comes to buying books, but it is very dangerous indeed. Because, Amazon uses its outsize power in some measure to control the conversation. Publishing, like other entertainment businesses, relies in great measure on buzz. "And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz," Krugman writes. "It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place."
And the Hachette dispute shows unequivocally that Amazon abuses this power.
It's also telling, Krugman points out, how Amazon is using its power to select what Americans read, which may have everything to do with owner Jeff Bezos' politics.
Last month the Times’s Bits blog [7] documented the case of two Hachette books receiving very different treatment. One is Daniel Schulman’s “Sons of Wichita [8],” a profile of the Koch brothers; the other is “The Way Forward [9],” by Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate and is chairman of the House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan’s book Amazon offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about “Sons of Wichita”? As of Sunday, it “usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks.” Uh-huh.
Ugghh. Fight the power.
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http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/3724#.U-ZRevldUkU
IN HIS CLASSIC 1936 COMEDY, ModernTimes, silent filmmaker Charlie Chaplin depicted the trials and tribulations of a harried factory worker trying to cope with the sprockets, cogs, conveyor belts, and managerial "efficiencies" of the new industrial culture.The poor fellow continuously finds himself caught up (almost literally) in the grinding tyranny of the machine. The movie is hilarious, but it's also a powerful and damning portrayal of the dehumanizing consequences of mass industrialization, including monotonous assembly-line work, ruthless bosses demanding more and faster output, mass unemployment, rank inequality, union busting, and police deployed to enforce the corporate order.
The universe says No to us. We in answer fire a broadside of flesh at it and cry yes!"-- A line from a Ray Bradbury novel that Bezos adopted as his credo in the mid-1980's.
The ultimate indignity for Chaplin's everyman character came when he was put on an assembly line that included a mechanized contraption that force-fed workers as they worked. Not only did this time-management "innovation" eliminate the need for factory owners to provide a lunch break, but it also transformed humans into automatous components of the machine itself. Of course, worker-feeding machines were a comedic exaggeration by the filmmaker, not anything that actually existed in his day, and such an inhuman contrivance would not even be considered in our modern times. Right? Well... if you work for Amazon.com, Inc., you'd swear that Chaplin's masterpiece is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' idea of a properly run workplace.
Brave new paradigm
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is the elfish, almost preternatural man of unbounded ambition who founded Amazon, the online retailing colossus that trumpets itself as "Earth's most customer-centric company." At first blush, you might wonder why the Lowdown is digging into a company that has built a strong reputation with millions of consumers and even has a rather hip vibe going for it.
After all, isn't Amazon considered a model of tech wizardry, having totally reinvented retail marketing for our smart-phone, globally-linked age? Yes. And doesn't it peddle a cornucopia of goods through a convenient "1-click" ordering system, rapidly delivering the goods right to your doorstep? Yes, yes, and yes. Also, doesn't it offer irresistibly steep discounts on the price of nearly everything it sells (which is nearly everything)? Yes, again.
However, as an old saying puts it: The higher the monkey climbs the more you see of its ugly side. Amazon certainly has climbed high in a hurry. Not yet 20 years old, it's already a household brand name and America's 10th largest retailer.
Yet, mesmerized by its digital charm and explosive growth in sales, few have looked closely at the Amazon animal. Its media coverage has been more gee-whiz than questioning, generally attributing the retailers' phenomenal rise to Bezos' ceaseless search for ever-greater corporate efficiencies. The press marvels that his obsession with electronic streamlining and systems management allows him to sell everything from books to bicycles, barbeques to Barbies, at cheap-cheap-cheap prices, undercutting all competitors--even Walmart.
But what is the source of those "efficiencies" and the low prices that are so greatly admired by Wall Street and so gratefully accepted by customers? Are they achieved strictly by being a virtual store, selling everything through the World Wide Web, meaning that it doesn't have to build, staff, and maintain any retail outlets? Or is Amazon achieving market dominance the old-fashioned way--by squeezing the life out of its workers and suppliers, by crushing its competitors (from small shops on Main Street to big chain-store rivals) with monopolistic muscle, and by manipulating our national and state tax laws?
Voila! There's the ugly side.
As we've learned in recent years from exposes of the revolting business practices of Walmart, "cheap" can come at a very heavy price. And that price tag is no less revolting because it's asserted by a company that has a cachet of online cool and is based in cosmopolitan Seattle instead of rural Arkansas. Thus, in both this month's issue and September's, the Lowdown will take a hard look at what Amazon is doing to whom--and where that is leading our society.
We're focusing on Bezos/Amazon ("BeZon" would be a more appropriate corporate name, for the man is the corporation and vice-versa), not because this is yet another badly behaving behemoth. Rather, Amazon screams for scrutiny because it, more than any other single entity, has had the infinite hubris to envision a brave new, computer-driven oligarchic order for our society--then has proceeded to assemble it.
For some 30 years, corporate control has steadily (and stealthily) enveloped major elements of our society--workplaces, politics, education, media, upward mobility, etc. This encroachment has even been given a benign name: "The new normal." But it's not normal, and it's not the result of some immutable economic force, marching through history--it is the product of corporate money and power being relentlessly asserted by individuals.
No one has imagined corporate domination more expansively nor pushed it harder or further than Bezos, and his Amazon stands today as the most advanced and the most ambitious model of a future under oligarchic control, including control of markets, work, information, consumerism, media... and beyond. He doesn't merely see himself remaking commerce with his vast electronic networks, algorithms, and metrics--but rebooting America itself, including our society's concept of a job, the definition of community, and even our basic values of fairness and justice. It amounts to a breathtaking aspiration to transform our culture's democratic paradigm into a corporate imperium, led by Amazon.
The birth of Amazon
LEGEND HAS IT that Amazon is a classic story of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. In 1994, a bright, young fellow named Bezos heads off to the Seattle ... [read more]
Bezos, an admirer of Walmart's predatory business strategy, didn't just duplicate it--he wired it into his supercomputers, applied the Big Data techniques of the NSA to it, and routed it through the matrix of his own grandiose imagination. Walmart, the "Beast of Bentonville," is now yesterday's model of how far-reaching and destructive corporate power can be. Amazon is the new model, not just of tomorrow's corporate beast, but the day after tomorrow's. Only, it's already here.
Going inside Amazon
The establishment media are unabashedly infatuated with Bezos and have crowned him with numerous laurels, from "Person of the Year" to world's best living CEO. This May, however, the reigning God of TechWorld was awarded a less-coveted prize by the International Trade Union Confederation: "World's Worst Boss."
Even high-rankers in the corporation's hierarchy describe him as a cold, remote, controlling, ungenerous, and often vengeful gnome of a man with no empathy for the people who work for him. As far back as the 1980s, when he was a Wall Street banker, he was perceived as lacking the human touch. "He was not warm," remembers one who knew him then. "It was like he could be a Martian for all I knew."
To witness the full Bezonian disregard for workers, however, one must look beyond the relative comfort of Amazon's expansive cam- pus headquarters and visit any of about 40 of its "fulfillment centers" spread across the country (and about 40 more around the world). These are gated, guarded, and secretive warehouses where most of the corporation's 100,000 employees are engaged in: (1) Unpacking the hundreds of millions of items that Amazon peddles;(2) Coding and storing the items on an immense array of shelves; (3) Picking individual items off the shelves to fill the consumer purchases made online; and (4) Packing and shipping the goods to Amazon's hundreds of millions of customers.....
applied to japan car (?)
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kpfa 3/31/14 10 am
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salon: Excerpted from "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans"
When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate world, Amazon now ranks with Apple as among the United States’ most esteemed businesses. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, came in second in the Harvard Business Review’s 2012 world rankings of admired CEOs, and Amazon was third in CNN’s 2012 list of the world’s most admired companies. Amazon is now a leading global seller not only of books but also of music and movie DVDs, video games, gift cards, cell phones, and magazine subscriptions. Like Walmart itself, Amazon combines state-of-the-art CBSs with human resource practices reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Amazon equals Walmart in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees and in settings that go beyond the assembly line to include their movement between loading and unloading docks, between packing and unpacking stations, and to and from the miles of shelving at what Amazon calls its “fulfillment centers”—gigantic warehouses where goods ordered by Amazon’s online customers are sent by manufacturers and wholesalers, there to be shelved, packaged, and sent out again to the Amazon customer.
Amazon’s shop-floor processes are an extreme variant of Taylorism that Frederick Winslow Taylor himself, a near century after his death, would have no trouble recognizing. With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers,take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.
Amazon is also a truly global corporation in a way that Walmart has never been, and this globalism provides insights into how Amazon responds to workplaces beyond the United States that can follow different rules. In the past three years, the harsh side of Amazon has come to light in the United Kingdom and Germany as well as the United States, and Amazon’s contrasting conduct in America and Britain, on one side, and in Germany, on the other, reveals how the political economy of Germany is employee friendly in a way that those of the other two countries no longer are.
Amazon, like General Electric and Walmart, prides itself as a self-consciously ideological corporation, with Jeff Bezos and his senior executives proclaiming an “Amazon Way” that can illuminate the path forward for less innovative businesses. In December 2009 Mark Onetto, chief of operations and customer relations at Amazon and a close collaborator of Bezos, gave an hourlong lecture on the Amazon Way to master’s of business administration students at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Onetto is a disconcerting figure, because once he starts talking, style and substance are in sharp contrast. He is French born, and he still speaks with the rather faded insouciance of Maurice Chevalier and “Gay Paree,” and he makes much of this in his lecture. But there was nothing gay (in the traditional sense) or insouciant about the Amazon workplace that Onetto described for UVA’s MBA candidates.
Like most such corporate mission statements, Onetto’s uses a coded language that hides the harshness of his underlying message, which needs translation along with a hefty reality check. As with Walmart so at Amazon, there is a quasi-religious cult of the customer as an object of “trust” and “care”; Amazon “cares about the customer,” and “everything is driven” for him or her. Early in the lecture, Onetto quotes Bezos himself as saying, “I am not selling stuff. I am facilitating for my customers to buy what they need.”
Amazon’s larding of its customer cult with the moral language of “care” and “trust” comes with a strong dose of humbug because Amazon’s customers are principally valued by the corporation as mainstays of the bottom line, and not as vehicles for the fulfillment of personal relationships. There is still more humbug in the air because Amazon treats a second significant grouping of men and women with whom it has dealings—its employees—with the very opposite of care and trust. Amazon’s employees are almost completely absent from Onetto’s lecture, and they make their one major appearance when they too are wheeled in as devotees of the cult of the customer: “We make sure that every associate at Amazon is really a customercentric person, that cares about the customer.”
But as so often in Amazon’s recent history, it has been in Germany that this humbug has been stripped away and the true role of the “cult of the customer” has become clear. In its US and UK fulfillment centers, Amazon management is hegemonic. There is no independent employee voice to contest management’s demands for increased output unmatched by increases in real wages. But in Germany Amazon has to deal with work councils (Betriebsrat); a powerful union, the United Services Union (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, or Ver.Di), with 2.2 million members; and high officials of the federal and state governments more closely aligned with labor than their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom.
When in December 2012 the Ver.Di representatives in Leipzig called on the management of Amazon’s local center to open negotiations on wage rates and an improvement of working conditions, and especially for temporary workers who are badly exploited at Amazon, management refused on the grounds that employees should be “thinking about their customers” and not about their own selfish interests. This was treated with derision on the union side, but at all Amazon’s centers, and especially those in the United States and the United Kingdom, the cult of the customer is a serious matter and provides the rationale for the extreme variant of scientific management whose purpose, as at Walmart, is to keep pushing up employee productivity while keeping hourly wages at or near poverty levels.
As at Walmart, Amazon achieves this with a regime of workplace pressure, in which targets for the unpacking, movement, and repackaging of goods are relentlessly increased to levels where employees have to struggle to meet their targets and where older and less dextrous employees will begin to fail. As at Walmart, there is a pervasive “three strikes and you’re out” culture, and when these marginal employees acquire too many demerits (“points”), they are fired.
Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of “functional foreman,” introduced by Taylor in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times, economics correspondent Sarah O’Connor describes how, at Amazon’s center at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav (satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.
All this information is available to management in real time, and if an employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer the consequences. At Amazon’s depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day, mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March 2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she had been found unproductive during several minutesof her shift, and she was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at Amazon centers worldwide.
Whereas some Amazon employees are in constant motion across the floors of its enormous centers—the biggest, in Arizona, is the size of twenty-eight football fields—others work on assembly lines packing goods for shipping. An anonymous German student who worked as a temporary packer at Amazon’s depot in Augsburg, southern Germany, has given a revealing account of work on the line at Amazon. Her account appeared in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the stern upholder of German financial orthodoxy and not a publication usually given to accounts of workplace abuse by large and powerful corporations. There were six packing lines at Amazon’s Augsburg center, each with two conveyor belts feeding tables where the packers stood and did the packing. The first conveyor belt fed the table with goods stored in boxes, and the second carried the goods away in sealed packages ready for distribution by UPS, FedEx, and their German counterparts.
Machines measured whether the packers were meeting their targets for output per hour and whether the finished packages met their targets for weight and so had been packed “the one best way.” But alongside these digital controls there was a team of Taylor’s “functional foremen,” overseers in the full nineteenth-century sense of the term, watching the employees every second to ensure that there was no “time theft,” in the language of Walmart. On the packing lines there were six such foremen, one known in Amazonspeak as a “coworker” and above him five “leads,” whose collective task was to make sure that the line kept moving. Workers would be reprimanded for speaking to one another or for pausing to catch their breath (Verschnaufpause) after an especially tough packing job.
The functional foreman would record how often the packers went to the bathroom and, if they had not gone to the bathroom nearest the line, why not. The student packer also noticed how, in the manner of Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century panopticon, the architecture of the depot was geared to make surveillance easier, with a bridge positioned at the end of the workstation where an overseer could stand and look down on his wards. However, the task of the depot managers and supervisors was not simply to fight time theft and keep the line moving but also to find ways of making it move still faster. Sometimes this was done using the classic methods of Scientific Management, but at other times higher targets for output were simply proclaimed by management, in the manner of the Soviet workplace during the Stalin era.
Onetto in his lecture describes in detail how Amazon’s present-day scientific managers go about achieving speedup. They observe the line, create a detailed “process map” of its workings, and then return to the line to look for evidence of waste, or Muda,in the language of the Toyota system. They then draw up a new process map, along with a new and faster “time and motion” regime for the employees. Amazon even brings in veterans of lean production from Toyota itself, whom Onetto describes with some relish as “insultants,” not consultants: “They are really not nice. . . . [T]hey’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” But as often as not, higher output targets are declared by Amazon management without explanation or warning, and employees who cannot make the cut are fired. At Amazon’s Allentown depot, Mark Zweifel, twenty-two, worked on the receiving line, “unloading inventory boxes, scanning bar codes and loading products into totes.” After working six months at Amazon, he was told, without warning or explanation, that his target rates for packages had doubled from 250 units per hour to 500.
Zweifel was able to make the pace, but he saw older workers who could not and were “getting written up a lot” and most of whom were fired. A temporary employee at the same warehouse, in his fifties, worked ten hours a day as a picker, taking items from bins and delivering them to the shelves. He would walk thirteen to fifteen miles daily. He was told he had to pick 1,200 items in a ten-hour shift, or 1 item every thirty seconds. He had to get down on his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day to do this. He got written up for not working fast enough, and when he was fired only three of the one hundred temporary workers hired with him had survived.
At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.27 At the Seattle warehouse where the writer Vanessa Veselka worked as an underground union organizer, an American Stakhnovism pervaded the depot. When she was on the line as a packer and her output slipped, the “lead” was on to her with “I need more from you today. We’re trying to hit 14,000 over these next few hours.”
Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and Stakhnovism, laced with twenty-first-century IT, there is, in Amazon’s treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust—for customers, but not for the employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through scanning checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots, to guard against theft, and sets up checkpoints withinthe depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon’s German employees call Pausenklau(break theft), shrinking the employee’s lunch break from thirty to twenty minutes, when they barely have time to eat their meal.
Other examples include providing UK employees with cheap, ill-fitting boots that gave them blisters; relying on employment agencies to hire temporary workers whom Amazon can pay less, avoid paying them benefits, and fire them virtually at will; and, in a notorious case, relying on a security firm with alleged neo-Nazi connections that, hired by an employment agency working for Amazon, intimidated temporary workers lodged in a company dormitory near Amazon’s depot at Bad Hersfeld, Germany, with guards entering their rooms without permission at all times of the day and night. These practices were exposed in a television documentary shown on the German channel ARD in February 2013.
Perhaps the biggest scandal in Amazon’s recent history took place at its Allentown, Pennsylvania, center during the summer of 2011. The scandal was the subject of a prizewinning series in the Allentown newspaper, the Morning Call, by its reporter Spencer Soper. The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.
On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”
On July 25, with temperatures in the depot reaching 110 degrees, a security guard reported to OSHA that Amazon was refusing to open garage doors to help air circulate and that he had seen two pregnant women taken to a nursing station. Calls to the local ambulance service became so frequent that for five hot days in June and July, ambulances and paramedics were stationed all day at the depot. Commenting on these developments, Vickie Mortimer, general manager of the warehouse, insisted that “the safety and welfare of our employees is our number-one priority at Amazon, and as general manager I take that responsibility seriously.” To this end, “Amazon brought 2,000 cooling bandannas which were given to every employee, and those in the dock/trailer yard received cooling vests.”
* * *
With Walmart’s and Amazon’s business model, the workplace practices that raise employee productivity to very high levels also keep employees off balance and thus ill placed to secure wage increases that match their increased output. The “cult of the customer” preached by both corporations is a scented smoke screen thrown up to hide this fact. Apart from the model’s intensive use of IT, there is not much to distinguish its methods from those of the primitive American and European capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On both sides of the Atlantic, these excesses were harbingers of the rise of the labor movement and the political Left, both revolutionary and democratic, with the movements strongly focused on relations between capital and labor as the central issue of politics and society.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the parties of the center Left, the Democrats and the Labour Party, have today lost this focus, and the labor movements in both countries are in long-term decline. But in Germany the labor movement remains strong, and on workplace issues the mainstream political parties, the Christian Democrats as well as the Social Democrats, are well to the left of their American and British counterparts. This became apparent following the scandal at Amazon’s Bad Hersfeld depot in 2012, when security guards allegedly forced their way into dormitories housing temporary Amazon employees and intimidated them. Amazon faced what Der Spiegel called a Shitstormand was strongly criticized by the federal minister of labor, the prime minister of the state government of Hesse, the head of the Labor Office in Hesse, as well as the Social Democratic Party opposition in the federal and state parliaments.
Amazon was on the defensive, and in an interview with Spiegel Online that followed the scandal, Amazon’s local CEO, Ralf Kleber, distanced himself from the managerial absolutism of Bezos and Onetto in saying that he would welcome the setting up of more work councils (Betriebsrat) at Amazon depots. The services union, Ver.Di, was also a beneficiary of the Amazon Shitstorm. The union’s goal is to organize the whole Amazon workforce in Germany, negotiate wage increases with Amazon management, improve the working conditions of temporary employees, and blunt Amazon’s more oppressive workplace practices. In a German political and social context, it has a good chance of succeeding. Such success would, however, raise issues of ethics and economics that apply equally in a US and UK setting.
Union success would unquestionably raise Amazon’s costs and slow the growth of employee productivity. Wages would begin increasing in line with employee productivity, and productivity growth itself would slow as the union and the Betriebsrattogether blunted Amazon’s practice of pushing employees to the limit and beyond. We can be sure that at this point, Amazon would play the “cult of the customer” for all its worth and would do the same in an American setting if faced with the same challenge. So customers would have to start paying more for their packages and could no longer be absolutely certain of receiving delivery of them the very next day.
But should these marginal benefits to customers really be purchased at the price of a system that treats employees as untrustworthy human robots and relies on intimidation to push them to the limit, while denying them the rewards of their own increased efficiency? This is not a choice to be made solely with the economist’s narrow calculations of monetary costs and benefits. In quantitative, monetary terms, the cost to Amazon customers of a benign reengineering of the company would far outweigh the monetary benefits to employees. But what is the real value of such customer inconvenience when set alongside the value lost with the millions of lives damaged by Walmart, Amazon, and their ilk?
Excerpted with permission from “Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans” by Simon Head. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group.
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July 15, 2011
Amazon referendum creates jobs -- for political strategists
Amazon.com has set off a feeding frenzy in Sacramento, and it has nothing to do with free shipping.
Political consultants have been giddy with the prospect of an expensive ballot war ever since Amazon filed papers this month to overturn a new online tax collection law. If the Seattle-based company can gather enough signatures for a referendum and survive a legal challenge, Amazon ($96 billion market value) would square off against retail giant Wal-Mart ($186 billion) in the June 2012 election.
Other Fortune 500 retailers and labor groups would also join the fray over whether the most populous state in the nation should force online stores to collect taxes on purchases.
"It's very rare that you see so many deep pockets preparing to engage in the same fight," said Dan Schnur, a former GOP strategist and director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.
Under Assembly Bill X1 28, a bill passed by Democratic lawmakers and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month, major online retailers would be required to collect sales taxes on purchases by Californians. Democrats believe the proposal would raise $200 million in the first year.
Though 10,000 Amazon affiliates complained about job losses once the company cut off its customer referral program in California in an attempt to avoid collecting taxes, a referendum of the so-called "Amazon tax" would create instant employment for select Capitol insiders.
Not since billionaire Meg Whitman ran for governor has Sacramento seen such a rush to line up political work. Political consultants across town are scrambling to get a piece of the action, and one Republican strategist admitted he was pitching both sides of the measure.
"Usually these fights divide along very predictable ideological lines," Schnur observed. "But because you have factions of the business community in opposition to each other, any consultant can sign up with either side."
Sacramento law firm Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Gross & Leoni filed the referendum papers and is providing legal counsel to Amazon. A nascent coalition of online retailers has yet to finalize other partners, but Sacramento-based strategist Rick Claussen has been tied to a potential campaign, as has former Department of Finance director Michael Genest.
Genest said he does not yet have an agreement. But he has engaged in talks and said his firm, Capitol Matrix Consulting, "would be an influential voice if someone wants to bring us aboard."
On the other side, Mercury Public Affairs, has worked with brick-and-mortar retailers all year to push for the tax law. The firm's Sacramento office includes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger adviser Adam Mendelsohn, former Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and former Schwarzenegger aide Becky Warren.
Brian Brokaw, a Democratic strategist who ran Attorney General Kamala Harris' campaign last year, has been responsible for coalition building with retailers, small businesses and labor groups.
Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/07/amazoncom-has-touched-off-a.html#storylink=cpy
amazon pulls out of alec
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Amazon's Membership Demonstrates Corporate Control of ALEC Agenda
by Brendan Fischer — April 23, 2012 - 11:14am
- Topics: Corporations
- Projects: ALEC Exposed
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Online retail giant Amazon is being criticized for its relationship with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and accounts of its participation in ALEC illustrate how ALEC's corporate members and funders drive the ALEC agenda.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) is asking Amazon to follow the lead of 12 other corporations and drop its association with ALEC. Amazon apparently became an ALEC member in part to oppose new state taxes on online sales, but Amazon's membership dues and sponsorship grants help fund the overall ALEC agenda, which includes bills like "Stand Your Ground / Kill at Will," voter ID, anti-environmental legislation, and more.
In response to growing criticism of ALEC and an exodus of corporate and legislative members, ALEC has published a new set of "Frequently Asked Questions" to present a positive image of the organization. ALEC's claims in those FAQs are contrary to what some participants say actually happens in ALEC meetings, including in those meetings involving Amazon.