By George Howsen.
Amazon being held to account.
Amazon, we all know it, chances are we all use it, is owned by the richest man on the planet (by an ever-increasing margin). Allowing for delivery of more or less anything you can imagine and have it delivered right to your door, from groceries to hobby related items. Also, pretty famous for have its workers urinate in bottles and work to the point of exhaustion. Wait what? ...
Turns out, convenience comes at a cost.
Amazon is a company so large that most people just accept it, but those that put it under a degree of scrutiny will hastily come to find that they are not as squeaky clean as their smiling logo would have you believe.
To start we should probably go over the oldest allegations made against this monolith, and work forward from there, those allegations being poor working conditions in Amazon's warehouses. I suppose it's to be expected that you don’t get to be the largest company on the planet, shipping 415 million packages in July last year, without an awful lot of challenging work, usually on the part of those warehouse workers, the problem being that the upkeep of their services just demand to much of it.
The corporation has been hit in the past with several lawsuits, making such accusations as workers being denied the legally required 30 min lunch break, and quotas of such magnitude that they couldn’t even take restroom breaks. An allegation that they at first denied, but eventually admitted to.
Now naturally, when subjected to such conditions the first thing they would think to do is band together. If one gear refuses to turn then you just replace that one gear. But if they all lock up at once, then trying to replace them becomes incredibly costly.
However, Amazon seems to have had this same thought as there have also been more recent allegations of union busting according to an article published by the Guardian in February of this year, has made several anti-unions drives by way of text messages / videos anti-union captive audience meetings, as well as directing them to its anti-union website doitwithoutdues.com, (it is to be noted that all links I have found to this website across several publications seem to be nonfunctional, so it is possible that the site has since been taken down). And most recently would be a case launched by Germany regarding anti-competitive practice. Doing so under a law that came into force in January which would come into force in January of this year, which would allow for the German government to have a tighter control over the E-commerce giant, in order to restrict the potential of market abuse.
This is the third case that Germanys FCO (federal cartel office) has going on against amazon at the moment, which for reasons I'm about to explain, can't really be anything but good.
It can't really be disputed that we live in what can only be called the corporate age, as of March 2021 Apple inc. was worth $2.08 trillion (£1.46 trillion) which puts its monetary value at bigger than most things up to and including: the combined net worth of the world richest 18 people, the monetary cost of WW1, and all but 7 Entire CONTRIES globally (not combined).
If money really dose make the word go round then its giants like google, amazon and apple doing the turning. Fortunately however, even they need foundations, and the customers that form these foundations are also the foundations of the nations in which they operate (legally, at least). And it is thanks to the collective will of these people as voters, rather than consumers that these companies can be reined in. So, no matter how much these titans seem to just keep on going, it is a comforting thought that as long as the power of the people stays fresh in the minds of consumers, they are just the cast of a vote away from being brought to heel.
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