Amazon is beating its brick-and-mortar rival, Walmart, for subhuman work conditions. As happened with Walmart, the retail behemoth of virtual space is increasingly developing a monstrous reputation. Walmart had to make major changes as public scorn grew against it. Amazon will, too.
Is it Amazon’s right to be greedy in order to maximize profits for stockholders? Of course it is! It is also everyone else’s right to hate them for it. Increasingly, many do. That’s part of being a world citizen. Plain and simple.
For years, most people (not me, but most) luuhved Walmart for having one of the biggest selections of merchandise at the lowest prices. Anything for a lower price on skivvies, even turning your soulful little town into a soulless strip mall. Over time, stories of Walmart’s treatment of its workers continued to spread, though, until the Walton family became the slum-dog billionaires. Eventually, the company’s reputation preceded it in the marketplace of human resources, making it difficult for the company to build new stores until, finally, it had to substantially up its game in terms of wages and benefits.
The amazing Amazon’s rate of flow
Usually, I take the macroeconomic view from 40,000 feet. This time I’m going to take the micro view of just one greedy but highly successful company that is top in stocks and run by the richest man in the world to show how the richest treat the rest as expendable. If you don’t fight for every cent you get, you get nothing.
We’re going to take a look at corporate greed from a Petri dish where it is plentiful. Our opening shot starts so close in all you see is the character’s hands flurrying about her business:
Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t. Dixon’s scan rate – more than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a day – was being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT.
(The camera dollies back to reveal a vast Amazon warehouse around her with hundreds of employees all doing the same thing until Dixon is a mere speck at the far end of the warehouse.)
Think of Amazon as being a large data stream filled with piranha where thousands of frenzied workers will devour other workers whose numbers are marginally slower. As a worker, you know the company literally watches over your shoulder every second, and, if your numbers fall a fraction behind the mainstream flow, you’re gone in a gulp.
Read the rest here: https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/amazon-is-the-new-walmart-of-the-workplace/
I just quit Amazon. They are not paying their employees any base pay increases this year (no raises for any salaried employees) and only the top 20% get any raise of any type (they award stocks that vest in 2 years). A company that made literally Billions in 2020 due to COVID not giving any raises to any of their employee anything for their work. Evil, sick, greedy SOBs.