The Human Cost of Amazon

The digital era empowers us to buy anything from anywhere at the flick of a wrist. But the company spearheading this convenience, Amazon, has sins to answer for. Is any amount of convenience worth enabling men like CEO Jeff Bezos?

One of Amazon’s most topical and recent victims, the high street, is a contentious one. Fundamentally, the capitalist mentality that innovative business will exterminate competitors who fail to adapt may seem agreeable. But the manner through which Amazon achieves this hegemony renders its threat to local business problematic. Human cost is utterly disregarded in Amazon’ s conduct. According to The New York Times, Amazon’s prioritisation of logistical expediency over human life has caused over 60 Amazonrelated vehicle accidents since June 15, 2017, claiming 10 deaths. Meanwhile, as COVID-19 rages on and most of the world is working from home, Amazon is unwilling to grant its workers this basic right.

Moreover, Amazon’s warehouse working conditions are pitiful and unsanitary, with recent patents suggesting that upper management have considered keeping workers in literal cages. The conditions are so appalling that, when a writer investigated an Amazon warehouse in Staffordshire, he noted that the employees urinated in water bottles to avoid penalties for toilet breaks; similar conditions have been reported in Seattle. In a display of solidarity, France’s labour minister has asked Amazon to better their working environment, as “the protection conditions are insufficient”. Whilst employees worldwide have gone on strike demanding leave, Amazon actively attempts to stifle unionisation.

words by: MIKE O’BRIEN and MUSKAN ARORA design by: ELAINE TANG As revealed by the Guardian, repair and maintenance technicians filed the first petition at the National Labor Relations Board, but the movement was swiftly crippled by Jeff Bezos’ who directed his wealth towards hiring a law firm to suppress the union. In 2000, when Communication Workers of America organised customer service employees to unionise, Amazon shut down all its call centres and claimed the mass firings were unrelated to the incident. A few months later, The New York Times reported that personalised reports for managers included a section where instructions were given on “detecting and bursting” internal unions. The Times also exposed, that Amazon warehouses in Delaware fabricated an anti-union story to scare off employees from organising any unions against the company.

Despite unacceptable conditions and anti-union dictatorship, Amazon employees face low wages and little to no holidays. The working environment is one where, as the Guardian reports, the “fear of missing productivity targets” dominates work culture, and full time workers are pushed beyond their physical limits, rendering any sort of worker’s assembly an exhausting thought.

Most of us are busy folks with a moment-to-moment lifestyle, and with so many moral issues plaguing the Earth, fighting a war on so many fronts is overwhelming. In that respect, who can blame us for soliciting services like Amazon who trivialise a timeconsuming and tiring aspect of life? We can’t all be 24/7 humanitarians – but no one is asking you to. All we can do is the best we can from our limited position, and if that means buying stuff from somewhere else to decline slavery, perhaps we should be grateful this battle is distant enough to ignore.