The Case Against Exploited Labor

The wealthiest man on earth has made his wealth off the backbone of invisible exploited workers. Internationally, Amazon's use of outsourced labor has proved unethical. Amazon's partnership with Foxconn's factories to produce their famous products such as the Kindle and Echo Dot has shown deplorably low wages, which are half the average Chinese workers' salary during off-peak seasons in addition to numerous Chinese labor law violations including: overreliance on dispatch/gig workers to avoid providing benefits, incredibly long working and overtime hours (seeing 100 hours of overtime during peak season), and a lack of physical safety precautions in the dormitories and safety training [link].

Domestically, Amazon demonstrates a similar disregard for worker safety and a culture of retaliation, especially against POC and women workers. During the coronavirus pandemic, warehouse workers reported overcrowding, which made them unable to abide by CDC social distancing guidelines, a shortage of PPE, and denial of paid sick time. When technology and warehouse workers spoke out publicly against these dangerous working conditions and tried to discuss unionizing, they were fired [source]. Since 2001, Amazon has normalized firing leaders and participants of unionization drives. In 2020, Amazon's Whole Foods was found to be using a heatmap of locations with high pro-union sentiment, using indicators like racial diversity and poverty levels (Business Insider). 

Not only does the quick delivery promises of Amazon lead to dangerous working conditions within the warehouse, it extends to intense work quotas and dangerous conditions for their delivery drivers [link].

As one of their own distinguished engineers and Vice Presidents wrote, after leaving the Company: "Amazon...has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward. [link]"