
Boycotting Amazon - phelm
https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2018/04/16/its-time-to-boycott-amazon/
======
auntad
"The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their
feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were
timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their
breath.

Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from
labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from
depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide."

While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting
that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with
"Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the
same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?

~~~
dx034
I'd like to see some statistics comparing Amazon to other retail jobs. Low-
skilled retail jobs are often physically exhausting and not fulfilling. Many
amazon workers might feel depressed, but would they feel better if they worked
at Walmart instead?

~~~
magissima
I can't comment on Walmart specifically, but from my experience working in a
warehouse for a couple months it seems that Amazon is totalitarian in a way
your average crappy low-skill job isn't.

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discreditable
This isn't just an Amazon problem. I've got a friend who worked at Wal-mart
for a while. They give points against you for taking sick days no matter how
bad it is. One time she got sent home for having some poison ivy on her arms
and was still punished for it. Workers who have high points, but not so many
to get fired get their schedules screwed with until they quit.

~~~
test6554
I mean if you are in the top 90th percentile nationally for taking sick days,
then working you into the schedule would probably be a nightmare for managers.
By reducing your hours, they are reducing the scheduling work that managers
need to do. Also, It's likely expected that every employee has some points,
but taking way more than everyone else is what this type of system is likely
designed to catch.

~~~
discreditable
It's not just reducing hours. For example you might start getting rotated
around different shifts. They'll make your schedule as irregular as possible
to encourage you to accrue points or quit. My friend saw this happen to
several coworkers in her two years there. Towards the end her direct manager
even asked her why she hadn't quit yet.

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mcfrankline
Well I guess anytime the Internet has a problem these days, we are either
going to delete the problem or boycott it into oblivion. If you look deeply
into any giant Corp or business serving millions of people you’re going to
find faults and deficiencies like this every time. Follow the production Chain
of Apple, Google, Tesla etc etc you’re going to find someone at the deep end
bearing the entire cost of their success.

So what happens now ? Assuming everyone boycotted Amazon and the unlikely
event occurred and it shut down. What next? Tens of thousands of those works
go home to what? Does the editor then start another campaign to employ all the
people laid off? Think they’d be working there if they had a lot more options?

How about trying to fix the problem or at least fix as much as humanly
possible? How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations?
How about the government? Isn’t that what they’re there for? Do we have to
resort to Social justice for everything now ? Because it obviously doesn’t
work with these corporations. See Equifax, See Facebook ?

~~~
ukulele
> How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations?

I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on
politicians.

> Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations.

There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops
probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line,
which is what they ultimately care about.

~~~
not_kurt_godel
> I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on
> politicians.

Relying on politicians is hard in the short term, but regulatory policy fixes
the problem more or less permanently in an accountable, democratic, and
globally applicable (in a national context) way. If we as a society believe
what Amazon is doing is fundamentally wrong, why not prohibit legally rather
than rely on an ad-hoc solution that will probably be circumvented once
attention fades away?

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falcolas
So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon,
there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident
indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is
backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any
meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that
revenue.

Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur
the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for
poor working conditions in another section of the company.

~~~
whistlerbrk
> AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days

Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.

~~~
falcolas
Inaccurate wording on my part. AWS is amazon's primary source of "operational
income" (i.e. raw revenue minus operational costs) these days. $1.17 billion
for AWS vs. $0.35 billion for Amazon as a whole, for Q3 2017.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-
revenue-q3-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-
revenue-q3-2017.html)

~~~
whistlerbrk
I see, I see. Thank you for clarifying.

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arbitrage
There's a big difference between boycotting Nike, and boycotting Amazon. In
the case of Nike, there were more than enough substitute goods to fill the gap
for a consumer choosing to not purchase athletic gear from Nike.

How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy.
It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you
substitute for that?

~~~
davidhyde
The thing that worked for me was to not renew my Prime membership. It then
became much easier to force myself to use something like eBay. It's really
difficult to wait those 5 extra days for shipping but makes me feel a little
better nonetheless. For cloud I use Azure.

~~~
ReverseCold
And if you absolutely _need_ something within two days, USPS Priority mail
comes within that time frame (though may be prohibitively expensive for large
packages).

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amelius
Everybody is talking about a decentralized Facebook alternative, but can't we
build "federated shopping", where independent shop owners join in an Amazon-
like shopping experience (for the customer), with reviews based on proof-of-
purchase, using smart contracts/blockchain technology?

~~~
ebiester
What does blockchain add to this?

~~~
jamra
You can prove that your reviewer is the same person as the person who paid
with blockchain. I'm just not sure how to do so if the customer pays with
traditional means.

~~~
ebiester
That has an interesting side effect. If someone writes enough bad reviews,
will people stop selling to them? We saw VE electronics refuse to sell
anything else to anyone who gave them a bad review on any product. Would
vendors band together on this?

~~~
jamra
I suppose one could just create a different wallet and use that one.

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c2h5oh
No, it's time to have labour laws making what's happening in Amazon warehouses
too costly due to fines to continue.

~~~
reacweb
We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear
if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as
something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its
malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle
vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a
deterministic algorithm.

~~~
notyourwork
I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like
software, over time accrues debt.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like
> software, over time accrues debt.

It's like software, in that incremental changes are safer and ground-up
rewrites are usually disastrous failures engineered by people who failed to
fully understand the complexity of the application domain.

OTOH, I'm not sure a “refactor” is a meaningful concept for the legal system.
Oh, sure, you can hold requirements and expected outcomes the same and change
the details, structure, and organization of legal code. “Refactors” of that
kind happen all the time. They aren't as significant in impact as with
software, because the code isn't imperative and doesn't run on dumb machines,
so refactors are mostly about readability, and don't (e.g.) improve runtime
resource usage significantly.

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cryptoz
Why does an article about boycotting Amazon try to convince you to share their
content directly to Amazon's servers? Seems to me like the author does not
believe in this mission one bit and is just writing clickbait.

Author, if you're reading this, you ought to live by your words and reduce at
least your Amazon supporting activities in the very article you are
complaining about their doninance in. Remove that Reddit share icon and
everything eles that sends data to Amazon, or we'll all assume you don't care
about this, you're just in it for the money and the fame and the clicks. With
that Reddit share button, you make it clear you want us to use Amazon a lot to
spread your content far and wide.

Can't have it both ways.

~~~
TomAnthony
TNW is a well respected and well established tech news site with a large team
[0]. The author likely doesn't have direct control over the sharing buttons.

I take your point, but on the other hand it is probably quite difficult to be
aware of all sites that use AWS, especially if they sit behind a CDN. I didn't
know Reddit use AWS.

[0] [https://thenextweb.com/team/](https://thenextweb.com/team/)

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drinchev
I always wondered why Amazon doesn't have some labor union which at least
negotiates normal working conditions.

Boycotting usually doesn't have the same effect as a 2-days strike.

~~~
danirod
They seem to have an union at least here in Spain, and maybe in other
countries as well. Last month, workers at a local Amazon ware house in Madrid
did a 2-day strike, which was pushed by a national workers union as a complain
on the working conditions [1]. I've been out of the loop on news so I don't
know how things are going since then.

[1]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-
spain/spains-a...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-
amazon-workers-call-two-day-strike-over-wages-rights-idUSKCN1GP13L)

------
sigsergv
Boycott isn't a solution, proper media coverage is. Nike was damaged not by
boycott campaign but by a massive media outbreak. Just image effect of good
documentary film created by some famous talented director. It's much much
worse for reputation than disorganized boycott campaign.

~~~
dragonwriter
Boycotts are, among other things, tactics to get media (and thereby public)
attention. Saying a result. wasn't produced by a boycott because it required
media attention which was in significant part drawn by the boycott, which had
drawing such attention as a goal, is, well, missing the point of active
protest entirely.

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apple4ever
No

------
HillaryBriss
Even without a boycott movement, we may already have reached peak Amazon.

This year, the Supreme Court may create a revolution in the ability of US
states to tax consumer purchases from online retailers
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#Supreme_Court)).
This could erode Amazon's online retail profitability enough to seriously slow
its ever-increasing sales volume and give the competition enough breathing
room to survive and even grow a bit.

And Trump keeps complaining about the prices the USPS receives to deliver
Amazon. Whether or not there's any merit in Trump's complaint, as a convenient
piece of political theater, this cause could easily be picked up by the next
president and renegotiated. It would be a crowd pleaser for someone like
Elizabeth Warren.

Perhaps the playing field will be tilted just enough to slow the whole Amazon
machine.

~~~
dwyerm
Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor.
Collecting taxes is _difficult_. There are hundreds of thousands of variables
depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying.
Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts
of Disney World.

There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service
might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.

~~~
HillaryBriss
There sure seem to be a lot of sales tax calculation service and software
companies already, aside from Amazon:

[https://www.capterra.com/sales-tax-software/](https://www.capterra.com/sales-
tax-software/)

A lot of them are revealed by googling 'sales and use tax software'

I think that sort of software solution has been around for about 20 years.

~~~
dwyerm
Oh, no doubt. I helped to support that software twenty years ago. It was
expensive. It took constant grooming from an entire team of people. At the end
of the month, the company had to cut hundreds of checks to authorities all
over the country. For a Fortune 500 company, this is a normal cost of doing
business. But this is not the kind of thing you want to subject small business
owners to.

We only had to go through this mess two decades ago because we had nexus sites
at all our warehouses. Before Mayfair, the mom-and-pop internet seller could
get by with only taxing their local customers.

The Mayfair result is going to force difficult and expensive sales tax
compliance onto the backs of small business. Your small business owner doesn't
want to go shopping for 'sales and use tax software'. They want the shopping
cart to do that work for them.

Unless the states actually get together to come up with a simplified and
unified system, companies like Amazon who can abstract all that away are are
going to be a necessity. I think a nation-wide internet sales tax is better
than forcing additional burden onto small business or driving them right into
the arms of places like Amazon.

