Amazon sues NY Attorney General in preemptive strike: Web giant faces claim it did not fully protect workers in COVID-19 pandemic Amazon on Friday sued New York Attorney General Letitia James to prevent her office from bringing legal action that would punish the behemoth computing biz for alleged worker health and safety violations. The lawsuit follows from a year of rancorous disputes with Amazon warehouse workers who claim the company hasn't done …
...soon with it's own Air Force:
https://apnews.com/article/sports-nfl-football-new-york-jets-17f74a62c2e12f5ecf41234df10bd4ab
-Seattle-based Amazon has been working to deliver most of its packages itself and rely less on UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and other carriers.-
-Amazon said the 11 planes, all of which are Boeing 767-300s, will be converted to hold cargo instead of passengers.-
-
It looks like just the start. Also many US trucking businesses have been going to the wall with a splat while Amazon's fleet keeps truckin'
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-truckers-low-rates-no-work-2019-6?op=1&r=US&IR=T
What's the phrase for a 'state within a state? ;)
Amazon response to its detractors is 'Cry me a river' as long as it is legally allowed to get away with abusing its dominant market position.
In a spectacular display of what, I’m sure, has to count for hyperbole and bad parenting, I’m afraid to say that I raised the spectre of Amazon as a whip to encourage m’boy to do his bloody homeschooling.
One boy needs no encouragement. He works his socks off. The other however, would rather idle his life away looking for ways around our network security to enjoy the internet’s copious supply of … well, never mind what. The point is that he isn’t doing what he should be doing - his homework.
So I’ve pointed out that Amazon is a strange, double headed, beast. If he works hard at school, gets a good degree, and proves himself then, if he wants a job at Amazon, they’ll coddle him and pay him well and use his mighty intellect to build a clever online system to put someone else out of business. On the other hand, if he idles his life away, Amazon will offer him 50 years of slavery, where even a loo break is frowned upon, with a pitiful pittance of a pension at the end of it - if he’s lucky.
Sadly, it’s not an argument that seems to convince him. It seems that Amazon’s behaviour is too unbelievable to be convincing.
So why do I still use them? Because they’re convenient, dammit. And I’m a massive hypocrite. But I do try to find alternatives.
Trouble is that 90% of the population fit nicely in the the '50 yrs of wage slavery' catagory.
ok its good for the 9% your other son fits into(they just make him want more expensive trinkets and junk so he ends up just as broke and in debt as the other 90%)
All amazon are doing is supplying stuff at the cheapest price they can get away with and not caring whether suppliers can make a profit,
What defines us as a society is what to do about the likes of amazon et al.
Do we allow them to exploit their workers to the nth degree or do we force them to treat their employees as human beings? and if they can treat 1 employee as a more valuable than gold, and the rest of them as disposable slaves , what does that say about amazon as a company....
Yes. This.
Take the price of computers, for example. Adjusted for inflation, a humble Speccy cost £800. No screen, no mass storage included. And yet people (most, perhaps) baulk at paying this much for a laptop nowadays. But, if we’re going to pay a fair price and not exploit others, this is probably what it costs - and then we have to accept that a yearly renewal of our tech is not sustainable - we need to look after it and make it last longer.
All round, paying more would be better for the planet and better for the workers. But it’ll never happen. It won’t happen because of my greed, your greed (apologies - I’m assuming you enjoy cheap tech as much as I do!) and the greed of people like Bezos. Nearly all of us are culpable to one degree or another.
Adjusted for inflation, a humble Speccy cost £800. No screen, no mass storage included. And yet people (most, perhaps) baulk at paying this much for a laptop nowadays.
Not really a valid comparison, silicon components are a lot cheaper and orders of magnitude more complex now. Modern laptops probably have fewer chips than a Spectrum but billions if not trillions more transistors in chips that (apart from the CPU) cost pennies to make while those in the Spectrum cost pounds to manufacture. Back then they sold fewer CPUs a year than are sold every day now, economy of scale really adds up.
If you are going to compare then and now prices, you need a product that is fundamentally unchanged. Bread, beer and housing are better products for this purpose. Alternatively citing prices as a percentage of the average wage is possibly a more revealing tool.
>If he works hard at school, gets a good degree, and proves himself then,..., they’ll coddle him and pay him well. On the other hand, if he idles his life away, Amazon will offer him 50 years of slavery...
What can I say?
A) This sounds fair - you work hard, you get money; you don't - you don't.
B) Unhappy at Amazon? Go somewhere else, you're not a slave, you're an employee, you can quit anytime.
I avoid Amazon for most things now for the reasons mentioned, plus surveillance-based price manipulation that offers the same item at different prices to different people at the same time and the frequent Prime con that often gives a discount on an inflated price that matches the price offered without inflation / discount to non-Prime customers.
One that p'ed me off was having a review rejected because it mentioned that the same item could be bought at various supermarket chains for between 33% and 66% less. My review 'wasn't helpful', the email said.
Today I checked the price of Pataks Brinjal (aubergine) pickle.
Amazon
Pack of 2 for £8.28 (FREE Delivery) = £4.14 per jar
Pack of 6 for £15.71 (FREE Delivery) = £2.62 per jar
Local Tesco £1.99 per jar
Local Waitrose £2.05 per jar
Amazon prices (not to mention purchased reviews) need to be treated with caution, even leaving to one side the employment abuse and effects on local businesses that can't afford the offshore profit / tax shuffling - a legal form of money laundering not available to smaller and UK-based businesses (substitute your own country.
The issue is that so many people just assume Amazon is the cheapest or have arrived by a search. The first search was generic but the top link was for the item they needed at price a. It is then out of stock so the next search is on Amazon.
Amazon are a monopoly and are a growing issue globally. They siphon money out of countries to bury in offshore accounts where it is of no use to anyone. The more that is siphoned out due to dubious accounting practices the worse it will get.
Just how you can sue to stop the law being enforced is beyond me and goes to show just how out of balance these big corporations are. Amazon are still treated as tech and in doing so are avoiding all sorts of regulation that the industries they are decimating have to adhere to.
namely the criminal family of Trump and Friends (Rudi G etc)
They will do more to enhance her political ambitions that fighting with Jeff 'I rule the world' Bezos.
Opps. I'd better edit the title to say 'smaller'... OTOH perhaps not.
Can we get Trump vs Bezos in Court? That would make excellent TV.
"namely the criminal family of Trump and Friends (Rudi G etc)"
Steve, it's time you sat down and asked yourself if Trump is the problem or if there is something deeper that is wrong in the USA. The American people appear to becoming evermore divided and I believe that this is simply the result of the last 20 years of American politics, bad media and corporate greed.....All parties being equally at fault...
Saying "Orange Man Bad" will resolve nothing. It's time for the people to move on, grow up and become adults. It's not a Republican or Democratic problem, it's an American problem.
It's not a Republican or Democratic problem, it's an American problem.
There are structural problems too deep seated to be easily addressed. Perhaps the most dangerous is having a politically appointed judiciary. For Democracy to stand any chance the judiciary has to be independent of the executive branch and be seen to be independent.
"They're not equally at fault. If you can't see that you need to look harder and think more."
Neitzsche said it well.
Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
I fear that if you don't realise the time has come to stop blaming the "other side" then you are repeating the attitudes that are a large part of the problem. If the irony of an incoming president talking about a need for unity whilst his supporters are enthusiastically attempting to pursue his departing predecessor in a highly polarising exercise escapes you then I submit that looking harder and thinking more would indeed be desirable.
The new leitmotif appears to have become : Stigmatise and Denigrate in order to divide..
Most of what is happening appears to be politically motivated, I have a hard time believing that the "majority" of Americans agree with current views, regardless of their party...
Someone is feeding the fires with gasoline and like most crimes, in order to find the culprit one only needs to look at who has most to profit..
Excellent! Splendid phrase.
And the culprits are well distributed on both sides. On this side of the pond a large percentage of the left are incapable of saying "Tory" without suffixing it with "scum", whilst in the other direction left is frequently prefixed with "looney".
You are right, since amazon owns the Washington Post which served as one of the many Big Tech propaganda outlets for Biden, the AG better starts going after Trump if he wants to advance in his career.
Who cares about rights for workers anyway, for sure not Big Tech who elected Biden.
When technology has been used to deskill every job so that they can all be undertaken by interchangeable peons who can be replaced at the drop of a hat with minimal loss of productivity then the power of collective bargaining is minimal. When sacking half the workforce would mean a catastrophic drop in production and a near impossibility to find sufficient skilled workers to replace them then collective bargaining had real teeth. If on the other hand you can sack half the workforce and replace them with third world workers who just have to follow the pictures and be up to speed in a week then...
...I wonder just how many workers they would be left with? It's clear that they are using COVID to get rid of people they don't like. Are there any records of non-activist staff being sacked for COVID rules infringement?
I work for a much smaller company, and the COVID rules are all in place, one way systems etc., but if they were as strictly enforced as the paperwork implies, half the staff would be in disciplinary proceedings by now, if not sacked. Most people treat the rules as guidance and bend or break them everyday simply because it easier and most people are using common sense. One way corridor? No one else in sight so use it in the wrong direction because it take 3-4 times longer to go the "proper" way.
They have handled things terribly in the UK too. Changing one way systems constantly and not giving us enough prior notice of changes. We have also seem to have mostly white guys as Social Distancing Ambassadors, and they're allowing black people to consistently flout the distancing, because they're shit scared of being called racist if they call it out. Yet the BAME community are more at risk of catching COVID.....
Anon, for obvious reasons....
All other complaints of Amazon's actions aside, Smalls was being paid by Amazon to stay home and quarantine after possible covid exposure and yet during that time while he was still on the clock he decided to come to the warehouse and protest. THAT is why he got fired, and THAT is why he lost his labor board case.
For a different department of the state to come in and demand that he be rehired and given back pay and bonuses for defrauding the company is just ridiculous, and for that reason alone it would appear that Amazon is in the right on this one -- and I say this as someone who HATES Amazon and what they stand for, such as their corporate support for antisemitism, the way that they sell counterfeit goods and go to great pains to protect those sellers while screwing over the legitimate ones, their treatment of employees in general, etc.
I tried to organise a family boycott of Amazon after a distant relative suicided due to working there. Even his close relatives said, "It's just too convenient".
I've started taking alternative action. I ordered £2 of catnip on my mum's account. I don't know how much the catnip cost them, but I know the delivery cost them more than £2. Where you can, order your deliveries item by item.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
