When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, he didn’t just open an online store out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington. His business was global and ready to extract every drop of workers, suppliers, consumers, the planet, and everyone in between. It was the perfect opportunity to extract more from the pandemic. The company doubled its workforce, tripled its profit and even increased its profitability.
Amazon’s geographic expansion continues apace. Amazon will expand its geographic reach to at least five additional countries in 2023: South Africa, Chile, Colombia and Nigeria. Even with some slowed growth in recent months, Amazon is stronger — and more profitable — than it was three years ago.
Amazon is more than a marketplace. Amazon makes its products and distributes them through an extensive global supply chain. Amazon Web Services is the cloud-services arm of Amazon, and it now has a third market share. Amazon is now a major player in the grocery sector, thanks to Whole Foods. The recent acquisition by One Medical has allowed the company to continue its progress in the healthcare sector. Amazon has also become a big player in the entertainment industry — whether that’s Prime Video or Twitch, the live streaming video platform.
The underside of Amazon’s explosive growth, however, is felt by the very people who generate its wealth: its workers. From the lack of masks and other protective equipment during the pandemic to injury rates twice as high as the industry standard to warehouses catching fire, Amazon workers are constantly put at risk — with fatal consequences all too often.
The supply chain is often worse. Amazon was found to be selling clothing made in dozens of Bangladeshi blacklisted factories after the Rana Plaza garment factory disaster. The legally binding Accord to Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh is not signed by Amazon, despite being a demand from workers, unions, activists, and trade unions.
With global inflation rising — and reaching its highest rate in forty years in North America and Europe — the prices of essential goods, such as energy and food, are soaring. The company raises the prices of Prime members in most markets but refuses increase the wages to keep up with inflation. The company’s anti-union stances and hardline views on improving work conditions are unchanged. In the UK, it offered workers a ridiculous 35p raise per hour in August — in other words, a massive real-term pay cut. Workers in France and Germany also rejected real-term pay cuts. Amazon made $33.3 billion in profit in 2021, but it won’t pay its workers a fair share.
Amazon also undermines our governments’ capacities to fight the cost-of-living crisis. Amazon avoided US corporate federal income tax of $5.2 Billion in 2021. In Europe, Amazon paid no income tax on €55 billion sales, instead receiving €1 billion in tax credits. Amazon continues to ignore attempts of regulators and abuse its market power. In India, Amazon has dodged Indian law, which stipulates that an e-commerce platform can only connect sellers to buyers and — unlike in the United States — not be active as a seller on the platform itself. Amazon has been accused in the United States and Europe of a variety of antitrust violations and unfair competition practices. Amazon spent decades fighting to pay taxes in Bangladesh.
Amazon is continuing to contribute to climate change. Despite its pledge to fully decarbonize its operations by 2040, the corporation’s CO2 emissions rose by 18 percent in 2021. And the number is only so low because — unlike competitors like Target — Amazon is drastically undercounting its carbon footprint: it solely counts its own branded products in its reporting, which make up only 1 percent of its overall sales. Amazon Web Services continues not just to supply fossil fuel companies, but has entered into “strategic collaboration” with some of them. And another chapter was added to Amazon’s history of sponsoring climate denial when, shortly before the US midterm elections, it was revealed that Amazon gave money to at least twenty-five climate-denying candidates.
It is clear that we cannot depend on Amazon’s goodwill to pay the bills. Amazon workers need to unite with their trade unions. Tax watchdogs, tax watchdogs, regulators, as well. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now.
Amazon workers from France, Germany and other countries have been striking for better working conditions. They won only a small victory. Amazon increased wages in Germany by 2%, but still below inflation. In the UK, Amazon announced a £500 bonus for warehouse workers.
Regulators and politicians, too, are pushing back on the corporation’s anticompetitive behavior. Amazon in India was required to sell off its shares of the top sellers on its platform to stop it abusing its market power. In the United States, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — the first major effort by Congress to regulate Big Tech in the internet age — would prevent Amazon from featuring its own brand, Amazon Basics, at the top of a product search above other similar products. In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act, which was approved in the summer of 2022, will make Amazon’s use of third-party data from small and medium enterprises to compete with rival products on its own marketplace illegal.
These are great victories but Amazon employees, our societies and the planet need more.
That’s why workers and organizers are uniting on November 25 in a campaign to Make Amazon Pay. Amazon faces coordinated protests and strikes from the United States, South Africa and Bangladesh. They demand that Amazon increases wages for its employees above inflation, stop union busting and decarbonize its entire supply chain.