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Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Democracy Dies In Amazon’s Warehouses

The Washington Post [owned by Jeff Bezos], at least since its latest re-brand in February 2017, prides itself on supposedly illuminating the threats and dangers to American democracy and the nation’s values. While in the Trump era, WaPo’s reporters, columnists and editors have generally agreed that the man in the White House himself represents the most dire of threats.

Regardless of the accuracy of such a judgement, it is one a newspaper can hold and still remain honest and accurate. If that same paper has declared itself such an arbiter of the things threatening the country’s foundations, one would expect it to investigate all the controversies facing all facets of American society.

In the case of WaPo’s coverage, there exists one growing controversy that has remained conspicuously uncovered: the conditions of Amazon’s workplace [also owned by Jeff Bezos].

Such conditions have been covered extensively in the mainstream press. A number of Amazon’s warehouse workforce have long complained about abusive conditions, with one reporter who went undercover as a warehouse worker for six months comparing it to a stint in prison.

“I’ve worked in warehouses before, but this was nothing like I had experienced. You don’t have proper breaks — by the time you get to the canteen, you only have 15 or 20 minutes for lunch, in a 10-1/2-hour working day. You don’t have time to eat properly to get a drink,” the writer, James Bloodworth, told Business Insider.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

WaPo has always been CIA.
Bezos is also intelligence.

Time to wake up folks.

Anonymous said...


Are kids at the border destined to work in Bezos' sweatshops? If he were wring today, would Dickens write about Scrooge, or about Bezos?

Anonymous said...

Decades ago I worked for a person like Bezos. He was extremely rich and paid nearly all of his hard working employees minimum wage. In my third year of working for him full time as a salaried worker, I had to call in sick for the first time. I had the flu and was confined to bed.
In the evening the door bell rang and it was him. He walked past my wife, and went straight into our bedroom as though he owned the place. He looked at me and muttered "just making sure you really are sick." He then walked out without another word. When I went to work the following week he handed me my paycheck and I noticed he docked me three days pay.
I just looked at him, and told him that I quit. Two other workers also quit and the three of us luckily ended up working for his main competitor for many years.
The three of us often said that we didn't know how miserable it was to work for him until we saw how a decent employers treated the employees.

Anonymous said...

I loaded trucks for UPS while in college. It was similar there. No breaks at all until your truck was loaded. Could be 4 hours could be 8. I assume it's different now.
The money was great and no one ever complained.

Anonymous said...

June 26, 2018 at 10:06 PM:

Sounds like Johnny Janosic