May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.
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And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.
Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It 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.
Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.
You can read the rest @
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
Two things ought to be abundantly clear:
(1) From a lay person's point of view, Amazon should have been collared using US antitrust laws long ago. Why hasn't this happened?
(2) Few people are going to give up $1 million just to make a point, so Mr. Bray deserves our appreciation and support.
It's quite possible Amazon hasn't broken any laws. They're quite clever and can afford the best lawyers. On the other hand, how many of you are happy with the way Amazon is treating the rest of us?
To the extent possible, I no longer do business with Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Google, or any of the other behemoths. We the People have paid a heavy price for their success, and it's time we stopped paying that price.
It's not likely "our" gutless Congress and the Trump administration or their successors are going to jump into this fray. The only way to shut these bums down is to cut off their income. It's up to you and me to make that happen.
And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.
Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It 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.
Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.
You can read the rest @
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
Two things ought to be abundantly clear:
(1) From a lay person's point of view, Amazon should have been collared using US antitrust laws long ago. Why hasn't this happened?
(2) Few people are going to give up $1 million just to make a point, so Mr. Bray deserves our appreciation and support.
It's quite possible Amazon hasn't broken any laws. They're quite clever and can afford the best lawyers. On the other hand, how many of you are happy with the way Amazon is treating the rest of us?
To the extent possible, I no longer do business with Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Google, or any of the other behemoths. We the People have paid a heavy price for their success, and it's time we stopped paying that price.
It's not likely "our" gutless Congress and the Trump administration or their successors are going to jump into this fray. The only way to shut these bums down is to cut off their income. It's up to you and me to make that happen.
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