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May 5, 2020 - 3:48pm
Tim Bray, a respected engineer and vice president at Amazon, has quit. Yesterday he announced that he was resigning “in dismay” at the company’s firing — or in Amazon’s own jargon, releasing — of workers who had dared to question it over workplace safety during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Moreover, the company had also recently attempted to smear workplace organisers as ‘inarticulate’ in the media. Bray claimed in a blogpost that this was “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture”.
Amazon has been treating some of its ‘associates’ poorly for years. When I went undercover at the company in 2016, it was a disciplinary offence to take a sick day — even with a note from the doctors. The most striking incident occurred when I found a Coca-Cola bottle half-filled with urine sitting incongruently on a shelf full of miscellanea from Amazon’s website. So afraid were certain workers of taking a bathroom break that some poor drudge had decided, on balance, that pissing into a coke bottle was the safest option.
“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first” — so wrote Frederick Taylor in his influential book The Principles of Scientific Management more than 100 years ago. Taylor popularised a sort of managerial Leninism in which productivity was elevated far beyond any concern for the wellbeing of the “mentally sluggish” worker who was to be subjected to its diktats.
Amazon is the closest thing we have to a Taylorist behemoth today. As Bray writes in his blogpost:
The Romanian migrant workers I interviewed at Rugeley in 2016 compared their jobs to ‘modern slavery’ due to stringent productivity targets. Workers were mere units of production; their physical and emotional wellbeing was secondary.
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SubscribeWow! Some decency at the higher levels of corporate life. That’s a first. I should point out that I have always refused to buy anything from Amazon having always considered it to be evil. Your local bookshop can order any book you need very quickly.
I don’t own any stock in Amazon, or any other retailer. However, let’s make one point absolutely clear. Amazon didn’t become the behemoth it is today by accident. The consumer made it that way. Why? Because of two things: price competition, and CONVENIENCE. If the consumer had stopped buying from Amazon as soon as past stories of employee mistreatment by their immediate supervisors and management came out, it would have been a different story. But, I would argue that, for the most part, people really don’t care…as long as it’s not affecting them, and their needs (or wants) are met. They show that with their wallets. Sad reality.