Amazon & workers rights

Originally posted: 10th December 2020

Every year at the end of November, we get overwhelmed with attractive Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts. The Guardian estimated that due to lockdown in the United Kingdom, online sales in 2020 will probably rise by 60% compared to 2019. One of the companies that are expected to benefit the most from current pandemic restrictions is Amazon.com, an American e-commerce platform. Thus, in face of the growing popularity of the company, it is important to spread awareness and hold them accountable for human rights issues regarding workers’ rights that they are involved in.

Covid-19 Spread Inside Warehouses

Despite Amazon.com reporting a net income of more than 11 billion dollars in 2019, the company failed to protect its workers and ensure that they were working in safe conditions during this unprecedented time of the pandemic. In April 2020, Amnesty International revealed that hundreds of Amazon workers felt unsafe being in warehouses in Indiana and New Jersey, USA. Nonetheless, they had to show up to work in order to prevent unemployment. Six months later, the BBC reported that nearly 20,000 Amazon workers in the USA contracted coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. Staying open and failing to ensure adequate measures to protect its workers is undoubtedly an abuse of Article 23 (‘right to just and favorable conditions of work’) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Amazon.com, for which they need to be held accountable.

Unionizing

Besides failing to stop the coronavirus spread in Amazon’s warehouses, the company has a long history of not letting its workers unionize, which too, is a violation of Article 23. Unions are a vital element of the working environment — they allow workers to ensure that they are treated with dignity, by, methods such as, negotiating decent wages and/or working conditions. Amnesty International reported that Amazon.com is allegedly monitoring workers’ private Facebook groups and investing a large sum of money into developing spying technology to control workers. In 2018, a famous 45-minutes-long training video for Amazon employees was leaked; it aimed to teach people to watch out for phrases, such as: ‘living wage’ or ‘ contract’, as they may be warning signs of suspicious behavior (or unionizing) in the warehouses, which is an extremely outrageous statement to make.

What can be done about this?

Although we, regular people, have an important purchasing power and by choosing human rights-obeying companies we can ensure that corporations, such as Amazon will gain less money, the blame is too often put on us. It is important to realize that for some people Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales are the only moment during the year when they can afford desired articles. The blame for the abuse of employees' human rights should mostly be directed at the company itself. How is it that the wealthiest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bazos, is able to make an annual salary of his lowest-paid employees every 11.5 seconds, but is not able to ensure they will be treated with dignity and earn living wages? This is one of the most outrageous workers’ rights issues that could easily be avoided by governments implementing adequate policies that would help to trace and penalize the predatory behavior of some of the biggest multinational corporations in the world and hold them accountable for their wrong-doings. _____________________ Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/.../lockdown-and-black-friday... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54381928 https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics... https://qz.com/.../jeff-bezos-makes-more-than-his-least.../ https://www.statista.com/.../annual-et-income-of-amazoncom/ https://www.amnesty.org/.../04/amazon-workers-covid-safety/