Dear Mackenzie Scott, This week, you announced that you’ve made $4.2 billion in charitable donations in the past four months. For that you deserve an extremely modest amount of congratulations! You are, no doubt, besieged at all times by people who come to kiss your ass and beg for money. We come to you today with something different: moral …
Dear Mackenzie: There’s One More Donation You Owe to the World Read More »
This article is part of a series on Amazon workers produced in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Courtenay Brown spends her day making grocery runs for others in a football-field-sized maze of narrow aisles and refrigerated enclaves. At the Amazon Fresh unit in a Newark, New Jersey fulfillment center, she works on the outbound ship dock, helping …
This Amazon Grocery Runner Has Risked Her Job to Fight for Better Safety Measures Read More »
For Sean Carlisle (a pseudonym) a 32-year-old graduate student and native of California’s Inland Empire, the last three years at his local Amazon fulfillment center have been an education. As a student of urban planning, he studies how built environments shape a community’s behavior. As a picker, he packs items at a breakneck pace amid stacks of inventory and snaking …
Hibaq Mohamed has worked for Amazon nearly as long as she’s been in the United States. In 2016, the twenty-something Somali immigrant landed in Minnesota by way of a refugee camp, joining one of the largest East African communities in the country. She soon joined the legion of workers who fuel the state’s main Amazon facility, the …
Meet the Warehouse Worker Who Took On Amazon Over Inhumane Conditions and Harassment Read More »
Amazon warehouse workers across the country today decried the company’s decision to end a policy of unlimited unpaid time off, and said that working conditions inside Amazon fulfillment centers are putting their lives at risk. Employees from New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan and New York, working with Athena Coalition, said on a call today that a policy …
Amazon’s Unlimited Unpaid Time Off Ends May 1, and Workers Say That Could Be Deadly Read More »
Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are. Putting it mildly, postal workers …
Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Jeff Bezos has gotten $24 billion richer. Amazon’s stock price has risen more than 40% since mid-March. This explosive creation of corporate wealth has coincided with an unprecedented level of labor activism against Amazon, including multiple well-publicized workplace walkouts, protests, and a growing drumbeat of negative PR about the company’s handling …
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon has rolled out a new policy that extends paid time off to thousands of part-time operations employees. The change follows a months-long campaign by workers in Amazon’s last-mile delivery stations to demand PTO, touted in the company’s public communications as an “essential” benefit offered to all its workers. After …
Amazon Says It’s Giving Part-Time Workers PTO—But There May Be a Catch Read More »
Two months after Amazon warehouse workers across the globe staged a one-day strike, the great “disruptor” is facing another workplace disruption—this time by tech workers at its Seattle headquarters. The group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice announced this week that it would join the September 20 Global Climate Strike led by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg. The employees …
Amazon Worker: Why We’re Bringing the Climate Strike to Jeff Bezos Read More »
What should be done with Amazon? While some parts of the company should indeed be broken up, its sprawling scale is not its only problem. Much of what Amazon does is harmful for reasons inherent to the logic of private ownership, and would remain so at any scale. While the public probably does not need to …
Breaking Up Amazon Doesn’t Go Far Enough—We Must Put It Under Public Control Read More »
Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.
