ND-Dem
ND-Dem's Journal2014: Amazon got $418 million in taxpayer subsidies in 49 locations.
A 2014 report by Good Jobs First found that Amazon had received at least 49 taxpayer subsidies worth $418,822,109. The report is based on information in public databases, news stories, and open records requests made by Good Jobs First, and is likely a conservative estimate.(14)
On the issue of subsidizing low-wage employers, the report notes,
"When a state or local government subsidizes a Wal-Mart store or an Amazon.com warehouse, it is doing the most to intensify economic inequality by enriching individuals at the very top of the income hierarchy while also perpetuating poor quality jobs at the bottom."
14)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Amazon
14.? Jump up to: 14.0 14.1 Philip Mattera, Kasia Tarczynska and Greg LeRoy, "Tax Breaks and Inequality: Enriching Billionaires and Low-Road Employers in the Name of Economic Development," Good Jobs First, December 2014. Accessed January 5, 2014.
Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books (after stealing them)
Kindle readers, take note: You may have been paying for books you could legally download for free--in nearly identical editions--elsewhere.
The titles in question aren't just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg. They appear to be the exact Gutenberg files, save only for minor formatting adjustments and the removal of that volunteer-run site's license information.
Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4.
"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them..."
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation chief executive Greg Newby expressed frustration about what he called an old problem for the non-profit organization. "Is this legal? Yes," he wrote in an e-mail Nov. 11. "Is it ethical? I don't think it is..."
Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman did not deny the basic allegation in an e-mail last Wednesday that followed a series of queries to the company's PR department: "These books were uploaded by a third party using our self-service platform. I've sent your note to the appropriate team internally." She did not reply to a message asking follow-up questions sent that afternoon and repeated on Monday.
Newby noted that when Gutenberg had complained about copyrighted, non-public-domain works showing up on Amazon, the site "took immediate action." But he said the Seattle-based retailer had ignored its suggestion that it directly offer Gutenberg titles as no-charge, DRM-free downloads--something Apple did in its iBooks store, mostly to Newby's satisfaction.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html
Jeff Bezos wants to privatize schools and get rid of teachers unions. (Surprised, Amazon-lovers?)
Lee Fang, brilliant investigative journalist for The Nation, has looked closely at Jeff Bezos’ interest in education, and the news is bad...
Bezos is throughly smitten with the idea that the way to improve education is to privatize public schools and to eliminate teachers’ unions.
—The Bezos Foundation has donated to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit organization that funds attack advertisements against teachers’ unions and other advocacy efforts to promote test-based evaluations of teachers. Education Reform Now also sponsors Democrats for Education Reform.
—The Bezos Foundation provided $500,000 to NBC Universal to sponsor the Education Nation, a media series devoted to debating high-stakes testing, charter schools, and other education reforms.
—The Bezos Foundation provided over $100,000 worth of Amazon stock to the League of Education Voters Foundation to help pass the education reform in Washington State. Last year, the group helped pass I-1240, a ballot measure that created a charter school system in Washington State. In many states, charter schools open the door for privatization by inviting for-profit charter management companies to take over public schools that are ostensibly run by non-profits.
Other education philanthropy supported by the Bezos Foundation include KIPP, Teach for America, and many individual charter schools, including privately funded math and science programs across the country...
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/06/jeff-bezos-worse-than-we-thought/
jeff bezos buys washington post, cuts employees' retirement, benefits
Jeff Bezos made his fortune fending off his employees’ attempts to organize into unions, but now that he owns the Washington Post he’s going to have to take a seat at the negotiating table, and it’s not off to a great start. Several dozen Posties, upset with Bezos’s proposed cuts to their pensions and severance pay, turned 15th and L into a picket line Thursday afternoon.
The Post, now a year into the Bezos era, wants to freeze its unionized workers’ pension plan and introduce a cash-balance model, which provides a lump sum or annuity on retirement, rather than the traditional plan which guarantees benefits regardless of market conditions. The switch only affects people hired before September 2009; newer employees will be given 401(k) retirement plans and supplemental savings accounts.
Bezos’s side also proposes cutting severance benefits in half from two weeks’ pay for every year saved to just one. A flier printed by Local 32035, the union representing Post employees, suggests that employees could be let go with even less if Bezos’s proposals go through. “[The] Post thinks that an employee who served two years—doing things such as covering a hurricane, or delivering newspapers in a hurricane—should be okay with two weeks’ pay,” the flier reads. “Oh, and cake.”
These are suggested changes that longtime staff writer Fredrick Kunkle, a co-chair of the local, says will turn the paper from a career destination to a “way-station” where journalists only stay for a few years before moving on. And the Post’s pension plan, unlike many other newspapers’, is relatively robust. It was $604 million ahead of its outstanding liabilities when Bezos bought the paper, a financial position earned by following some smart advice Warren Buffett offered Katherine Graham in 1975.
That Bezos would try to pare back the union’s benefits comes as no shock to many Posties, though. Amazon has successfully busted every one of its employees’ unionization efforts, most recently in June when workers at a warehouse in Delaware voted against joining a union after what labor organizers called “intense pressure” from management and outside consultants.
http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/capitalcomment/post-watch/washington-post-employees-arent-too-happy-with-jeff-bezos-right-now.php
Amazon belonged to ALEC until pressured to quit in 2012. What's the problem with pressuring them
over their unfair labor practices?
Protesters Confront Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos
Richard (R.J.) Eskow May 29, 2012
During Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, May 24, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was confronted by protesters from Working Washington, a coalition which includes community groups, unions and members of Occupy Seattle. As police evicted demonstrators, Bezos told shareholders that nine out of Amazon’s ten best-selling products were either digital content or digital platforms like the Kindle. Bezos was making a point: the physical world is being phased out of Amazon’s business plan...
Amazon has received intense and well-deserved criticism for working conditions in its warehouses, where temperatures can reportedly rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The people working inside them are underpaid, overworked, subject to firing without cause and deprived of employee benefits. Amazon gets away with this because it uses a variety of legal tricks, like demanding that its employees call themselves “independent contractors.”
Amazon has also taken heat for its membership in ALEC—the American Legislative Executive Council—a corporate-funded group that backs right-wing politicians. ALEC also drafts and promotes laws like those that effectively disenfranchised large numbers of minority voters, the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that has resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and a number of other people, and the anti-union laws brought to national attention by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
If nothing else, Bezos offered symbolic gestures of conciliation today...Bezos did not announce that employees in Amazon’s warehouses would receive the benefits they’re due under state and national law, or that Amazon would stop forcing them to declare themselves independent contractors.
And Amazon was behind the curve in withdrawing from ALEC, lagging well behind companies such as KFC, Taco Bell, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Intuit, McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. Most of these companies left ALEC more than a month ago, when revelations about its role in “Stand Your Ground” gave renewed momentum to demands that corporations leave it.
But then, ALEC has treated Amazon very well. It has defended the “Amazon loophole” that allows online sellers to avoid charging sales taxes the way other businesses do. This unfair advantage has given Amazon a lot more clout against neighborhood bookstores and retail book chains—clout it has used to drive many of them out of business....A recent report in the Seattle Times noted that, unlike Microsoft and Boeing, Amazon gives virtually nothing to Seattle-area charities.
Bezos is a libertarian who reportedly exults in the fact that Amazon’s loophole prevents the government from collecting taxes. He appears to exemplify a certain kind of Internet or computer entrepreneur—call them “digital libertarians”—who can be visionaries in technological and cultural ways and yet blind to social and economic realities....
http://www.thenation.com/article/168109/protesters-confront-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos#
Amazon one of largest US h1b employers
Amazon actually was originally founded as a real, brick-and-mortar bookstore by Jeff Bezos. However, it expanded operations to online bookselling, was incorporated in 1994 and sold made its first online book sale in 1995. Amazon grew slowly throughout the 90s; in fact, it didn't even reach a modest profitability until 2001... The company also has extended its operations to the technology field, becoming a consumer electronics and tablet producer, and a provider of cloud services.
The company also had become one of the USA's biggest H1B visa sponsors; weighing at 26 on the list, having filed for 342 visas in the first two quarters of FY2012. It filed LCAs for occupational categories including Software Development for Applications and Systems Software, Financial Analysis, Operations Research Analysis, Computer and Information Systems Management, Computer Systems Analysis, Marketing Management, and General and Operations Management, among others.
http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1basereviewsamazon/ref/1714/
Amazon's overseas labor policy: Trust us/Foxconn produces Kindle Fire
While Apple and some other corporations have increased public reporting about their global suppliers, Amazon has not released information about who produces its brands or the results of watchdog audits.
Overseas suppliers manufacture thousands of Amazon.com products ranging from Kindles to pillows to lawn chairs. All the suppliers are supposed to comply with an Amazon code of standards that includes a ban on child labor and forced labor.
But in an era when worker- and human-rights activists are pressing for increased disclosure, Amazon remains mum about which international suppliers make these products and about the results of watchdog audits.
Amazon officials said the company works with Bureau Veritas, a global firm that offers inspection, audit and certification services, and Amazon managers participate in many audits. But they declined to disclose any of the audit results...
Amazon's most publicized labor issues have flared in the United States, where it employs tens of thousands of workers in fulfillment-center warehouses....Earlier this year, The Seattle Times reported on harsh conditions at a Campbellsville, Ky., warehouse, where employees who complained about the workplace feared losing their jobs and a former human-resources employee said managers strategized on how to shed injured workers.
With the past half-decade, Amazon also has rapidly expanded a network of overseas suppliers to manufacture products such as Kindle e-readers, as well as lines of furnishings, electronics and other private-label merchandise.
Earlier this year, The New York Times published a lengthy examination of Foxconn's treatment of workers producing iPhones. Foxconn also does contract work for Amazon, according to Ken Hui, a Hong Kong-based analyst for Jefferies, a banking and investment firm. Hui, who says his information is based on supply-industry sources, says Foxconn produces Kindle e-readers and one model of the Kindle Fires...
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020017651_amazonsuppliers30m.html
Amazon taps Foxconn for 10-inch Kindle Fire, says report
Amazon will consign production of a 10-inch Kindle Fire tablet to Foxconn, according to an Asia-based report. If true, this would mean that Amazon has its sights on a slightly bigger tablet than previous reports have claimed.
Shipments of the 10-inch class Fire would begin in the second quarter, according to a report in DigiTimes.
http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-taps-foxconn-for-10-inch-kindle-fire-says-report/
Apple, Amazon contractor boss calls workers “animals”
The chairman of the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, Terry Gou, referred to his workers as “animals” during an appearance at the Taipei City Zoo on Friday. The remark caused an uproar. He later apologized and said the media had distorted his comments.
Foxconn produces around 40% of the world’s consumer electronic devices, including Apple’s iPad, the Amazon Kindle, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and many more.
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/foxconn-boss-calls-workers-animals/
Supreme Court Liberals rule with conservatives in favor of Amazon wage theft
Opinion analysis: No overtime pay for after-work security check
Workers who are required to stay after their normal hours on the job to undergo a security screening are not entitled to overtime pay while they wait for that process and then go through it, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday.
The decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. (Amazon's pet temp agency) v. Busk overturned the one federal appeals court that had ruled in favor of workers in that scenario — an increasingly common practice in the workplace.
The overtime pay case involved workers at two warehouses in Nevada, which served as storage and order-filling facilities for the online retail giant Amazon.com. Two of Integrity’s hourly workers sued the company after it began requiring all workers to go through screening before they left the premises, a policy designed to deter theft of goods.
The two workers, who filed a class-action lawsuit, contended that they had to wait up to twenty-five minutes to be searched, at which point they then had to remove their wallets, keys, and belts and pass through a metal detector. Their lawyers argued that because this procedure was a mandatory part of their job, imposed by their employer, they were entitled to be paid overtime for the additional time.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Integrity had to pay overtime for the screening process, concluding that this after-work review was a job requirement and was for the company’s benefit.
Reversing that result, and reaching the same conclusion reached by all other federal appeals courts that had considered the issue, the Supreme Court declared that such screening procedures were not an “integral” part of the job. Integrity’s staff at the warehouses, the Court said in an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, were hired to take products off the shelves and package them for shipment to Amazon’s customers, not to go through security screenings.
The Court also found that Integrity could have eliminated the screenings without affecting the workers’ ability to complete their normal tasks. The decision commented that the Ninth Circuit was wrong in focusing on whether the employer had required the extra activity at the end of the workday. If that were the test, Justice Thomas wrote, it would sweep into the realm of paid employment the very kind of activities that Congress had enacted the Portal-to-Portal Act, passed in 1947 to narrow the scope of wage and hour rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act, to address.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote a brief concurring opinion, elaborating on their understanding of the standards the Thomas opinion had used.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/12/no-overtime-pay-for-after-work-security-check/
What a travesty. The company REQUIRES you to go through the screenings to keep your job. It's irrelevant that they "could" eliminate the screenings, or that the "normal" job consists of moving merchandise. The company requires its workers to be searched before they can leave the workplace, and the searches steal the workers' time for the benefit of the employer.
Like Walmart, only with supercomputers and drones: At Amazon.com "cheap" comes at a very hefty price
At first blush, you might wonder why the Lowdown is digging into a company that has built a strong reputation with millions of consumers and even has a rather hip vibe going for it. After all, isn't Amazon considered a model of tech wizardry, having totally reinvented retail marketing for our smart-phone, globally-linked age? Yes. And doesn't it peddle a cornucopia of goods through a convenient "1-click" ordering system, rapidly delivering the goods right to your doorstep? Yes, yes, and yes. Also, doesn't it offer irresistibly steep discounts on the price of nearly everything it sells (which is nearly everything)? Yes, again.
However, as an old saying puts it: The higher the monkey climbs the more you see of its ugly side. Amazon certainly has climbed high in a hurry. Not yet 20 years old, it's already a household brand name and America's 10th largest retailer...
But what is the source of those "efficiencies" and the low prices that are so greatly admired by Wall Street and so gratefully accepted by customers? Are they achieved strictly by being a virtual store, selling everything through the World Wide Web, meaning that it doesn't have to build, staff, and maintain any retail outlets? Or is Amazon achieving market dominance the old-fashioned way--by squeezing the life out of its workers and suppliers, by crushing its competitors (from small shops on Main Street to big chain-store rivals) with monopolistic muscle, and by manipulating our national and state tax laws?
Voila! There's the ugly side. Thus, in both this month's issue and September's, the Lowdown will take a hard look at what Amazon is doing to whom--and where that is leading our society.
Amazon screams for scrutiny because it, more than any other single entity, has had the infinite hubris to envision a brave new, computer-driven oligarchic order for our society--then has proceeded to assemble it.
For some 30 years, corporate control has steadily (and stealthily) enveloped major elements of our society--workplaces, politics, education, media, upward mobility, etc. This encroachment has even been given a benign name: "The new normal." But it's not normal, and it's not the result of some immutable economic force, marching through history--it is the product of corporate money and power being relentlessly asserted by individuals.
No one has imagined corporate domination more expansively nor pushed it harder or further than Bezos, and his Amazon stands today as the most advanced and the most ambitious model of a future under oligarchic control, including control of markets, work, information, consumerism, media... and beyond. He doesn't merely see himself remaking commerce with his vast electronic networks, algorithms, and metrics--but rebooting America itself, including our society's concept of a job, the definition of community, and even our basic values of fairness and justice. It amounts to a breathtaking aspiration to transform our culture's democratic paradigm into a corporate imperium, led by Amazon.
Bezos, an admirer of Walmart's predatory business strategy, didn't just duplicate it--he wired it into his supercomputers, applied the Big Data techniques of the NSA to it, and routed it through the matrix of his own grandiose imagination. Walmart, the "Beast of Bentonville," is now yesterday's model of how far-reaching and destructive corporate power can be. Amazon is the new model, not just of tomorrow's corporate beast, but the day after tomorrow's...
http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/3724#.VNL2jGctGgx
Why Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Is More Evil Than Walmart and McDonald’s
1. At Amazon, any a particular employee’s promotion isn’t his or her boss’s decision, but rather, depends on whether that boss can convince his or her peers that an employee is promotion-worthy. In other words, not only does an AMZN worker need to suck up to his or her supervisor, but it would behoove them to suck up to every other boss in the building. This can make office politics very tricky — as well as cut-throat — in that it allows someone to keep a better employee (i.e. competition) ineligible for any kind of advancement where they might become a threat.
2. The average warehouse worker, which is a huge segment of the AMZN employee base, earns an average annual paycheck of $23,582. That’s on par with Walmart’s lousy pay. In some of those warehouses, Amazon employees were forced to raise a serious stink before air conditioners were installed. (Note: $23,582 = $11.33/hour, and if that's a typical wage average, it's right-skewed, meaning the typical worker makes less but the 'average' is raised by a minority of higher-paid workers)
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Jeff Bezos has created a culture at AMZN where any customer complaint is presumed to mean an employee has made a mistake, or an employee is ultimately somehow at fault. Example: Any emailed customer complaint that Jeff Bezos receives — and apparently that’s a great number of them — are simply forwarded to the appropriate individual with nothing more than a question mark added by the CEO. A resolution and a plan of action to prevent the problem from arising again is expected within hours; there’s no one at AMZN who doesn’t know what the lone “?” actually means...
And make no mistake — Jeff Bezos isn’t simply being efficient by adding a sole question mark to complaint e-mails. He uses plenty of words when he feels it’s merited. He has been credited with saying the words “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” and “You’re a total idiot, but do it anyway” plenty of times.
There are better ways to get someone’s attention, and it might be less humiliating to simply fire an employee who’s truly an idiot, incompetent or lazy. Under the right circumstances, harsh words like that can lead someone to commit suicide.
Unfortunately, Jeff Bezos doesn’t seem to have any other way of making his point.
http://investorplace.com/2013/12/jeff-bezos-amazon-amzn-worst-company/2/#.VNLyz2ctGgw
and here's a comment from someone who worked in one of bezos' warehouses (the ones that are locked and allowed to heat up to over 100 degrees while compassionate Bezos keeps ambulances stationed outside to take away any workers who drop from dehydration)
AMZNhorrorshow's avatar
As a former masters level manager for AMZN, I could not even bear to watch what was done to the hourly warehouse workers, let alone participate. Worst job I ever had. I have never seen such contempt for workers, and I've managed globally, including China! Young, naive MBA's can bring their dogs to work at AMZN Seattle, but warehouse workers don't even have time to get to their lunch and back within 30 mins, in a million square foot bldg during a 12 hour shift, and that's just a minor problem. ( Most Chinese workers, btw, have a chef on the premises)
All of the sheeple excuses about "at least they have a job," plays right into the hands of Jeff "Beelzebub" Bezos...but as long as you get free shipping, who cares.( until they eat the competition, and end it) I am not religious, but that place made me believe in evil! True story.
http://investorplace.com/2013/12/jeff-bezos-amazon-amzn-worst-company/2/#.VNLyz2ctGgw
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