Amazon’s stock prices hit an all-time high this summer, helping Jeff Bezos' wealth grow large enough to surpass Bill Gates’ own fortune. Accumulating that wealth came at a cost, though—homelessness and housing costs are rising in Amazon’s HQ city of Seattle, and there are many reports of exploitative work conditions in its fulfillment warehouses.
Instead of using Amazon’s immense wealth to create consistently humane working conditions, the company is taking a different approach: they’ve hired employees to become full-time “ambassadors” who use their official Twitter accounts to counter negative tweets about their employer’s warehouse conditions. While they were first suspected to be bots, Amazon says they are real people tweeting.
Amazon Prime’s fee recently went from $99 a year to $119 a year; they have over 100 million members. That increase alone could help stop reports of warehouse workers resorting to urinating in bottles because they don’t get enough break time to use the restrooms. It’s clear the company isn’t hurting for money and has the ability to raise customer costs to cover what they want. Unfortunately, Amazon would rather pay at least 15 people to tweet creepy fill-in-the-blank responses to negative posts than help thousands of warehouse workers.
Check out how weirdly artificial and perky their tweets are in this exchange with Twitter user augusta_khalil.
I think emojis are officially dead.
In a statement to Mashable, Amazon insists that these people are speaking from their own experiences. “FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfillment centers. The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience. It’s important that we do a good job of educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers,” their spokesperson said.
So Amazon is lowkey calling everyone who’s spoken about poor conditions in their warehouses liars while paying a couple people likely higher wages to sit online and serve as personal micro PR machines. It’s not hard to see the difference in class in the types of labor involved—doing social media is different work from the very manual labor required for fulfillment-center employees. Amazon is hoping that the comfort of the few will help them escape accountability for all.
I really hope people don’t fall for this.