Damien Gayle reported yesterday in the Guardian that the global initiative Progressive International is calling for a boycott today of Black Friday on Amazon, under the hashtag #MakeAmazonPay and the domain MakeAmazonPay.com. A video by the economist Yanis Yaroufakis asks consumers to not even visit the Amazon website today. Protests are being planned for Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, the UK, the US and many other countries, and strikes are being organized in Germany to demand better pay and working conditions. (As an aside, there are other reasons to boycott Black Friday, starting with the fact that Black Friday deals are no longer all that good.)
The MakeAmazonPay campaign notes that during the COVID-19 epidemic, Amazon became a trillion-dollar company, its CEO Jeff Bezos’s wealth is up $100 billion since March, and Bezos became the first person in history to amass $200 billion. Despite President Trump’s well-publicized animus against Amazon, its market value has quadrupled during the Trump administration.
Amazon’s wealth has come at the expense of the rest of us, not merely because Amazon notoriously avoids paying taxes. In a statement published by Progressive International yesterday, labor researcher Casper Gelderblom said that consumers:
... feel that they can hardly avoid Amazon, unless they are willing to wait longer and able to pay more. Through mass surveillance technology like Alexa, Echo, and Amazon Ring, the corporation has infiltrated millions of households and collected their most intimate data.
Across this network sits Amazon Web Services, which has played a key role in the operation of extractive industries and law enforcement; as well as Amazon’s recent ventures into sectors like financial services, food provision, and health care. Amazon has, in effect, become a wholly unaccountable, predatory transnational private state — or, indeed, a 21st-century empire.
Progressive International’s list of demands include:
- pay increases
- workplace safety improvement (including COVID-19 safety)
- better job security
- ending Amazon’s union busting in the US
- environmental sustainability
- paying taxes
- ending anticompetitive business practices
- guaranteeing transparency over privacy and the use of consumer data
- stopping development of systems that expand mass surveillance
Amazon has rejected these demands, saying that they are based on “a series of misleading assertions by misinformed or self-interested groups.”
Most Democratic politicians have been silent on these issues. In contrast, Bernie Sanders has publicly opposed Amazon’s union-busting, most recently by tweeting his support for Amazon workers in Alabama who have taken steps to unionize Amazon’s new warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Also, President Trump has bashed Amazon’s tax avoidance and its relationship with the US Postal Service.
It strikes me that continued silence on these issues by Biden, Harris and most other Democratic leaders is not a good long-term strategy. Amazon’s market dominance is growing and this will become a bigger problem for America’s democracy. If mainstream Democrats don’t even try to address this issue, Republicans are likely to follow Trump’s lead and pretend to solve the problem while letting Amazon’s power and political influence grow even faster. Although Democrats need not demonize Amazon, they cannot be so fearful of Amazon that they give up their fundamental principles. Instead, Democrats should encourage and cajole Amazon via sensible reforms, so that it can become a better corporate citizen.
Paying its fair share of taxes would be a good start.