Bezos building a dystopian United States of Amazon
You’ve no doubt seen the new Amazon corona-ads, including the one thanking its workers — “heroes” in the warehouses, the skies, the trucks, pledging that the company “will continue to do everything we can to keep” their frontline workers “healthy, safe and protected.”
That ad, which debuted nationally on March 31, features barefaced workers. Not one wears a mask.
My favorite is more recent. Called “Rainbows of Hope,” a little girl is seen drawing a rainbow in chalk, then writing “Thank you!” with hearts below and waiting by the window for her Amazon delivery man — who by now has been given a mask and gloves — to see her tribute and get choked up.
All while “This Little Light of Mine” plays in the background. Subtle it is not.
Contrast this schmaltz — really, who knows or even sees their Amazon delivery person? — with the blistering open letter by Amazon engineer and vice president Tim Bray, who quit his million dollar-plus job last Friday “in dismay” over the company’s heartless firings of warehouse whistleblowers begging for workplace safety.
“Chickens—t” and “kill the messenger” are two ways Bray described the company’s cowardly firings of these activists, followed by internal attempts to smear at least one, Staten Island worker Chris Smalls, as “not smart or articulate.”
That’s a dog whistle, a coded racist description of an African-American blue-collar worker.
Smalls, who staged a walkout over unsafe working conditions in March, was immediately fired.
“I’m happy to see that someone in such a prominent position with the company decided to … speak out,” Smalls tells the Post. “There are people who are sick and who have died working for this company.”
Bray wrote that before quitting, he went through the proper channels to make his concerns known. While Amazon, he says, takes care to make sure their white-collar workers have a healthy work-life balance, the frontline workers, those packing and shipping and delivering the products Americans so desperately need, are treated not as human beings but as “fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.”
And, Bray points out, “It’s not just workers who are upset. Here are attorneys general from 14 states speaking out. Here’s the New York State attorney general with more detailed complaints. Here’s Amazon losing in French courts, twice.”...MOREBut, but free delivery!
Also at the Post, gotta work on the phrasing in the headlines:
WWE's John Cena surprises Make-A-Wish 7-year-old with cancer
