from Hacker News

Boycotting Amazon

by phelm on 4/16/18, 1:06 PM with 96 comments

• by auntad on 4/16/18, 1:53 PM

  "The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their breath.

  Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide."

  While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

  Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?

• by discreditable on 4/16/18, 2:13 PM

  This isn't just an Amazon problem. I've got a friend who worked at Wal-mart for a while. They give points against you for taking sick days no matter how bad it is. One time she got sent home for having some poison ivy on her arms and was still punished for it. Workers who have high points, but not so many to get fired get their schedules screwed with until they quit.

• by mcfrankline on 4/16/18, 2:06 PM

  Well I guess anytime the Internet has a problem these days, we are either going to delete the problem or boycott it into oblivion. If you look deeply into any giant Corp or business serving millions of people you’re going to find faults and deficiencies like this every time. Follow the production Chain of Apple, Google, Tesla etc etc you’re going to find someone at the deep end bearing the entire cost of their success.

  So what happens now ? Assuming everyone boycotted Amazon and the unlikely event occurred and it shut down. What next? Tens of thousands of those works go home to what? Does the editor then start another campaign to employ all the people laid off? Think they’d be working there if they had a lot more options?

  How about trying to fix the problem or at least fix as much as humanly possible? How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? How about the government? Isn’t that what they’re there for? Do we have to resort to Social justice for everything now ? Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. See Equifax, See Facebook ?

• by falcolas on 4/16/18, 1:33 PM

  So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

  Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue.

  Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for poor working conditions in another section of the company.

• by arbitrage on 4/16/18, 1:19 PM

  There's a big difference between boycotting Nike, and boycotting Amazon. In the case of Nike, there were more than enough substitute goods to fill the gap for a consumer choosing to not purchase athletic gear from Nike.

  How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?

• by amelius on 4/16/18, 1:22 PM

  Everybody is talking about a decentralized Facebook alternative, but can't we build "federated shopping", where independent shop owners join in an Amazon-like shopping experience (for the customer), with reviews based on proof-of-purchase, using smart contracts/blockchain technology?

• by c2h5oh on 4/16/18, 1:57 PM

  No, it's time to have labour laws making what's happening in Amazon warehouses too costly due to fines to continue.

• by cryptoz on 4/16/18, 1:24 PM

  Why does an article about boycotting Amazon try to convince you to share their content directly to Amazon's servers? Seems to me like the author does not believe in this mission one bit and is just writing clickbait.

  Author, if you're reading this, you ought to live by your words and reduce at least your Amazon supporting activities in the very article you are complaining about their doninance in. Remove that Reddit share icon and everything eles that sends data to Amazon, or we'll all assume you don't care about this, you're just in it for the money and the fame and the clicks. With that Reddit share button, you make it clear you want us to use Amazon a lot to spread your content far and wide.

  Can't have it both ways.

• by drinchev on 4/16/18, 5:25 PM

  I always wondered why Amazon doesn't have some labor union which at least negotiates normal working conditions.

  Boycotting usually doesn't have the same effect as a 2-days strike.

• by sigsergv on 4/16/18, 2:29 PM

  Boycott isn't a solution, proper media coverage is. Nike was damaged not by boycott campaign but by a massive media outbreak. Just image effect of good documentary film created by some famous talented director. It's much much worse for reputation than disorganized boycott campaign.

• by apple4ever on 4/16/18, 5:34 PM

  No

• by HillaryBriss on 4/16/18, 2:24 PM

  Even without a boycott movement, we may already have reached peak Amazon.

  This year, the Supreme Court may create a revolution in the ability of US states to tax consumer purchases from online retailers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#...). This could erode Amazon's online retail profitability enough to seriously slow its ever-increasing sales volume and give the competition enough breathing room to survive and even grow a bit.

  And Trump keeps complaining about the prices the USPS receives to deliver Amazon. Whether or not there's any merit in Trump's complaint, as a convenient piece of political theater, this cause could easily be picked up by the next president and renegotiated. It would be a crowd pleaser for someone like Elizabeth Warren.

  Perhaps the playing field will be tilted just enough to slow the whole Amazon machine.