AmaZen
Has Jeff Bezos been scouring this newsletter for ideas?
Last month Amazon launched AmaZen, an “interactive kiosk where you can navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge the internal batteries”.
It’s unclear whether staff are paid while they use the cry room, or if they can only use it in their unpaid 30-minute break during a 10-hour shift.
Since the one photo I could find was so bad — and had such a strange spelling mistake “lock before entering” — I wondered if this was some fake news designed to smeer Amazon. But this story on their site indicates it’s real, even though content is hard to find (perhaps they deleted quite a bit in response to the backlash…)
AmaZen is a fantastic example of the happiness trap. The more we emphasise the tools for personal happiness, the more we de-emphasise the role played by structures in affecting happiness. If your life is shit, you can only blame yourself. If you want a better life, don’t try and change the world, change yourself. In a counter-intuitive twist, the assertion of agency and the rhetoric of empowerment serve to make you look inwards, and dissuade you from engaging with wider changes that might really be necessary to assert your agency and power. And who does that suit? Those that benefit from the status quo.
(This is not to say that self-examination is not vital, it’s just not sufficient)
Verdict are excellent retail market analysts with corporate commercial considerations. Even so, they call it perfectly when they say that businesses “use wellness trends to avoid dealing with material deficiencies such as pay, working hours, child-care, and dignity in the workplace. It is essential to couple corporate wellness initiatives with better working conditions, for both brand perception and increased employee productivity,” and, I might add, for simple human decency. “Such gimmicks are not the answer to demands for better labour rights for low-income gig economy workers”.
I know AmaZen is just a silly little local initiative, but it really clearly illustrates these big points.
Astroturfing against unions
One approach to improving working conditions is for employees to come together and negotiate as one, beefing up David to have a chance against Goliath.
Labour unions have a bad rep. They’re out of fashion. They’re associated with loud-mouthed obstructive stick-in-the-muds who restrict innovation and strangle enterprise. The propaganda machine has really done a wonderful job on them. I’m sure many unions are awful organisations too.
But we mustn’t forget that unions brought us the 40 hour week, safety at work, paid holidays and sick leave etc. And the right to organise labour and collectively bargain was hard won, just like voting for women and the end of apartheid. Blood was spilled along the way, like at the Ludlow Massacre.
The Economic Policy Unit, a think tank I know nothing about, published an interesting chart:
Correlation doesn’t imply causation etc., the metrics are fairly arbitrary, but it is striking.
Despite their unpopularity, unions have a vital role to play in a functioning democratic market economy. One way you can tell is by considering how monopolistic behemoths think about them…Do you think Amazon is pro-unions?
There’s an ongoing landmark case in Alabama where some warehouse workers are trying to form a union. So far Amazon has successfully blocked them with some pretty underhand tactics. No machine guns, but they did create the illusion they controlled the ballot box, filmed what workers did at the ballot, threatened pay cuts, removed union supporters from mandatory captive-audience training, and instructed workers to vote against unionisation...
Most amusing was a thorough and transparently inept astroturfing campaign where dozens of Amazon bots, with GAN-faces, tweeted positive things about working in Amazon warehouses and great reluctance to pay union dues, as reported in Geekwire.
Astroturfing, for those who haven’t come across the term, is the practice of manufacturing a fake grass roots movement. Amazon has been doing it forever (e.g., these fake kindle reviews in 2010). Many of the more active anti-union accounts got shut down:
The $61m dollar question
Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered Amazon to repay $61m in tips to drivers for its delivery service.
“Amazon told delivery drivers in its Amazon Flex program – as well as customers who placed orders through services like Prime Now and AmazonFresh – that 100% of tips would go directly to the drivers. But according to an FTC lawsuit, for a period of more than two years, Amazon secretly pocketed over $61 million of those tips”.
The company has a history of using customer tips for delivery drivers to meet the minimum wage promises in areas where it operates.
There are some that like to describe all these ‘flex’ drivers as entre-preneurs, but I think the precariat is a much more accurate description.
On a personal level it’s a great argument for tipping with cash, rather than adding a payment to a bill. Deliveroo or JustEat drivers are inordinately grateful for even £1. If everyone tipped them like that it makes their day much more worthwhile.
On a political level it’s another argument for independent regulators with sharp teeth. Checks and balances, baby.
How Bezos taxes his employees
Nations across the world have struggled to tax Amazon.
The G7 has been working on standardising corporate tax rates to reduce tax competition, close tax havens and simplify the process of taxing cross-border multinationals. The proposals are a flat rate of 15%.
As with any tax regime the devil is in the detail and there are likely to be unintended consequences. The Guardian reports a threshold on margins, which is easily gamed, may make Amazon exempt from this tax.
Amazon has reacted positively to the news, fair tax campaigners less so.
A lot of people are anti-tax for many good reasons. I often think there are alternative ways to look at it. Here’s one. It’s not perfect, but it is illustrative.
Say Jeff Bezos is worth $200bn (Last year when I did something similar, he was worth $100bn).
Invested in an ordinary way this could provide 5% or about $10bn income each year without touching capital.
There are 800,000 Amazon staff.
If Jeff divided the $10bn between them, that would give them $12,500 each every year.
Jeff wouldn’t notice the difference. He would still have $200bn.
The median Amazon salary is $29k. Let’s round it up to $30k. Every year Bezos’s existing wealth could be expected to earn him over 40% of the median salary of ALL his employees combined.
Or one could say, each Amazon employee is foregoing over 40% of the wealth created by their past and present labour to Jeff. And that’s before they pay taxes.
One could say Jeff is ‘taxing' or skimming the proceeds of their work to the tune of $12,500 every year.
Of course Jeff is not spending that ‘tax’ he collects from his employees on schools or hospitals or roads.
In fact, the state often supplements the income of low-earning Amazon employees; in effect, subsidising Jeff.
Now I know all the maths and terminology and logic don’t stack up perfectly, but even so there’s something staggering in this comparison if you pause to think about it. The Goose’s common is being stolen.
Wealth is being concentrated with those who have it at the expense of those who don’t.
Anyone with an anti-tax pro-entrepreneur libertarian stance should also consider how business leaders are 'taxing' their employees’ work and reducing their freedoms when they benefit from excess profits not distributed to those that worked to create them.
Or, to put it another way…
Dividends are taxes collected on work for private gain. Taxes are dividends collected on work for public gain.
The death of the middle ground II
I’ve written about abandoning the middle ground with the content I consume.
The same pattern is ocurring with retail, as described by Erik Torenberg in a piece which opens up more thinking on the subject by Nassim Taleb and others.
In short, the argument is that access to the internet has meant that we now want exactly what we want or what is easiest to get immediately. “Everything in the middle gets slaughtered.”
“If [I am on a street] and [find an espresso shop that’s exactly what I want]
then [Go there]
else [Go to Starbucks]”
Some niche specialists survive. Department stores die. Amazon takes all.
Ok, I confess I’m an Amazon shareholder, indirectly. You’d have been mad not to be. Platform pravileges after all.
Amusement arcade
Visual
There’s a genre of films about people going up a river and going a bit mad: Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, Lost City of Z, Embrace of the Serpent, Deliverance...I love it, and so does Werner Herzog (he did it twice).
Can you match the films to the images?
Nicolas Roeg, Tim Roth, and John Malkovich made a version of Conrad’s grand daddy ur-story - Heart of Darkness - but I haven’t managed to see it yet. While the ingredients are good, it might not be. Anyone seen it?
African Queen doesn't make the list because it’s not bonkers enough.
Thank you as ever. I wish you peace and love.