Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/15/amazon-on-prime-day-strikes.html
Workers say they’re underpaid and overworked, strikes planned for July 15th & 16th
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I’m assuming this was written with the plan of posting it last week.
I hope the strike results in positive change for the workers.
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On the one hand, I hate the fact that Amazon is monopolizing so many aspects of life. On the other hand, if we wind up with only one employer in the retail sector it will be:
- easy to organize
- easy to regulate
- easy to disrupt with targeted strikes
And honestly I don’t hate the idea of a future where 1000 minimum-wage-paying mom and pop operations are replaced by a small number of union-fearing behemoths.
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I have seen several posts about boycotting Amazon today in support of the Union members.
This is the problem with these new unions; they just don’t understand how to strike effectively. They shouldn’t have breathed a word of this to anyone but the organizers and the union members, who should have all been sworn to secrecy. They should have asked their friends and families to intentionally shift any Amazon purchases to today. Get all the demand - all the sales, all the stuff.
And then walked out at about 1:00 today, so Amazon has a choice: they can either continue to guarantee shipping within 2 days, or they can call off their sale. Or they can try to staff their warehouses with their management - and good luck with that, with it being such a lean organization. They would be up a creek without a paddle.
And the customer outcry would have been horrid! All the packages missed and late and all the crow that the customer service department will need to handle… except they would walk out sometime about Wednesday afternoon… right when it was all hitting.
That would have driven change at Amazon, presuming they survived. Real money lost, right now, in real time. Orders - real orders, not potential- piling up with no way to fill them. Money paid for orders returned. Not just a potential for noticing that this Prime day was marginally worse than it should have been, perhaps even flat to last year.
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I also find it interesting that Amazon Prime Day is two days long. Will it reach a point where it’s an entire week of unbelievable savings? One can hope.
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I agree that it’s not conventional wisdom! But wasn’t the golden age of unions also the golden age of giant corporations? I’m thinking… General Motors in particular.
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I love how boingboing posts an Amazon ad/article a few posts after this one. Guess they’re not playing favorites today.
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I’m OK with the story-writing/editorial side being kept separate from the monetization side.
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Yes and no. There were certainly many giant corporations, but the government was also still pretty focused on regulation, including against monopolies. GM had competition domestically for car production. And all those companies were indeed unionized, too.
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Do you seriously believe it would be feasible to plan and organize a nationwide strike on that scale without one non-union-member catching wind of it?
That level of organization would make the D-day invasion look like a surprise birthday party.
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Is Jeff Bezos intentionally trying to look like Lex Luthor or what?
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Especially when even the monetization posts have open comment threads where we can gently poke fun!
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If Black Friday can do it, so can Prime Day!
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You mean this ain’t th’ golden age of giant corporations? I bet they were paying a boatload more taxes - or were supposed to - than the pittance they now do, and ronnie rayguns all but destroyed the unions.
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I wish they had adequate air conditioning and heat, so that the employees didn’t have to be carted off for heat stroke and frostbite.
And why does he only wear one contact lens?
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Silly Amazon employees – is having enough break time to eat and urinate more important that Lord Jeff earning his next billion? You really need to think about your priorities.
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Keeping it secret isn’t realistic, but otherwise yes, this. Also applies to most political protests in our more atomized society: no central organization with a clear strategy that people pay attention to.
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I was just watching coverage on this on the German TV news (the venerable Tagesschau), and it struck me that they only mentioned the strike, but not their “prime day” (square quotes & lowercase intentional¹). If we can assume that
- many people do not really care about how bad Amazon is and will still continue shopping while trashing them on social media (and continued ads here seem to support this)
- the strikes do not seem to have much effect, as Amazon’s machinery is just too big and evil to be affected (anecdotal: a friend used to work in their Leipzig warehouse and witnessed buses of Polish (very) temp workers brought in when strikes loomed)
this would make strikes a very efficient means of advertising for “prime day”, and statements like this just garbage to keep the garbage fire going.
I’m pretty sure there is a nice term for this somewhere on WikiPedia involving net sums or something : )
¹ EDIT to propose to rebrand/reappropriate “prime day” to some harmless numerological fun where Prime Days occur if YYYYMMDD ∈ Primes, e.g. on 2019/07/19. …this way we’d have one ~3 per month so maybe let’s limit it to some more exotic and/or appropriate Prime numbers.
EDIT 2: of course there’s a calculator!
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