Amazon.com: Modern Day Slavery

Cyber-Slavery at Amazon.com
extends beyond warehouse locations

It's cyber-Monday, but if you're anything like I once was, you've already purchased more than a few gifts for this season from Amazon.com by now.

And why not? They seem like a great company, right? They deliver things quickly, they have the best prices and if something goes wrong, they fix it, right?

Wrong. 

There is something seriously up with the news agencies in the United States. They report Amazon's response's to claims of slave conditions, but not the claims themselves, nor have they bothered to work the story that hard.

Then again, American news outlets are owned by a handful of names, and those names make more money off of us if we don't know about modern day slave conditions than if we do.

But that's where I come in. And that's where news programs like the BBC's Panorama come in
(they uncovered Scientology long before Going Clear was ever even conceived, never mind nominated for a million awards). Yes, they're technically owned and aired in the UK, but they're universally known as the #1 journalism program on the planet, so people post episodes for the rest of us online.

Thank God.

I've come to rely upon Panorama to do the real investigative journalism that I've come to only enjoy from people like John Oliver, when he first started, but even now, as I watch more and more of Panorama's programming from the last 25 or 30 years, I realize Oliver's Last Week Tonight is just rehashing some old topics Panorama hit years ago.

So why not go straight to the source? When I'm feeling blue, I watch a Panorama episode, and I feel like justice is real again, and that people have decency in their hearts and heads on their shoulders.

Unlike Amazon.

Amazon is, in short, a modern day slave colony. And I don't say that lightly. When employees are given incredibly heavy carts to push up and down four floors of a huge warehouse... hmmm... how would you guess they get to each floor with their carts?

By an elevator, right? Wrong. Amazon builds their elevators to fit the size of the cart, and requires the employees who push them to run down the building and run the stairs to catch up to the elevator.

And when I say run, I mean exactly that. They are required to RUN.

It only gets much, much worse. That's why news crews aren't allowed in Amazon plants. It's why workers have gone on strike at Amazon plants in places like Germany twice because Amazon's workplace norms "deny basic human rights." 

That's putting it mildly.

And that's happening at more than just their warehouses. It's happening at their Video on Demand locations too. They conduct slavery conditions across the board.

I don't want to hear the horrid "well, if you get things for cheap you expect cheap labor." They made 89 billion in profits three years ago. Yeah. Slavery they need not have. Slavery was outlawed, and if they didn't go by it, they'd still make billions in profits. Without violating basic human rights.

Look. Amazon supplanted Walmart at the #1 retailer in July. Do you get that? But Walmart's business practices are transparent. Not Amazon's. And that's a problem. Because they could be. They choose not to be.

Why? Because modern-day slavery is the name of the game at Amazon.com. Here is the bloody "Truth Behind the Click."

BBC Panorama's 

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CLICK

Now. You might be thinking, "Oh no! It's going to cost me so much more to buy offline!"

Wrong. I started shopping offline, and guess what I found? Prices were less than Amazon's prices. LESS! I recall them being very low back in the day when they started Prime, and I remember them rising a bit over time, but I didn't realize that they had literally surpassed my local supermarket in price!

Let me put it this way:

Do you want someone to unwrap an item that's been in a one of these employee's hands?

Do you want this season, which is supposed to be about love, joy, family and cheer, to be supplied by a company who has deleted those words from their vocabulary?

Do you want a company that lies on national television, saying that their workers play nerf ball in their warehouses just for fun, to be a part of your lives this season? (Google won't even bring up that story anymore from the WSJ - wow. Way to pay off Google and the media!)

Bottom line? The company just doesn't fit in the world today. Not after all the wars we've fought for humanity and won. Amazon.com doesn't fit the American Dream. It doesn't even fit the communist, socialist or marxist dream. 

Amazon.com feels like the dreams plantations were made of. 

Scarlett O'Hara was stunning in that green and white frock of a dream-dress. (Bet there's one like it available on Amazon right now!) But who suffered so she could have it? And who turned a blind eye to it? We were never supposed to let anything close to that happen again, here or overseas.

Buy local. Buy labels. Buy online! But don't buy Amazon.com. Because if their version of Modern Day Slavery is allowed to continue and goes on behing supported by people like you and I, then other companies will follow suit.

Slavery never ended without a fight.

Fight with me this holiday season, and tell Amazon.com to go stuff it.

Love, Joy & Peace,

Katherine

PS - My husband is routinely recruited by headhunters (he's an engineer) and about two years ago he was offered a job by Amazon to design a fully functioning warehouse that required no workers at all. A "robot-run-warehouse," if you will.

It scared him at the time, and he passed, but if you'll remember from BBC's Expose above, Amazon has built their warehouses on "public funds" based on the promise that there will be "permanent jobs" at these warehouses for the rest of their existence.

Of course, that's no longer true. Amazon bought out companies that do the job Nick was called upon for, and soon most of these warehouses, paid for by you and me, will have robots doing the jobs and their workers unemployed.

Slave labor or sky-high unemployment rates: purchased by you and me. Thanks Amazon. You're the devil.