September 23, 2011
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Amazon.com, the books-to-diapers-to-machetes Internet superstore, is a perfect snapshot of the American Dream, circa 2011.
It grows by the hour, fueled by a relentless optimism that has made America America. First it sold books. Then it realized that buying printed words in bulk, sorting and shipping them was a transferable skill. It has since applied it to anything you could want.
In 2011, for example, I have bought the following from Amazon: a hard drive, an electric shaver, a Bluetooth headset, a coffee machine and some filters, a multivoltage adapter, four light bulbs, a rubber raft (don’t ask), a chalkboard eraser, an ice cream maker, a flash drive, roller-ball pen replacements, a wireless router, a music speaker, a pair of jeans and a shoe rack — and, oh yeah, some books. (Disclosure: A book and a long-form article I have written are sold on Amazon.)
Buying these things the traditional way would have meant driving around to many different stores and paying as much as twice the price for certain items. What’s more, Amazon knows me. It’s like family. It knows where I live, what I like, my credit card number. (Which, come to think of it, makes it closer than family.)
In a moment rife with talk of American decline, my Amazon experiences provide fleeting mood boosts. They remind me that, for now at least, this remains the most innovative society on earth.
And then my bubble burst.
Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.
The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”
The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.
His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated.
In a statement this week, Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said that it was working to address them, including by installing air-conditioners.
The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.
Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.
It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.
It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can. Or when members of a presidential debate audience cheer for a hypothetical 30-year-old man to die because he lacks health insurance. Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing. Or when an activist publicly labels the U.S. military, recently made safe for open homosexuals, a “San Francisco military.” Or when most of the television pundits go on with prefabricated scripts to eviscerate their rivals, instead of doing us the honor of actually thinking.
The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.
What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.
“Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing.”
False equivalence, meet reductionism.
Comment by FGFM — September 23, 2011 @ 8:33 am
This is a local story of interest for me.There are not only ongoing problems of health,security and theft at this location but Amazon’s dependence on local taxpayer services to solve these problems.Though I’m not employed by Amazon,I do similar work and did take a wasted day of vacation going to the initial 2010 job fair.From what I observed at Amazon’s hiring “fair”(yes,complete with popcorn),as well as working with many of this kind of worker in this field,and reading Spenser Soper’s other daily newspaper work,I believe every word of this story.And while you read the Morning Call’s entire story,know that this is what “temporary workers” are. Many desire full time employment and benefits from Amazon but these “temps” are continually strung along with the possibility of said employment from the “good temp”pool at Amazon’s disposal. Of course,come January,after the holiday rush,many will be let go,no matter how good the work performance as business shrinks.And since unemployment collection is based on the last five quarters of work,many will not qualify for those benefits or,at best, recieve limited monies while still searching for a real job.But while on the clock,they are considered in the “federal employment numbers” and,I believe,fall in the “newly created” bracket since they were indeed newly hired.This is just part of the legal scam that has been going on for decades in the employment charade,so know that even when things appear rosy,there is a stink of something rotten underneath that grew those numbers.
Comment by Mac — September 23, 2011 @ 9:24 am
Nice essay. But I bristle at the false equivalence a previous commenter noted. You seem more concerned about how Amazon *decides* to treat vulnerable workers, than by the fact that they are vulnerable to begin with. And you impugn the unions who would empower them.
The problem is, Amazon doesn’t mistreat them “just because it can,” as if it’s a bad person. It does so because its investors and its customers *demand* that it does, and unless a countervailing force intervenes (unions and government), it will have no choice but to do so.
Comment by Cannoneo — September 23, 2011 @ 10:08 am
Dear Anand
You are very insightful and brave.
I am sure that, just as I myself, you are not anti-American. And in view of the fact that, still today, and for some time to come, the wellbeing of the world depends on American power, it is indeed of a deep general concern that the Americans should better live up to the great role providence assigned to them in modern times. To put is bluntly. Some nations have a far worse system than they deserve. Some other ones have a far better one than they can live up to. And clearly, the Americans are the champions in this second category. But then, to a good extent, the same goes for all the Western nations. Being myself busy in science for nearly six decades by now, and due to the fact that we see ourselves as more and more a “knowledge society”, I have been involved in trying to understand the great troubles we have inflicted upon ourselves related to science research, troubles to which the Americans have contributed most since WW II. In case you may be interested, let me know an email address where I can send you two related items. And please, keep up the good work …
Elemer
Comment by Elemer E Rosinger — September 23, 2011 @ 10:53 am
I guess I should not be surprised when essentially anti-Muslim sentiments –on the sly — will be slipped in by American journalists in such popular newspapers and they get away with it and no one comments.
The article by Giridhardas –the first one I have read of his and one that will also be the last–is quite typical of such professedly educated ignorant people. The analogy that Texans speak of New Yorkers as “Certain Sunnis speak of Shiites” is nothing more than a stereotypical anti-Muslim statement. I put it down to his American influences that create shallow, raciist overpaid journalists
Comment by Khairunessa — September 23, 2011 @ 11:17 am
It appears to me that you are making Marx’s case regarding the contradictions of capitalism based upon the exploitation of labor by capital which is experiencing it’s natural limitation these days with more and more people without jobs lacking the required purchasing power to keep the system going. As evidence the growing inequality in America and within fast capitalizing India has been well documented. I would also cite the impotence of monetary policy to move the economy out of a liquidity trap. It’s really unfortunate that Marx is conflated in the US today with communism, which merely repaved one master-slave relation with another dominated by state bureaucracy
The reaction of labor unions can be seen as a rational response to further erosion of wages
based upon the steady pressure to pay teachers their exchange value while discounting their use value to society.
Comment by Ravi Nathan — September 23, 2011 @ 12:00 pm
Interesting article about a lot of negatives. It does offer a somewhat skewed view though. While the Amazon story is disturbing, it is also a fact in this country that it can be reported and the company held accountable. America has never claimed to be perfect, it has claimed though to be the best country to live in for a variety of reasons. Ask the people who have come from other countries and become citizens here and you will find the evidence to support why we are still a good country to live in. And while we seem to have temporarily lost our way, we do have elections, and the opportunity to change course, and to change leaders. So far we have been able to do so without much violence against one another. The challenges are even getting tougher as the world ecoonomy suffers, and unemployment remains high, and the stock market goes lower, we all need to dig deep to persevere, to remain calm, to continue to look to correct injustice, and to support one another, especially when we disagree.
While I recognize what you wrote to probably be true, I think you could do another piece about the amazing kindness we often show one another. Whether it is strangers stopping to pull a man out from under the bottom of a car to save his life, or people from different states all across America reaching for their checkbooks to give charitable contributions to areas hard hit by tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and so forth, or people giving blood so strangers might live, we are still a country to be admired.
Warm regards,
Chuck Wolfe
Comment by Chuck Wolfe — September 23, 2011 @ 12:08 pm
In 1939 Robert Staughton Lynd in Knowledge For What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture argued the existence of “contrasting rules of the game” as “one of the most characteristic aspects of our American culture.” Here it seems you document the essential contrast and antagonism between democratic values (humanism, fairness, empathy, etc.) and capitalism (competition, monetary success, individualism, etc.).
Nicely done, as usual.
And kudos for recognizing that unions can at times be as perverse as anyone else. Let’s be real.
Comment by Dan Kurland — September 23, 2011 @ 12:13 pm
Anand, I enjoyed your article in the Times, “The Fraying of a Nation’s Decency.”
Perhaps it is the cynic in me, but I don’t see this fraying as a new phenomenon. Your article promotes the idea that we used to be decent.
The facts are, corporate America has never been decent, when it could get away with something less. That reality dates back to the times in the 19th and early 20th centuries before child labor laws, labor unions and the like, and before that even to the stain of slavery as the moral cost we paid to produce prodigious cotton revenues.
Unfortunately, I agree with you that there is a creeping dehumanization in this culture. But the dehumanizing behavior of corporations such as Amazon? That’s old news.
Comment by Lee Roberts — September 23, 2011 @ 1:46 pm
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
“It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.” Decency? Really?
Comment by ahoving — September 23, 2011 @ 8:04 pm
People love to play the ‘blame game’ when they feel they cannot change a bad situation. I also feel that this past decade has seen a tremendous increase in individuals’ use of the internet. The more you are on it, the less you are interacting with people in-person, and manners are nowhere near as significant. Also, when given the option to communicate with anyone in the world, most people would choose those who think similarly to themselves. I hypothesize that there has been a lessening of communication with different viewpoints this past decade, and it has caused an exponential divide of people into groups who share a few similarities among themselves, and end up focusing on only those similarities.
Comment by Robert Palatchi — September 23, 2011 @ 8:48 pm
1. This is the internet. Not linking to the original investigation just looks sloppy.
2. Only a total lack of historical perspective would allow one to be shocked by this investigation, or see it as a portent of some new decline. I can’t tell if you’re actually serious or just trying to be sensational.
Comment by Ed — September 23, 2011 @ 11:30 pm
To Ravi N – capitalism is still the best system ever invented. We don’t need you or Marx to teach us that it must be managed. We need common-sense economics.
Conventional economics regards production as a result of capital alone. Labor is assumed to be plentiful. THAT, as it was in 18th century Europe. That is the fundamental issue. Both capital and labor are necessary for
Comment by SG — September 24, 2011 @ 2:00 am
To Ravi N – capitalism is still the best system ever invented. We don’t need you or Marx to teach us that it must be managed. We need common-sense economics.
Conventional economics regards production as a result of capital alone. Labor is assumed to be plentiful.
THAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL FALLACY.
If you acknowledge that capital and labor are jointly responsible for production, you get a very different kind of economics. Both factors must be rewarded, and neither must be allowed to shut down production. The threat of a strike is as bad as the threat of a shutdown.
With this formulation, you don’t need unions or strikes or protracted negotiation. You won’t outsource jobs by the million. Just have a 2/3rd majority of the board of directors directly elected by the workers. They don’t have to be blue-collar floor labor or anything; they can be executives, professionals or community stalwarts – just have 1/3rd of them run for election every 2 years as we do in the US Senate. Then sit back and watch.
Comment by SG — September 24, 2011 @ 2:06 am
I’ve worked in my fair share of warehousing and distribution and your portrait of the amazon warehouse is pretty much in line with every warehouse I’ve ever worked in. The only difference is that here in the deep south, the temperature in the summer is consistently well over 100 with a humidity you wouldn’t believe. Tough working conditions? Certainly. Unbearable or even out of the ordinary? Not at all.
Comment by Alan Ocean — September 24, 2011 @ 2:38 am
I found your piece very prescient. I’m an MBA student I’m currently analyzing exactly how these phenomena spill over from the organiation into broader society. I’ve just written an assignment essay and I’ve quoted you:
……us to imagine that there is a ‘them and us’ divide between management idealists and experienced practitioners. ‘MBA types’ are sometimes held responsible for all sorts of organizational and social problems. But as Mintzberg (2004) notes, “Humility is not a word often pegged on MBAs” and even that they contribute to the modern “society of meanness”. Similarly Barnett (2005) notes that MBAs are sometime perceived not as dispassionate decision makers; rather they are passionate about only their own advancement! The assumption is that those who formulate theory and ideals have not earned their “managerial stripes on the job” (Mintzberg, 2004). They have parachuted into their role from a position of privilege.
Thus, the assumption is that there are two groups of stakeholders cannot find common purpose and that the bonds of empathy and decency have frayed (Giridharadas, 2011)……
Thanks for the inspiration!
Comment by Colin Daly — September 24, 2011 @ 9:20 am
Nostalgia for the good old days is almost never justified. This sudden decay of decency, detected by the author, doesn’t appear to take into account the fact that less than a hundred years ago, half of all Americans were not permitted to vote. Less than 50 years ago there were still laws on the books preventing black and white people from marrying. And labor has been fighting a losing battle against capital for 30 years – which makes the crack about Chicago school teachers all the more inappropriate in a listing of what’s wrong with America.
Many people have no understanding of history, and engage in magical thinking about how we’ve suddenly lost our sense of decency – the wonder is that the NYTimes pays to publish such empty rhetoric.
Comment by Nancy — September 24, 2011 @ 10:29 am
The dehumanization of people that are different than you does seem to be on the rise, especially with media always wanting to show conflict and the extreme ends of the spectrum. It distorts everyone else. A few months ago, I started a community photography project to show that anyone can do good, no matter who they are in hopes of showing that everyone is different in some way but that doesn’t mean they’re evil. Anyone can participate and become part of the collection at http://www.noevilproject.com/
Comment by Troy B. Thompson — September 24, 2011 @ 10:45 am
Many Amazon customers probably never stopped to think about the conditions in the warehouses.
A little follow-up would be interesting. How are conditions at the other top (5 or 10) “Internet” companies with big shipping operations (Lands’ End, etc.)? And, for books etc., is there an alternative to Amazon, for consumers who are willing to pay more for a company that treats its workers better?
Comment by J — September 24, 2011 @ 12:43 pm
I was nodding all the way through until your throw-away demonizing of schoolteachers in Chicago – You did exactly what you accuse others of – Do you really understand the plight of schoolteachers in Chicago or what is really affecting the students? Poverty, relentless testing that none of the “Ed reform” “leaders” foist on their own children. You are wrong to include teachers in your group of those who treat others badly. That was indecent of you. Believe me, teachers are now treated just like those amazon employees. And you piled on, gratuitously.
Comment by Ann Howe — September 24, 2011 @ 1:30 pm
100 years ago it would have been children doing these tasks. And those whose skillset is simply box packing would have starved. And the KKK roamed the south lynching folks. I am totally missing your point. Everything seems a hell of a lot more decent than you are letting on.
Comment by M — September 24, 2011 @ 2:50 pm
Schoolteachers cling to their union perks? I would love to know what these exotic “perks” are that teachers get. Maybe 10 years of “No Child Left Behind” has more to do with failing schools than greedy teachers? I get the theme of what Mr.Giridharadas is doing but he goes out of his way to bring up unions, and offers no evidence to back it up — it’s almost as if he was told to bring up unions as equally at fault so he could get the facts about Amazon published. Schoolteachers and unions are under heavy attack from billionaires like the Koch brothers. The decency that is fraying in this country has everything to do with the wealth gap in this country and the people – billionaires – who control the narrative of main stream media. If the workers in the Amazon factory had a union, they would have had workers’ rights. Let’s stop blaming the victims of this “Class War” and take a long, hard look at the perpetrators of it instead.
Comment by Christopher — September 24, 2011 @ 4:45 pm
I agree with the many others who cite false equivalence. Ditto on anti-science attitudes, which are far more common on the right than on the left.
@Robert Palachti … the Net is a tool more than a symptom; a tool for the Koch Bros. to do their astroturfing, for example. It’s also a tool for connecting progressives who recognize the problem. (And real progressives will start looking outside the Democratic Party, if they haven’t already.)
Comment by SocraticGadfly — September 24, 2011 @ 7:49 pm
Glad to see this story make the NYT. They are massive hiring right now. BIZARRE situation there.
Comment by Amazon Worker — September 24, 2011 @ 10:30 pm
What’s the solution then? How to ask people to behave nicely when their leaders, whom the people look up to, are acting like teenagers in a bowling alley?
The people go after their leaders.It started before Nixon, but Nixon exemplifies the distrust, and the fragmentation of the American society. Don’t u think so?
Comment by Amin Mir — September 24, 2011 @ 10:39 pm
I don’t understand why people look over the fact that it was record heat, 100 degrees in places that never see 100 degrees, that caused the problems. From what I’ve read Amazon had paramedics on-site for those who felt ill. I don’t think an uncaring, indecent employer would have done that.
Comment by Scott — September 24, 2011 @ 11:35 pm
While applaud some of the sentiments in this article, I am not sure it will do much good. Amazon will address the issues raised here in some form or another, and everyone will forget about it, and go right back to buy crap from Amazon.
Corporations have never been decent. Thats not what they are setup to do. They are setup to maximize profits. Thats it. Nothing else. Its not that corporations are evil. There not. They are completely amoral. No amount of regulation, laws or public outcry will ever force a corporation to do the right thing for long. Eventually profit wins out.
If you want to do business with a something that exhibits some basic human decency then try doing it with an actual real live human being.
Comment by Todd Geist — September 24, 2011 @ 11:50 pm
Human indecency is not anything new–just look at how long human trafficking or child labor has prevailed. Perhaps what is most shocking about this article is that human indecency has finally superceded the American exceptionalism.
Comment by Lily — September 25, 2011 @ 1:08 am
Yeah, only too true. But that’s human nature for you: presented with an opportunity to exploit your fellow humans, too few are able to resist the temptation. Also, due to temperament, circumstances etc. etc., victims of exploitation usually cannot defend themselves effectively.
Humans are rationalizing animals, nothing is easier than deceiving yourself.
I guess and hope that on the whole things are moving towards a better future, but very slowly and with the occasional backstep.
Comment by Krister Wikstrom — September 25, 2011 @ 4:05 am
It was the rioting in London recently that more shockingly demonstrated a total lack of decency and empathy as homes and businesses were destroyed without a thought for their owners, and a selfish acquisitiveness and lack of morals displayed by mass looting.
As a business owner, the practices mentioned at Amazon are appalling. But I find it hard to believe that they can get away with them since there are so many laws, both health and safety as well as state and federal employment regulations, to protect employees. Whereas the honest and good employer sometimes finds all these rules and regulations onerous, costly and time-consuming, they are obviously put in place to prevent such abuses and we respect them. Do these laws exist in places such as China? Or India?
Comment by Beth — September 25, 2011 @ 7:47 am
While I find most of this article heartening, I really have to push against your characterization of this as a sign of the “fraying of decency”:
“Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing.”
Lengthening the hours of instruction—which is essentially asking teachers to work more hours—without an increase in pay proportional to that added amount of work is essentially asking the teachers to take a pay cut or work additional time for free. Any union that didn’t fight against its workers being forced to take a pay cut or work for free would be a pretty lousy union.
And if that extra instructional time is going to be spent on more rote drill-and-kill test prep nonsense—instead of restoring the arts, music, PE, and other classes that have been cut in recent years in order to focus on standardized testing, the things that provide the well-rounded education that all kids deserve—it would be an act of the grossest negligence for us all not to fight it. Our kids need more school, not more test prep.
And let’s not pussyfoot around which “system” is failing the children of Chicago. It isn’t the school system, whose dedicated personnel fight like hell for the children; it’s the “system” of economics and government that thinks that 20% of children living in poverty conditions is an acceptable thing, that tolerates the massive acquisition and hoarding of the nation’s wealth by a very few while the children of Chicago often have to worry if Mom and/or Dad will be able to keep a roof over their heads or food on their tables, or if they’ll be able to see a doctor when they’re sick.
Comment by James — September 25, 2011 @ 1:00 pm
Swipes at unions weaken an otherwise perceptive essay. As one reader already noted, the abuse of workers at Amazon’s facility near Allentown are the very kinds of things strong unions can prevent. And is it really right to blame Chicago teachers, represented by their union, for not wanting to bear the cost of a lengthened school day? If citizens believe that a longer school day would be valuable, they should be willing to pay their teachers more for it, not expect these already overworked, underpaid, and undervalued professionals to shoulder the entire cost.
Comment by Ann Priester — September 25, 2011 @ 1:46 pm
What? So because some working conditions are bad America is becoming incapable of humanizing others? Because people in Texas speak poorly and in generalities of people in New York, that means the country is beginning to fracture? Anand, you need to learn some social history and not rely on jingoistic glosses of American history from July 4th addresses. This appeal to the “golden age” sentiments is embarrassing to you and the New York Times.
Once conditions in most factories were MUCH worse than Amazon’s or anywhere else’s and very few people cared — this is a fact. And once, the situation between the northern and southern states was famously MUCH more antagonistic than it is now and they didn’t just have regional differences in presidential candidates or different views on abortion, they killed each other by the thousands — that is a fact, too!
For you to claim that dehumanization is now “creeping” into American society ignores Jim Crow, ignores Native Americans, ignores the treatment of the Irish and the Chinese, ignores the huge class divides of the 1800′s, ignores so many different facets of American social history that you should really be a little ashamed that you’re on such ahistorical, afactual auto-pilot with your column. You’re misinforming and misguiding your readers. Try harder.
Comment by Jacob — September 25, 2011 @ 1:46 pm
These practices are on-par with the distribution centre for any major brick and mortar retailer. Of course they are brutal. And we should try to fix them. But it doesn’t do any good pretending this is a new problem – these kind of brutal warehouse jobs have existed at least since Walmart invented the just-in-time delivery system for big box stores.
I say fight to unionize, don’t boycott.
Comment by Tristan — September 25, 2011 @ 2:08 pm
Thanks for your article, Anand. This issue is near to my heart as I’m building a business designed to make shopping at local stores even more convenient than regular online shopping. We are a finalist in the MassChallenge startup accelerator in Boston and I’ll be there this coming week. Could we get together for a chat over coffee?
Comment by Brad Lauster — September 25, 2011 @ 2:34 pm
where is the moral police! we damn developing nations on human rights to include child labor, blah, blah without attempting to understand why is it so! too many people and and no schools, and better than landing up on the streets.
and lookie here at the market leader in the most developed nation. is that what benchmarking is all about. do you think amazon even would care for quality/standards. seriously, how many times have you had to return your deliveries due quality issues/wrong delivery.
what is with corporations and people – to speed up revenues with disregard for people (read as community/society/family).
God Speed. but remember they said it….. ‘Speed Kills’
Comment by Prem Bajaj — September 26, 2011 @ 8:38 am
it is unfortunate amazon.com is coming to india…..to destroy the culture and society of another set of people/s who are more naive and ignorant (poverty/uneducated) and will easily succumb to a coerced human rights violation….
Comment by Prem Bajaj — September 26, 2011 @ 8:46 am
Yes, clearly the lesson of Amazon’s inhuman cruelty to its workers is that labor unions don’t respect how awesome Amazon is.
Comment by Brad Johnon — September 26, 2011 @ 10:45 am
Amazon treats employees unfairly? Really? Do you really think you’re uncovering some sort of modern sweatshop conspiracy, where the evil minds at the big company rub their hands together and say how can I squeeze these guys until they drop! My understanding is that the company provides tens of thousands of jobs in many parts of the country that have high employment, offers competitive wages and stock for all employees (which has consistently increased value over multiple years for all shareholders last time I checked), and even has some interesting hiring practices (e.g. my parents-in-law worked in Reno over holidays on their way south and they provided free parking for their mobile home –and they loved it and are signing up again). If there are extreme temperatures, I have no doubt that would present a huge challenge for everyone, but I posit that any decent manager in the 21st century in a modern fulfillment center (amazon, crate & barrel, sears, etc.) has faced this, and has worked hard to help alleviate the situation, not drive everyone harder until they drop. This just doesn’t equate for me, feels like sensationalism more than real reporting.
Comment by Lorinda — September 26, 2011 @ 10:59 am
I wonder what our nation would have been like if the government bailout didn’t happen.
During the Great Depression, the rich suddenly saw their friends, family, and even themselves… suddenly devoid of wealth. I think this actually made this country stronger and more unified.
Now, we find that the corporate fatcats know the government will insulate them against failure. An episode of This American Life on NPR eavesdropped on Wall Street traders and it was something every American should listen to.
Major changes in the economy are a way to reset the disparity between the rich and the poor. When the government saves the rich at the cost of the poor, we only hurt our nation in the long-run.
Comment by Brian — September 27, 2011 @ 1:38 am
Well said. It’s our failure to imagine what others are suffering that gives rise to the dehumanization of others, whether they be blue collar workers, leftists, tea partiers, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, or unborn babies. Let’s seek justice for all humankind. The oppression or death of any one human being diminishes us all, because we are all involved in humanity.
Comment by A J MacDonald — September 27, 2011 @ 8:34 am
Is this just an effect of globalization? We in America have had it very good — perhaps unjustifiably good — for a long time, while workers in other countries have toiled in far worse conditions than Amazon’s to provide us with goods. Meanwhile, a vaunted entrepreneurial spirit here has begun to give way to a sense of entitlement.
Now barriers to trade are falling and the global playing field is beginning to level out. Their standard of living will rise and ours will probably fall, until we have some rough parity. It will be painful for us in the transition, but the end result will hopefully be more equitable for all, and lead to greater overall prosperity.
Comment by Barry Schader — September 27, 2011 @ 8:38 am
The recent Republican debates, in which the audience (who shouted as if they were at a sporting event when it was suggested that a 30-year-old without health insurance should be left to die and also cheered and applauded when it was announced that Texas had executed over 400 prisoners under Perry’s watch) was even crueler than the politicians, reflects the current sad underbelly of American culture in which we no longer care about helping our fellow citizens and in which our own financial success is the only scorecard in which we live our lives. It seems to me that the religious symbols in our churches, synagogues, etc. should be replaced with giant dollar signs or the color green, because that’s all we seem to care about these days.
Even in our culture, we no longer care about the artistic quality of a movie, book or TV show — we only care about how much money it makes.
My fear is that my grandkids will grow up in a world where the successful live in fancy, gated self-sufficient communities in isolation of everyone else. For decades, “everyone else” was the middle-class. But we’re losing the middle-class because rich corporations don’t give a damn about anything but their stock price. So everyone else is going to be poor and if conservatives have their way and eliminate social security and Medicare, we’re going to have masses dying in the streets and be largely indistinguishable from many third-world countries.
In the example you gave, Amazon probably rationalizes its behavior because my guess is that those temp workers, since they go through an agency, don’t actually work for Amazon. It’s bad enough that such workers only make minimum wages with no hope of a permanent job, but we now have some politicians and pundits calling for a rollback of the minimum wage to $3 an hour. It’s almost as if they enjoy seeing ordinary people suffer.
Comment by ZoetMB — September 27, 2011 @ 9:16 am
This is absolute blather. This woman decries the conditions that the Amazon.com workers “toil” under, and then in the next breath talks about t…eachers who “cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing”?
Union “perks”? Really? Who does she think is going to improve working conditions for those poor laborers? Oh, I see. The businesses should just find their inner “human decency” and remember that “it could have been them crawling through the aisles”. Ok. Sure. Fine.
What is shocking is how completely relevantly recent history has been erased from memory (and not just in this one obviously ignorant woman but nationally).
Why do we have weekends? 8 hour work days? Breaks? Holidays? Was it because the companies appealed to people’s cries for “human decency” or was it because they were fought and in some cases literally died for by workers using the one source of power they had against the exponentially greater resources and power of the businesses who were abusing them, and banded together to withold their labor? That’s what a union is – no more, no less. It’s not some club that some workers join to get an advantage over other workers.
The sheer idiocy of this article is stunning. She begins by saying how disappointed she is to discover how the convenience Amazon affords consumers like her is at the cost of abusing workers, expending great effort to paint the picture of squalid conditions in an Amazon warehouse, yet concludes with: “And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.”
So the bad bad labor unions have little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something by abusing workers in warehouses?
This isn’t about any erosion of human decency it’s about myopia, and loss of memory.
Comment by Tom — September 27, 2011 @ 6:45 pm
Apparently I have revealed both my cultural and gender insensitivity in my inability to decipher the gender of the author based on his name alone. Apologies. The content of the last post however, stands.
Comment by Tom — September 27, 2011 @ 9:24 pm
I work for amazon the things covered in the attical only brush over some of the discussing behavior and conditions some are exposed to. The sad thing is many of the locations are in areas of high unemployment so we stay to keep food on our tables dispite treatment and conditions . Many bring the issues to management only to see a problem band-aid long enough for the hype to go away just to be repeated again. It’s not just temps that get this treatment but many who are hired fear if we let the public know we would be out of a job plus the monster you know is always easier then the one you do not. Moral is low depression high but right now many console ourselves with being thankful for a job
Comment by living it — September 27, 2011 @ 10:20 pm
Good read. Keep up your good work.
Comment by Alice C — September 28, 2011 @ 3:44 am
Bravo, Anand! Thank you for ing, The Fraying with such heart and dignity. I grew up in America in a time whe. solidarity with and respect for the working man were tangible virtues. Now I live in Norway, where these virtues still stand tall. Decency is good for business, America. Right now is a wonderful time to begin falling awake!
Comment by Kevin McKiernan — September 28, 2011 @ 10:17 am
The examples and equivalencies in the article were of course very weak, as has been noted hotly and coldly in the comments. So what? The essay is about bridging the gap between view points. The difficulty of this hand-holding is herein quite obvious: nobody wants to join the party because the host doesn’t have a solid grasp of the history of Labor in the United States, or because he’s guilty of watching CNN’s coverage of intra-regional conflict in Iraq. These are the attitudes the article would like to quell, but failed to do because of its naivety. But where is the informed person who’s naive enough to suggest peace?
Comment by Chadwhat — September 28, 2011 @ 11:50 am
What I’ve found most disturbing in the days since this piece was published is how few of my friends and colleagues are speaking out against Amazon.com’s warehouse management practices. The cynic in me thinks that had the story been about Walmart, there would be much more of an uproar from that quarter. Not only is our lack of decency showing, so is our elitism.
Comment by Debbie Wolfe — September 29, 2011 @ 10:59 am
Thank you for a fantastic article.
Successful societies are about balance – in this case the balance of power. Amazon has too much power over the workers (a temporary workforce is unable to form unions). Conversely, in many government bodies unions have too much power and prevent any kind of change, even that which is necessary.
Ultimately balance is disturbed when groups become too large. They become overly powerful and less in-touch with events. Huge unions forget about protecting the futures of the individuals they supposedly represent, huge corporates chase shareholder profits (as they are legally obliged to do) at the cost of the welfare of their staff.
With an increasing globalisation, larger corporates and super-states (e.g. EU) this problem is going to get worse, not better.
Comment by David Hamilton — October 2, 2011 @ 6:30 am