An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos
Instead of spending your billions on a penis rocket, use them to pay and treat your Amazon workers better.
Hello, fellow Bluestockings! To celebrate Women’s History Month, paid subscriptions are now 30% off. Offer ends April 1.
Thank you to everyone joining and being part of my salon. If you enjoy posts like today’s, please think of becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers help sustain Bluestocking Bombshells and contribute to its growth. In addition, paid subscribers have access to my “Novel Observations,” interactive salon and posts responding to current news in literature, art and sociocultural events from a feminist lens. Founding members receive these benefits along with my response to their written work of up to 6,000 words; that response also includes a remote conference for an hour.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil.” — 1 Timothy 6:10
Dear Jeff,
Hello. I hope you were able to get a full night’s sleep before awakening on Saturday because I did not. At 5:30 a.m. this past Saturday, one of your Amazon delivery drivers rang my buzzer to drop off an order I had made the night before.
That’s right — 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning.
The first buzz woke up my husband and I, but we ignored it and tried to fall back to sleep. But the delivery driver kept buzzing before calling my cell phone that was charging on my nightstand. The caller ID read “Amazon.”
With a cheer in his voice the delivery driver said, “This is Amazon. I’m here with your package.”
My groggy voice asked him, “You do realize it’s 5 a.m. on a Saturday?” Profanities, however, clogged my husband’s voice as he headed to the living room to buzz in the delivery driver.
Unlike him, I was not angry with the delivery driver. It’s you I’m angry at.
I know the driver did not make his own choice to deliver the package that early. I know you force your workers to adhere to inhumane workplaces, schedules, quotas and results. I know how you mistreat your workers. I also know how you place pressure and stress on your delivery drivers and warehouse workers because of your unregulated capitalism. Never has the U.S. Post Office, UPS or FedEx rung my buzzer on Saturday at 5:30 a.m.
.A 2021 New York Times investigation found Amazon shortchanged workers on their paychecks. These workers were on family or personal leave whether that was to welcome a baby or deal with a medical issue or disability. Despite your record profits after COVID-19 hit the U.S. in March 2020, you did not use those profits to do right by your workers.
Using your company’s own records in addition to personal interviews with Amazon workers, the New York Times discovered that “widespread” problems in your shitty payroll system and record keeping
affect[ed] the company’s blue-collar and white-collar workers — and more harmful than previously known, amounting to what several company insiders described as one of its gravest human resources problems.
Workers across the country facing medical problems and other life crises have been fired when the attendance software mistakenly marked them as no-shows, according to former and current human resources staff members, some of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of retribution. Doctors’ notes vanished into black holes in Amazon’s databases. Employees struggled to even reach their case managers, wading through automated phone trees that routed their calls to overwhelmed back-office staff in Costa Rica, India and Las Vegas. And the whole leave system was run on a patchwork of programs that often didn’t speak to one another.
Because of your desire for bigger profits at the expense of your workers, you have sacrificed their health, dignity and humanity so they can keep up Amazon’s unrealistic pace and online delivery demands.
Just last August the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) again found that your warehouses created “hazardous conditions by imposing onerous production quotas and failing to provide proper medical care.” These OSHA violations created musculoskeletal and back injuries that the warehouses’ medical teams did not adequately treat.
The federal government’s fines imposed on you though are a drop in the bucket to your massive wealth. Paying these off is less work than restructuring your company. Paying these fines off also costs less than hiring more people, building new OSHA-compliant warehouses and workspaces or paying your workers a fair living wage.
Because your workers actually want safe working conditions and a wage they and their families to live on, you have also fought and busted unions. In fact, Amazon’s union-busting video is available on YouTube.
One part of the video sounds a lot like the email that went out to unionizing part-time faculty when I taught at a certain Chicago university (the union-busting was just one reason why I left the university). It was when Amazon stated it preferred to deal with matters directly. The short and long versions of the union-busting video are provided below for your viewing pleasure.
ABC News in December of last year examined union-busting at a Kentucky Amazon warehouse. There your workers were threated with termination though federal labor law protects union organizing.
My husband tells me that Amazon is still the best place to quickly buy certain items when we sometimes have trouble finding them in brick-and-motor stores. As I prepare for my trip to Dublin, Ireland next week, I admit I bought certain TSA-approved items I need for international online air travel. But I know what you are doing to your Amazon workers is evil and the necessary evil that Amazon has become is still evil.
The late legendary feminist theorist bell hooks framed our society and her theoretical scholarship by calling it a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” You and other tech bros like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel embody hooks’s framework.
On the other hand, while you exploit your most vulnerable workers, your ex-wife the novelist MacKenzie Scott, who studied under the Nobel-Prize winner and America’s greatest novelist Toni Morrison, uses her economic and racial privilege to benefit and uplift the underserved and ignored. She continues to donate funds from her Amazon shares to legal aid societies, affordable housing proponents, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), tribal colleges and Habitat for Humanity.
I am not anti-capitalist. I too wish to earn more money from my teaching labor and writing. My problem is with how you continue to misuse your wealth—wealth you’ve gained at the expense of your workers. Instead of investing your money toward another brief trip to space, put that money toward investing in your workers. That is what respects, enhances and supports their humanity directly.
Kind regards,
L.D.
Laura,
First, "Instead of spending your billions on a penis rocket, use them to pay and treat your Amazon workers better." is a brilliant opening. And your letter is an important salvo in the fight for a better and more fair form of capitalism in this country.
Jeff Bezos owns about 9% of Amazon, so anything he does to lower Amazon profits affects the remaining 91% of the shareholders. That gives him a very large excuse to hide behind.
Amazon workers should have much better working conditions in terms of wages, benefits, and greater health safety. I believe that has to come from governmental intervention.
Your post might not affect Jeff Bezos or the Amazon Board, but it affects those of us who read it and are now wondering , for example, what OSHA is really doing to protect workers.
I found that there is a Senate investigation proceeding about work conditions at Amazon, which I now know about because of your article.
https://www.help.senate.gov/amazon-investigation
So, we could call our senators and say this is an important issue.
Knowledge is power.
‘Write about what enrages you.’ It’s advice that’s reached cliche, and yet… SO crucial. Knowledge is power, indeed, and expansive. Thank you for your voice on this!