Because Twitter threads are not user-friendly for many readers I have curated this one to the best of my ability for easier reading. This one is from Dan Price.
It was six years ago when CEO Dan Price raised the salary of everyone at his Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments to at least $70,000 a year. Price slashed his own salary by $1 million to be able to give his employees a pay raise. He was hailed a hero by some and met with predictions of bankruptcy from his critics. But that has not happened; instead, the company is thriving.
Every tweet includes a hyperlink supporting the message which I transcribed when I began putting this post together, but I got tired and stopped linking. But all can be found by going to the original thread and tracking down to the number.
Thread on how Amazon treats its workers
Context: Amazon full-time warehouse employees make $31,200 a year. Jeff Bezos makes that every 12 seconds.
Cost to give warehouse workers 2 weeks paid sick leave + pay bumps so they don't qualify for food stamps = 0.9% of Bezos' fortune.
1. Amazon workers in Staten Island just won a vote to unionize. During the union drive, the company held 20 mandatory anti-union meetings per day and had pro-union workers arrested.
2. Amazon paid a 6% tax rate last year, which is up from 0% a few years prior. So one of the richest companies in the world pays a lower tax rate than their warehouse workers making $31k a year. Were those saved taxes used to help workers or profits?
3. Amazon pays its workers so little that they often qualify for food stamps. It is among the top 3 employers (along with Walmart and McDonald's) whose employees are on public assistance in virtually every state
4. Amazon just flat-out stole $60 million in tips from drivers. For real.
Its punishment:
- No one goes to jail
- No fine
- Just pay back the $60 million - which Amazon makes every hour and 15 minutes
5. After Amazon announced a $15 min wage, it came out later (to much less fanfare) that it ended worker bonuses and stock options.
Altogether, a lot of workers actually got a pay cut.
Yet Amazon still touts its $15/wage to this day as if it was a gift
Yet Amazon still touts its $15/wage to this day as if it was a gift
6. In July, Jeff Bezos went to space and added $1.745 billion to his net worth.
So he literally could have dumped a billion dollars out of his space ship and still gained more money than 23,000 Amazon warehouse workers will make all year combined.
7. Amazon's turnover rate is 150% a year. Seriously. 150%.
They're so desperate for labor they cut off disability benefits for a worker who got brain damage on the job and pressured him to come back.
8. 6% of Amazon workers are injured on the job each year, double the U.S. average for warehouses. Workers blame brutal quotas that push them to their limit.
The company's churn-and-burn model prices this in; they just replace whoever gets hurt
9. In response to worker burnout during the pandemic, did Amazon give them paid sick leave or a raise?
No, they supplied coffin-sized boxes for individual workers to go cry in
10. After 3 years on the job, Amazon stops worker raises and offers employees $1,000 to quit so they can be replaced by fresher bodies willing to make $15. This also thwarts labor movements since employees aren't allowed long enough to organize
11. In last year's Alabama union vote, the company successfully pushed the USPS to install an unmarked postal box on warehouse grounds so it could see who voted in the union election. It was so unfair the government forced a re-do election.
12. Amazon, which spends millions on commercials touting itself as a green company, illegally fired workers who spoke out publicly against the company's environmental policies
13. Workers have filed 3x more labor complaints against Amazon than Walmart, which is not exactly a bastion of worker love.
Amazon workers who promote better working conditions are interrogated for 90 minutes by ex-FBI company security, then disciplined
14. A year ago, Amazon denied its workers' quotas are so punishing that they have to pee in bottles.
The next day, documents showed that not only do workers regularly have to urinate in bottles, they also defecate in bags, and Amazon is well aware of this
15. Amazon has received $3.8 billion in public subsidies to open warehouses.
The typical transition: a factory that paid $35 an hour with good union benefits like pensions is replaced by Amazon, which pays $15 an hour and aggressively breaks unions
16. Amazon tracks workers' every moment to make sure they aren't slacking for even seconds at a time.
But they also hire Pinkerton spies to monitor workers to make sure they aren't talking about unionizing or griping about their working conditions
17. Amazon offered pro-union workers $2,000 to quit, so they can be replaced with workers who would vote against the union in Alabama.
That year Jeff Bezos made $9.4 million per hour, every hour
18. Amazon noticed pro-union workers were passing out information to employees stopped at red lights outside a warehouse.
So Amazon literally got the traffic light changed to make sure workers wouldn't be stopped long enough to talk with organizers.
19. Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago have been moving to unionize & staged a walkout over working conditions.
Amazon closed the warehouse and offered displaced workers one shift at a nearby facility: from 1am to lunch, called a "megacycle," or be fired
20. Life in an Amazon warehouse voting on a union. Management:
*Sends 5 texts/day warning them not to unionize
*Put anti-union flyers in bathrooms
*Takes photos of employee IDs when they make pro-union comments in meetings
*Fired outspoken pro-union worker
21. Amazon had workers spend up to 25 minutes a day - unpaid - going through security to make sure they don't steal anything. Collectively, this has cost workers hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid time at work.
22. Amazon's actions also have led to untold job cuts at small businesses it forced out - including those that use Amazon.com
- A small business began selling camera tripods on Amazon
- It reached $3.5 million in sales, 0.001% of Amazon's revenue
- Amazon copied the tripods exactly and sold them as AmazonBasics tripods
- Amazon banned the tripod company from Amazon
23. After Amazon opens a warehouse, local industry wages drop 6% as it becomes an employer monopoly.
At Amazon, only 3% of workers get promotions, one-third the industry average.
24. In 2020, Amazon tripled profits. Instead of giving workers hero pay or increasing wages, it gave holiday bonuses of $150 for part-time workers and $300 for full-time. The cost equaled 2.9% of its profit.
My small business gave more than that.
25. Amazon could have quadrupled worker pay and still grown its profits in 2020. Instead, it kept its minimum wage at $15 an hour, which is below the median wage for a U.S. warehouse employee.
Profits continued to soar unabated since then.
26. Amazon increased prices for essential items like hand sanitizer and cleaners by up to 1,000% in the pandemic - including items sold directly by Amazon.
At the same time it canceled $2/hour hero pay for workers less than two months into the pandemic.
27. Amazon banned employees from even talking about which coworkers have covid, making it harder to know the health risks of working.
Months into the pandemic, the company revealed 20,000 of its workers had tested positive for covid.
28. Amazon warehouse workers face covid infection rates that are 4x the risk for the local community.
But with strict productivity standards and no paid sick leave, workers were forced to choose between their job and their health
29. The local organizer who led the successful Staten Island union vote?
Amazon fired him after he was outspoken about working conditions.
Documents later showed Amazon execs discussed a PR campaign to smear him
30. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is worth $188 billion.
A worker making the company's $15 minimum wage would need to work full-time for 6 million years and never spend a dime to have that.
31. Amazon is spending big to open grocery stores and convenience stores with no cashiers and is leading the charge to push the technology into stores everywhere, which would make cashiers extinct.
Cashier is the No. 2 most common job in America
32. Amazon has arranged unusual tax deals as "incentives" to open warehouses in town.
A Kentucky county forced Amazon workers to pay 5% of their paychecks to Amazon (instead of taxes going to local public needs)
33. How Amazon commemorates workers who die on the job ~~> Image ~~>
34. In Baltimore, GM paid workers $100k a year with good union benefits. It was replaced by an Amazon warehouse where people make under $40k a year, 800 workers are fired by algorithm a year and 600 get food stamps
35. Amazon touts itself as a great job creator.
For every $1 in wages it pays, taxpayers dole out 24 cents in public assistance because so many workers are in poverty.
In Southern California, half of its warehouse workers live in substandard housing
36. Amazon has a gig economy website called Mechanical Turk that paid workers a median of $1.77 an hour.
Full-time, that's $3,681 a year. Bezos made more than that in the time in took to read this tweet.
37. In a 4-year span, reporters found accidents involving Amazon delivery drivers caused 60 serious injuries and 10 deaths, a fraction of the likely total. Many drivers said they were running late and cut corners to meet Amazon's 99.9% arrival time quota
38. Warehouse workers have reported exhaustion and dehydration at hot facilities without air conditioning, which is especially hard for workers fasting during Ramadan
“I got so thirsty, I couldn’t even swallow my saliva."
39. Amazon's anti-union stance is not new. It produced a 45-minute union-busting training video for Whole Foods, years ago.
40. Voter suppression: Amazon tried (and failed) to block its workers from voting by mail on whether to unionize (in a pandemic, when 90% of U.S. union votes have been done by mail)
41. Amazon tracks workers and logs a "time off task" whenever they take a break. Too many of these will lead to a warning, and eventually you could be fired
42. Amazon has AI-enabled cameras in delivery vans, which produces a score for every movement a driver makes. Drivers say things like unanswered incoming calls can ding their score for alleged distracted driving.
43. that's just a small sampling
/end
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