Modern Day Slave-Drivers: Amazon and the Culture of Individualism

Regarding the NY Times story on employment practices at Amazon, it is critical to note that Amazon is a public entity, and if its shareholders so choose, they can change the way things are done there and make it a more employee-friendly company. I suspect they like the ROI—not to mention competitive prices and fast, free delivery—and will do nothing, as is their prerogative.

But the societal change which underlies the Amazon employment environment is classic Art of War: as Sun Tzu proposed many centuries ago, to unite your people, create an enemy. It works every time you want to distract people from the truth. And the truth is, we have become obsessed with money over community. We might ask ourselves how and why this sea-change has occurred in our society. Why the individual ethic has trumped the all-for-one-and-one-for-all ethic of the Post War Era. Why it is that instead of hating poverty, we now hate the poor, labeling minimum wage workers who can’t support a family of four on two paychecks, “lazy.” And why, instead of hating hunger, we hate the hungry, and call them “takers” so the self-proclaimed “makers” can feel better about themselves.

And now, the Super PAC-class wants to donate without attribution—they want to control our politics, but leave no fingerprints. We’ve always valued disclosure as a field-leveler in politics, but now the structure of the 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations and their relationships with the opaque Super PAC’s has been engineered intentionally to hide their billionaire-donors’ identities. One answer, offered by Thomas Frank in his seminal book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, shines a light on the immensely cynical strategy the society-controlling one-percent (really, one-tenth of one-percent) foists on socially conservative Middle American voters, the good old bait-and-switch: promise them you’ll repeal Obamacare, abortion rights, gay marriage and loose immigration laws, then, when they elect you, focus solely on tax cuts for the rich and other breaks for the monied special interests.

In contemporary Europe, and, for what it’s worth, in Mid-Twentieth Century America, Amazon’s nasty employment habits, like shooing cancer victims out the door as uncommitted drags on the company’s productivity, would be shamed by the public, and contained by labor laws. Unless and until we regain some focus on society as a whole versus aggrandizing the super-wealthy we perceive as magically rugged individualists, we will see this kind push and pull.