Jeff Bezos, not wanting to just appear like a Bond villain, has been in the news recently, due to reports on the state of the work conditions in the Amazon storehouses. These stories are not new; back in 2012 I wrote about ambulances parked outside one of their storehouses where they were just waiting to pick up workers that would collapse. Back then I was surprised that Bezos would accept that.
Since then I have realized that I should have been surprised that I was surprised. Working conditions in the storehouses are now famously bad, even if Amazon did hire a bunch of people to tweet happy messages about the company.
Bernie Sanders has introduced an act to counter some of the practices that Amazon, among others, use to lower wages and remove benefits. The act is called Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies – or, in the American tradition of naming, STOP-BEZOS. I wonder how long they took to find that name.
