Reply To: The Elizabeth Warren Thread
Dave, more for your speech at Conference — a 20-page Marxist analysis of Amazon as a new capitalist business model (signaled by a lurker on this forum — thanks):
Wages and working conditions are discussed on pages 14-16. From this it appears that working conditions as very bad (as generally in such warehouses):
Various reports, whether authorised or not by the management, compiled in warehouses and by Amazon managers, show that the working conditions in force in this company are comparable, equivalent, to those experienced by the majority of proletarians in the advanced countries in industry or largescale distribution. The physical strain, in particular in the little-mechanised warehouse-factories where the pickers walk 10 to 15 kilometres per day and where, conversely, the packers experience long periods of standing in one place, the duration of work, the repetitive tasks at a frantic rhythm imposed by the machines, the surveillance and the permanent pressure from the managers, is accompanied by a company patriotism based on a culture of always producing more. The big boss, the big cheese of Amazon who is the centre of everything, Jeff Bezos, promotes an ideology of “high standards of quality” and a “customer orientation” with slogans such as “You make history” (“Work hard, have fun, make history” plastered everywhere). Yet the average time served in the company is no more than a year.
As to pay, it could be worse as Amazon pays its workers a bit above the minimum wage:
Concerning its wages policy, Amazon tends to pay slightly above the minimum wage in force in the states where it is established. For example, in 2018, Amazon stated that permanent staff would get €12.22 per hour starting salary, in Germany, and €14.31 in Spain. In the UK, the basic wage in the company is £9.50 per hour (£10.50 in the London area). In France, Amazon refuses to apply the collective labour agreement in force in logistics, preferring its own scale which starts at 2.79% above the SMIC (minimum wage). In 2018 the management granted a wage increase of 2.8% to all employees in warehouses in France. In the US, Amazon has stated that it pays employees working full-time in warehouses (250,000 people) at the rate of $15 per hour on average (special payments and bonuses included)