We shouldn't be beholden to our employers to have good working conditions and we shouldn't be mad at uber wealthy companies for using the taxcode to avoid paying taxes.
There are 100s of individuals and companies doing exactly what Bezos has done. We solve nothing by blaming companies for working withing the confines of law and being shitty.
Blame legislators that have allowed for such a system to exist. Vote in primaries and public for politicians that are looking at making things better for the individual.
Just because there was no law that said "do not be an asshole" doesn't mean that an asshole is any less of an asshole.
Doing it at Bezos-scale makes it a Bezos-scale asshole problem.
I would only blame the government if they forced him to do this. He had free choice.
When slavery was legal, were the individual plantation owners terrible? Yes. However, it was the lack of government protections that allowed them to continue operating. Trying to draw the distinction between bezos and other billionaires feels like trying to compare one slave owner to the next and hoping that somehow that condemnation would make them grow a conscience.
Slavery didn't end in the US because abolitionists condemned slave owners. It ended because it was made illegal through the force of law (and in the end, a civil war).
Companies abusing their employees and the tax code won't go away because you dislike them. Those practices will only stop if the law changes.
«Except, none of those are crimes.»
Breaking the law is the textbook definition of a crime, isn't it?
Is that perhaps a non sequitur?
Amazon instigated the surge in all the major retailers moving toward $15 / hr as the new minimum wage for unskilled, entry labor. Amazon is setting the bar and forcing everyone else to keep up. They're likely to keep moving it higher faster than everyone else as well.
It also (very obviously) doesn't excuse all the mistakes that Amazon has made that everyone here is well acquainted with. I don't think anybody would pretend otherwise. The good goes with the bad. Amazon deserves credit for the things they get right as well as what they get wrong.
Amazon didn't set that bar, everyone everywhere else did. Amazon finally caught up after years and years of messing around with monopolistic tactics and is only just now doing PR damage control.
Among other things, you forgot the part about scheduling people like machines to the point where they feel like their only option is to pee in bottles.
It's pretty easy to make any powerful person look good if you're willing to be shamelessly selective.
Are you saying customers should've been denied this choice in order to subsidize those local store jobs?
Do you realize that doesn't excuse anything? A rather extreme example to make the point: slave-holding is still wrong even if you can find someone desperate enough to voluntarily sell themselves into it to you.
You left out the "and they can freely leave at any time" part. Your analogy doesn't make sense once you add it back in.
So? That doesn't excuse anything either. If my plane crashes next Jeff Bezos's Antarctic base, and he lets me in on the condition that I submit to daily sadistic beatings for his own pleasure. Does the idea that I could leave at any time (and freeze to death) make his beatings OK? Of course it doesn't.
Assuming Base Bezos is the only one around, without it you would have had one choice, death. Now you have an additional choice, survival with daily beatings. He has made you unequivocally better off, despite being a sadistic evil billionaire. Capitalism can be weird that way.
Now - in a scenario closer to the reality of an Amazon warehouse worker - let's assume there are hundreds of other bases around, each with their own terms, with little barriers to entry keeping other bases from being built, and Base Bezos is the one with the best terms. Then again, it's existence makes you better off. If it didn't exist, your choices would be worse.
All the workers at those warehouse jobs (a job far better in every way than the factory jobs I had) are better off because those jobs exist. And people at comparable jobs are better off too, because their employers now have to compete with someone providing what is in reality good pay, benefits, and working conditions for entry level manual labor jobs.
You should note that's a straw man, since I did not make a comparison, rather I used a different example to illustrate a concept. To spell it out in the simplest way I can think of: voluntarily agreement to a contract does not make the terms of that contract right. That's true for all wrongs, including slavery and bad working conditions.
Then why should I bother paying the mortgage to my house or car because that APR sure ain't right in them terms. Dam' bank found me desperate for a new BMW and is slaving my balls off!
You're being obtuse.
And no, I'm not comparing you to an angle.
But quite frankly, even though several of those are actual crimes, I don't think you need to have committed a crime to be an awful person. Jeff Bezos qualifies for his smug demeanor while being an asshole, regardless of what crimes his company has committed.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... - Literally on the front page today [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27177539 [3]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo...
Bezos did put in the hard work and got results, so he can be smug.
People who will never amount to anything will of course claim it was just luck.
> Amazon != Bezos, and Amazon's got obligations to its shareholders.
That's a distinction without a difference. Bezos was the CEO and largest shareholder. The shareholders weren't going to fire him if he'd chosen not to have Amazon pursue "anticompetitive and shady behaviors."
Amazon is still Bezos. Ownership and leadership wise just not day to day.
There are two things that have hindered those efforts: )1the race to the bottom is very fast, so by the time one retailer has had abuses exposed every retailer is doing it. 2) Enforcement efforts have been neutered, to the point where the fines are just cost of doing business - and that has it's own complicated history of abuse.
For the crime of making tens of thousands of people millionaires, providing people with what they want the world over, living the American dream, and hurling Shatner's body into the void?