Amazon, the seemingly untouchable behemoth that controls our lives from afar, is in a very real sense a local problem: the company’s violent, racist, society-destroying behavior depends on the decisions made daily by our literal neighbors.
Jeff Bezos spent $19 million dollars to buy DC’s largest private residence, a former museum located in Dupont Circle. Bezos just became the world’s first trillionaire, on the back of pandemic profiteering including price gouging; grotesque labor exploitation of essential, badly overworked and underpaid warehouse, shipping, agricultural, and grocery retail workers; and sellling white supremacist manifestos no other publisher will touch.
Jay Carney has a $2 million home in Palisades. The Amazon SVP of corporate affairs was President Obama’s press secretary, and poster child for the lucrative revolving door between the state and Big Tech. Carney very publicly doubled down on Amazon execs’ racist smears against warehouse worker Chris Smalls — who was fired for speaking up about unsafe warehouse conditions — then took a self-congratulatory Twitter selfie in Mayor Bowser’s “Black Lives Matter Plaza”.
25,000 more of our neighbors are slated to take high-salaried, white-collar jobs at Amazon in the next several years, thanks to the $2.5 billion HQ2 facility being built in (and receiving massive public subsidies from) Arlington County.
Everyone who enables this company’s exploitation is responsible for the damage it causes, and needs to feel the pressure of being held personally accountable for their decisions — just as individual cops are feeling that growing pressure now, in the fourth week of the uprisings taking place all across this country.
A substantial element of daily life inside the Beltway has long consisted of the unspoken agreement that we politely pretend not to look too closely at the violence perpetrated by our neighbors down the block, or sitting at the next table at brunch, who actually make the decision every day to do grievous, irreparable harm to workers, public health, democracy, and the planet. The uprisings are our collective voice saying: we no longer consent to this arrangement.
These are openly bad actors who, like the police, cannot be reformed, because capitalism requires such exploitation, and ensures it is backed with state violence. Designed-to-fail unemployment systems, employment-based access to health care, lack of both family leave and childcare, commodified housing, divestment from pandemic preparedness, and uninterrupted reliance on police to enforce racialized social control — even as prisons and jails are teeming with Covid infections — are the principal ways in which the state ensures we have no formal recourse for the harm Amazon inflicts.
That harm is unconscionable. Amazon has long been a notoriously dangerous and exploitative place to work. When Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death by a forklift in a Plainfield warehouse, Indiana OSHA officials who had found Amazon legally responsible made those citations and fines go away, retroactively blaming Terry for his own death in a bid to attract HQ2 to Indianapolis. Terry had lain dead in a pool of his own blood for nearly two hours before anyone noticed — despite the fact that Amazon is infamous for such intensive workplace surveillance and productivity monitoring that workers are forced to urinate in bottles.
We now know that the company’s surveillance infrastructure is being wielded to spot and kill union organizing, with a particular emphasis on manipulating the racial composition of the workplace. Its surveillance infrastructure is ostensibly being levied to track Covid spread, while in practice (much like police-worn body cameras), the information collected is being used only to benefit the company at the expense of the surveilled — who have had to improvise their own crowd-sourced contact tracing system on Reddit.
Amazon also sells surveillance equipment directly to the police, and is known to collaborate with ICE, CBP, and Palantir. Amazon’s Rekognition AI facial analysis and recognition tool is in the hands of so many police forces across the country that AWS' CEO recently said it was impossible to keep track. Amazon Ring’s wifi-connected home surveillance system is known to contract locally with Takoma Park PD, Bladensburg PD, PG County PD, Seat Pleasant PD, and Alexandria PD. The company is both using police as an external sales team and coaching them on how to push private Ring customers to turn over their footage.
Amazon has now put a one-year moratorium on new sales to local police forces, but has said nothing about its collaboration with federal agencies. How this is playing out at competitor Microsoft is instructive: Microsoft was recently revealed to have been demo-ing facial recognition technology to the DEA at its offices in Reston. Trump has just given the DEA the power “to enforce any federal crime committed as a result of the protests over the death of George Floyd."
Amazon’s relationship with the carceral state and its reliance on police to handle problems with workers is reflexive. When workers went on strike in Spain, Amazon called the police on them, demanding the state ensure that productivity continue as normal. When Amazon fired Chris Smalls in New York, executives went straight to the police seeking a PR win: general counsel David Zapolsky suggested “we donate strategically” by “giving masks away — give 1,000 masks to every police station in the country."
This is while Whole Foods is keeping workers at home rather than allow them to wear masks that say Black Lives Matter This humiliating treatment comes on the heels of Whole Foods and Amazon forcing workers to wear “Hero” t-shirts; the shirts were handed out right as their $2/hour hazard pay, a demand that essential workers have made across industries, was rescinded. Similarly, Amazon’s short-lived unlimited unpaid time off policy, put in place in response to the pandemic, was canceled in anticipation of planned May Day strikes for safer working conditions
Amazon is a criminal organization that thrives on our willingness to be complicit with state-backed corporate violence, even as it kills us off one by one. We have the power to defend ourselves by holding our neighbors who work for this monster accountable to us.