During the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with CEO Jeff Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Amazon’s carbon footprint is larger than two thirds of all countries in the world. Amazon, with its expansion of the „smart world“, stands in all areas of everyday life for a vision of the future in which life is shaped through digitization and automation of one’s own generation of profit. Amazon wants to restructure existing labor standards and life habits entirely. Humans as a circumferential resource: customer, employee and data donor in one. To escape the future managed world of Amazon – with its monopoly attitude – will not be an easy path.
But the tide begins to turn. Participation of IT technicians at the global climate strike 2019 was followed by important concessions of the Amazon management. The Make Amazon Pay coalition, a cross-border alliance of more than four dozen social and environmental justice groups including UNI Global Union, Amazon Workers International, Progressive International, has managed to integrate the previously diffuse resistance of Amazon workers.
The Make Amazon Pay coalition staged a worldwide protest against Amazon on Black Friday, 27th December 2020, with actions in 15 countries: Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., the U.K., Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Poland, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Australia. Workers at several logistics centers across Germany are engaged in a three-day strike meant to disrupt Amazon’s profitable holiday sales during the retail industry’s busiest period.
Left-wing economist Yanis Varoufakis called on consumers to participate in a Black Friday boycott of Amazon, which he described as „a gigantic, behavior modification machine,“ pointing to the relationship between its data services, algorithms, and policy-making. The coalition also seeks to protect Amazon workers‘ rights to organize as well as unions‘ rights to promote the interests of employees—without fear of surveillance and retaliation, throughout the company’s global supply chains.
On Monday 22th March 2021, in Italy the first national strike against Amazon took place. About 40,000 Amazon workers in Italy participated in the strike. The national strike was truly a novelty, because it involved all the different figures working in the Amazon supply chain – sorting and storage workers, drivers, security workers – in an overall rejection of the working conditions imposed by the algorithm. With the vast majority of Amazon’s employees in Italy (between 70 and 80%) hired on a temporary basis and with precarious contracts, this mechanism produces a constant increase in the overall average productivity and work rhythms, and thus an accelerated wear on health.