And remember, the owner of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 10:56 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: $1 of Every $2 Spent Online Goes to Amazon.
Can We Break the Company's Stranglehold?
Ah! Free enterprise and glorious Capitalism.
Working on our behalf, while putting billions into select pockets.
King Midas has nothing on Amazon.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/21/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
$1 of Every $2 Spent Online Goes to Amazon. Can We Break the Company'ssuccessful product.
Stranglehold?
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 By Mario Vasquez, Truthout | Report
Amazon Books, for now the online retailer's sole physical bookstore,
at the University Village mall in Seattle, March 9, 2016. (Photo:
Michael Hanson / The New York Times) Stories like this will always
remain free to read at Truthout. But if you can spare a small
donation, please click here to ensure independent media has a future!
Amazon.com is ubiquitous: It seems to reach into all the corners of
our lives, selling everything from toiletries to furniture. Yet,
beyond the "A to Z" selections offered on Amazon exists the reality
that workers, consumers and their communities are suffering from the
retailer's stranglehold on the American economy, researchers at the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) say in a study released in
late November. Not only does Amazon possess an increasingly dominant
share of the retail market -- with one of every two dollars spent
online going to the company -- but it is increasingly expanding into
other low-road money-making schemes, at the expense of public coffers.
Amazon's grip on the US economy should be worrisome for anyone seeking
an egalitarian and fair society.
"A to Z"? The M Is for Monopoly
As ILSR puts it, when considering Amazon, imagine "if Walmart owned
most of our malls and Main Streets, decided the terms by which its
rivals could rent these spaces, and oversaw every sale they made."
Although Walmart has long been the archetype for a corporation that
drags down communities with poverty-waged big-box store jobs and
exploitative labor practices up and down its supply chain, it has
nothing on Amazon's gatekeeper status. Upon inspection, Amazon's
business practices, obfuscated behind the gleam of a seamless,
consumer-friendly online interface, reveal that the company is what
ILSR describes as a "monopoly hiding in plain sight."
First, Amazon uses its position as the owner of its massive retail
marketplace to its advantage when it comes to marketplace
participants. For third-party sellers on the site's marketplace,
Amazon ends up taking a portion of each sale: somewhere between 15 and
50 percent. If the sellers do not agree to these terms, and forgo a
place on the company's platform, then there exists the risk that their
products won't be seen by the one-half of online shoppers who start
their shopping directly at Amazon instead of via search engines.
Amazon is currently the top toy retailer, and by end of next year, it
will be the leading retailer of clothing and consumer electronic
goods. This will come on top of the company's dominance in book retail
(where much of publicized Amazon's strong-arming against smaller
competitors occurs). Within the book industry, Amazon owns 65 percent
of the market share. This is as much as Standard Oil owned of the oil
industry back in 1911, when it was broken up for acting as a monopoly.
Any success that third-party sellers do have usually leads to Amazon
creating its own knockoff product, decreasing sales of the original
product when Amazon's copy is boosted to the top of the results page.
This practice is underlined by Amazon's ability to track customer
shopping habits, boosting its chances of manufacturing a particularly
Theexceptional edge.
cumulative effect, ILSR believes, is limited choice and the stifling
of competition from smaller, independent online retailers and
suppliers. It is Amazon's control of several parts of the supply
chain, as both a manufacturer and retailer -- what is called vertical
integration -- and the power that comes with it that gives the company an
Anyone hoping for a Standard Oil-like split up for Amazon, as ILSRbrick-and-mortar stores.
recommends, would have to acknowledge that the political will to act
on antitrust violators has shrunk since the 1970s and 80s,
transitioning more toward the mindset that as long as consumers are
getting low prices, everything is fine. Amazon's powerful position as
a dual manufacturer and retailer would have been viewed as an
antitrust violation before the ideological shift on breaking up
monopolies began, but as law scholar Linda Khan tells Truthout,
"Current law has a very dim view of what constitutes as
'anticompetitive' in vertical arrangements."
The Public Cost of an "Everything" Store Beyond Amazon's predatory
tactics lies the public damage the company causes with its dominance.
When accounting for the fact that retail shopping is rapidly shifting
online, ILSR estimates that Amazon has "displaced enough sales at
brick-and-mortar stores to force the elimination of about 295,000
retail jobs," while only creating roughly half as many jobs in its
warehousing and distribution operations. In almost half of the
country, Amazon generates billions of dollars in sales within each
state without employing a single person. The loss of retail jobs in
physical locations means store closures and subsequent vacancies, and
as ILSR finds, because on-the-ground shopping is one form of social
interaction in the community, the hyper-reliance on Amazon leads to a
reduction in social bonds and communal vibrancy.
The fiscal losses to public coffers at the expense of Amazon's private
gain could be just as damaging. The shift toward online shopping --
half of it conducted on Amazon -- means that communities and states
lose the property taxes that would have been brought in through
Furthermore, as the progressive advocacy group Good Jobs First notesmanagement by stress."
in a study released this week, politicians are encouraging Amazon's
behavior via public subsidies. Since 2005, Amazon has received
approximately $900 million worth of subsidies to construct and operate
its facilities, with $241 million awarded since the start of 2015.
These efforts grease the track for a corporation that has to build
these facilities, regardless of any potential subsidies. The
researchers at Good Jobs First conclude: "Public officials must
recognize their communities' value. They need to recognize that the
prize on the bargaining table isn't an Amazon facility: it's more
access to the local market for another aggressive retailer growing at
the expense of existing retailers."
The Squeeze on Labor
The people inside Amazon's oft-publically-subsidized warehouse and
distribution facilities, who keep its infrastructure functioning, are
also victims of Amazon's might. You'd never know it from the outside:
One job posting for its order fulfillment centers reads, "Our
fulfillment centers are where Amazon orders come to life, where we
focus on delighting our customers by delivering smiling boxes filled
with everything under the sun."
But the experiences of workers detailed in ILSR's study shed light on
grim conditions. A harsh quota system must be met at a breakneck pace.
An International Business Times report describes the company's
manipulative motivation technique: "Amazon's productivity numbers are
apparently purposely designed to be unattainable for most workers so
that employees feel that they are falling down on the job and push
harder to hit the impracticable levels. This strategy [is] known as
With wages lower than at comparable facilities (9 percent to 22turnover.
percent less, according to ILSR estimates), the quota system creates high
This makes for a tougher terrain to utilize a key tool that mightconcessions from unionized shops at USPS and UPS.
significantly alter the way the company operates -- unionization.
The massive volume of packages that go in and out of Amazon facilities
also gives the company leverage to affect the work at carriers who
deliver Amazon orders. The start of the United States Postal Service's
(USPS) partnership with Amazon in 2013 opened the doors for Sunday
package delivery, leading to a new "underclass" of postal employees
often working more than seven consecutive days, and dragging down
standards for the entire workforce.
Meanwhile, Amazon has sought to reduce its dependence on the
union-backed workers at United Parcel Service (UPS). ILSR notes that
in an effort to reduce its shipping costs, Amazon has steadily
decreased its use of UPS and FedEx in the past few years, switching
instead to regional couriers that utilize independent contractors "who
are in many cases treated like employees but denied the benefits and
security of the employer-employee relationship." The proliferation of
such potentially unjust contract work lowers the standards throughout
the delivery industry and provides an out for management to extract
ILSR codirector and study author, Stacy Mitchell, tells Truthout,participants actual employees is a real one.
"Delivery drivers at companies like UPS and the postal service, as
well as freight pilots, typically earn solid middle-income wages and
have reasonable workloads. But Amazon's intention is to impose the
same arduous and dehumanizing conditions and workloads on the people
in its delivery system as it does in its warehouses."
The independent contract situation within the courier industry will
grow further entangled with Amazon in the near future. As a part of a
strategy that company insiders call "Consume the City," Amazon is
seeking to flesh out its own shipping and delivery infrastructure --
described in one report as an "e-commerce Walmart with a FedEx
attached." Amazon is supplementing its own Uber-like delivery service
called Amazon Flex, which is already operating in 30 cities across the
US. Like other "gig economy" companies, Amazon touts that its platform
enables the flexibility of supplemental income. But given Amazon's
proven record of dragging down job standards and killing retail jobs,
the question of whether the company has an obligation to make Flex
The Fight Backcalls Prime Air.
Amazon's move toward controlling more of its package delivery
logistics has also led it toward investing in cargo airlines, what it
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to lease as many as 40Imagine Christmas without Amazon!"
planes from two carriers, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) and
Atlas Air, with the option to purchase 20 percent and 30 percent
stakes of each respective company in the next few years. Here, Amazon
is running into its first pockets of real resistance, and it is
turning into a battle to set the standards of labor at Amazon's air
investments.
On November 22, 250 pilots at ATSG's Amazon-servicing subsidiary, ABX
Air, went on strike to protest the lack of compensatory time off
granted after the pilots were forced to work extra hours to make up
for the understaffing at the airline. The pilots, members of Teamsters
Local 1224, were forced back to work the next day after an injunction
was ordered by Judge Timothy Black of the US Court for the Southern
District of Ohio. Judge Black remarked, "Absent an injunction, ABX,
its customers, and the public will suffer immediate, irreparable harm.
Over at Atlas Air, home of the first Boeing 747 jet flying Prime AirEmail him:
branding, 1,700 pilots are considering their own strike. The same
understaffing issues, as well as low pay and benefits, are at the
center of the conflict. The pilots, also members of Teamsters Local
1224, picketed at Amazon headquarters on December 7 with signs
reading, "Santa won't deliver on time without us." They hope that
Amazon will push Atlas to come to the negotiating table in good faith.
"You reach a point where no matter what you offer, pilots don't want
to work there because it's their livelihood. You spend a lot of time
in these jobs here and you want to work in a place that is rewarding,"
says the head of Atlas' union pilots, Robert Kirchner.
Considering Amazon's treatment of workers across the supply chain, as
described in ILSR's findings, it should perhaps be no surprise that
Amazon chose these specifically low-road cargo airlines as its bases
for Prime Air.
However, the Teamsters Local 1224 chose to fight back, and their fight
could provide a model of resistance for other workers under the thumb
of Amazon.
"If the time comes, if the situation happens, there will be no
hesitation about going on strike at all," says Kirchner.
The labor fight could also stimulate policy makers to wake up to the
stranglehold that Amazon has on society at large. Could the
stranglehold not be more evident than when a federal judge used
"Imagine Christmas without Amazon!" as his logic for squashing a
strike?
ILSR recommends strengthening labor law to allow greater room for
successful unionization and bargaining, saying that tougher
enforcement on misclassified independent contractors is key to
loosening Amazon's drag on the economy. Additionally, antitrust laws
must be expanded and brought back from the "dim view" that Khan
describes to break up Amazon's anti-competitive measures as a retailer
and manufacturer.
"Without a strong and thoughtful public policy response to Amazon's
growing monopoly power, and the high costs it's imposing on
competition, small businesses, workers and consumers, many of the
benefits of the digital revolution will not be realized," ILSR concludes.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
MARIO VASQUEZ
Mario Vasquez is a writer from southern California interested in labor
and grassroots progressive movements. His work has been previously
featured at In These Times and Salon. Follow him on Twitter: @mario_vsqz.
mario.vasquez.espinoza@xxxxxxxxx.successful product.
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Report ________________________________________
Show Comments
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
$1 of Every $2 Spent Online Goes to Amazon. Can We Break the Company's
Stranglehold?
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 By Mario Vasquez, Truthout | Report
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid.
. Amazon Books, for now the online retailer's sole physical
bookstore, at the University Village mall in Seattle, March 9, 2016.
(Photo:
Michael Hanson / The New York Times)
. Stories like this will always remain free to read at Truthout. But
if you can spare a small donation, please click here to ensure
independent media has a future!
Amazon.com is ubiquitous: It seems to reach into all the corners of
our lives, selling everything from toiletries to furniture. Yet,
beyond the "A to Z" selections offered on Amazon exists the reality
that workers, consumers and their communities are suffering from the
retailer's stranglehold on the American economy, researchers at the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) say in a study released in
late November. Not only does Amazon possess an increasingly dominant
share of the retail market -- with one of every two dollars spent
online going to the company -- but it is increasingly expanding into
other low-road money-making schemes, at the expense of public coffers.
Amazon's grip on the US economy should be worrisome for anyone seeking
an egalitarian and fair society.
"A to Z"? The M Is for Monopoly
As ILSR puts it, when considering Amazon, imagine "if Walmart owned
most of our malls and Main Streets, decided the terms by which its
rivals could rent these spaces, and oversaw every sale they made."
Although Walmart has long been the archetype for a corporation that
drags down communities with poverty-waged big-box store jobs and
exploitative labor practices up and down its supply chain, it has
nothing on Amazon's gatekeeper status. Upon inspection, Amazon's
business practices, obfuscated behind the gleam of a seamless,
consumer-friendly online interface, reveal that the company is what
ILSR describes as a "monopoly hiding in plain sight."
First, Amazon uses its position as the owner of its massive retail
marketplace to its advantage when it comes to marketplace
participants. For third-party sellers on the site's marketplace,
Amazon ends up taking a portion of each sale: somewhere between 15 and
50 percent. If the sellers do not agree to these terms, and forgo a
place on the company's platform, then there exists the risk that their
products won't be seen by the one-half of online shoppers who start
their shopping directly at Amazon instead of via search engines.
Amazon is currently the top toy retailer, and by end of next year, it
will be the leading retailer of clothing and consumer electronic
goods. This will come on top of the company's dominance in book retail
(where much of publicized Amazon's strong-arming against smaller
competitors occurs). Within the book industry, Amazon owns 65 percent
of the market share. This is as much as Standard Oil owned of the oil
industry back in 1911, when it was broken up for acting as a monopoly.
Any success that third-party sellers do have usually leads to Amazon
creating its own knockoff product, decreasing sales of the original
product when Amazon's copy is boosted to the top of the results page.
This practice is underlined by Amazon's ability to track customer
shopping habits, boosting its chances of manufacturing a particularly
Theexceptional edge.
cumulative effect, ILSR believes, is limited choice and the stifling
of competition from smaller, independent online retailers and
suppliers. It is Amazon's control of several parts of the supply
chain, as both a manufacturer and retailer -- what is called vertical
integration -- and the power that comes with it that gives the company an
Anyone hoping for a Standard Oil-like split up for Amazon, as ILSRbrick-and-mortar stores.
recommends, would have to acknowledge that the political will to act
on antitrust violators has shrunk since the 1970s and 80s,
transitioning more toward the mindset that as long as consumers are
getting low prices, everything is fine. Amazon's powerful position as
a dual manufacturer and retailer would have been viewed as an
antitrust violation before the ideological shift on breaking up
monopolies began, but as law scholar Linda Khan tells Truthout,
"Current law has a very dim view of what constitutes as
'anticompetitive' in vertical arrangements."
The Public Cost of an "Everything" Store Beyond Amazon's predatory
tactics lies the public damage the company causes with its dominance.
When accounting for the fact that retail shopping is rapidly shifting
online, ILSR estimates that Amazon has "displaced enough sales at
brick-and-mortar stores to force the elimination of about 295,000
retail jobs," while only creating roughly half as many jobs in its
warehousing and distribution operations. In almost half of the
country, Amazon generates billions of dollars in sales within each
state without employing a single person. The loss of retail jobs in
physical locations means store closures and subsequent vacancies, and
as ILSR finds, because on-the-ground shopping is one form of social
interaction in the community, the hyper-reliance on Amazon leads to a
reduction in social bonds and communal vibrancy.
The fiscal losses to public coffers at the expense of Amazon's private
gain could be just as damaging. The shift toward online shopping --
half of it conducted on Amazon -- means that communities and states
lose the property taxes that would have been brought in through
Furthermore, as the progressive advocacy group Good Jobs First notesmanagement by stress."
in a study released this week, politicians are encouraging Amazon's
behavior via public subsidies. Since 2005, Amazon has received
approximately $900 million worth of subsidies to construct and operate
its facilities, with $241 million awarded since the start of 2015.
These efforts grease the track for a corporation that has to build
these facilities, regardless of any potential subsidies. The
researchers at Good Jobs First conclude: "Public officials must
recognize their communities' value. They need to recognize that the
prize on the bargaining table isn't an Amazon facility: it's more
access to the local market for another aggressive retailer growing at
the expense of existing retailers."
The Squeeze on Labor
The people inside Amazon's oft-publically-subsidized warehouse and
distribution facilities, who keep its infrastructure functioning, are
also victims of Amazon's might. You'd never know it from the outside:
One job posting for its order fulfillment centers reads, "Our
fulfillment centers are where Amazon orders come to life, where we
focus on delighting our customers by delivering smiling boxes filled
with everything under the sun."
But the experiences of workers detailed in ILSR's study shed light on
grim conditions. A harsh quota system must be met at a breakneck pace.
An International Business Times report describes the company's
manipulative motivation technique: "Amazon's productivity numbers are
apparently purposely designed to be unattainable for most workers so
that employees feel that they are falling down on the job and push
harder to hit the impracticable levels. This strategy [is] known as
With wages lower than at comparable facilities (9 percent to 22turnover.
percent less, according to ILSR estimates), the quota system creates high
This makes for a tougher terrain to utilize a key tool that mightconcessions from unionized shops at USPS and UPS.
significantly alter the way the company operates -- unionization.
The massive volume of packages that go in and out of Amazon facilities
also gives the company leverage to affect the work at carriers who
deliver Amazon orders. The start of the United States Postal Service's
(USPS) partnership with Amazon in 2013 opened the doors for Sunday
package delivery, leading to a new "underclass" of postal employees
often working more than seven consecutive days, and dragging down
standards for the entire workforce.
Meanwhile, Amazon has sought to reduce its dependence on the
union-backed workers at United Parcel Service (UPS). ILSR notes that
in an effort to reduce its shipping costs, Amazon has steadily
decreased its use of UPS and FedEx in the past few years, switching
instead to regional couriers that utilize independent contractors "who
are in many cases treated like employees but denied the benefits and
security of the employer-employee relationship." The proliferation of
such potentially unjust contract work lowers the standards throughout
the delivery industry and provides an out for management to extract
ILSR codirector and study author, Stacy Mitchell, tells Truthout,participants actual employees is a real one.
"Delivery drivers at companies like UPS and the postal service, as
well as freight pilots, typically earn solid middle-income wages and
have reasonable workloads. But Amazon's intention is to impose the
same arduous and dehumanizing conditions and workloads on the people
in its delivery system as it does in its warehouses."
The independent contract situation within the courier industry will
grow further entangled with Amazon in the near future. As a part of a
strategy that company insiders call "Consume the City," Amazon is
seeking to flesh out its own shipping and delivery infrastructure --
described in one report as an "e-commerce Walmart with a FedEx
attached." Amazon is supplementing its own Uber-like delivery service
called Amazon Flex, which is already operating in 30 cities across the
US. Like other "gig economy" companies, Amazon touts that its platform
enables the flexibility of supplemental income. But given Amazon's
proven record of dragging down job standards and killing retail jobs,
the question of whether the company has an obligation to make Flex
The Fight Backcalls Prime Air.
Amazon's move toward controlling more of its package delivery
logistics has also led it toward investing in cargo airlines, what it
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to lease as many as 40Imagine Christmas without Amazon!"
planes from two carriers, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) and
Atlas Air, with the option to purchase 20 percent and 30 percent
stakes of each respective company in the next few years. Here, Amazon
is running into its first pockets of real resistance, and it is
turning into a battle to set the standards of labor at Amazon's air
investments.
On November 22, 250 pilots at ATSG's Amazon-servicing subsidiary, ABX
Air, went on strike to protest the lack of compensatory time off
granted after the pilots were forced to work extra hours to make up
for the understaffing at the airline. The pilots, members of Teamsters
Local 1224, were forced back to work the next day after an injunction
was ordered by Judge Timothy Black of the US Court for the Southern
District of Ohio. Judge Black remarked, "Absent an injunction, ABX,
its customers, and the public will suffer immediate, irreparable harm.
Over at Atlas Air, home of the first Boeing 747 jet flying Prime AirEmail him:
branding, 1,700 pilots are considering their own strike. The same
understaffing issues, as well as low pay and benefits, are at the
center of the conflict. The pilots, also members of Teamsters Local
1224, picketed at Amazon headquarters on December 7 with signs
reading, "Santa won't deliver on time without us." They hope that
Amazon will push Atlas to come to the negotiating table in good faith.
"You reach a point where no matter what you offer, pilots don't want
to work there because it's their livelihood. You spend a lot of time
in these jobs here and you want to work in a place that is rewarding,"
says the head of Atlas' union pilots, Robert Kirchner.
Considering Amazon's treatment of workers across the supply chain, as
described in ILSR's findings, it should perhaps be no surprise that
Amazon chose these specifically low-road cargo airlines as its bases
for Prime Air.
However, the Teamsters Local 1224 chose to fight back, and their fight
could provide a model of resistance for other workers under the thumb
of Amazon.
"If the time comes, if the situation happens, there will be no
hesitation about going on strike at all," says Kirchner.
The labor fight could also stimulate policy makers to wake up to the
stranglehold that Amazon has on society at large. Could the
stranglehold not be more evident than when a federal judge used
"Imagine Christmas without Amazon!" as his logic for squashing a
strike?
ILSR recommends strengthening labor law to allow greater room for
successful unionization and bargaining, saying that tougher
enforcement on misclassified independent contractors is key to
loosening Amazon's drag on the economy. Additionally, antitrust laws
must be expanded and brought back from the "dim view" that Khan
describes to break up Amazon's anti-competitive measures as a retailer
and manufacturer.
"Without a strong and thoughtful public policy response to Amazon's
growing monopoly power, and the high costs it's imposing on
competition, small businesses, workers and consumers, many of the
benefits of the digital revolution will not be realized," ILSR concludes.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Mario Vasquez
Mario Vasquez is a writer from southern California interested in labor
and grassroots progressive movements. His work has been previously
featured at In These Times and Salon. Follow him on Twitter: @mario_vsqz.
mario.vasquez.espinoza@xxxxxxxxx.
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Slaughter, Labor Notes | ReportAmazon, Domino's and Big Brother:
Drones Flying the Not-So-Friendly Surveillance Skies By John W
Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute | Op-EdAmazon-CIA $600 Million
Deal Facing Scrutiny: "What's the CIA Doing on Amazon's Cloud?"
By Marcy Wheeler, Norman Solomon, Institute for Public Accuracy |
Report
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