Sunday, November 26, 2017

THE JEFF BEZOS PLAN - THE NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY IS NOT RACIST. IT IS SIMPLY GROSS EXPLOITATION

ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN 

WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN 

FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY


Jeff Bezos’ $100 billion: The case for expropriation

27 November 2017
After a Black Friday surge in Amazon’s stock value, CEO Jeff Bezos’ wealth surpassed the $100 billion mark, making him over $10 billion dollars richer than the world’s second wealthiest man, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
The rise of the $100 billion man is a further milestone in the unprecedented growth of social inequality worldwide. Bezos’ wealth would make the robber barons of the 19th century green with envy.
In November, the Institute for Policy Studies found the three wealthiest billionaires owned as much as the poorest half of the United States. Thanks to Bezos, this study is already out of date, because the billionaire increased his wealth by roughly $20 billion since its publication. Worldwide, the five richest billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s population, some 3.5 billion people.
Bezos acquired his wealth through the exploitation of his 300,000-strong international workforce. Amazon workers make as little as $233 per month in India, to an average of just $12.40 an hour in the United States. Workers toil for long hours with minimal safety protections, very limited benefits, and often in temporary or “flex” positions. In September, when 59-year-old Phillip Terry was crushed by a forklift at an Amazon facility near Indianapolis, the Department of Labor said the company might be forced to pay $28,000 in fines. Bezos makes this much each minute, more than his US employees make in a full year.
The company demands tribute from governments worldwide, requiring billions in tax breaks and free handouts in exchange for building its warehouses. Amazon is bringing back the “company town” of the late 19th century. It has forced over 200 American cities into a bidding war to lure the company’s second headquarters with massive handouts. Chicago, for example, offered Amazon a $2.25 billion “incentive package,” while Stonecrest, Georgia’s city council voted to change its name to “Amazon” and appoint Bezos as “mayor for life” if the company grants them the second headquarters.
Bezos has transformed his corporation into a semi-official organ of the US military-intelligence apparatus. Just this month, Amazon and the CIA announced the launching of a new “Secret Region” cloud system where the company will host data for the CIA, NSA, Defense Department, and other military-intelligence agencies.
A CIA spokesmen recently called the 2013 $600 million deal between Amazon and the government “the best decision we ever made.” Earlier in November, the Senate approved a $700 billion defense spending bill that included an “e-commerce portal” amendment guaranteeing that Amazon will supply the military-intelligence apparatus with computers, chairs and other office supplies.
The $100 billion man has wielded his wealth to curry tremendous influence in the halls of power. Amazon has spent over $9.6 million lobbying the federal government this year. Bezos has used the pages of the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013, to advance the Democratic Party’s agenda. The Post, under Bezos’ direction, has been a foremost advocate of the campaign against Russia, publishing in November 2016 the “PropOrNot” list, a false compilation of alleged “Russian propaganda” news agencies that included left-wing news web sites.
While Bezos accumulates a personal fortune by colluding with the military-intelligence agencies, the material needs of growing numbers of people are going unmet.
The UN estimates that it would cost $30 billion to solve world hunger by providing 862 million people with food for a year. The World Health Organization claims just $11 billion is needed to halve the number of people without access to clean water. Another UN study found that $26 billion would provide education to every child that does not receive one .
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that with $13 billion, free maternal and prenatal care could be provided for every mother in the developing world. It would cost $11 billion to house each of the 150,000 people who are homeless on a given night in the US. The cost of preventing 4 million malaria deaths would be $6 billion each year.
The total cost for these essential changes would be roughly $97 billion.
The accumulation of such immense wealth is proof that the conditions for the socialist transformation of the world are pregnant in the present situation.
In 1880, Friedrich Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that for socialists, the abolition of classes is not a utopian dream. Rather, it “presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination…by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.”
Engels continued: “The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.”
Even more so today. The technological advances of the past quarter century and the international integration of the world economy have become weapons in the hands of massive corporations that control the world and its governments. On the one hand, the private ownership of these corporations facilitates the concentration of wealth. On the other hand, the contradiction between the global character of the world economy and the nation-state system is everywhere erupting in the form of war, dictatorship, and the expulsion of tens of millions of refugees from their homes.
The Socialist Equality Party demands that the major corporations be placed under international social control to be organized democratically by the workers themselves to meet the needs of society.
The vast wealth of the financial oligarchy, expressed in their ownership of massive corporations, must be seized and expropriated, while the complex technologies, supply chains, and advanced transportation systems must be integrated in an organized, planned manner to harness the anarchic force of the world economy and eliminate material scarcity.
Amazon is a prime example. Its supply lines and delivery systems could distribute goods across the world, bringing water, food, and medicine from each producer according to his or her ability, to each consumer according to his or her need.
The massively sophisticated computational power used by the technology companies to censor and blacklist political opposition could instead be used for logistical analysis to conduct rescue and rebuilding missions in disaster zones like Houston and Puerto Rico. Drones used in the battlefield could be scrapped and rebuilt to distribute supplies for building schools, museums, libraries, and theaters, and for making Internet service available at no cost for the entire world.
The ruling class and all of the institutions of the political establishment stand inexorably in the way of efforts to expropriate their wealth. What is required is to mobilize the working class in a political struggle against the state and the socio-economic system on which it is based, through the fight for socialism.
Eric London

“We’re human beings, not slaves and 

animals”


UK newspaper exposé details Amazon’s super-

exploitation of workforce


By Robert Stevens and John Newham
30 November 2017
An undercover investigation by the Sunday Mirror newspaper has exposed brutal working conditions at Amazon’s warehouse in Tilbury, in southern England.
A reporter from the newspaper, Alan Selby, spent five weeks working at the “fulfilment centre”, which opened a few weeks ago and is the biggest warehouse of its kind in Europe. The four-storey plant occupies 2.2 million square feet—the size of 11 football pitches--and employs 1,500 workers.
Selby used a concealed camera to take video footage and photos of exhausted workers slumped at their work stations, while he himself was under constant pressure to increase his workload. He worked 10.5 hour shifts, with just two 30 minute breaks, for £8.20 (US $10.92) an hour —just a few pence above the £7.50 (US $9.99) minimum wage.
Selby explained, “Two half-hour breaks were the only time off my feet, but it was barely enough time to race to the canteen and wolf down some food to keep my energy up.”
Describing his workday, Selby wrote, “Alone in a locked metal cage, 10 feet from my nearest colleague, a robot approaches from the shadows and thrusts a tower of shelves towards me. I have nine seconds to grab and process an item to be sent for packing--a target of 300 items an hour, for hour after relentless hour.”
He reports how a computer screen in front of him gave constant reminders of his “units per hour” and exactly how long each has taken. Workers are given impossible targets under threat of being sacked. Breaks are timed and people are so exhausted that they fall asleep. Three of the photos in the exposé show workers slumped at their workstation, with one woman described as being asleep. Exhausted workers are warned about the consequences of even sitting down.
An angry co-worker asked, “Why are we not allowed to sit when it is quiet and not busy? We are human beings, not slaves and animals.”
One of Selby's pictures was of a filthy and unusable staff toilet. The plant is so huge that “walking to the toilet could take more than five minutes—almost a third of a mile from some of my workstations, and even longer when those on my floor were out of order, as they often were...the system would know I had not been active, so the pressure was on to hold it in.”
Selby was moved from the picking to the packing department. But the exploitation was just as extreme. He writes, “I was told to pack 120 single items an hour, or 85 multiple items. And I’ve since been told this will rise to 200 items.”
Workers are regularly fired for not meeting targets. Selby told of scores of staff sacked because of missed performance targets in the lead up to Black Friday.
The constant pressure has dangerous health consequences. “Workers reported ambulances being called to the warehouse on at least 2 occasions when one woman suffered a panic attack after being told she had to work compulsory overtime over Christmas, which would mean her working up to 55 hours a week, and another collapsed on the job, after struggling on despite feeling unwell.”
One worker told him, “Everybody suffers here. I pulled my hamstring but I just had to carry on. My friend spent two days off after she damaged her knee ligaments.”
Another said, “At my induction someone was asking why the staff turnover was so high here. It’s because they’re killing people. All my friends think I’m dead. I’m exhausted.”
Selby recalled "two safety incidents that could have seen somebody seriously hurt” in his final fortnight.
Selby also noted that he was barely able to tolerate Amazon's punishing regime even though he is physically fit. “Weeks before I went in, I had finished a summer running season which included two marathons and a handful of half marathons. Physically I am no slouch--yet my body felt drained every day. My blood pressure and resting heart rate both rose from the stresses of the job.”
He reported his body ached with the workload. His fitness tracker showed he walked at least 10 miles most days, with the physical effort leaving him on occasion feeling dizzy.
Despite the low wages, many workers have long, expensive commutes. Workers spend £4 (US $5.33) a day out of their own wages to get a bus to the plant from a site in London. Some spend four hours a day commuting.
These inhumane conditions are replicated at Amazon’s 16 UK fulfilment plants. Last December it was reported that workers at the Amazon plant in Dunfermline, Scotland, were forced to sleep in tents nearby in order to save on transport costs.
The company’s exploitation of its workforce is constantly being ramped up. This year Tilbury is due to ship 1.2 million items. In an article prior to Black Friday, the Daily Mail reported that workers at Amazon’s plant in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire were being expected to dispatch an aggregate of 85 items every second for the duration of the sale period.
To achieve its targets, Amazon is recruiting an additional 20,000 temporary workers--on poverty level wages--at its UK operations in the run up to Christmas. These are on top of its regular 24,000-strong workforce. This is the model employed by all the major players in the retail and delivery industry. The Commercialfleet.org website reported, “To help cope with the sheer volume of orders, an extra 49,000 seasonal staff will be hired across Royal Mail, Argos and Amazon bringing the total staff numbers working for all brands to 263,701.”
Based on the super-exploitation documented by Selby, Amazon--the UK’s largest retailer--made £7.3 billion (US $9.2 billion) in the UK last year alone. He concludes, “Its army of 24,000 unhappy elves are paid as little as seven pence per item to help pack and deliver each one across the UK. My final shift was two days ago, Black Friday--when millions of Brits logged on to help founder Jeff Bezos earn an extra £1.8 billion overnight.”
The World Sociali st Web Site reported that Bezos recently became the world’s richest man with a net worth over £75.11 billion ($100 billion) due to the exploitation of Amazon’s 300,000 strong international workforce, the undercutting of competitors and monopolising the home delivery market. Workers make as little as £175 (US $233) per month in Amazon’s Indian plants, to an average of just £9.31 (US $12.40) an hour in the United States.
A final point should be noted about Selby’s exposure. He writes that the “Tilbury warehouse is a slick operation, up to speed on health and safety and workplace law. But just because it is legal does not mean it is good for you.”
This statement is damning indictment of the present Conservative government and past Labour ones who have eviscerated workplace standards and regulations to a point where such degradation of workers is legal!
This is all with the connivance of the trade unions. Some 2,500 Amazon workers in Germany struck six plants last week to demand better pay. Staff at an Amazon facility near Piacenza in northern Italy also struck on the same day to demand “dignified salaries” and more staff. The strikes were held last Friday to coincide with Black Friday. The role of the unions as appendages of management was summed up by its role in Italy, with the Daily Mirrorreporting, “The unions advised workers who are on short-term, work-on-demand contracts to stay on the job, so they would not risk losing future gigs.”
The Sunday Mirror report sheds further light on the conditions reported by the International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV), which is published by the WSWS and fights to link the struggles of Amazon workers in Europe, the US, Asia and Latin America in a unified fight for workers’ rights and socialism.

No comments: