"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail.
It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL
GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
MODERN SLAVER JEFF
BEZOS
AMAZON’S ASSAULT ON
AMERICA CONTINUES
Amazon, the multinational online
retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to
take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires
owns as much as 750 million people, more than the total population of
Latin America and double the population of the US."
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor
rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and
illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down
production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics
assembly plants in China.”
JEFF BEZOS of AMAZON
DECLARES THAT AMERICAN-BORN SLAVES ARE NOT CHEAP ENOUGH. CHINA MUST DELIVER THE
REAL SLAVE LABOR!
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor
rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and
illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down
production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics
assembly plants in China.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is
importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech
industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a
massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy
and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS IS
THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
The
gains for employees are a novel pain for the investors and employers who have been able to hold
down wages for decades because the federal government is trying to grow the
economy via cheap-labor legal immigration.
“INVESTORS” HAVE AND WILL DESTROY THIS NATION IF IT WOULD
IMPACT THE NEXT QUARTER’S EARNINGS!
Amazon, the multinational online
retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to
take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a
massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy
and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
$3,000 per second
for Bezos, poverty wages for Amazon workers
18 July 2018
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed $150 billion on Monday,
making him the richest person in modern world history.
The magnitude of such a sum is difficult to comprehend. Its real
meaning emerges when juxtaposed with the social position of Amazon’s 500,000
workers.
* Jeff Bezos has made $50 billion in 2018. The $255 million he has
made each day of
the year equals the annual salaries of over 10,000 Amazon workers in the US.
* The amount Bezos has made per second in 2018, $2,950, is more
than the annual salary of an Amazon worker in India, $2,796.
* In five days of 2018, Bezos made as much money as the combined
income of every Amazon fulfillment center worker in the world in 2017.
* If Bezos’ wealth were divided equally among Amazon’s employees,
each would get a check for $300,000.
* In the time it will take the average reader to read these five
bullet points, Jeff Bezos will have made another $70,000, seven times the
global annual average income of $10,000.
The existence of such fortunes exposes the oligarchic character of
American and global society. Under capitalism, Bezos and billionaires like him
dominate the political parties, select who is elected to public office,
determine the policies of the world’s governments, and dictate “public opinion”
through their control over academic institutions and the media. Here too, Bezos
is a prime example. He purchased the Washington
Post in 2013 for $250 million—less than what he now makes in a
day.
Behind great wealth there are great social crimes. Bezos has made
his billions through the ruthless exploitation of the Amazon workforce, which
has more than doubled in size since 2015, when Bezos’s wealth was $60 billion.
Amazon has hired roughly 300,000 new workers since 2015, allowing Bezos to
pocket the surplus value generated by the labor of a veritable army of the
exploited.
Amazon has gained a competitive edge by introducing 21st century
methods to squeeze every last drop of sweat from its workers, who wear
monitoring devices that measure how hard they are working and who are forced to
walk or run up to 14 miles per day. Injuries are common, and deaths and
suicides also take place with regularity. The National Council for Occupational
Safety found Amazon among the most dangerous workplaces in the US.
Amazon is deeply implicated in the crimes of the US government,
both in its imperialist wars abroad and in its Gestapo-like attack on democratic
rights at home.
The company hosts the web servers for the US military and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and it sells its cloud service to Palantir,
a data analytics firm that provides software used by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids and detain immigrants. In May, the ACLU
reported that Amazon also sells Orwellian facial recognition software to police
departments and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Opposition to this corporate giant is emerging, including from
within the company itself.
In June, an undisclosed number of Amazon employees published a
letter demanding the company halt its involvement in mass deportation and
police surveillance. “This will be another powerful tool for the surveillance
state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized,” the letter reads,
citing IBM’s involvement in providing Hitler with the infrastructure used to
murder millions in concentration camps.
This year has also seen the development of a series of strikes at Amazon
facilities worldwide. In Spain, Poland and Germany, workers’ anger over low
wages, “permanent temporary” work and brutal working conditions is near
universal, forcing the trade unions to call limited protest strikes to coincide
with “Prime Day”—a 36-hour sale period from July 16 to 17.
The trade unions’ goal in calling the Prime Day protest strikes is
the exact opposite of the aspirations of the workers participating in them.
In Spain, the union has kept the strike to a single fulfillment
center. In Germany, the bulk of workers chose not to participate in a one-day
strike called by the Verdi union, knowing that Verdi regularly calls isolated
strikes that will not impact corporate profits. In Poland, the union has called
only a partial slow-down of work in order to block a broader strike.
While the workers want to shut down Amazon’s supply chains and
achieve massive increases in wages and significant improvements in working
conditions, the unions have admitted from the outset that they are organizing
the strikes as limited protests that will have no impact on Amazon’s supply
chains.
And while the workers aspire to unite in a common international
struggle with their co-workers across national boundaries, the unions by their
nature keep workers tied to “their own” nation-states and governments.
At Amazon and across all workplaces worldwide, the trade unions
serve as an obstacle, not a conduit, for the development of the class struggle.
Their leaderships, both in terms of political function and social composition,
are hostile to the working class members whose dues help pay their salaries.
The trade unions, through the relentless suppression of the class struggle at
Amazon and elsewhere, are responsible for making Jeff Bezos’ fortune possible.
In their struggles against the transnational corporations, workers
must throw off the shackles of the trade unions and construct new,
rank-and-file factory organizations.
These factory committees must fight to establish lines of
communication between workers at different workplaces, not to isolate workers
at each plant. They must be based on the principle that the interests of
workers and capitalists are incompatible, not on “cooperation” between workers
and management. They must foster the highest degree of democratic discussion,
planning, and debate among the workers themselves. They must be based on an
understanding that the working class is an international social force and that workers
are powerless when divided based on nationality.
The suppression of the class struggle has produced unprecedented
levels of social inequality. In the United States, three people own the same
amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population—160 million people.
Worldwide, the five wealthiest own as much as the poorest half—3.6 billion
people. Outside of the wealthiest 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population,
the masses of people face levels of economic hardship that vary only in degrees
of extremity.
The existence of such extreme levels of inequality raises the
urgent need for socialist revolution. Society cannot afford the capitalist
system. The trillions of dollars that sit in corporate bank vaults and in the
trust funds of the super wealthy must be expropriated and spent on massive
international programs to provide water, food, education, culture, housing and
infrastructure to every corner of the world.
The international integration of the world economy that under
capitalism serves as a source of conflict, war and competition will become,
under socialism, a mechanism for distributing resources from each region of the
world according to its ability to each region according to the needs of its
population. Amazon, with its complex logistical web spanning every continent
and dozens of countries, will be transformed into a public utility to ship
medicine, building material, food and disaster relief across the world.
Neither Bezos nor the capitalist class will give up their wealth
without a fight. The working class must prepare for the coming class battles by
joining the fight for socialism.
Police beat up Amazon
strikers in Spain
By
James Lerner and Paul Mitchell
18 July 2018
Police charged a picket line and beat Amazon workers during the
second day of a three-day strike at the company’s largest logistics centre in
Spain at San Fernando de Henares, Madrid.
The strike was timed to coincide with Amazon’s “Prime Day,” and
took place as thousands of workers in Germany and Poland also struck the
company.
Until the police attack, the Amazon workers and their supporters
had been peacefully picketing, under the broiling sun at the main entrance to
“MAD4,” as police escorted trucks and scabs into the centre. According to
strikers, the police “without apparent reason,” beat them up with truncheons,
which led to one suffering “an open wound on the face caused by a blow from a
policeman.” Three others were arrested and taken away to police stations.
Ana told the World
Socialist Web Site that she had come to the assistance of a
fellow worker who had been corralled by the police but found herself being
“clubbed three of four times” resulting in “contusions on her arm and
backside.”
The Amazon workers have been involved in a long running dispute,
since 2016. For nearly two years, Amazon has been negotiating with the trade
unions—CGT, CCOO, UGT and CSIT—to impose the Provincial Collective Agreement of
Logistics and Packing of the Madrid Region, which would replace the previous
warehouse agreement and drastically reduce workers’ rights.
In March, they went on a 48-hour strike supported by 75 percent of
the workforce that followed similar action by Amazon workers in Italy, Germany
and France during November’s Black Friday sales. However, the company, buoyed
by the collaboration of the unions, unilaterally imposed new terms and
conditions that meant:
·
Lower wage increases, with wages
falling below the inflation rate
·
No more pay increases based on
seniority
·
A 25 percent reduction in sick pay
·
A two-tier wage system, with new
hires earning €3,000-5,000 less than current inventory workers
·
Cuts to overtime for working
“extraordinary hours,” including holiday and night shifts
Another worker in her fifties, who wished to remain anonymous for
fear of reprisals, told the WSWS that Amazon has gone further, paying new hires
on the 18th day of employment instead of the usual fourth day. She believes
that Amazon could “very well close up the San Fernando facility and go
elsewhere.” She criticised the unions, saying they each sought to defend their
own “brand” and that the struggle was being undermined by the lack of unity.
She had previously supported the Communist Party aligned CCOO (Comisiones
Obreras), but now backed the anarcho-syndicalist CGT.
The CGT poses as a radical alternative to the discredited CCOO and
PSOE-aligned UGT.
Amazon’s onslaught is based on a European-wide and global strategy
of offering cut-price goods delivered through sweatshop conditions involving
relentless speed-ups, total surveillance, back-breaking quotas, and minimal
toilet and meal breaks. The CGT has no perspective to defeat it.
CGT member José, who is a member of the Company Committee,
complained, “We are suffering from police repression, they are preventing us
from reporting, we have been denounced. ... Once again we see how the powerful
are backed up with the laws and the forces of the state.”
Another CGT official complained that “the company wants to
negotiate on the current agreement and not on what we already had, that we
recognize as lawful.”
In contrast to the unions, the company has long prepared for this
week’s strike. Fred Padje, operations director of Amazon Spain and Italy,
warned before the March strike, ”We work with a network of 46 centres
throughout the continent and with that we can cover the demand throughout
Europe.” He boasted how they had managed to deactivate the protest at one of
the company’s facilities in northern Italy during last year’s last Black Friday
sale in what is popularly called ‘logistical plumbing”—by increasing the
workload at the company’s plant in Barcelona.
The same has been happening during this week’s strike, with Amazon
workers continuing to work at the distribution centre in Alcobendas, just half
an hour’s drive north-west from San Fernando de Henares and at Getafe, half an
hour to the south-west. Reports suggest that in the four weeks before the
strike, the company took on up to 350 new temporary hires.
In a sign that the strikes are being wound down, union officials
admitted to the media that they are putting the issue of the scab labour in the
hands of their lawyers, claiming it contravenes section 6.5 of Royal Decree
Labor Relations which states that “during the course of the strike, the
employer cannot replace strikers by workers who did not belong to the company
when it was announced.”
Many workers mentioned that the police were more aggressive in
clearing the entrance to the Amazon site and that in the previous strike in
March they allowed people to come closer. It is an indication that Amazon asked
for and got closer cooperation from the Spanish government and police.
The police violence was also a sign of pressure from higher-ups to
crack down on the pickets and tilt the media narrative against the workers.
This takes place under a new Socialist Party (PSOE) government
installed in June with the help of the pseudo-left Podemos party and regional
nationalists. It is inconceivable that the police action in such a high-profile
dispute involving a company that dominates the country’s e-commerce market,
worth an estimated €22 billion annually, was not closely coordinated with the
Interior Ministry under Fernando Grande-Marlaska. It was the government
delegate in the Community of Madrid, the PSOE’s José Manuel RodrÃguez Uribes,
who sent them in.
The attack on the Amazon workers is a warning to Spanish workers
and youth that the PSOE will attempt to stamp out any opposition to the
austerity and militarist policies it is intent on imposing.
To cover up Podemos’ complicity, two Unidos Podemos deputies,
Alberto Rodriguez and Ana Marcello, were dispatched to the Coslada Police
Station to show their support for those detained and demand their release. The
Parliamentary Group of Podemos in the Assembly of Madrid pleaded with the PSOE
government on Tuesday to intervene, so that the detainees are released
“immediately.”
Workers from San Fernando de Henares, or any other Amazon
warehouse, cannot defeat transnational corporations like Amazon without a
unified international fight. If Padje can boast of the company’s
strike-breaking preparations, this is due to the role of the unions who act as
facilitators for the exploitation imposed by Amazon. During months of
negotiations with the company, they have refused to coordinate actions with
Amazon strikes down the road, let alone in the rest of Europe.
The role being played by the anarcho-syndicalist CGT is further
proof that workers need new organisations—rank-and-file workplace committees,
independent of the unions, that they control democratically. The CGT, the
third-largest union and promoted by various pseudo-left groups as a radical
alternative to the social-democratic UGT and Stalinist CCOO unions, supports
the same nationalist divisions as its counterparts and capitulate as quickly as
their competitors.
$3,000 per second
for Bezos, poverty wages for Amazon workers
18 July 2018
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed $150 billion on Monday,
making him the richest person in modern world history.
The magnitude of such a sum is difficult to comprehend. Its real
meaning emerges when juxtaposed with the social position of Amazon’s 500,000
workers.
* Jeff Bezos has made $50 billion in 2018. The $255 million he has
made each day of
the year equals the annual salaries of over 10,000 Amazon workers in the US.
* The amount Bezos has made per second in 2018, $2,950, is more
than the annual salary of an Amazon worker in India, $2,796.
* In five days of 2018, Bezos made as much money as the combined
income of every Amazon fulfillment center worker in the world in 2017.
* If Bezos’ wealth were divided equally among Amazon’s employees,
each would get a check for $300,000.
* In the time it will take the average reader to read these five
bullet points, Jeff Bezos will have made another $70,000, seven times the
global annual average income of $10,000.
The existence of such fortunes exposes the oligarchic character of
American and global society. Under capitalism, Bezos and billionaires like him
dominate the political parties, select who is elected to public office,
determine the policies of the world’s governments, and dictate “public opinion”
through their control over academic institutions and the media. Here too, Bezos
is a prime example. He purchased the Washington
Post in 2013 for $250 million—less than what he now makes in a
day.
Behind great wealth there are great social crimes. Bezos has made
his billions through the ruthless exploitation of the Amazon workforce, which
has more than doubled in size since 2015, when Bezos’s wealth was $60 billion.
Amazon has hired roughly 300,000 new workers since 2015, allowing Bezos to
pocket the surplus value generated by the labor of a veritable army of the
exploited.
Amazon has gained a competitive edge by introducing 21st century
methods to squeeze every last drop of sweat from its workers, who wear
monitoring devices that measure how hard they are working and who are forced to
walk or run up to 14 miles per day. Injuries are common, and deaths and
suicides also take place with regularity. The National Council for Occupational
Safety found Amazon among the most dangerous workplaces in the US.
Amazon is deeply implicated in the crimes of the US government,
both in its imperialist wars abroad and in its Gestapo-like attack on democratic
rights at home.
The company hosts the web servers for the US military and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and it sells its cloud service to Palantir,
a data analytics firm that provides software used by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids and detain immigrants. In May, the ACLU
reported that Amazon also sells Orwellian facial recognition software to police
departments and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Opposition to this corporate giant is emerging, including from
within the company itself.
In June, an undisclosed number of Amazon employees published a
letter demanding the company halt its involvement in mass deportation and
police surveillance. “This will be another powerful tool for the surveillance
state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized,” the letter reads,
citing IBM’s involvement in providing Hitler with the infrastructure used to
murder millions in concentration camps.
This year has also seen the development of a series of strikes at Amazon
facilities worldwide. In Spain, Poland and Germany, workers’ anger over low
wages, “permanent temporary” work and brutal working conditions is near
universal, forcing the trade unions to call limited protest strikes to coincide
with “Prime Day”—a 36-hour sale period from July 16 to 17.
The trade unions’ goal in calling the Prime Day protest strikes is
the exact opposite of the aspirations of the workers participating in them.
In Spain, the union has kept the strike to a single fulfillment
center. In Germany, the bulk of workers chose not to participate in a one-day
strike called by the Verdi union, knowing that Verdi regularly calls isolated
strikes that will not impact corporate profits. In Poland, the union has called
only a partial slow-down of work in order to block a broader strike.
While the workers want to shut down Amazon’s supply chains and
achieve massive increases in wages and significant improvements in working
conditions, the unions have admitted from the outset that they are organizing
the strikes as limited protests that will have no impact on Amazon’s supply
chains.
And while the workers aspire to unite in a common international
struggle with their co-workers across national boundaries, the unions by their
nature keep workers tied to “their own” nation-states and governments.
At Amazon and across all workplaces worldwide, the trade unions
serve as an obstacle, not a conduit, for the development of the class struggle.
Their leaderships, both in terms of political function and social composition,
are hostile to the working class members whose dues help pay their salaries.
The trade unions, through the relentless suppression of the class struggle at
Amazon and elsewhere, are responsible for making Jeff Bezos’ fortune possible.
In their struggles against the transnational corporations, workers
must throw off the shackles of the trade unions and construct new,
rank-and-file factory organizations.
These factory committees must fight to establish lines of
communication between workers at different workplaces, not to isolate workers
at each plant. They must be based on the principle that the interests of
workers and capitalists are incompatible, not on “cooperation” between workers
and management. They must foster the highest degree of democratic discussion,
planning, and debate among the workers themselves. They must be based on an
understanding that the working class is an international social force and that workers
are powerless when divided based on nationality.
The suppression of the class struggle has produced unprecedented
levels of social inequality. In the United States, three people own the same
amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population—160 million people.
Worldwide, the five wealthiest own as much as the poorest half—3.6 billion
people. Outside of the wealthiest 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population,
the masses of people face levels of economic hardship that vary only in degrees
of extremity.
The existence of such extreme levels of inequality raises the
urgent need for socialist revolution. Society cannot afford the capitalist
system. The trillions of dollars that sit in corporate bank vaults and in the
trust funds of the super wealthy must be expropriated and spent on massive
international programs to provide water, food, education, culture, housing and
infrastructure to every corner of the world.
The international integration of the world economy that under
capitalism serves as a source of conflict, war and competition will become,
under socialism, a mechanism for distributing resources from each region of the
world according to its ability to each region according to the needs of its
population. Amazon, with its complex logistical web spanning every continent
and dozens of countries, will be transformed into a public utility to ship
medicine, building material, food and disaster relief across the world.
Neither Bezos nor the capitalist class will give up their wealth
without a fight. The working class must prepare for the coming class battles by
joining the fight for socialism.
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