A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
Streets of Philadelphia "During Thanksgiving" Kensington Ave Documentary, Thursday, Nov 25, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNp_Vo78CWM
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVURsBK1-zY
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A
Inside Jeff Bezos' $78 MillIon Dollar Hawaii Estate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kELjWUwqllc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $300 Million Mansions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UsHq_99lJE
‘Make Amazon Pay:’ Workers in 20 Countries Plan to Strike on Black Friday
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KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images
22 Nov 20210
3:29
Amazon employees in 20 countries are reportedly preparing to strike on Black Friday as part of a campaign titled “Make Amazon Pay.”
Business Insider reports that Amazon employees in 20 different countries are planning a mass strike on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, as part of the “Make Amazon Pay” campaign. The campaign includes a coalition of 70 organizations including Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amazon Workers International.
Mural of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)
The workers are demanding accountability from top executives who they believe are placing profits ahead of worker wellbeing. Individual workers “from oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centers, to corporate offices” are expected to take part in the walkout on November 26.
Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands on its website: “The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet. Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”
The protests come as Amazon employees continue to complain of long hours, low pay, and strict performance review systems. Make Amazon Pay is demanding increased salaries, improved job security, and the suspension of the “harsh productivity and surveillance regime Amazon has used to squeeze workers.”
The group is also calling for a “pay back to society” which will include enhanced environmental sustainability efforts, increased transparency over the use of user data and privacy measures, and the immediate end of partnerships between Amazon and police forces and immigration authorities which are “institutionally racist.”
“Amazon is not alone in these bad practices but it sits at the heart of a failed system that drives the inequality, climate breakdown, and democratic decay that scar our age,” Make Amazon Pay wrote in its demands.
A company spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is “inventing and investing significantly” in several of the categories that the campaign is calling for action in, including climate efforts. The spokesperson said:
These groups represent a variety of interests, and while we are not perfect in any area, if you objectively look at what Amazon is doing in each one of these areas you’ll see that we do take our role and our impact very seriously.
Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”
A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
Wealth-X report: Billionaire wealth surged during pandemic
A new report from research firm Wealth-X found that the global COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the growth of social inequality and witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth among the most privileged layers in society. For the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020.
This amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. Billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/John Locher, File)
“Viewed in aggregate, the global pandemic delivered a windfall to billionaire wealth, boosted by the flood of monetary stimulus and swelling profits in key sectors that coined a new wave of younger, self-made billionaires,” the report said.
Billionaire wealth has increased steadily since 1990, but one-third of these wealth gains have occurred during the pandemic. US billionaire wealth increased nineteen-fold over the last 31 years, from an inflation adjusted $240 billion in 1990 to $4.7 trillion in 2021.
The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.
The US was the top billionaire country in 2020. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS), American billionaires have seen their collective wealth surge by 62 percent, approximately $1.8 billion, since March 18, 2020. Following North America, Asia saw its number of growing by 16.5%, for a grand total of 883. Asia’s billionaires saw their collective net worth grow to $2.6 trillion, a 7.5% increase.
The good fortune of this tiny layer of the world’s population over the past 18 months is all the more appalling when contrasted to the growing immiseration and impoverishment of billions of workers around the globe. As a few thousand billionaires amassed enormous sums of wealth, workers around the world lost $3.7 trillion in earnings during the pandemic, according to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).
The report estimated an 8.8 percent year-by-year decline in global working hours from 2019 to 2020, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is approximately four times greater than the recorded loss during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
The lost working hours were due to massive cuts in working hours and unprecedented levels of job loss, impacting some 114 million people and their families. Significantly, 71 percent of these job losses came from “inactivity,” meaning at least 81 million people around the world left the labor market because they could not find work.
Women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic than men. Globally, employment losses for women stand at 5 percent, versus 3.9 percent for men. Women were much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market, most commonly due to childcare concerns. Younger workers have also been devastated. Employment fell by 8.7 percent among workers aged 15-24 years old, compared to 3.7 percent for adults. Generation Z, the oldest of whom is 23, has become the most unemployed generation and is on track to experience the same financial struggles as millennials.
In the US alone, the official poverty rate rose by 1.0 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The poverty rate grew to 11.4 percent, marking the first increase in the official poverty rate after five years of consecutive decline. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
At the same time, median household income in 2020 dropped by 2.9 percent from the previous year. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.
Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.
The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of poverty—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. Every action these vultures have taken in response to the pandemic has been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of a few. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must fight for a policy based on the interests of the working class, the vast majority of society.
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