this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I'd like to see a law where this immediately dissolves the company.
Yep, there needs to be real consequences. In addition, no member of that board or executive team should be able to act in those positions in any company for like 5 yrs.
They should be in prison.
That would be a very effective way to keep them out of those positions.
Can you not be on a company board from prison?
Corporation - n.
An ingenious method for securing individual profit without individual responsibility.
Damn you for being exactly right!
Honestly, I don't think the company needs to be dissolved, but I think that accountability for the law should exist at director level and up. For a company the size of Amazon, that's probably around 100 people that should face the consequences - and that's only the retail org.
The best description of Amazon is that it is a management company. It's not a retailer, or a tech company. It's output is its management process, and it's this that it uses to build products in different markets.
So, remove the source of those processes. Let people move up to higher roles, and let someone not breaking the law take the senior positions.
Hold everyone who works at amazon and every shareholder responsible. Because they are.
Are the dudes moving packages in warehouses responsible?
Rip her out, root and stem. (Seriously though, the low level labourer isn't responsible.)
Yeah but then how would I be able to get that napkin holder that I ordered in my underwear delivered tomorrow! You don’t understand how much I need this thing right now even though I can’t be bothered to get dressed and drive my ass to the store.
How about if the company is so large and sewn into the fabric of the modern world then instead of dissolving the company it instantly becomes a public utility, turn the shares into treasury bonds, and jail the executives?
I don't really see any other company building massive warehouses that employs millions of underserved people and providing them with decent paying jobs with good benefits. I don't think 1.6million Americans should be unemployed because of shady actions of the execs.
Yeah because Amazon kills off all the competition.
It wasn't necessarily Amazon that killed of the competition, it's the tech behind Amazon (e-commerce) that killed retail stores. Just like UBER demolished the taxi industry, just like cars replaced horse carriages, and just like AI's about to make knowledge workers completely obsolete. Amazon still has a great deal of competition from Walmart, Target, and lots of retailers.
They also killed a huge amount of e-commerce sites with their sheer size. This isn't really about tech more about their monopoly.
Shopify accounts for 1/3 of all e-commerce sales in the US in 2023, and with the rise of way cheaper Chinese alternatives to amazon like shien, Temu, & Alibaba express no one really has a monopolistic control in the e-commerce space.
Yes but no. E-commerce got rid of many retail jobs. So did WalMart. But Amazon also uses a ton of monopolistic and dirty practices. Amazon is working hard to eliminate the competition, because capitalists would rather control the market than compete.
What monopolistic and dirty practices are you referring to exactly?
There are so many things that we could talk about. I think the simplest thing to realize is that Amazon was losing money for years so that they could become the central hub of vast numbers of shoppers and sellers, and after they got control of the market, they had a huge amount of leverage over all of those people. Now they can increase prices and manipulate search results, as recent court cases have shown us. They also do horrible things to their workers, they try to bust unionization, many of their delivery drivers are peeing in plastic bottles because they don't have time to stop at a public restrooms, the list goes on and on.
Because it's such an exhaustive list, and because I don't think you should take my words at face value, I highly recommend that you read the newspaper. There's so much great information compiled by people online. When in doubt, start with Cory Doctorow.
I don't think forcing people to work in inhumane conditions while paying them close to nothing, so that they still need to use food stamps, counts as employing. It sounds more like exploiting the most vulnerable people, which have no other employment option, because big monopolies like Amazon killed all the competition
No one's forced to work at Amazon. For unskilled uneducated Americans $16 an hour is higher than what you can make in retail or fast food, which are some of the only options left especially for Americans in the rust belt. It's not monopolies that killed jobs that used to provide livable wages like manufacturing it's globalization. I'm not mad at your ignorance because I didn't realize how bad parts of America were until I moved to the rust belt. If you want to blame anyone for the lack of quality employment for undeducated Americans blame the politicians and greedy companies that let high paying jobs go overseas to China and Mexico.
People are still fling to buy shit. Maybe they have to do it locally instead? Probably some other company would step up to replace their monopoly. It's only be an improvement.
It's a myth that corporations are job creators. Their very premise is that they can do the same job for less because they have fewer labor costs.