A team from the New York Times has published a series of reports on the realities of Amazon, working for Amazon, how its strategies were developed, and more, and this would be a week where the PR and HR departments for that mammoth company will be earning their money.
The most ruthless finding, so to speak, is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has always operated on a negative assumption about most employees: the longer they work there the less motivated they will be and the more expensive the cost of labor will become. So rapid turnover is a positive thing for Amazon.
This sounds like a system where there is an unlimited pool of eager job seekers, and combining this constant churn of workers with increasing automation, makes for a great CUSTOMER experience while the employee experiences are not very good at all.
Some Amazon executives are wondering if this strategy might not eventually take the company to the point where the pool of potential employees is exhausted, which makes the practices seem both cruel and short-sighted.
The government likely has no problems with Amazon's practices, though the revelations late last week from Propublica that the richest Americans pay far less in income taxes than pool schmucks like you and me is drawing some attention from legislators.
But the press, or at least sections of the press, despite being blasted by all sorts of financial and trust challenges, continues to devote resources to digging into large entities as well as local, state, and national government, and revealing abuses to our systems and to our basic sense of fairness and decency.
The press can't "fix" the problems, of course, but merely making lots of people aware is a necessary first step in moving forward.
Consumers can make different choices than mindlessly accumulating more stuff, even if Prime Day is less than a week away.
Even the threat of some percentage of customers choosing to NOT take advantage of some deals that are partially financed by exploitation of workers might produce some changes at Amazon. Imagine millions of Americans opting out of Prime memberships.
Bezos and other executives will be fine with slightly less profit but slightly more good will among customers, don't you think?
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