Amazon Prime Day, which took place earlier this week, offers a flurry of deals for savvy consumers. But the two weeks leading up to the event and Prime Day itself result in double the industry average of recorded injuries.
A worker pulls a cart at an Amazon same-day delivery fulfillment center on Prime Day in the Bronx borough of New York on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. (Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The lure of affordable goods and convenient delivery is strong. While the worst of the affordability crisis is beginning to ease, for some, the challenge of making ends meet never abates. The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness writes that more than half of the country is living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck, and “one crisis away from homelessness.” So it’s hard to blame anyone for shopping for a deal at a big-box retailer, in-store or online, like Walmart or Amazon.
While we can understand the draw to these retailers, we must also recognize and reckon with the true cost of their business model. Walmart is a wretched, exploitative corporation that underpays its workers and fights tooth and nail against unionization attempts. But Amazon makes it look like the Paris Commune.
A new Senate report finds that nearly half of Amazon’s warehouse workers are injured during the company’s Prime Day event. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders, states, “Prime Day is also a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers who make it possible.”
The two-week lead-up to Prime Day and the event itself result in double the industry average of recordable injuries, which must be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s ten injuries per hundred workers, which is an astounding number that is only surpassed by the seemingly impossible but all-too-real rate of forty-five injuries per hundred workers when including nonreportable injuries. Nearly half of Amazon’s warehouse workforce.
Amazon, of course, rejects these numbers.
Walmart is a wretched, exploitative corporation that underpays its workers and fights tooth and nail against unionization attempts. But Amazon makes it look like the Paris Commune.
The HELP Committee reports, “These injury rates are especially egregious in light of the incredible revenue the company generates and the resources it has available to make its warehouses safe for workers.” It also points out that “incredible revenue” amounted to nearly $13 billion over two days last year from the sale of 375 million products. For context, Walmart’s monthly sales over the course of this year’s first quarter were roughly $36 billion per month. Prime Day generates almost 40 percent of Walmart’s monthly sales in just two days.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around these kinds of numbers. There is a world in which the economy of scale Amazon offers consumers is accompanied by robust safety protocols and decent pay. This is not that world. HELP sums it up, writing, “Prime Day and the holiday season are characterized by extremely high volume and intense pressure to work long hours and ignore safety guidelines.”
In short, for Amazon, workers are grist for the mill. And so are consumers. Writing in Wired ahead of Prime Day this year, Ryan Waniata explains how Amazon, like other retailers, systematically raises their prices before the big sale day.
“Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers tend to jack up pricing on all sorts of products that have long since sunk below their manufacturer’s suggested retail price ahead of a major sale,” he writes. “That way once you see it on the big day it looks like a really great deal — even when it would have been impossible to buy the product at the inflated price displayed even if you had tried.”
Amazon also has a long history of bullying its suppliers and abusing its market position. It’s facing federal and state lawsuits in the United States and an investigation in Canada over its various practices. The company is also notorious for Orwellian surveillance of its workers.
Abusive and exploitative practices by big “discount” retailers targeted at workers and consumers are profoundly cynical. For one, they’re inherently wrong, in and of themselves — indefensible and morally reprehensible.
On another level, as chain retailers displace smaller businesses and dominate the market, they gain excessive power to set prices as they please, lowering them to run competitors out of town and then raising them again once their competition is out of business. They may then have the “cheapest” prices, but only relative to a suite of nonoptions by way of a dead marketplace.
The broader, long-term effect of these practices is higher prices for consumers, shuttered small and local businesses in increasingly derelict downtown centers, and terrible working conditions for workers. There’s also an anti-solidarity effect. Bereft of alternatives, consumers are chased into the waiting arms of Amazon or Walmart, pursuing the lowest prices they can find day to day, even if these prices aren’t always, in fact, the lowest. Consumers get sucked further and further into the big-box ecosystem, ultimately ending up paying more and often watching better jobs disappear as these behemoths get fatter and fatter on their own monopolies.
Today’s scenario echoes the low wages, long hours, and unsafe work environments of the early twentieth century.
What are people struggling to get through the day meant to do? It’s easy to tell someone who’s trying to make it to bed with rent or mortgage paid and necessities stocked that they really ought to take the time to “shop local” — which is no real solution, since mom-and-pop shops are often awful employers themselves — or to hunt around for a bargain in the name of solidarity. The reality on the ground doesn’t always align with such advice.
The problem falls to labor. Today’s scenario echoes the low wages, long hours, and unsafe work environments of the early twentieth century. The situation demands an all-out strategy to grow labor power and unionization rates, and to encode better practices in a new, or at least reinvigorated, Fair Labor Standards Act. Governments must also play a key role in solving this problem by restraining these retail behemoths through legal, regulatory, and legislative action.
If Amazon is going to routinely injure its workers, then it shouldn’t be permitted to operate while it does. If Walmart is going to union bust, then it shouldn’t be permitted to operate while it does. If each or either are going to abuse their scale, access to technologies, and market position to crush smaller competitors, then they should be brought to heel, downsized, dismantled.
It seems like the lessons bosses have learned in the past must be taught again. Workers are not to be treated as fodder for corporate profits, and consumers shouldn’t be duped or coerced into being complicit in that abuse. But governments won’t solve this problem unless pushed. Workers and the broader public must step up to force them.