Coronavirus has made Amazon a public utility – so we should treat it like one
At Amazon, it’s always “day one”. Founder Jeff Bezos coined the phrase in the company’s early days, and it’s now deeply woven into the firm’s culture: it has appeared in every shareholder letter since 1997, and even adorns the building in which Bezos works. As tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz writes, “day one” means “inventing like a startup” – a call for continual improvement and innovation. Dynamism is in; complacency is out. For Bezos, “day two” is another name for death.
However, it’s not always wise to take corporate self-description at face value. Still, given the staggering speed and scale of Amazon’s growth, it’s reasonable to think that its “day one” mentality has had something to do with its success. Since it was founded in 1994, Amazon has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a market capitalisation of just over $1tn at time of writing.
And the Covid-19 outbreak hasn’t slowed Amazon down. Quite the opposite: even as other businesses have downsized or shuttered, Amazon has proved remarkably well-placed to capitalise on these new circumstances, with customers spending a reported $11,000 (£8,845) a second on its products and services. As lockdown orders have trapped people indoors, many are turning to home deliveries via Amazon, bolstering the importance of a company that has already captured nearly 50% of the US e-commerce market. To keep up with increased customer demand, the company plans to hire 100,000 new workers. Despite being a commercial entity, Amazon increasingly looks like a public utility. It has even partnered with the Canadian government to distribute medical equipment, and with the UK government to deliver at-home testing kits. Indeed, it may be one of the few retailers to emerge from this pandemic stronger than before.
But despite the outward success, Amazon’s embrace of ceaseless invention has come at a cost. In the ab
sence of a strong ethical code, the ruthlessness that makes Amazon so successful for its shareholders can become indistinguishable from cruelty toward those who are not counted in its success metrics. Amazon itself may be flourishing during the coronavirus pandemic, but not all Amazonians are benefiting equally.
As customers turn to delivery services such as Amazon out of fear of contracting the virus, the risks appear to have merely been shifted on to workers. A warehouse worker in New York state organised a walkout last month to protest what he alleged were the company’s inadequate safety measures, including its lack of paid sick leave, and was fired; a leaked memo indicated that Amazon’s general counsel wanted to depict him as “not smart or articulate” in their PR strategy (the executive who made this remark later published a statement that read “I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me”).
Amazon’s poor treatment of its frontline workers – both during this crisis and beforehand – illustrates the dark side of the “day one” mentality. Amazon’s constant push to improve productivity may serve shareholders, but it also results in working conditions so physically taxing that warehouses are stocking vending machines with pain medication, in a tacit acknowledgement of the physical toll. For Amazon, collateral damage appears irrelevant as long as there’s a steady flow of workers walking through the doors every morning.
That Amazon is evidently not accountable to its workers should raise the question of who Amazon isaccountable to. The more Bezos’s empire embeds itself into the infrastructure of our lives, the more important it becomes to question its motives. In the midst of a crisis with an easily identifiable villain – the virus – Amazon has an opportunity to recast itself as corporate saviour for our times, the company that kept everyone stocked with necessary supplies, even when they couldn’t leave their houses. As other services have slowed or ground to a halt, Prime deliveries are one of the few continuities from the world we’re leaving behind. But make no mistake – Amazon is not merely a benevolent or charitable force, akin to the Red Cross. It is, after all, a commercial company, and its ownership structure is absurdly out of sync with the map of who’s affected by it.
Most technology companies reserve a large chunk of shares for founders, and Amazon is no exception. Bezos currently owns nearly 60 million shares, or 11% of the company, even afterhaving liquidated $12bn of shares (Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie holds 4%, as part of their divorce agreement last year). Of the shares held by employees, ownership is heavily concentrated among early employees in executive roles. The workers most at risk during this pandemic are severely underrepresented: warehouse workers, who were previously awarded approximately one share per year, saw their pay adjusted in 2018 to remove even that paltry grant.
As this pandemic makes the world more dependent on Amazon, it’s useful to remember who is actually doing the day-to-day work that keeps the company running. It’s not Jeff Bezos making the deliveries or packing the boxes, after all. For that, we should thank the frontline workers, who are underpaid, overworked and often putting themselves at risk.
The coronavirus crisis has essentially functioned as a stress test of our entire socioeconomic order, inadvertently shining a harsh light on all the ways people are being failed by this system. The result could be massive upheaval. In the US, unemployment rates are higher than they’ve been in eight decades; millions of renters are skipping their rent payments; policies that would have been considered anathema before the crisis are being seriously debated. The structure can be changed – indeed, once we emerge from this crisis, we may find that it will have already changed. Our political imaginations will need to be updated to reflect this new reality.
The more Amazon effectively functions as a utility, the more we should be thinking about how to treat it that way. There are many avenues that could be explored: stronger anti-trust legislation; something akin to nationalisation; breaking it up into separate companies; stronger labour protections; increased worker control. Rather than an Amazon that sacrifices workers on the altar of shareholder value, we could have an Amazon that balances the needs of all relevant stakeholders.
These suggestions might sound impossibly radical, not least because those currently in charge are unlikely to support measures to decrease their wealth and power. But maybe we can borrow a page from Amazon’s book to frame this discussion in a new way. After all, there’s something quite appealing in the idea of “day one”, with its connotations of disruption and reinvention. It’s just a pity that Amazon has directed that energy exclusively towards maximising shareholder value.
Imagine instead, if that “day one” spirit were directed toward the socioeconomic system that subordinated these workers in the first place, such that the fruits of their labour were shared more equitably. Day two might not be that terrifying after all.
Wendy Liu is a former computer programmer based in San Francisco. Her first book, Abolish Silicon Valley, is out now