Amazon’s Showdown in France Tests Its Ability to Sidestep Labor
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here in India, Amazon has been required by law to sell and ship only essential items, nationwide from 25 March until 3 May, and in all "Red Zones" (which include nearly all urban centers) through today. They've happily complied, and in fact stopped taking orders on non-essential items before the legal requirement kicked in. That just shows the only reason they've refused to do that in France is because they don't want to give a win to labour organisations. What an awful company.
For example, if you go to Electronics -> Headphones -> Earbuds and sort by price, this book comes up: https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph-Smith-ebook/d...
Although visiting it by that link then shows it as a book, so I’m a bit lost.
EBay suffers similar problems but is more consistent witha mostly functional sorting system.
Our conclusion at home (just a guess based on noticing where our Prime deliveries were coming from...) is that Amazon shut down most/all of the warehouse operations in France in line with court orders, put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid by the state, and then continued fulfilling orders from their warehouses across the border in Germany. Our Prime deliveries still arrived on time, Amazon still got my money, but the workers were sent home and the state pays for them to be there (mostly anyway).
Impressive and nimble by Amazon, and not sure that's a big win for labor here in the longer term.
No, amazon requested it and the French government told them to fuck off, as they should have.
https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavir...
At no point did the court force Amazon to close its warehouses. That was pure, spite on Amazons part. I even think we are already past the date the court considered for the review and improvements, so if Amazon had complied its warehouses would be running and serving the full product spread again.
I'm not going to cry for Bezos, especially after they had the audacity to ask the government to pay for their employees unemployment benefits. Fuck them and fuck them good, at least it's happening in France and not in the US, these employees are 100% covered and won't end up bankrupt.
PS: It all started when amazon union said that "employees risking their lives and their family lives to ship and deliver video game consoles to strangers is non sense", amazon was found guilty of not following basic health regulations, after which it was ordered to limit their business to essentials items.
The funny thing is that it's exactly what's happening in the US right now but their law doesn't protect employees and puts businesses before people: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/retail-workers...
Oh really? Considering that an economy is a system of consumption and distribution of goods and services, how exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that consuming and distributing goods and services don't serve anything?
> The economy is the way we measure productivity.
Wrong. The economy is a system of exchange and consumption of resources. Productivity is a secondary attribute and a side-effect, and one that is secondary to the whole reason of having an economy.
> People really must stop thinking of it like some kind of mysterious beast from another dimension that we must tame into subservience
I would refrain from judging other people on their ignorance if you show so little understanding of the subjects you're discussing.
Amazon is free to do business in France, and they are free not to (as they threatened)
They are not free to exploit people. That is equality and fraternity at it's best.
Always surprised when neocons come out the woodwork with their hetero economic view about some God-given-right to exploit the poor and desperate because they are rich.
I am sad to see this style of employer-employee relationship creep into Europe through globalization.
We don't need what is essentially a monopoly, or at least targeting becoming a monopoly, controlling internet sales. It's not beneficial. It may have been in the very short term, but now the effects of pushing out small businesses are clear, we can just not have it.
The labour practices are almost besides the point, anti-trust should break them up.
It's not like online retailers don't exist. Well, for now. They _will_ go under if we just let Amazon run everything unchecked.
What matters is that we provide an environment within which we can trade amongst each other as (relative) equals, not one in which the Great Overlord owns all of the means of production.
This isn't a border dispute, this is about behaviour within a country.
Forcing the adoption of exploitative labor practices is helpful to consumers within that jurisdiction?
The problem is that a massive company essentially owns online commerce, anti-trust legislation should be addressing this and somehow it's not. Let them own a few % of the market, don't let them literally take over.
I understand your concern, but the reason that anti-trust legislation is not addressing this is that there is frankly no monopoly here.
[1] https://de.statista.com/infografik/16018/marktanteile-von-am...
The current percentage is almost irrelevant anyway, the endgame of this is monopoly whether or not they have it right now, the vertical integration of delivery alone is enough.
I'd split up the major supermarkets as well FWIW, but that's a different discussion.