FTC approves $61.7m settlement with Amazon for pocketing driver tips
theregister.com
theregister.com
Allegedly steal a backpack with valuables, get caught? Get sent to Rikers with no trial, held in solitary confinement for 2 years, and up hanging yourself.
Oh and guess what: in both cases the defedendants (Gary Ewing, Kalief Browser) were black.
Fast forward: a certain Jeffery Preston Bezos instructs his minions to steal $61.7m worth[1] of tips from his (essentially) minimum-wage drivers... not only gets off scot free, but gets to launch himself into space at the next convenient opportunity.
It's just how things work.
[1] Per the article: "The $61.7m settlement represents the amount of tips that Amazon allegedly withheld from drivers and it forbids Amazon from misrepresenting the likely income of drivers and from changing how tips are used as compensation without prior driver consent."
For starters, it’s less chaotic - you have to sign up to be a victim. Also, it’s gradual — the driver gets paid less, one trip at a time. And then when you notice you’re being scammed, you can keep doing it, or deal with some other company.
Ewing was a serial burglar and robber who refused to stop stealing stuff.
Kalief Browder was charged with robbery and assault and had bail set at $3000, and would have gotten out, only he was on probation.
(Personally I think Amazon including management up the chain shouldn’t have gotten off so easy, but Ewing is a textbook example of the kind of guy who belongs in jail.)
This is a semantic dodge. It is widely acknowledged that fraudulent misappropriation of wages is a form of stealing; there's even a name for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
Also, Amazon's violation was orders of magnitude greater in scale (and enacted against victims who were individually more vulnerable) than, say, Ewing's alleged violation.
Ewing was a serial burglar and robber who refused to stop stealing stuff.
Bezos is also a serial violator who can't stealing in all sorts of other ways (tax avoidance, pushing counterfeit products, etc), also at ginormous scale.
Kalief Browder was charged with robbery and assault and had bail set at $3000, and would have gotten out, only he was on probation.
There's no way you can talk down the harm that was done to Kalief Browder. The consensus among everyone involved was that he was wrongly incarcerated (even given the circumstances you've described) and severely mistreated (beaten -and- sentenced to 23 hour shifts of solitary confinement).
Even the City tacitly agrees - that's why they agreed to the $3.3 million civil finding. (Oh and the charges against Browder turned out to be quite flimsy, btw, and were most likely spurious all along).
Ewing is a textbook example of the kind of guy who belongs in jail.
The point isn't that Ewing doesn't belong in jail - but that Bezos clearly does, by this point.
Why does that matter?
Average consumer, however, is does not see the exploitation and happily buys the junk they sell anyway. What's the solution?
Should minimum wage be tied to the given company revenue? Should employees be partially paid in shares? All those giants could easily pay much more, but they don't - how would you make them?
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.