Almost everyone has been groomed to defend these corporate behemots' rights to stomp on our lives like if they were defending the right of a small mom and pop shop to kick out a rowdy drunkard.
When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to a different set of standards.
This is the part where it stops making sense to me. I don't see why it's morally more just for a mom and pop shop to abuse workers than it is for a big corporation. If it's wrong to treat workers poorly, it should be wrong for everyone to treat workers poorly. This logic implies that the amount you're "allowed" to abuse your workers is on a sliding scale with income. Big corporations should be nice to workers, small businesses are allowed to not be nice to workers, so are businesses in poor countries allowed to be outright awful to their workers? It sounds like the start of a justification for slavery in third world countries.
You can make the argument that Amazon can afford it, and mom and pop shops can't, but I don't find that a convincing argument. It bears the same issues as above. If we establish a sliding scale, we can't simply ignore the implications at the extremes.
Personally, I think we just need to raise the bar across the board. It's bad when Amazon does it, and it's bad when small businesses do it. Small businesses shouldn't get a break on labor violations.
You are of course right, and we don't want abuse at either scale. I think GP is also relying on mom and pop shops not having enough economic power to abuse workers at that level.
A local business usually can't afford burning through workers like cigarettes, it would go out of business at the 3rd contractor (and hopefully these 3 people can take legal action without a barrage of lawyers sucking their life savings).
Amazon can afford to burn through thousands without seeing any clear impact on its bottomline. That's where rules should be stricter IMO.
When I see people slaving away on a bicycle in any kind of weather, delivering groceries or boxes of food, I feel pity. I know they earn very little, have very few benefits, and literally zero chance of moving up. It's a dead end job. It's modern poverty. It's the tiny house equivalent of a job.
I've personally met those refugees, I've personally heard their slavers boasting about it. I'd estimate their proportion in Paris around 30% of all Deliveroo drivers. In smaller cities it's not as common.
These slavers will open accounts in the name of their whole family, and they keep 75% of what those poor guys will make.
technology is more ruthless in its application
If workers didn't think these jobs were better options than whatever existed before, they'd still be working jobs other than these.
People opted in to this.
Those laws and the regulators may be strongly influenced by deep-pocketed employers such as Amazon.