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Comment by Fckd | Hacker News Reader

i reduced buying from amazon drasticly before. after reading this i do not think i can ever buy anything from amazon

It's a shame people don't think like this when it comes to AWS though. That's where the bulk of their profits come from after all.

No Netflix, no Disney plus, no HBO... Whatever about paying 10% more for a plastic rake, that's a bridge too far!

Google has similarly bad business practices and beyond AWS and GCP there's Microsoft's Azure, which I don't think a lot of companies are keen on switching to.

Plus, most large companies care about profits. Not feelings or the death of a lowly worker. If you boycott the source you'll have to boycott the whole chain of things, and it'll have to be widespread and immediate for them to care.

I just don't see it happening. We're stuck with this timeline it seems :/

I'd say consumer boycott makes you feel better and you should partake in it if you want to keep your integrity.

Still it is not the way to change things:

"All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people’s rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That’s what democracy was invented for!" -- Richard Stallman

I agree with stallman's spirit but it's just as nebulous as boycotting - the average person cannot form their own democracy in a way that would effect change.

> Google has similarly bad business practices

Can you give some examples? Google don't run an online marketplace and they don't have huge warehouses or a a distribution network so I can't see how their business practices can be "similarly bad". I'm sure they do have bad business practices but I doubt they're in the realm of the inhumane conditions Amazon workers have to endure.

I will move my apps out of AWS slowly within the next 6 months

The company where you purchase stuff probably also has deaths at workplace, but it doesn’t get into news.

If anything is to change, individual consumer action won't do it; the workers would need to unionise.

FYI: In Germany, a lot of Amazon workers are unionized already. There are nation-wide unions that are not workplace-specific, and if I remember correctly, Amazon workers in Germany were on strike at least once.

In Poland however, unions are often frowned upon because of Poland's past, although there are one or two small workers union that have been helping the warehouse employees.

Amazon is certainly worse than the average company domiciled in the US, but it is quantitatively and not qualitatively different. Capitalism requires employers to extract as much work out of employees as possible, lest competition overtake them.

But the size of Amazon amplifies the inherent problem and makes the whole thing a caricature of normal work conditions.

does Walmart have similar problems with employees being forced to work to death? I thought it was mainly because Amazon leadership are your inhumane rationalist optimiser types.

No that is fatalistic. In the same way as Google and Facebook are leading the charge on Spyware-aaS, Amazon is leading the charge on crappy workplace conditions for warehouse and delivery workers.

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