Some of you are so young… You weren’t here for Dashcon… Mishapocalypse… That fateful day when Pizza was deleted… There is much history you do not know children. Be grateful you’ll never have to live those horrors. Be grateful…
Jeff Bezos is sitting on $97 billion because of stuff like this
Amazon made $47B in gross profits in 2016. They have 540,000 employees.
If they gave every employee a $5/hr wage increase and increased their workforce by 10% to reduce time pressures on individual workers, it would cost them between $6B and $9B per year (assuming 40 to 60 hr average work week), still leaving about $40B in gross profits. That’s still a ridiculously huge amount of money being made.
But capitalists always want to squeeze out ever more profits and this is always done by exploiting workers.
THIS is why they strike, and THIS is why we support them. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM AMAZON FOR THE DURATION OF THE STRIKE. BUY ELSEWHERE, and MAKE IT CLEAR that you’re supporting the striking workers.
A really common strike tactic in the pre-internet days was form a
picket line. Basically, the striking workers would hold up signs
explaining their strike and surround their place of work with a line of
people all chanting and marching. This not only got the public
interested in the strike, but it also physically blocked people from
entering the business they were striking against.
When
workers strike, businesses sometimes hire “scabs”, or workers willing to
step in and replace the strikers to make the strike meaningless. A
picket line would mean that even if the business got a full complement
of scabs, they would still take a huge hit financially during the
strike.
“Never cross a picket line” is something union and
other pro-labour parents used to teach their children, and it meant both
“never be a scab” and also “never patronize a business currently under strike.”
Amazon will likely
hire scabs during a widespread strike to pick up at least some of the
slack. But this time, workers can’t use a physical picket line to block
access, because Amazon is an online business. But it’s still important
to make sure the company isn’t able to bring in a lot of profits during
the strike – hence the calls for boycott online.
Amazon knows they need their employees. They just think they can get away with abusing them. The boycott and the strike are not to convince them to think anything, it’s to make it so unprofitable to continue that they have no choice but to concede to the strikers’ demands.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
