Dear friends,
I often wonder how Black people in the US continue to love this country. After the fatal traffic stop that ended Philando Castile’s life, I remember a staff meeting in which a colleague, a tall Black man, told the mostly-white staff the number of times he had been stopped by the police since he’d gotten his license. I don’t remember the number, but I remember calculating that it was more than five times each year. Please compare that to your own experience.
Another young black man has been killed by an officer in Minnesota. He called his mother from the car when he got pulled over and she told him she would give the insurance information to the police. Daunte Wright’s mom did not have a chance to speak to the officer, who shot her son in his car while his girlfriend sat in the passenger seat.
The trial of Derek Chauvin continues, but it is difficult to believe that there will ever be justice for George Floyd or Daunte Wright or Sandra Bland, or Breonna Taylor or Philando Castile, or, or, or….
Support Black Lives Matter. Do not give up the fight against white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence.
Amazon’s employees suffer injuries at rates far higher than the national average for the warehouse industry, stats that it has worked hard to hide from the public. Turnover at its facilities is so far off the charts that you have to conclude that treating workers as disposable cogs is a core part of its business model. The company is obsessed with crushing unions; the workers in Alabama voted down the union, but Amazon’s victory came at the cost of laying bare its antagonism toward organized labor.
I followed the link to the information about worker turnover and read that the rate for warehouse workers in counties in which Amazon had warehouses was over 100 percent in 2017. On average. Farhad Manjoo points out that OSHA, the federal agency that is meant to maintain safety standards in US workplaces, has failed to make rules that protect workers from ergonomic injuries because of the expense. OSHA’s slow process for adopting new rules and its inadequate funding and staffing mean that workers are not protected from the conditions at Amazon that one worker called “the systematic devaluing of human bodies.”
As consumers, we are all implicated. Manjoo suggests emailing Jeff Bezos, who has a history of forwarding customer complaints to his staff for immediate action. Manjoo’s sample email:
Jeff, you will not believe how much stuff I buy from you. But I am having more and more trouble defending that choice, and I’m starting to look at the alternatives. Your workers are hurting, Jeff. One of your employees told me he had trouble holding the phone because his hands had been rendered numb from the unrelenting repetitiveness of his job. Another told me that your company treats him as if he weren’t human.
Jeff, you are a smart, inventive man, and you have racked up a fortune larger than you know what to do with. Don’t you have enough? You have altered the retail industry more than just about anyone. You can do much better than simply meeting the lowest bar of American workplace standards. You can be transparent about injuries and what you’re doing to address them. You can remake Amazon as a better place to work — a company that empowers employees rather than chews them up in pursuit of tax-free profits.
As a customer, I demand it.
Email jeff@amazon.com with your demands.
I will leave you with Ada Límon’s poem, Instructions on Not Giving Up:
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
with love,
L