Anand Giridharadas tells an awful story about Amazon, and draws from this story a ridiculous conclusion.
The awful story:
Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.
The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”
The ridiculous conclusion:
The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.
Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own....
People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.
Mistreating workers has a long history in America. Slavery, indentured servitude, children in coal mines, sweatshops, migrant farmworkers, and so forth.
You'd kind of have to be an idiot to believe that it would be a good idea to rely upon the "decency" of large corporations to prevent them from exploiting their worst-paid and most vulnerable employees. This is why working people fought for "labor laws" and "unions."
So, I guess gold star for Giridharadas for feeling bad for exploited workers after finding out exactly how he was able to get so much cheap crap from Amazon. But that this was apparently a light-bulb moment for him makes him rather a dope, and the false-equivalence union-bashing is precisely the sort of banal, pompous dickishness masquerading as "insight " or "bravery" that makes our nation's elite newspaper op-ed sections such an empty wasteland of smug howling stupid.
MAS. From his bio:
In 2011, he was named a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Right. Allow me to contribute to the Fraying of our National Decency by observing that Giridharadas is well paid to keep his head firmly inserted up his well-pampered ass.