{"id":33626,"date":"2013-12-02T14:14:34","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T14:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/new-aesthetic-my-week-as-an-amazon-insider\/"},"modified":"2018-12-06T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T20:13:12","slug":"new-aesthetic-my-week-as-an-amazon-insider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/new-aesthetic-my-week-as-an-amazon-insider\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-33626 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/new-aesthetic-my-week-as-an-amazon-insider\/attachment\/33627\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_mx66gafNNs1qjjis9o1_500-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/new-aesthetic.tumblr.com\/post\/68778569515\/my-week-as-an-amazon-insider-technology-the\">new-aesthetic<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2013\/dec\/01\/week-amazon-insider-feature-treatment-employees-work\">My week as an Amazon insider | Technology | The Observer<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The first item I see in Amazon\u2019s Swansea warehouse is a package of dog nappies. The second is a massive pink plastic dildo. The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon\u2019s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK\u2019s largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap. [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>On my second day, the manager tells us that we alone have picked and packed 155,000 items in the past 24 hours. Tomorrow, 2 December \u2013 the busiest online shopping day of the year \u2013 that figure will be closer to 450,000. And this is just one of eight warehouses across the country. Amazon took 3.5m orders on a single day last year. Christmas is its Vietnam \u2013 a test of its corporate mettle and the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet. [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>If Santa had a track record in paying his temporary elves the minimum wage while pushing them to the limits of the EU working time directive, and sacking them if they take three sick breaks in any three-month period, this would be an apt comparison. It is probably reasonable to assume that tax avoidance is not \u201cconstitutionally\u201d a part of the Santa business model as Brad Stone, the author of a new book on Amazon, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, tells me it is in Amazon\u2019s case. Neither does Santa attempt to bully his competitors, as Mark Constantine, the founder of Lush cosmetics, who last week took Amazon to the high court, accuses it of doing. Santa was not called before the Commons public accounts committee and called \u201cimmoral\u201d by MPs. [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an Amazon \u201cassociate\u201d in an Amazon \u201cfulfilment centre\u201d \u2013 take that for doublespeak, Mr Orwell \u2013 is the future of work; and Amazon\u2019s payment of minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A future in which multinational corporations wield more power than governments. [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;They dangle those blue badges in front of you,&rdquo; says Bill Woolcock, an ex-employee at Amazon\u2019s fulfilment centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire. &ldquo;If you have a blue badge you have better wages, proper rights. You can be working alongside someone in the same job, but they\u2019re stable and you\u2019re just cannon fodder. I worked there from September 2011 to February 2012 and on Christmas Eve an agency rep with a clipboard stood by the exit and said: \u2018You\u2019re back after Christmas. And you\u2019re back. And you\u2019re not. You\u2019re not.\u2019 It was just brutal. It reminded me of stories about the great depression, where men would stand at the factory gate in the hope of being selected for a few days\u2019 labour. You just feel you have no personal value at all.&rdquo; [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s taxes, of course, that pay for the roads on which Amazon\u2019s delivery trucks drive, and the schools in which its employees are educated, and the hospitals in which their babies are born and their arteries are patched up, and in which, one day, they may be nursed in their dying days. Taxes that all its workers pay, and that, it emerged in 2012, it tends not to pay. On UK sales of \u00a34.2bn in 2012, it paid \u00a33.2m in corporation tax. In 2006, it transferred its UK business to Luxembourg and reclassified its UK operation as simply \u201corder fulfilment\u201d business. The Luxembourg office employs 380 people. The UK operation employs 21,000. You do the math. [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;It\u2019s a form of piracy capitalism. They rush into people\u2019s countries, they take the money out, and they dump it in some port of convenience. That\u2019s not a business in any traditional sense. It\u2019s an ugly return to a form of exploitative capitalism that we had a century ago and we decided as a society to move on from.&rdquo; [\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a mirror image of what is happening on the shop floor. Just as Amazon has eroded 200 years\u2019 worth of workers\u2019 rights through its use of agencies and rendered a large swath of its workers powerless, so it has pulled off the same trick with corporate responsibility. MPs like to slag off Amazon and Starbucks and Google for not paying their taxes but they\u2019ve yet to actually create the legislation that would compel them to do so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>new-aesthetic: My week as an Amazon insider | Technology | The Observer The first item I see in Amazon\u2019s Swansea warehouse is a package of dog nappies. The second is a massive pink plastic dildo. The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon\u2019s standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-33626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8Km","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33628,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33626\/revisions\/33628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}