Amazon has hidden behind 'contractors' employing 'delivery drivers' in order to union bust up until now. However a recent court ruling might change things.
It’s because individual consumer choice is a really bad way to get companies to change their behavior.
Thousands of people have stopped buying anything from Amazon, and the only change in the world is that those people don’t get the convenience that Amazon provides; Amazon is still doing all the same things.
As an individual, your only two choices are: shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today, or don’t shop at Amazon, don’t get the benefits, and Amazon still exists exactly as it does today. The only person that suffers if I stop shopping at Amazon is me, it doesn’t make one persons life better.
This is a Collective Action Problem, and it can’t be fixed by consumer choice.
I agree but I also think it’s even worse than you explained because it’s always the bottom tier that gets squeezed the most. So if Amazon was, by some miracle, to get financially hit by people shopping elsewhere, those delivery drivers would still see the blunt end of further cost savings.
A boycott is different than just a general call to not patronize a business.
If a boycott is organized and specific, with an obtainable demand, it can work. A general “we don’t like Amazon’s business practice so don’t shop there” won’t work, but a “everyone in our 2 million member group won’t shop there until you grant workers X benefit, and we will also boycott any partner company until it happens” has an actual chance of success, since there is a specific thing for Amazon to base a choice on (is the cost of the lost business more than benefit x). If I just don’t patronize them but don’t have a specific demand, Amazon isn’t going to be put into any sort of position to make a trade off decision.
A boycott is never going to put a company out of business.
There haven't been many successful boycotts in the past. Despite decades of BDS campaigning Israel is still around (and so are Sodastream, Coca Cola and a host of other companies targeted by BDS). The only one I can recall of having worked was the Shell boycott [1], but that one was easy to pull off as there is healthy competition in the gas sector whereas there is barely any in convenient online shipping.
Ironically the only reason there is healthy competition to Shell was because the government stepped in to break up Standard Oil, who had a monopoly up to that point.
I know this is an unpopular opinion on HN but it always comes back to governments being the ones who need to regulate industry because literally nobody else has both the incentives and the power to enact that kind of change. You either have industry self regulate, but as we’ve seen, the incentives just isn’t there for them to behave. Or the customers boycotting a business, and has been discussed already, customers can’t agree on a collective action large enough to make any difference at all.
It's actually surprisingly easy to convince friends and family to cancel Prime or atleast comparison shop. Everyone has gotten some cheap crap from China they never would have bought if they could have seen it in real life and had to suffer with it or go through an increasingly annoying return process. Prime shipping is no longer two days, just a when they feel like getting it to you. Ask them why do you always give your money to a company that gives you crap?
Prices on things you'd actually want to buy, well known quality brand, are often the same price else where. With unknown brands you're usually better off paying more else where to make sure you get something that someone somewhere in the company decided wasn't totally terrible and worth selling instead of AliExpress drop seller garbage.
I tend to try and buy direct from electronics sellers but a large number of them sell through amazon.
Which is funny because one step I've had to adopt to avoid fraud is going to the manufacturer's website to find where to buy the item. I can't trust the amazon listing that comes up on a search.
It's less about wanting cheap crap now and more about amazon having a huge market presence that makes avoiding them difficult.
Its on the employees then namely the managers but also the ground-level folk to organize. There's a reason companies like Amazon go after unions so hard.
But even before that, I feel like there is enough information on working at Amazon at this point that anyone with the ability to choose between Amazon and another job should pick the latter. Worker strikes are just as effective.
> If you're successful at causing amazon to crumble and they lose their job, would you really feel good?
This feels like a bit of a straw man — if Amazon start losing potential sales because people don't like how they're treating their workers, they'll fix their workers rights before they let the company crumble out of spite.
Customer pressure is a real lever in these scenarios.
This argument is absurd. You can tell how absurd it is because if you just take it to it's logical conclusion, suddenly you're supporting indentured servitude in Dubai.
Do you support that? Almost certainly not. So the only resolution is you don't actually believe this argument.
Indentured servitude prevents switching jobs, so we can't assume its their best option. As long as workers are free to switch jobs, we can assume its their best option, that despite all of the downsides, they think its worth it.
I'm guessing Amazon pays above average and that's why people keep working for them despite their reputation. The people there have a choice. Keep making more at Amazon but be treated poorly, and that's a choice they make.
If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
You can hate Amazon, thats fine, you can choose to never work for Amazon, thats fine, but lets not lie to ourselves. The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there. They all applied, accepted the job, and show up every day.
No it doesn't, you're fully allowed to switch once you've paid off your debt. The debt that people chose to take on in exchange for housing, transportation, a new shot at life.
That's not my argument of course, but it's a hypothetical argument if you want to appeal to the "free market always good" type people.
> If Amazon doesn't like a worker, they can fire them.
> If a worker doesn't like Amazon, they can quit.
False dichotomy, you've run head-first into the hypocrisy of modern Capitalism. These actions do not have equal power because the labor market is not a free market.
Amazon firing a worker can literally cost them their life, whereas a worker leaving does nothing to Amazon. This is because the labor market is almost perfectly tipped, rigged, in the employer's (buyer's) favor.
In order to fix the leverage and create a free market, the employees would need to unionize, which is the correct solution here. Then, if Amazon does something evil, the employees can say "fix it or we walk" and that actually means something.
> The people who choose to work at Amazon want to work there
Your understanding of choice is infantile, almost comically so. You're purposefully leaving out the pressure of life from this decision. I think you'll find starvation a powerful coercive technique.
unionize, boycott, strike