Jeff Bezos also signed the Business Roundtable statement, committing to allowing “each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.”
As the ink on his signature dried, Bezos carried on with the same cutthroat version of capitalism that had made him the wealthiest person on earth.
For years, Amazon had been the subject of stories about exploitation inside its warehouses, where low-wage workers faced unrelenting pressure to manage an overwhelming flow of packages. The pandemic dramatically intensified the strain. There were more packages than ever.
Between April and June 2020, as the first wave assailed the globe, Amazon sold 57 percent more items1 than it had during the same period in the previous year. In July alone, the company shipped 415 million packages2.
Amazon’s enormous warehouse and delivery operation initially buckled in the face of this extraordinary surge, yielding delays and consumer complaints—a grave problem for a company that cited the satisfaction of customers as justification for the incessant pressures on its workers. In a furious effort to expand capacity, the company added warehouses, renting space from Blackstone, which was investing tens of billions of dollars to purchase such facilities, cannily exploiting the growth of e-commerce.
Amazon also unleashed a hiring binge akin to a wartime mass mobilization. It added roughly five hundred thousand employees3 over the course of 2020, stretching its workforce to 1.3 million, roughly double the number of only two years earlier4. Yet even that pace of hiring was outstripped by the sheer growth of merchandise coursing through its warehouses.
Amazon’s online shopping empire long had prospered by undercutting bricks-and-mortar shops. In 2020, what physical retail outlets remained were suddenly shut or shunned as danger zones, leaving the digital realm as practically the only way for people to shop.
Demand for everything from dishwasher detergent to sweatpants was exploding. Professionals outfitting bedrooms as workspaces needed printers and computer monitors.
People forced to scrap vacations consoled themselves with new towels and bubble bath crystals. Parents filled basements with toys and stocked kitchens with baking supplies. Everyone hoarded hand sanitizer and toilet paper.
During the first half of the year, Amazon sold $164 billion’s worth of goods, or more than $10,000’s worth every second. Over that time, Amazon’s stock price nearly doubled, turning the increases in Bezos’s net worth into fodder for everyday conversation, like the batting exploits of a record-chasing baseball star, or the wind speeds of a hurricane. By the end of August, Bezos was the first human being to possess a fortune in excess of $200 billion5, an increase of $87 billion since the beginning of the pandemic (which presumably helped diminish the sting of having agreed to the largest divorce settlement in history, a payout of $38 billion to MacKenzie Scott).
Before 2020 ended Bezos came to personify the rapacious opportunism of the billionaire class who were extracting wealth from a public health emergency, at the expense of employees laboring in proximity to the virus.
This turn was largely because of a thirty-one-year-old father of three, who had simply had enough.
Christian Smalls had worked for Amazon for more than four years, starting at the company’s warehouse outside Newark, New Jersey, at an entry level wage of $12.75 an hour. He began as a picker, selecting items required to fulfill orders, and placing them into bags that he deposited on a conveyor belt, bound for another team that put them into boxes.
Smalls was a natural, owing to his previous job on the graveyard shift inside a wholesale grocery distributor, where he pulled items off shelves and piled them onto pallets, forming pyramids reaching ten feet high. At that job, nearly all of his coworkers were African American men from the surrounding environs of Newark, where poverty and gang violence were constants, and jobs scarce. The supervisors were almost entirely white men. They rode around the floor on pallet jacks, hollering at workers who stopped to catch their breath.
“It was like modern-day slavery,” Smalls told me. “It was like we were in the cotton fields.”
Smalls had grown up middle-class, raised by a single mother who worked at a nearby hospital. He had graduated from high school and attended college in Florida, before getting homesick and dropping out. Passionate about hip hop, he had pursued a music career before relinquishing that dream to the realities of earning a living. He had married at twenty-two and began supporting his wife’s son, and then their twins. When his wife started nursing school, he became the sole breadwinner.
In the fall of 2015, his mother heard about the new Amazon warehouse opening up outside Newark. She applied on his behalf. Smalls was one of the first five hundred people to be hired.
Compared to his previous warehouse, Amazon was an upgrade. The floor was air-conditioned, and the break rooms were lined with video game consoles. He earned a promotion to supervisor after only seven months, giving him responsibility to train new hires. His pay increased to $18.50 an hour.
When Amazon opened another warehouse outside Hartford, Connecticut, Smalls was recruited to move there and initiate the new hires. He rode the Greyhound bus home to Jersey every weekend to see his wife and children, but the stress and the distance took a toll, and his marriage disintegrated. When Amazon opened another facility in New York in the fall of 2018, Smalls transferred there, accepting the night shift as the price of getting closer to home.
By then, he had sole custody of his three children, anchoring him in New Jersey. The new Amazon warehouse sat on Staten Island. Smalls did not own a car. Getting to work entailed two buses, a subway ride, and the Staten Island Ferry—a three-hour commute that was justified, though barely, by the $27 an hour he was earning for working nights.
After a few months, he managed to get back to working days. He was supervising more than three dozen people. The warehouse was humming, full of thousands of workers.
Then, in early March 2020, his employees began complaining of severe exhaustion while developing hacking coughs.
Smalls found himself glued to the television news, obsessively following the course of the pandemic.
“I’m sitting in the break room watching all this and thinking, ‘What the hell are we doing to protect these workers?’”
Amazon was not supplying masks or sanitizers. It was not imposing social distancing. It was not even educating workers about the need to wash their hands.
Smalls worried about bringing the virus home to his children. When he went to human resources to express his concerns, he was told that the company was “monitoring the situation.”
His employees were continuing to come to work even as some came down with fevers. It was either that or forego their pay, because Amazon did not provide paid sick leave. The United States was one of only a handful6 of major economies where this was permissible, though some states legally required paid sick leave.
In Washington, the powers-that-be were claiming to have plugged this gap. As Congress approved the first wave of federal relief, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted the inclusion of a mandate that employers provide paid sick leave.
“We cannot slow the coronavirus outbreak7 when workers are stuck with the terrible choice between staying home to avoid spreading the illness and the paycheck their family can’t afford to lose,” she said.
But the bill that gained passage, bearing the comforting name “Families First,” did little to reorder the priorities. It gave full-time workers ten days of annual paid sick leave, but it exempted companies with five hundred or more people8. The bill allowed businesses with fewer than fifty employees to apply for hardship exemptions.
All told, the legislation left 80 percent of American workers facing the same conundrum: they could keep working when they got sick, or they could surrender their pay.
Under pressure, Amazon announced that it would provide up to two weeks of paid leave to employees ordered into quarantine by a doctor. Even then, some Amazon workers reported not receiving the money9.
In withholding paid sick leave, Amazon was not merely exploiting a hole in American law. It was applying its corporate muscle to keeping that hole wide open. Amazon outsourced the dirty work10 to a host of trade associations—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Food Marketing Institute. All reported lobbying on paid sick leave policies in the Families First Act. So did Dimon’s shop, the Business Roundtable, despite its public championing of stakeholder capitalism.
When Smalls asked for time off, citing worries about his family’s health, Amazon supervisors told him that he was welcome to stay home without pay. He used up his vacation time. He drained the $1,000 in his 401(k) retirement plan.
Meanwhile, he sent emails to the Centers for Disease Control, the governor, the mayor, and local media, alerting them to the fact that Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse was continuing normal operations without protective measures, even as people fell ill. He heard nothing.
In the middle of March, out of cash, he returned to work. There were still no masks or sanitizer on hand, he said. Some workers were bringing in their own masks and reusing them. Some donned garbage bags as protective gowns. Many of his employees were displaying COVID-19 symptoms, he said.
When Smalls pressed human resources for the details of its COVID-19 policy, he was directed to speak to his supervisor. But his supervisor had disappeared.
“The managers were telling the employees that they were taking vacations,” Smalls said. “In the middle of a pandemic. I’m like, vacation? They were lying to us.” He assumed that managers were working from home to avoid exposure to the virus.
Not for the first time, he was struck by who was in harm’s way. “The majority of the managers are white, and the workers are Black, brown immigrants,” Smalls said. “Who’s really being protected here?”
Concerned that some workers were staying home, Amazon began giving workers an extra $2 an hour in pay, plus double the usual rate for overtime. Smalls called it “blood money.” In several states, Amazon workers earned so little that many qualified for food stamps—an effective subsidy from the taxpayer that allowed the company to pay poverty-level wages. Amazon workers were desperate, and the extra cash was an additional inducement for them to look past their fears and continue showing up.
On March 21, Bezos posted a message to Amazon’s corporate website. “Dear Amazonians,”11 it read. “This isn’t business as usual, and it’s a time of great stress and uncertainty.”
Bezos acknowledged that people were laboring without sufficient protective gear, because Amazon—the company known as the Everything Store—could not secure it.
“We’ve placed purchase orders for millions of face masks we want to give to our employees and contractors who cannot work from home, but very few of those orders have been filled,” Bezos wrote. “Masks remain in short supply globally and are at this point being directed by governments to the highest-need facilities like hospitals and clinics.”
Bezos laid out a moral justification for keeping warehouses running, even without adequate protection. “We’re providing a vital service to people everywhere, especially to those, like the elderly, who are most vulnerable,” he wrote. “People are depending on us.”
In other words, Smalls and his coworkers were not being pressured to risk their lives so that Bezos could purchase his next trophy residence, or further his passion to explore space. They were heroically keeping people’s grandmothers safe. Moreover, the company was sharing in the sacrifice.
“We’ve changed our logistics, transportation, supply chain, purchasing and third party seller processes to prioritize stocking and delivering essential items like household staples, sanitizers, baby formula, and medical supplies,” Bezos wrote.
Smalls could see what his team was putting into boxes. “They never changed the inventory,” he said. “That was all a lie. It was the same shit—sex toys, dildos, board games, household items, clothing.”
And even as Amazon laid claim to a halo, the company was profiteering off the disaster: It was jacking up prices for the very goods it was supposedly prioritizing, the watchdog group Public Citizen later revealed.
Customers could find lower-priced products from independent vendors selling on its platform, but Amazon was dramatically marking up its own goods—the ones it promoted most aggressively.
Between April and August 2020—a period in which sixty thousand Americans a day were testing positive for the virus, filling hospitals and morgues—Amazon charged $39.9912 for a pack of fifty disposable face masks that it usually sold for $4. Amazon demanded $7 for antibacterial soap that was normally $1.49.
Amazon was also hindering shipments as part of its bid to dominate the delivery business. It was penalizing suppliers who dispatched their wares to customers using competitors like Federal Express and United Parcel Service. Amazon achieved this by limiting what products could gain its coveted Prime designation—an internal seal of approval that vouched for the legitimacy of the goods and the speed of delivery.
For a merchant selling through Amazon, the value of gaining Prime status was like setting up a store in Times Square compared to hawking goods from a roadside stand in central Nebraska. During the pandemic, Amazon effectively forced merchants to use its delivery network to qualify for Prime.
The tactic worked too well. Amazon’s logistics operation was swamped13, yielding delays in delivery. For Bezos, keeping customers stocked in critical goods took a back seat to the quest for monopoly power.
As workers tested positive, Amazon kept these cases quiet, Smalls said. He demanded that managers alert the workforce while shutting the building down for a deep cleaning, but extracted only a promise that individual employees would be discreetly informed if they had come into contact with someone who turned out to be carrying the virus. The managers urged Smalls to play along to avoid sowing panic.
Smalls had spent his adult life working for people who had displayed indifference to his well-being. Now, he felt he was being pressured to become an accomplice in a life-threatening charade. He sat down at a table inside the cafeteria and began telling coworkers that they were in danger. People were sick, and Amazon was covering it up.
On March 25, he led a group of a dozen warehouse workers into a conference room full of general managers, disrupting their meeting with demands for protective gear and a deep cleaning. The managers said there was nothing they could do.
In response, Amazon did agree to place one employee under paid quarantine: Christian Smalls. Ostensibly sent home for health reasons, Smalls interpreted the move as an attempt to sideline his advocacy.
On March 30, Smalls returned to the warehouse, leading about fifty of his coworkers out of the building and into the sights of news cameras.
The workers stood in the parking lot in front of the long, low building, waving picket signs. “Alexa,” one read—a reference to Amazon’s voice-activated speaker—“Send Us Home.” “Treat Your Workers Like Your Customers,” proclaimed another.
Smalls wore a black bandana as a face mask as he looked directly into the cameras.
“We came out here to make a cry for help,” he said. “We’re not safe.”
His protest went viral, bringing home the fact that Amazon’s profits and Bezos’s wealth were coming at the expense of vulnerable people who were usually invisible.
Two hours later, Smalls received a phone call from Amazon alerting him that he had been terminated.
The official reason: he had violated quarantine.
“I have three kids I have to take care of,” Smalls said later that day. “I just lost my job because I’m speaking up for people that don’t have a voice.”
As word of Smalls’s firing spread, Amazon employees around the country aired their own experiences, sparking union campaigns, congressional probes, and state enforcement actions.
In the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, workers complained that Amazon was forcing them to come to warehouses even when they were sick, flouting an executive order14 from the governor mandating two weeks of paid quarantine.
At a warehouse outside Minneapolis15, workers walked off the job after Amazon rescinded its short-lived unpaid leave policy, while also ending hazard pay. The plant employed about one thousand workers, many of them immigrants from East Africa16.
By the fall of 2020, Amazon publicly confirmed that nearly twenty thousand of its workers had contracted the virus, though the company said rates of infection were much lower17 than in the general population. This was a classic Davos Man evasive maneuver—deploying data to project an air of authority in an effort to shut down a damaging inquiry.
As epidemiologists pointed out, Amazon’s analysis was fatuous18. Almost any group of employed workers was likely to be less susceptible to the virus in a comparison with the general population, which included unemployed people. The jobless tended to mix more in pursuit of work and benefits.
“It looks like someone just put a bunch of numbers together,”19 declared one infectious disease expert, Preeti Malani.
Amazon responded to the protests not as impetus for reflection, but as a public relations crisis to be managed. At a meeting of senior executives that included Bezos, Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, outlined a campaign to discredit the burgeoning labor revolt by training the spotlight on Smalls.
“He’s not smart, or articulate20, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” Zapolsky wrote, in notes obtained by Vice News. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
Zapolsky hailed from a middle-class, predominantly white New Jersey suburb. He had degrees from Columbia and UC Berkeley. His Facebook page displayed pictures from his hikes in alpine country, and a photo of himself posing with the civil rights hero John Lewis. Now, he was in essence arguing that Amazon’s executives—largely white, and drawn heavily from Ivy League universities—should put down a rebellion from the largely Black and brown workforce by discrediting the movement as the work of an unsavory character.
Zapolsky’s summary, which was circulated widely within the company, noted that his proposed attack plan garnered “general agreement” among the participants21.
How did Amazon square this story with its public devotion to stakeholder capitalism? The company refused my request to put this question to a relevant executive, instead unleashing a barrage of statements attesting to its noble intentions.
“Amazon has in every way worked to protect our associates during the pandemic,” read one. Smalls had been “terminated for repeatedly violating Amazon’s social-distancing rules.” As for Zapolsky’s notes, the general counsel had spoken about many other things at the meeting, including the need to buy protective gear. His suggestion that the company focus attention on the leader of the protests had been “the result of personal frustration with the circumstances regarding Mr. Smalls.” At the time of meeting, Zapolsky had not been aware of “Mr. Small’s race.”
The public disclosure of Zapolsky’s notes confronted Amazon with a public relations disaster. Bezos announced that the company would devote the entirety of its first quarter profits—$4 billion—to hiring more workers and outfitting them with proper protective gear.
“If you’re a shareholder in Amazon, you might want to take a seat, because we are not thinking small,” Bezos said in late April. He was implying that Amazon’s primary sin was having failed to anticipate the magnitude of the danger to its workers, an oversight being remedied with gobs of money.
But the perils that Amazon’s employees confronted stemmed from more than an unforeseen pandemic. People were sick not because of management’s failure to execute an appropriate plan, but because of the plan that had been operative all along. From its inception, Amazon had been devoted to enriching shareholders through extreme vigilance against costs.
It was no coincidence that Bezos owned a collection of palatial residences while his employees were compelled to risk their lives inside his warehouses or jeopardize their own homes. It was a direct outgrowth of the way he ran his company, squeezing maximum production out of every employee while deploying sophisticated methods to assess their performance22. Amazon forged metrics that captured how fast individuals completed tasks, and how much time they spent doing other things like walking to the bathroom or chatting with coworkers. Bezos’s obsessively systematic approach to every facet of his company made him a revered figure among the shareholder class, a case study to be analyzed at business schools.
The previous year, an activist shareholder23, responding to a drumbeat of news about dreadful working conditions inside Amazon warehouses, had proposed a remedy to be put up for a vote at the next shareholder meeting. Amazon should commit to a detailed plan to protect the health and safety of its workers while explicitly affirming the rights of its employees to join trade unions. The shareholder sent the proposal to Zapolsky.
As the date for the shareholder meeting approached, Amazon sought to squelch the proposal by petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to ignore it without a vote. The initiative was unnecessary, Amazon argued, because the company had already vowed adherence to its own Global Human Rights Principles. “We provide a clean, safe, and healthy work environment,” those principles declared.
The SEC affirmed the company’s logic. The initiative disappeared24 from the agenda.
Three days after that ruling, Amazon fired Christian Smalls.
Two weeks later, Amazon fired a pair of white-collar employees who had circulated a petition demanding that the company provide sick leave to warehouse workers.
Then, a company vice president, Tim Bray, abruptly quit, penning a blog post that described poisonous corporate values.
“Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential,” he wrote. “Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”25
By late August, with Bezos’s net worth above the $200 billion mark, protestors convened outside his twenty-seven-thousand-square-foot mansion in Washington, spray-painting “Protect Amazon Workers” in multihued letters in the middle of the street. They installed a faux guillotine26, while demanding wealth taxes.
Bezos’s reputation as a modern-day Louis XVI holed up inside the palace was soon amplified by disclosures that the company was reinforcing the moat: Amazon had posted job listings for intelligence analysts27 at its Global Security Operations center in Phoenix to keep tabs on “organized labor” and “activist groups.” After a public uproar, Amazon deleted the postings.
Amazon was also caught producing and distributing television segments touting the company’s achievements28 in “keeping its employees safe and healthy,” while passing them off to content-hungry local television stations as real journalism.
At least eleven stations aired the packages, with their anchors reading the identical scripts word for word.
It made for a fitting tribute to stakeholder capitalism—official words of corporate empathy broadcast in unison, while the cameras cut away from protesting workers massing in Amazon warehouse parking lots.