Number one: how Amazon exploited its way to the top

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon made international headlines this year by becoming the 2^nd US company to reach the milestone of a $1Tn market value. Founded in Jeff Bezos’ basement in 1994 Amazon started off as an online bookstore and since then has seen rapid growth to become the largest online retailer in the world, making over $170B in 2017 alone.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO

This boom has made its founder the richest person alive, with over $160B in net worth; 56% more wealth than the 2^nd richest person, Bill Gates.

But how does Amazon make such a profit? How did it make Bezos the richest person on Earth? The answer lies, in part, to what plagues so many successful companies throughout history: the exploitation of workers and the evasion of tax.

Sleeping under bridges. Urinating in bottles. Timed toilet breaks.

These are just some of the accusations made against Amazon and they tell a story of a company so determined to maximise efficiency and profit that it will do so at the expense of the health of its workforce.

Exhausted Amazon workers fall asleep during work

A survey found more than half of Amazon workers have experienced depression since joining with some claiming to pee in bottles to package up to 300 items an hour. This coupled with findings that Amazon paid some UK workers less than minimum wage shows a workforce overworked and underpaid.

But this makes sense from Amazon’s point of view for the same reason a sweatshop does for a company like H&M: minimise cost of production at the bottom and you’ll maximise profit at the top.

The cheap price of products, convenience of one day (or even 2 hour) delivery and access to books, music and movies comes at a higher price than £70/year (Amazon’s prime membership cost). It comes at the expense of a low paid, exhausted workforce who have been reduced to sleeping under bridges and peeing in bottles.

And then we come to the issue of tax. With revenues of €20B in the EU in 2017 Amazon paid a puny €15m in tax. This trait is by no means exclusive to Amazon with a sea of highly profitable companies, including Google, Starbucks and Apple who collectively evade over $500B from the global economy a year.

The EU later ordered Amazon to pay €250m in lost tax but too many countries turn a blind eye to tax evasion.

Amazon, like its only companion in the trillion-dollar club, Apple, got to its position ruthlessly through means most would find morally repugnant. In America, employees rely on food stamps to get them through the day and Britain has seen a rise in food bank usage due, in part, to low pay.

The state aids people on low wages while the pot runs dry as companies like Amazon skirt tax, leaving the biggest capitalist successes reliant on socialism. This creates an eco-system of workers underpaid by corporations, topped up by government welfare then exploited by political parties who cut welfare programs due to lack of funds.

This is unsustainable, but companies like Amazon do so at the behest of greedy shareholders and myopic CEOs. And it won’t stop so long as countries turn a blind eye to the evasion of tax and consumers ignore the plight of the workers who package

their goods.