People think running a Substack newsletter is easy. And for the most part, it is. However, that hasn’t been the case recently. You see, Chazzy’s World, Limited is much more of a team effort than you may realize. While my face and name run on the top of every newsletter, I rely on a team of several dozen hardworking interns to pump out content roughly every week or so if I feel like it. The interns get an inside look at my process, as well as credit hours which are accepted at most unaccredited or for-profit colleges, as well as Bahamian medical schools. I reward their hard work with an “Introduction Ceremony” at the conclusion of each semester, in which I shake their hands, ask what their name is, and allow them to look at me directly.
Over the past few weeks, much of my attention has been diverted to putting out various fires amongst the ungrateful interns. The “complimentary coffee” I promised in the Craigslist posting is not what they expected. (They have to pay for it, but the coffee cart guy compliments them often on their physical appearance and body type.) They want the port-a-potty I installed in the garage for them emptied. They are tired of sleeping in sterilite bins underneath my bed. It’s hard being a job creator.
This is why I’ve been closely following the news surrounding Amazon and their myriad labor issues. It’s been a spiraling saga: a distribution center in Bessemer, Alabama is on the cusp of unionizing, which higher-ups fear could trigger a wave of organizing among Amazon’s 876,000 employees. Progressive politicians have chimed in with their support on Twitter, most notably Rep. Mark Pocan and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Amazon News account did a strangely smarmy #ThanksgivingClapback in the replies saying, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.” The post was so stupid that Amazon employees reported it as a security breach, believing they had been hacked.
A number of internal dissidents then leaked documents to The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, showing that peeing in bottles is, unsurprisingly, commonplace at Amazon. So common in fact, that the company has systems in place to punish workers for doing it. “Public urination” is first on a list of violations in one leaked document, ranked among the most severe fireable offenses. And they’re not just having problems with number one. A leaked email from a supervisor says that “DAs [driver associates] cannot, MUST NOT, return bags to station with poop inside.” (That sentence was bold and underlined in the original, as if “poop” doesn’t stand out enough in a message from your boss.)
Following that, Amazon issued a rare apology for the reckless tweets. Notably, the mea culpa was not for creating conditions that require workers to pee in bottles. Nor was it for being rude to Congressmen, which only I am allowed to do. Instead, they were sorry that the tweet was “an own-goal” which made Amazon look bad. In essence, they were doing self care and apologizing to themselves. The memo finishes with a list of links about how delivery drivers at other companies pee in bottles and a few embedded tweets where UPS drivers say they pee in their trucks. (Psst, Bezos! If you needed someone to spend all day searching “pee” on Twitter, I already do that for free.)
But by focusing on delivery drivers, the apology completely missed the point. The revelation that Amazon workers routinely pee in bottles originated in a 2018 book by James Bloodworth, which found the practice quite common in Amazon warehouses in Britain. Peeing in bottles is not a delivery driver problem, but an Amazon problem that follows the company internationally. Whether you drink Gatorade or Lucozade in your country, if you work for Amazon, you’re going to have to stick your tip in the bottle at some point. From the left lane to the supply chain, people are straining to abstain from draining the main vein to maintain insane capital gains.
And the issue isn’t really that people are peeing where they’re not supposed to. (I visit Berlin six times a year to do just that.) It’s that Amazon places demands on its workers which exceed the limits of the human body. Amazon uses a notorious algorithm which automatically tracks and fires workers based on their productivity. That doesn’t apply only to vulnerable hourly workers. An infamous New York Times expose from 2015 revealed the stress and abuse suffered by Amazon’s desk workers as well: a woman was expected to go on a business trip one day after miscarrying twins; another was told she might be fired because her breast cancer treatment is taking too much of her attention. The resounding theme across the company is that people are pushed to “do more for less money.”
A recent Times article reveals how Amazon has colonized swaths of California’s Inland Empire. Over Covid, the company has dramatically expanded its workforce there to keep up with increased demand. Many new hires are lured in by health benefits and a 401(k), but most don’t last long enough to qualify. The Inland Empire story is like every Amazon story: workers skip bathroom breaks and risk injury to scan more than 300 items an hour. An employee Facebook group advised wearing two pairs of compression socks, taking ibuprofen constantly throughout the day, and bathing in Epsom salts to counter the toll on the body. The workers considered unionizing, were immediately inundated with anti-union literature, and key organizers were surreptitiously fired.
But one unique detail gives us a glimpse of life under our Prime Overlords. Amazon has set up its own high school campus, where students study on an Amazon Logistics and Business Management Pathway. The students wear polo shirts emblazoned with the Amazon arrow logo. A giant banner reads “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS.” When the reporter visited, the students were getting a lesson on Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles. Rather than struggle to recruit and control a labor force which constantly turns over due to the physical impossibility of having a career at Amazon, the company intends to breed its next generation of workers. By providing youth with such a shitty, myopic education, they indenture them for life. If someone has been trained to work for Amazon from high school on, how could they ever quit? What skills do they have? Where else can they go?
I don’t use Amazon very much. I don’t buy anything from them. Like a good Gen Zer, I prefer to spend my money on meaningful experiences, designer narcotics, and property in distressed neighborhoods. I don’t watch content on Prime because they do not show guys doing impressive chugs. I don’t shop at Whole Foods because they don’t carry Sprite. I do not use a Ring doorbell, because the postman and I prefer to keep what we have between us, between us.
But it’s effectively impossible to boycott Amazon completely. Amazon Web Services is the second largest web hosting platform in the world, hosting 5% of all websites. Amazon has at least 350 contracts with the federal government, including with the FBI and ICE. When I moved into my current apartment, I told my roommates that one of my non-negotiables was that their Alexa could not be in the living room. But then I went home for New Years, came back, and there she was, listening to me. They know as well as anyone that she’s spying on our private lives, but once Amazon creeps into your life, it continues creeping in. As Bobby Berk’s first law states: an object at rest in the living room tends to stay at rest in the living room.
And that brings us to a question which plagues me: what is my responsibility to the world? How much power do my individual actions have? How little? I would not knowingly scab a strike or walk through a picket line. So, I won’t order anything on Amazon while they’re on strike in Bessemer, even though a distribution center in Alabama probably does not touch a package coming to me in Brooklyn. But do I need to go on Github and download some jeririgged way to never load an Amazon-hosted website? The earth is dying. 100 companies cause 71% of emissions, so why do I have to suck my iced coffee through a wilting paper straw?
The same goes for Covid. For most of this past year, my responsibilities were clear: stay home, wear a mask, get tested, wash my hands, get the vaccine as soon as I’m eligible. I’ve done all that. The problems that face us now are larger and beyond my control. Poor countries don’t have access to the vaccine. Nurses aren’t getting the shot because the side effects might make them unable to do the Yummy dance for an entire day. Those are real issues, but there’s nothing I can do about it anymore. The limits of my individual power have been reached. I’m sorry, that sucks, good luck with all that, I’m sneaking into the back of a restaurant to put the used silverware in my mouth.
But that doesn’t work for Amazon. They love that they are not just big to fail, but too big to challenge. They apologize when they respond poorly to a politician not because they look bad, but because they regret answering to politics at all. Amazon thinks they can terrorize their workers, bust unions, and turn the world into a giant toilet because you could not survive without them. They want you to think the world has to be this way, that millions have to suffer in the name of marginal convenience.
But, I mean, seriously. Could you really spend a tiny percentage more on household items? Could you really wait an extra day to get your stuff, or buy it from an actual store? Could you really shop at a normal, cheaper supermarket? Could you live without talking to your alarm clock? Could you survive without watching Jack Reacher? Actually, that doesn’t sound hard at all.