Amazon is seeking donations from customers to help out Amazon Drivers

So nice of Amazon to help out by asking their customers to support their drivers.

That’s but one of the juicy tidbits from an article posted by The New York Times entitled

As Amazon Rises, So Does The Opposition.

The article mentions a tweet from Stacy Mitchell, who is trying to spearhead Amazon resistance:

I can’t even process this…

Amazon — you know, the one run by the richest man, the one whose sales have shot up during a pandemic — is doing an online fundraiser. Asking all of us to donate to support its warehouse temps & flex drivers hit by Covid.
https://t.co/QWd851eXBk

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) March 20, 2020

Of course, after public outcry, Amazon changed their tune.  Now, it’s merely something that Amazon seeded with $25 million dollars and your participation is voluntary.

To be fair, many of the drivers aren’t exactly Amazon employees.  That would cost Amazon too much money, though surely they claim it’s a benefit to the drivers–you know, gig economy, side hustle, etc.

It seems almost childish to note that Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos is worth about $145 Billion dollars.  It’s hard to imagine he’d miss a billion dollars.  Or $144 billion for that matter.  Yet his workers still struggle.

Here’s the opening to the article, a must-read.

“If you relentlessly squeeze workers and suppliers, if you undermine every community’s local businesses, if you capture all of this surplus under the guise of efficiency and channel those gains to a small number of people, you end up with a system that is very vulnerable,” said Ms. Mitchell, an antitrust reformer and monopoly critic. “That is what we’ve been doing, systematically and as a matter of public policy.”

Basically, Amazon impoverishes society, which undermines not only individuals, but communities, businesses, and even the ‘tax base’ for most of the country, so a few people can reap the gains, and not pay that excess back into the system.