Jeff Bezos and Amazon are a fucking blight upon the working class. He got rich by treating rank and file employees like hot garbage toiling under dehumanizing, backbreaking conditions for shitty pay. When there are this many random strangers across various sectors/departments of a single company sharing similar horror stories, that can’t be dismissed as just a few disgruntled ex-employees. Grievances like these are why I quit using Amazon. They made my life easier at the expense of thousands of hardworking people being mistreated and disrespected behind closed doors. (thread)
This is why deregulation ruined us. It caused businesses to be able to do whatever they wanted to employees. If we had regulations in place to prevent this then it wouldn't have gotten this far and yet we let it happen.
This is due in part at least to the "American Dream" you hear so much about. That if you work hard and apply yourself then you will be successful and wealthy. After all Bezos did it himself didn't he so why not you too. That mentality leads to anyone who slogs through the brutal dehumanizing conditions to some sort of position of privilege, and even some that don't get that far but think they could, to have the temporarily embarrassed millionaire attitude. Like somehow they just know this is all temporary and they have more in common with their overlord than the person working next to them.
Politicians and corporations alike have encouraged and built up this ideology over decades despite a stagnant increase in wages vs overall profits. They learned their lessons from the Miner Strikes and Teamsters of the early 1900s whereas most working people forgot in the wake of start ups and "new wealth". We've allowed the idea of organizing and demanding suitable working conditions to become something "other" people do. Thing is as much as amazon puts on a face of stepping into the future and being super automated they would break in record time without a human workforce. Same thing for any number of other companies out there that treat their employees as disposable, they need people cause people produce, whether it's a product, an end result, some desired effect, they want it and you make it happen for cash. Get enough people that do so together, and agree that you won't do diddly till they treat you right and suddenly they magically have more pay for you and better conditions.
Truth is they always had more money to give but would you pay more for something than the sticker price? Collective bargaining is how a workforce sets their price, that includes working conditions and for some reason we seem to have forgotten that and the billionaires of the world did a collective rollback on us to make sure their own wealth would be unassailable. The flaw in their plan is that they are human just like the rest of us and so they need us more than we need them