Ramesh Kumar from Greater Noida
Guess who is the biggest anti-hero in the eyes of the United States?
Xi Jinping of China? No.
Vladimir Putin of Russia? No.
Then?
Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Yes, it's him. His birth name: Jeffrey Preston Bezos.
Don't believe it? You better.
His wealth is estimated at US$190billion as of now. And his company is worth US$1.65trillion. Just half a trillion away from Apple with US$2.16trillion, but much closer to Microsoft's US$1.9trillion.
Amazon is omnipresent. As an ordinary citizen, one is exposed to this global e-com giant daily. Neither the Chinese ruler nor his Russian counterpart draws so much mega public attention. No doubt, they are as Omnipotent as Bezos is.
When you're that powerful, though not a political busybody or heavyweight still at the receiving end of an attack, it needs a close look. A fortnight after Bezos passed on the baton of Amazon to his successor and began preparing his space odyssey, The New York Times ran a massive frontpage lead story (half of page one, right under the masthead and two full broadsheet pages inside with photos, graphs, etc), "The Amazon That Customers Don't See: Profits Soared, but Pandemic Exposed Flaws in Its Employment Machine".
The title says it all. Anything to do with the Amazon boss owning the rival publication, The Washington Post? Unclear but debatable. The message is clear: His wealth building and occupying one of the top slots among the world's biggest billionaires through Amazon - particularly during the pandemic has not gone down well with the denizens of Uncle Sam.
In yet another dispatch, published early June this year, NYT hinted at a strong lobby scuttled the passage of tightening Amazon's business practices that are alleged to be helping Chinese merchants. Expectedly, Amazon denied these allegations. Significantly, the Times analysis singled out Bezos-owned The Post's own exposes of such malpractices indulged by unscrupulous elements on the Amazon marketplace. Again, Amazon removed such listings after the airing of such complaints. Yes, Amazon is doubly cautious.
For a moment, ignore the Times' attack on Amazon. The Oscar best picture award of 2020 went to Nomadland. The film is cosmetic in the sense that it did not capture what Jessica Bruder wrote in her book in 2017 by the same name on which the movie was shot.
Bruder writes: "An Amazon recruiting handout warns CamperForce candidates that they should be ready to lift to fifty pounds at a time, in an environment where the temperature may sometimes exceed 90 degrees. ... In a closed, worker-run Facebook group called Amazon CamperForce Community, one woman talked about losing 25 pounds during her three months n the job. Another replied: "It's easy to lose weight by walking a half marathon every day. Bonus: you're too tired to eat!" A third worker boasted of walking 547 miles in 10 weeks of work. He was later topped by another, who posed a Fitbit log showing 820 miles in twelve and a half weeks."
Cruel is an understatement. Of course, the movie shot inside an Amazon fulfillment center is glossy where it shows the lead character working inside the warehouse. No wonder, the Bezos company greenlighted the shooting. By the way, soon after the shooting, it increased the hourly wages! Why no clue!
Across the Atlantic, Financial Times' Management Editor Andrew Hill, reviewing Brad Stone's new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire published in 2021 says: "For many critics, Bezos is the real-life equivalent of a Bond villain."
While in London, let us hop over to The Guardian, the left-leaning daily. It ran a damning piece soon after Bezos announced that he would be stepping down in June by Mark Connell, a big fanboy of Amazon.com.
He writes: "My relationship with this company is an extremely vexed one. I think of myself as a socialist, but my purchase history leaves me no choice but to also think of myself as a loyal customer of Amazon.com. The way that Amazon does business - its pressuring of suppliers, its systematic annihilation of retail competitors, its incessant harvesting of its customers’ data, its treatment of its own workers as little better than machines – is, of course, inseparable from the personal wealth of its founder, Jeff Bezos..."
Amazon bashing seems to be the flavor. One more book is out. Alec MacGillis is out with Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. His focus is on Amazon's gargantuan desire to meet customer satisfaction in whichever way possible. So, delivery through his Fulfillment centers forms the core of this book.
Anecdotal narration is the key feature of good storytellers. The prose is never dull because the reader relates easily to the subject. So, MacGillis begins thus:
"Hector Tore worked overnights, four nights a week, typically from 7.15 pm to 7.15 am. He worked all over the warehouse - stacking boxes in outbound trailers, loading packages onto pallets, and inducting envelopes and packages, which meant standing at the conveyor belts for the entire shift (there were no chairs on the warehouse floor) and transferring hundreds of items per hour from one carousel to another while turning them right side up so that scanners could read their codes...
He lifted a lot of boxes, some as heavy as fifty pounds - the challenge wasn't so much the weight as that you couldn't really tell, based on size, whether a box was going to be heavy or not when you went to pick it up. Your body and your mind never knew what to expect. He wore a back brace for a while, but it would get so hot that he felt like he was being cooked. His elbow tendinitis flared up. He often walked more than a dozen miles per shift, according to his Fitbit - he thought the device must be wrong and got a new pedometer, but it said the same thing. He put on a topical numbing cream before he goes to work, took ibuprofen pills while he was at work, and, when he got home, stood on ice packs, put ice on his elbow, and soaked his feet in Epsom salts. He switched shoes often to spread the impact across the sole."
Connell summarises his critique thus:
"It’s tempting to argue that Amazon’s true innovation has been the ruthless exploitation of human labor in service of speed and efficiency, but that’s really only part of the picture: the aim is removing humans – with their need for toilet breaks, their stubborn insistence on sleeping, their tendency to unionize – as much as possible from the equation; the grim specifics of the labor conditions are only ever a byproduct of that aim.
This has been an aim of capitalism since at least as far back as Henry Ford, and in an obvious sense, it’s precisely the dynamic you experience every time you wind up with unexpected items in the bagging area at Tesco. As usual with Amazon, it’s not that something new is happening – it’s that an old thing is happening with unprecedented force, speed, and efficiency."
Now that, there is a new tenant at the White House, what is in store for Bezos?
US President Joe Biden's pro-labor credentials are no secret. During the run-up to the Presidential Election 2020, Amazon's Alabama warehouse workers' desire to explore unionizing through a postal ballot got Biden's blessings. He tweeted his support: "Unions lift workers, both union and non-union, but especially Black and Brown workers. There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda..." Biden did not name Amazon directly but said "workers in Alabama". Sufficient hint for his discerning Twitter followers and the US media lapped it up. It is altogether a different story that Amazon won that race against its employees at Alabama. "
Well, the Biden administration has not lowered its arsenals to take the Big Tech which includes Amazon among others such as Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. Amid the Covid19 shutdown, the US government released a 449-page confirmation of Lina Khan, an arch critic of Amazon's monopolistic practices, as the Commissioner of the Fair Trade Commission in mid-June, is a pointer that the world's richest man cannot fly away from Planet Earth.
It is worth noting what the above report said its findings. "The companies investigated by the Subcommittee - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - have captured control over key channels of distribution and have come to function as gatekeepers. Just a decade into the future, 30% of the world's Gross economic output may lie with these firms and just a handful of others.
Turning to Amazon, the Report says that "although Amazon is frequently described as controlling about 40% of US online retail sales, this market share is likely understated and estimates of about 50% or higher are more credible.
Amazon has engaged in extensive anticompetitive conduct in its treatment of third-party sellers. Publicly, Amazon describes third-party sellers as "partners" but internal documents show that behind closed doors, the company refers to them as "internal competitors". Its dual role as an operator of its marketplace that hosts third-party sellers, and a seller in that same marketplace, creates an inherent conflict of interest.
The above sentiments are collective thoughts of the committee. The US-based Pakistani academic's own views on Amazon are crystal clear. In her 96-page report, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" Lina Khan without mincing words captures the true character of Amazon.
"Current law underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons: First, the economics of platform markets incentivize the pursuit of growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational - even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the ess3e3ntial infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors."
Crystal clear it is where her sympathies lie. Now as FTC Commissioner, she will be spearheading antitrust reforms, and the BigTech in general and Amazon, in particular, have to get ready to brace the storm.
Does it mean the end of Amazon?
Not at all.
Ask a simple question: What is Amazon: a retailer, marketing platform, a delivery, and logistics network, a payment service a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer and a leading host of cloud server space?
Well, these are Lina Khan's original questions that led her to write her 2017 'Paradox" paper. Now, she is in a position to facilitate finding an answer. Not to be forgotten is the collective lobby muscle of GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Given the bipartisan endorsement of Khan's anointment paves way for a change - cataclysmic or normal, one has to wait and watch.
Khan's induction, opines Simon Dukes, the Technology Business Editor of The Times of London, that "it is a signal of intent form Biden. Khan is an intellectual firebrand who advocates the break-up of Google, Amazon, and Facebook. She won't have a direct role in writing policy, but the antitrust agency will adopt a more muscular approach to Silicon Valley under her leadership."
Truly a nightmarish period ahead. Today's FTC has a 3-2 majority of Democrat nominees, who are on the same page on this critical issue. Biden has to ensure his fresh nomination to replace one of three Democrats on FTC has to pass through the tough Senate approval so that GAFA displays proper competitive tendencies.
So their future is bright because the world will be hosting a tech-friendly population. Luddites will vanish gradually. Are not we hearing a lot about artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithm, etc?
