You can kin me but I want you to really commit bc its not fair if you can go off and kin someone else when you get bored of me and I’m stuck being myself forever
It’s great to rally support for the Amazon strike, but a lot of the posts I’m seeing talking about it seem incomplete.
In particular, there’s a lot of talk about avoiding Amazon this specific day, July 10. That seems to imply people would be fine resuming any purchases tomorrow? But delaying purchases by a day doesn’t seem like something that would actually accomplish much. Boycotts don’t work if they stop before the company gives in to any demands.
A meaningful boycott of Amazon means being willing to spend weeks or months taking business elsewhere, and having some way of tracking the status of the demands to know if/when the situation changes. It also means having an agreement of what exactly the sort of business to avoid with them entails. That means identifying subsidaries (ex. Twitch) and determining how to handle them, including in more ambiguous situations (ex. watching Twitch streams without directly giving Twitch any money). And it takes time to get a meaningful amount of people on board with all this.
I hope the strike and any boycotting is going well in Europe, but the stuff I’ve been seeing around Tumblr doesn’t seem like it’s currently coherent enough to make much meaningful contribution.
Jeff Bezos is sitting on $97 billion because of stuff like this
Amazon made $47B in gross profits in 2016. They have 540,000 employees.
If they gave every employee a $5/hr wage increase and increased their workforce by 10% to reduce time pressures on individual workers, it would cost them between $6B and $9B per year (assuming 40 to 60 hr average work week), still leaving about $40B in gross profits. That’s still a ridiculously huge amount of money being made.
But capitalists always want to squeeze out ever more profits and this is always done by exploiting workers.
THIS is why they strike, and THIS is why we support them. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM AMAZON FOR THE DURATION OF THE STRIKE. BUY ELSEWHERE, and MAKE IT CLEAR that you’re supporting the striking workers.
