Sep 14, 2020
By Dray Breezy
A common retort I’ve heard from pretty much all the challenges ordinary people are facing with our suffering economy and coronavirus are, “Go work for Amazon.” Honestly, at this point in time, I’m really fucking tired of hearing this as a viable solution. Unemployed? Work at Amazon. Need health insurance? Work at Amazon. Like sleeping in your car because you can’t afford the housing costs of the area you work in? Work at Amazon.
Amazon is not the cure, it is the disease. The average Amazon employee makes 16.55 per hour BEFORE taxes. In 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services set the federal poverty level at $26,200 for a family of four. That’s equivalent to about $12.60 per hour for a full-time worker. In many larger metropolitan areas, the pay rate at Amazon would put a person below the poverty line. When you are telling me to work at Amazon you are telling me that my time and creative energy isn’t even valuable enough for me to live and support myself. You’re telling me that I should abandon all the countless hours I put into getting multiple degrees and certifications to…move boxes in a warehouse. You’re telling me that I deserve to work in a place where there is little to no significant room for growth or advancement.
Why should I be a wage slave?
The average Amazon employee works 40-50 hours per week in mostly 10 hour shifts. After putting in those types of hours, there isn’t much time for anything else. I am writer, when could I research and write? I am an artist, when could I paint? At Amazon there isn’t an opportunity for me to earn a wage that puts me comfortably above the poverty line, so why do you keep telling me to work there? Does my life not have value outside of the money I can make for a corporation? Why do I have to damage the only body I have to make money for Jeff Bezos who makes 13.4 million dollars per hour? Amazon’s CEO pay ratio—a required disclosure of the top executive’s pay compared to that of the median employee—was 1-to-58 in 2018.
I refuse to grovel before our corporate overlords. I refuse to worship the rich. Are the ideas of glorified middleman worth 183 billion dollars? When I think about it, I would rather be homeless, with my dignity, over being just another replaceable cog in giant corporate machine. I won’t advance dark forces that want to plunge us closer to feudalism, a world in which the rich own everything and we do whatever they tell us to. If you’re so eager to employ Amazon, you fucking work there.