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Bulletins

All the bad news for Amazon on Prime Day

Amazon delivery driver

Amazon Prime Day is today.

Image: Amazon

It's Amazon Prime Day, also known as the day Amazon sometimes make mores than $10 billion. But today also means more attention than usual on a company that is having objectively a very bad month.

    • First, there was the news from the Strategic Organizing Center that Amazon's injury rates are more than 1.5 times the national average and more than double Walmart's.
    • Then the New York Times released a massive investigation into how Amazon's glitchy human resources technology makes the work at Amazon even harder for the people who get lost in the system, can't get the benefits they need and have no human managers to actually give them support.
    • And then today, British ITV news released video showing how Amazon U.K. destroys enormous quantities of unsold products, ranging from TVs and laptops to hair dryers and face masks.
    • Finally, a coalition of more than 30 activist groups ranging from the Athena Coalition, Color of Change and the Open Markets Institute has released a letter today calling on Congress to increase enforcement of existing workplace safety laws and create new ones to force Amazon to change its worker surveillance and productivity systems.
    While all this news can't be good for Amazon's political future, today will still likely be one of Amazon's best days ever. Prime Day last year raked in north of $10 billion, a massive increase on the year before.
    Anna Kramer

    Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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