Although I use Amazon its labor practices trouble me. It depends on poor elderly workers whom it works half to death according to the research done by the author of this book.
Amazon is one of the largest employers of the workampers — and the most notorious. Incentivized by federal tax credits for employing elderly workers (25 to 40 percent of wages), the company aggressively recruits them, especially during the holiday season. Jeff Bezos has predicted that a quarter of all workampers will pass through his warehouses, working 10 hours or more a day, sorting packages.
It’s crippling work. The workampers’ RVs look like “mobile apothecaries,” Bruder writes. Amazon’s warehouses feature wall-mounted dispensers of free painkillers. America runs on ibuprofen; it’s the performance drug of the new economy.
Most infamously, on a sweltering day in 2011, managers at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania refused to open the loading doors to cool down the building (they were worried about theft). Instead, Bruder reports, they arranged for paramedics to wait outside, on call, to wheel out workers who became too sick to work. All those sent home, it was later reported, were disciplined for it.
On the Road With the Casualties of the Great Recession - The New York Times