Ibid., p. 231; Eylan Buchman, “The Rise of Amazon Logistics,” Transport Topics, August 20, 2018, www.ttnews.com/articles/rise-amazon-logistics. Accessed April 20, 2020.
41. David Jaffe and David Bensman, “Draying and Picking: Precarious Work and Labor Action in the Logistics Sector,” Working USA: Journal of Labor and Society 19 (2016): 67–71; Alimahomed-Wilson, “Unfree Shipping,” pp. 106–109.
42. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Injuries, Illness, and Fatalities, Table 1, Incident rates of nonfatal injuries and illnesses by industry and case types, 2017, www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/summ1_00_2017.htm. Accessed April 20, 2020.
43. Reveal staff, “Find Out What Injuries Are Like at the Amazon Warehouse That Handled Your Packages,” Reveal, November 25, 2019, The Center for Instigative Reporting, www.revealnews.org/article/find-out-what-injuries-are-like-at-the-amazon-warehouse-that-handled-your-packages/. Accessed April 20, 2020.
44. Michael Sainato, “Accidents at Amazon: Workers Left to Suffer After Warehouse Injuries,” The Guardian, July 30, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018jul/30/accidents-at-amazon-workers-left-to-suffer-after-warehouse-injuries. Accessed April 20, 2020; Tonya Riley, “She Injured Herself Working at Amazon: Then The Real Nightmare Began,” Mother Jones, March 19, 2019, www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/amazon-workers-compensation-amcare-clinic-warehouse/. Accessed April 20, 2020.
45. Alina Stanczyk, Zelal Cataldo, Constantin Blome, and Christian Busse, “The Dark Side of Global Sourcing: A Systematic Literature Revue and Research Agenda,” International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics 47(1) (2017): 41–45; Donald Waters, Supply Chain Risk Management: Vulnerability and Resilience in Logistics (London: Kogan Page, 2011), pp. 4–6.
46. Waters, Supply Chain Risk Management, pp. 62–63.
47. Uta Jüttner, “Supply Chain Risk Management: Understanding the Business Requirements from a Practitioner Perspective,” International Journal of Logistics Management 16(1) (2005): 127.
48. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, AMAZON.COM, pp. 8, 19.
49. Sheffi, The Power, p. 221.
50. Burrington, “Amazon’s Data Centers”; Uptime Institute, Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey (Seattle, WA: Uptime Institute, 2018, 2018), p. 2.
51. Berg and Knights, Amazon, pp. 62–66, 225–226, 234–235.
52. For a thorough analysis of “real capitalist competition,” see Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 259–326.
53. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 10-K, WALMART INC., Fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, pp. 29, 32; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, AMAZON.COM, 2018, pp. 36, 66.
54. Shaikh, Capitalism, p. 751.
55. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, AMAZON.COM, 2018, p. 57.
56. Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 224–251.
57. Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 59–69.
2
Power Accrues to the Powerful: Amazon’s Market Share, Customer Surveillance, and Internet Dominance
Dana M. Williams
Amazon’s corporate logo depicts a smile. Like other corporate brands, it is both wishful thinking and record-sanitizing. Google’s famous slogan “Don’t be evil” sought similar revisionism. In fact, tech giants like Amazon are not benevolent, smiling parts of our lives, but are central players in a state-corporate nexus. Such companies want to sell to us (and to profit from re-selling elements from our personal lives) and to enable governments to influence our lives. This state-corporate nexus is not new, but the modern era has seen its power taken to its logical, ominous conclusion. This chapter explores this by emphasizing an often-neglected side of Amazon: its incredible corporate power, web dominance, and surveillance of customers.
Amazon has accomplished much during its relatively short existence. Unfortunately, some of Amazon’s influence has been detrimental to workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. For example, by creating a “click consumerism” culture, Amazon has further facilitated the addictive lure of shopping, especially online. Thus, just as giant “big box” retail stores became the one-stop-shopping location that supplanted hardware, grocery, clothing, and electronics stores, Amazon.com makes it possible to do it all online. Amazon also has pioneered the mass collection of consumer data. While such data collection may seem innocent, it allows individuals to be unconsciously manipulated, exploited, and even preyed upon by the powerful actors who control the data. Every search and purchase by millions of users and customers is recorded by Amazon. The company uses this data to determine how to better market additional items. As an Amazon executive has stated, “In general, we collect as much information as possible.”1 An additional use of this user data is as a commodity itself to be sold to Amazon’s business clients. Amazon’s “Friends and Favorites” community requires validated profiles—replete with ample personal information, preferences, and behaviors—in order to be sold to other businesses for data-mining purposes.2 Amazon’s live-streaming platform Twitch is wholly about surveillance, which has been monetized in a political-economy of culture.3 All of this user-provided data is a valuable commodity. Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism,” where consumers provide the raw materials: their own data, experiences, and preferences for the profit of tech corporations.4 Such “big data” could also be employed by governmental actors seeking to control democratic participation or protest. However, few customers likely read the fine print of Amazon user agreements and therefore remain ignorant of how their curiosities, preferences, and profiles are being used. Customers often presume corporate neutrality and simply don’t understand the power corporations like Amazon receive from user data.
This chapter explores how Amazon enriches itself through incredible corporate power, how Amazon has developed an impressive online data apparatus and made it available to corporate America and the government, and how Amazon has proliferated tools of mass self-surveillance among millions of customers. First, Amazon’s primary objective—making lots of profit—is pursued through strategies like monopolistic practices and increasing its market share, through political lobbying, tax avoidance, and vertical integration. Second, through Amazon’s pursuit of massive data collection, it created an impressive web-service infrastructure called Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is used by large portions of corporate America
