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A Grassroots Movement Is Growing To Take On Amazon

November 30, 2019 Staff, Athenaforall.org , ,
Athena is a new alliance of people who believe that control over our lives, our communities, and our democracy should be in our hands. Everyone should be able to enjoy the benefits of digital technologies and online commerce without having to sacrifice our rights and liberties, health and planet, or hopes and dreams. But billionaire corporations like Amazon rig the rules so only they can prosper. They threaten our ability to earn a good living and live a good life. We are joining together to stop Amazon’s growing, powerful grip over our society and economy.

Meet The Immigrants Who Took On Amazon

November 15, 2019 Jessica Bruder, Wired.com ,
It was 11 days before Christmas in 2018, and Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, was operating at full tilt. At the rear of the facility, waves of semi trucks backed up to a long row of loading docks, some disgorging crates of new merchandise and others filling up with outbound packages. Inside the warehouse, within dark, cyclone-fenced enclosures, thousands of shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet, ferrying towers of merchandise from one place to another.

Alexa Everywhere – Homes, Cars, Phones, Body – Raises Privacy Alarms

September 28, 2019 By Jason Del Rey, Vox.com , ,
During an event at its Seattle headquarters on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled 15 new gadgets — many of which are integrated with its artificially intelligent voice assistant Alexa — including a pretty ridiculous Alexa-enabled ring (yes, for your finger) called Echo Loop, a kind of intriguing set of Alexa earbuds dubbed Echo Buds, and a pair of Alexa eyeglasses called Echo Frames. But the day’s keynote presentation, delivered by top Amazon executive Dave Limp, began on a now-familiar note for Big Tech companies adjusting to a new era of media and regulatory scrutiny...

Thousands Of Amazon Employees Walk Out For Climate Strike

September 22, 2019 Zoya Teirstein, Grist. , , ,
“Were gonna strike cause the waters are rising, we’re gonna strike cause people are dying,” an Amazon organizer sang into a bullhorn in front of a crowd of around 3,000 at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle on Friday. Behind him, the Amazon spheres — two geodesic domes reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s failed experiment — glinted in the sunlight. Someone held a sign in front of the spheres reading: “Spheres are cool. Don’t wanna live in one.” Amazon employees have been organizing in the name of climate change for months now. Earlier this summer, more than 7,500 employees backed a climate change resolution that called on the tech giant to adopt an aggressive climate plan. Shareholders voted the resolution down. But the company’s climate activists refused to take “no” for an answer.

Defender Of Brazil’s Indigenous Tribes Murdered ‘Execution-Style’ In Amazon Town

September 22, 2019 George Dvorsky, Earther. , , ,
Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, a veteran defender of Brazil’s indigenous people, has reportedly been shot dead in a remote Amazon town while riding his motorcycle. The BBC reports Santos was shot twice in the head while riding his motorcycle down the main street of Tabatinga, a Brazilian city near the border of Colombia and Peru, according to a statement issued this past weekend by the National Indian Foundation (INA), a union representing workers at Brazil’s indigenous protection agency, FUNAI. This incident happened on the evening of Friday September 6, according to Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. Santos worked at FUNAI for the past 12 years, where he defended both contacted and uncontacted Brazilian tribes from miners, loggers, farmers, and anyone else seeking to seize land in the Amazon rainforest.

Nearly 1,000 Amazon Workers Will Walk Out And Join Global Climate Strike

September 11, 2019 By Alexandra Jacobo, Nationofchange.org , , , , ,
"As a leader, we need to reach zero first and not be a company who slides in at the last possible deadline,” Nearly 1,000 Amazon employees have pledged to join the massive upcoming Global Climate Strike. The employees will walk out on September 20th to demand that the company “makes climate a priority.” The 941 Amazon employees that have signed the internal pledge includes workers at corporate offices, according to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the group organizing the walkout.

BlackRock: Divest From Amazon Destruction

September 11, 2019 Corporate Accountability , ,
BlackRock, the world's largest investment firm, has more money invested in the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries – the biggest drivers of climate change – than any other company in the world. That means that BlackRock's portfolio constitutes a huge liability for putting the planet on a path towards runaway climate change -- in fact, BlackRock contributes more to climate change than almost any other company on Earth. Demand that BlackRock divest and stop financing Amazon destruction!

Prince George’s County Residents Want To Halt Suspected Amazon Warehouse

August 12, 2019 By Dominique Maria Bonessi, Wamu.org , ,
When Briana Bostic moved to her developing Prince George’s County neighborhood last year, she was told that a shopping center, grocery store, library, and other amenities were going to be a part of the development. “It wasn’t just promises,” Bostic said. “It was a large and developed and involved plan with neighborhood input from thousands of people. It was the exact opposite of the process we see now.” Bostic is referencing a decision at a county council meeting last month to approve zoning changes.

Surviving Amazon

August 9, 2019 Sam Adler-Bell, Logicmag.io , , ,
It is human to resist even when our resistance is barely registered by those in power. In her memoir of working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany in 2010, Heike Geissler recalls these lines from Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek: “Anyone alive disrupts.” Speaking to herself or perhaps to the reader — the book is written almost entirely in the second person — she adds, “You ought to prove to your employer that you’re alive.”Geissler imagines various disruptive tactics for doing so. One could hide products to “remove them from the...

Journalist Who Took Job At Amazon: We Got 18 Minutes Total Break Time For 11.5 Hour Shift

July 27, 2019 Sahid Fawaz, Labor411.org , , , ,
“I took a job in an Amazon fulfillment center in Indiana over a few weeks–along with a call center in North Carolina and a McDonald’s in San Francisco–to investigate the experience of low-wage work. I wasn’t prepared for how exhausting working at Amazon would be. It took my body two weeks to adjust to the agony of walking 15 miles a day and doing hundreds of squats. But as the physical stress got more manageable, the mental stress of being held to the productivity standards of a robot became an even bigger problem.

Prime Day Brings Out Anti-Amazon Wave Of Protests And Activism

July 16, 2019 Ben Fox Rubin, Cnet.com , ,
Demonstrations happened in Minnesota, New York, Seattle and San Francisco, as well as across Europe. While Amazon is working to push its big Prime Day summer sale this week, activists and unions are using the day to highlight their many concerns about the world's biggest online store. Their concerns vary widely, from working conditions in warehouses to climate issues to its ties to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Much of the activist attention in the US was directed at Shakopee, Minnesota, where Amazon warehouse workers protested Monday...

Why It’s Prime Time To Boycott Amazon

July 15, 2019 By Valerie Vande Panne,  Independentmediainstitute.org , , ,
Are you ready to divest from Amazon Prime? How about Whole Foods? If the idea makes you break into a nervous cold sweat, no worries. You don’t need to divest from either. Yet. That’s the idea behind non-profit Threshold’s new campaign, Cancel Prime. The idea is for people to pledge to cancel their Prime accounts and stop shopping at Whole Foods—when there is a critical mass of people who will divest together.

PLEDGE: Solidarity With Amazon Workers Striking On Prime Day!

July 11, 2019 Staff, Solidaritycenter.ourpowerbase.net , , ,
On July 15 — 'Prime Day' — Amazon warehouse workers in Shakopee, Minnesota will stage a six-hour strike on a range of issues, including low pay, poor working conditions, increasingly heavy workloads, safety issues, among others. The strike is being built in collaboration with the Awood Center, an East African workers organization. Many of the workers who are leading the strike are Somali or other East African migrants, who have previously organized work stoppages at the warehouse around these and other issues.

Amazon Protested In Three Cities Over Climate Crisis

July 6, 2019 Forrest Crellin, Reuters. , , ,
Paris - Several hundred environmental activists protested outside Amazon’s headquarters in Paris and at two of its regional distribution centers in France on Tuesday as part of stepped-up climate change demonstrations. The protest drew support from groups including Friends of the Earth and the “Gilets Jaunes”, who have mounted months of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. Some 240 people blocked access to Amazon’s (AMZN.O) main office in Paris, organizers said, with many denouncing the online giant’s business practices, saying it wasn’t paying its fair share of tax or paying its employees a fair wage.

Report: Corporations And Bolsonaro Teaming Up To Destroy The Amazon

July 3, 2019 Joe Catron, Mintpress News. , , ,
As deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest reaches the highest level in a decade, the rainforest’s indigenous peoples and their supporters have called for action against the political and business interests they blame for a spike in illegal logging and other resource extraction. A report released by Amazon Watch as part of its ongoing “Complicity in Destruction” campaign aims not only to spotlight the role of North American and Western European financiers, importers, and traders in the ongoing destruction of the Amazon, but also to mobilize support for a boycott launched by the National Indigenous Mobilization (MNI) against the Brazilian agribusiness and mining interests encroaching on the threatened region.
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