Instead of doing things like, you know, paying taxes, Amazon and Jeff like to splash out now and then with big donations. Word to the wise: it’s a marketing spend. Here, Whole Foods (now owned by Amazon) employees are “offered the option” of donating their unused sick and holiday time to help fellow employees who have used theirs up. Bezos has enough money to fix half the world’s problems in one swoop, but the folk on the floor are being asked to share a piss pot together.
If this virus is teaching us anything, it’s that people like workhorse employees make the world function, not the billionaires who hold the reins. When it comes down to it, if you are an Amazon employee, or an employee of nearly any major corporation, you should know that you have a dollar value attached to you. If it’s more profitable to help you, you will get the help you need and deserve. If helping you is detrimental to the bottom line set from the top, you will get bulldozed into the mass HR grave in a heartbeat and no one will remember you were ever there. We could change all this, you know. I mean, once we’re able to gather again with pitchforks and torches.
(Note that Amazon is trying to spin this with PRs and updates, but it still stinks of minimum wage sweat.)
When progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders say “now is the time for solidarity” amid the coronavirus outbreak, they likely do not mean that employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—should be asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to their co-workers who have either contracted the deadly virus or been forced to take time out of work because of what is now a global pandemic.
But that is exactly what executives with the grocery chain are asking its employers to do, even though Bezos’ could effectively give them unlimited paid sick leave during the current national emergency without barely a scratch in his bank account.
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