A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter.
Source: Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work
Our country has allowed companies like Amazon to extract and outsource an integral part of their product to individual contractors who are fighting over slivers of scraps. They have the money to hire real people, full-time, with benefits and everything — and pay for the fleet of vehicles — to deliver the products they sell from Whole Foods.
These delivery gig workers, in a lot of cases, aren’t even making enough to cover the mileage on their personal vehicles. Meanwhile, Amazon sits on $71.3B in cash, paid $0 in corporate taxes for the previous 2 years, paid just 1.2% this past year, and execs all laugh their way to the next exercised stock option worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As they say, “It’s good work if you can get it.”
People in Portland continue to protest, loot, and burn the place down, and the media wants us all to think this all about the Presidential race. In my opinion, this sort of inequality that’s really driving the rage behind these “protests.” Large companies in America have broken the implied social contract that a corporate charter implies. Amazon is just one of the handful of extreme examples. There are many others. It think it’s time to get serious about reforming unfettered capitalism, and limiting the size and scope of a company, based on how well they share their success with their employees.