It was against a backdrop of floods, unstoppable blazes and chain-killing heat waves that the giant Amazon held its biggest sale of the year this week. As if the retail juggernaut’s marketing wasn’t aggressive enough year-round, the Prime Day Amazon wants to be an opportunity to retain new members to its express delivery service and to liquidate cheap gugusses, which are delivered to customers with disturbing speed.
It’s hard to miss this event which is not one, while several media have made it, without laughing, a subject of coverage. I have lost count of the list of “best offers not to be missed during the Prime Day » that I saw scrolling, broken down by purchase category, to generate even more « information content »: tech, kitchenware, sports, decoration. Even the New York Times featured non-stop coverage (you have to!) of the best deals unearthed on Amazon by “our dozens of experts who tirelessly hunt down worthwhile deals.”
Of course, life is expensive and it is not within everyone’s reach to equip themselves in an ethical and sustainable way. The hunt for discounts is sometimes a solution of necessity. Nevertheless, one wonders how the media can give these commercial events such high visibility without critical intent. We’ll call it flyer journalism: capturing attention by displaying the merchandise (regardless of its quality) to generate clicks that in turn allow you to display, and sell, even more merchandise. The loop is perfectly self-referential, disembodied. Nevertheless, the consequences of this commercial frenzy are quite tangible.
On the occasion of Prime DayChris Smalls, activist and president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the first union for Amazon workers in the United States, recalled on Twitter that millions of workers would be forced this week to work almost 60 hours to prepare and deliver parcels in particularly harsh summer conditions.
Remember that Amazon has often been singled out for its mandatory overtime policy. This provides compensation for hours worked in excess of 40 hours per week, but requires full-time employees to be available to work up to 20 hours of overtime, on call, depending on traffic. Furthermore, employees who receive a fixed (slightly higher) salary do not receive compensation for their overtime.
While we fabricate from scratch a peak period to fill the summer trough, “the heat stroke, the exhaustion will be unbearable. If you’re a Prime user, consider shopping elsewhere,” wrote Chris Smalls on Twitter—while taking part in the ALU’s Hot Labor Summer tour this summer to spur labor action in across the United States.
The cost of this commercial frenzy, one suspects, is not only human – although this would be reason enough to do without it. The environmental impact of the retail giant’s activities is also considerable.
Last month, several hundred employees of Amazon’s Seattle offices took part in an action to denounce the company’s inaction on GHG emissions, an initiative of the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. In 2019, the company pledged to be carbon neutral by 2040 (for what that means). Yet, unsurprisingly, disgruntled and helpless employees report that within the company, profit consistently trumps environmental considerations.
This explaining this, Amazon’s most recent internal sustainability report indicates that its GHG emissions actually increased between 2019 and 2021 — explained by the inevitable increase in sales volume — and justifies by saying that the important thing is to stay the course for 2040.
We recognize the strategy: we change nothing, or very little, in the way we generate profits, we always aim for unlimited expansion and we wash our confidence by presenting beautiful initiatives to offset emissions. We know, however, that it is never a panacea and that the only programs that are really mopped up are those that are never produced.
Take the forest fires that are currently ravaging the territory, in Canada as in the United States. Dark irony: it is pointed out that several forest areas that had been managed or preserved to offset GHG emissions are now going up in smoke, releasing the carbon they were supposed to capture into the atmosphere.
Basically, Amazon offers us a better metaphor here, perfect to illustrate the impasse in which we find ourselves. The juxtaposition of the above elements is no accident. It shows us that the world is burning and that the exploitation of workers in the name of the accumulation of profit in the hands of a few is one of the causes.
Columnist specializing in environmental justice issues, Aurélie Lanctôt is a doctoral candidate in law at McGill University.