Fear and Loathing in the Time of COVID

This is a response to the conversation between a couple of Distinguished Engineers and VPs at Amazon: Tim Bray, and Brad Porter. I want to show how Brad’s response to Tim’s critique of Amazon missed the point in a manner that spoke volumes. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll characterize the two sides of the argument like this: Tim said that he had resigned from Amazon because even though he believed Amazon was doing as much as they could for warehouse workers, he still felt like the firing of whistleblowers was unconscionable and spoke to a larger vein of “poison” running through the company, while Brad retorted by saying, basically, “But we’re doing a lot of things to keep them safe.”

As it turns out, I am suspended from Amazon, and based on my experience, my perspective is that Tim’s analysis is exactly correct — although, I do feel compelled to make one criticism of it: he didn’t take it far enough! In fact, I think it’s true to say that Amazon’s firing of warehouse workers who speak out about working conditions is indicative of a vein of toxicity running through our global culture. In order to fully understand the substance of my arguments here, it may be necessary to familiarize yourself with the following works which I draw from, as my summaries will be brief:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson.
• The Reality of The Virtual, Slavoj Zizek
• Grand Illusion: how the pandemic exposed we’re all just pretending, Lynn Steger Strong
• We need to rethink our value systems, Karen Studders and Kaliya Young
• Neofuedalism: the end of capitalism?, Jodie Dean reviewing Capital is Dead by McKenzie Wark
• Scale, Difference, and Universality in the Study of Race, Arun Saldanha
• The American Dream is Alive and Well, Michael R. Strain

My suspension

The officially given reason for my suspension is that I “knowingly and repeatedly refused to follow social distancing protocol despite repeated directives from your managers.” My perspective is that the real reason for my suspension is that my managers did not want to acknowledge and commit to providing a response to my email of April 26th, which pointed out that non-Amazon flyers for external Delivery Service Providers were being allowed on the bulletin board while my union flyers were being removed.

Before May 1

So, what do I mean when I say flyers? Take a look:

The brochure I created

I started bringing these in towards the end of January. At first, I stored them in a bottom locker in the locker room that was rarely used. Within a week or so of my bringing them, they had disappeared. (I believed they were removed by managers). Within a few weeks of that, the lockers in the locker room were changed out from the sort that we could put our own locks on, to the sort that had a keypad so they could be easily accessed by management. It became standard procedure at our facility to check the lockers between every shift at that time as well.

April 26

By April 26th, I had started bringing flyers again, and on this day (or the night before, since I work nights) I had brought in a few and left them in the break room along with some snacks. When I came back, the brochures were gone, but the snacks weren’t and that was exactly the opposite of what I would normally expect to happen. I decided that I was going to give up my anonymity and directly confront a manager about the flyers, so I did. Now, I had no idea what things were to come after this, but I have enough experience dealing with a large company to know that if you don’t put a thing in writing, then it’s as if it never happened, so I also wrote an email that day to the site HR email address regarding the issue.

Worker-organizers chalk social distancing markers on the ground outside of DSF4 for the May 1st protest

May 1

On May 1st I decided to clock out in solidarity with my co-workers from around the country who believe that we need to have more of a say in our working conditions at Amazon. I clocked out, and decided to hang out in the break room during lunch to hand out flyers. I was there talking to a co-worker, just as lunch was about to end when the manager first came in to talk to me about the “social distancing protocol.” I explained my reasoning for being there, and asked her to commit to getting me a response. She said she would talk to HR, and left the room.

Expecting her to come back with some sort of response, I waited, but instead of engaging me on my concern, when she returned, she had brought backup and they were doubly determined to get me to leave without acknowledging my concern. That’s when I decided that this was the moment that I needed to make a statement. I asked them to write me up. They refused. I asked what the consequences would be if I didn’t leave. They said it was up to HR. I stayed simply to drive home the point that they owed me an answer, and left shortly thereafter. Before leaving I snapped a picture of the bulletin board that had the external DSP flyer. I went home and filed an ULP complaint with the NLRB about the flyers. I provided Amazon with a copy through the HRC, and by sending an email to the DSF4 HR email address.

After May 1

On May 2nd when I arrived at work, I was immediately called into an office and suspended. I asked for the reason for my suspension, in writing then. I also sent a follow up email to the site HR email address. Nobody was willing or able to provide me with a reason for my suspension until May 14th.

On May 4th I received a call from an investigator, who posited something like what I ultimately received as the reason for my suspension, and asked for my statement. I told her that there was a big chunk of the story missing and that I didn’t feel that it was fair to ask me to provide a statement until more of the story had been filled in. The following day, an article came out in the Guardian which contained a version of the events of May 1st from my perspective, so I forwarded it to DSF4 HR and told them that I would be happy to speak with the investigator once she had read it.

When I finally did receive a response to my request for the reason for my suspension, I was also told that I had “refused to provide her any additional information” and that “in the absence of [my] participation HR is working to finalize the investigation.” I sent an email back clarifying my position, and asking that the investigator get back in touch with me and conduct the interview by email (since there had been an obvious miscommunication during our previous conversation). I mentioned my email of April 26th in this email.

On May 19th, I missed a call from the investigator, and wrote an email to HR reiterating that I would prefer to conduct the interview by email. Then I received another call from the investigator and I reiterated that I preferred to conduct the interview in a form that left an indelible record of what questions were asked and what I actually said in response. I got an email from the investigator saying that Amazon didn’t do investigations by email — even though I had previously done just that. I requested an extension, due to my ADHD, and was granted it.

Today: May 26

It is actually significant that the day on which I publish this is fully one month after my original email regarding the flyers was sent. To this date, I have not received so much as an acknowledgment of that email, let alone a response. While I’m sure there are many reasonable explanations as to why that is, I think the most plausible is the one Tim Bray offered the “big problem” in his post: “It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.” In what remains of this post, want to explain why he’s right — even up to his conclusion that this is the result of capitalism.

The Reality of the Virtual

In “The Reality of the Virtual”, Slavoj Zizek implores us to recognize that in order to understand the times we live in, we have to gain a better understanding of the way belief operates. For him, it is things which are purely imaginary which actually structure our reality most concretely:

[T]he really real — real core of the real — [is] much more fundamental than the symbolic real, but…paradoxically, is at the same time the most virtual real. It is what? Let us think about attractors in mathematics or in physics. For example, you have small pieces of iron and you throw them around a magnetic field. They are dispersed, following a certain shape, infinitely approaching this shape, but this shape, of course, is not existing itself. It’s just something that you can abstract, isolate from the dispersion of the small pieces of iron. That’s the idea of ‘virtual real’. It’s a shape — this is the real of this field, but it doesn’t exist in itself. It’s just an abstract form, which structures the disposition of actually existing elements around it.

In that way, our beliefs are efficacious in creating our behaviors despite our being largely unaware of them. Zizek extends Donald Rumsfeld’s famous statement that there are ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’, and ‘unknown unknowns’, suggesting that he should have gone on to include the obviously missing part of his analysis: the ‘unknown knowns’. “Unknown knowns”, with respect to belief, are those things which we come to believe through the general social atmosphere — our unconscious biases.

Zizek observes that in some sense, ideology creates our beliefs rather than our beliefs constructing our ideology:

The primordial fact is not some brutal intrusion…of a traumatic real. The primordial fact, and also the primordial real, is a purely formal imbalance. The symbolic space is curved — it’s cut across by antagonism, imbalanced, etc. — and to account for this you need reference to some real. Which is, of course, the real. … It’s a lure here. A trap. …

It’s not that struggle is at the level of the particular content, while universally it’s just some kind of neutral empty container, so that universal means some encompassing global notion, and then, within this notion, particular forms struggle… No! The sight of the struggle is universal antagonism itself. And all particular actually existing modernisms are attempts to cover up, resolve this problem.

What he’s saying here very closely mirrors a section of his post that Tim Bray aptly titled “Spot a pattern?”:

At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism.

Bray is saying that capitalism is the primordial fact — the purely formal imbalance, the antagonism — which curves the symbolic space of the relationship between Amazon and warehouse workers. The “reference to some real”, the lure, in this case, is the incident May 1st which led to my suspension — the fact that I refused to leave the break room when asked by managers. But it’s a trap because it draws you into accepting the premise that the discussion is about safety — at the level of the particular content — all the while obscuring that the battle is an ideological one — at the level of the universal. If the investigation is about whether I violated social distancing protocol, rather than about whether Amazon violated the NLRA, then Amazon has already gotten what it wanted. It can continue union busting with impunity, and fabricate an excuse to fire an organizer. It’s no wonder then, that Bray concludes that “[a]ny plausible solution has to start with increasing [workers’] collective strength.”

No matter what the merit of my claim that my rights were violated, it wouldn’t have mattered because large companies like Amazon are almost never held accountable for their actions. What chance do workers like me stand in a court room against Amazon’s army of high paid lawyers? With 40 million Americans unemployed and no end in sight to the pandemic, and therefore, the economic turmoil, who amongst us can afford to risk losing our job right now? There is no question in my mind that I would have been fired shortly after May 1, if it had not been for Bashir, Chris, Emily and Maren being fired, and Tim resigning. And neither the difficulty of holding corporations accountable, nor the risk associated with speaking up at work and losing your job, are products of the coronavirus — both conditions predated it.

On Capitalism

If capitalism, then, is the locus of struggle, and my situation is simply a manifestation of this greater antagonism, what can we learn about a way forward, through examining Amazon’s actions as though it is compelled by the ideology of capitalism — as if it is controlled by its ‘unknown knowns’? I want to compare some of the things that Amazon has said in the media, with my experience of their actions, through the lens of Zizeks ‘real virtual’. I invite you to join me, and the Supreme Court apparently, in personifying Amazon for the purposes of this exercise.

What they say vs what they do:

“We’re already offering what unions are asking, which is industry leading pay, great benefits and a safe and innovative workplace” — Rachael Lighty

Amazon isn’t the decider of what workers want. The benefits don’t really kick in unless you’re full time and I’ve been working there 6 months, and I’m still seasonal. As far as an innovative workplace — after a particularly bad, and unsafe night in the warehouse, I sent an email to the Station Manager suggesting that a digital forum might be more effective way to get feedback from employees. I was told flat out “That’s not going to happen.” Whether it’s their goal to be innovative, I can’t say, but I can say that it doesn’t feel that way on the front lines.

“Amazon respects the rights of our employees, and we have a zero tolerance policy on retaliation for employees raising their concerns.” — Rachael Lighty

Then, I’d love if someone investigated what happened in my case. I think there’s a pretty clear case to be made that I was suspended as retaliation for raising a concern about my right to organize. I still haven’t received a reply to my original email. Doesn’t seem like this is true to me.

“We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either. We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers or shareholders or most importantly, our associates.” — Amazon Management Training Video

Well, if this isn’t the most outrageous case of double-speak you’ve ever heard… the way I look at it there are only three stances you can take on any issue, you’re For, Against, or Neutral. If you’re not for them, obviously, and you’re not against them OR neutral, do you even exist? Genuinely confused about how this works.

“In the U.S., the average hourly wage for a full-time associate in our fulfillment centers, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses, is over $15/hour before overtime. That’s in addition to our full benefits package that includes health, vision and dental insurance, retirement, generous parental leave, and skills training for in-demand jobs through our Career Choice program, which has over 16,000 participants.”

That average hourly wage doesn’t really mean anything to me since I don’t live in a place with an average cost of living. From what I heard many people got their stock bonuses taken away when they got the raise to $15/hr. Amazon also doesn’t pay overtime in accordance with the law in California, in my opinion. The career choice program is great, but on the wages we earn, we all need a second job to survive, so when are we going to have time to go to school? Also, this is only one side of the equation, what is Amazon doing on the AWS side to ensure that it’s hiring practices are not rife with implicit bias?

“I think if you go through each one of those individuals what you’re going to find is some sort of substantive policy violation — or safety violation that occurred in the process.” — Dave Clark responding to Lesley Stahl’s question about whether workers were being retaliated against

I’d love for Dave Clark to comment on what the substantive policy violation was in my case that required a month long investigation, and still doesn’t seem to have uncovered the fact that this is all about my rights as an organizer and not safety.

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers.” — David Zapolsky’s memo referring to Chris Smalls

This is a dog whistle, plain and simple. First, what contact had he ever had with Chris to be able to say this? Whether or not he knew about Chris Small’s race at the time, he certainly must have known about the relative racial makeup of AWS vs Amazon Logistics, and known better than to have take the risk of ever writing something like that down. The fact that he didn’t indicates to me that he simply doesn’t believe that BLACK LIVES MATTER.

“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety. Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” — David Zapolsky’s memo referring to Chris Smalls

I think any illusion that Amazon is not union-busting is shattered by this quote. This shows that the entire leadership of the company, from Jeff Bezos down, were knowingly smearing an organizer. It’s significant here that he actually uses the word organizer — that shows that the first priority is not safety. But also, I want to point out how the dog whistle continues here — painting things that black people do as immoral and illegal is a tried and true white supremecist tactic.

“ Tim Bray is simply wrong when he says ‘It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.’ I find that deeply offensive to the core. For those of us who work in World-Wide Operations, nothing could be farther from the truth. Our associates are the most amazing people you will meet anywhere and the heart of everything we do.” — Brad Porter

Again, my view of Brad’s response as a whole is that he doesn’t respond in substance to Tim’s post. As I wrote in a response to his post:

“We’re not robots, Brad, we’re human beings. I bet you make a lot more money than me — would you be willing to risk your life for it? That’s what you’re asking us to do if you allow rhetoric to stand in place of real action in terms of our safety. Those are great talking points, and I’m sure it felt great coming up with them — but I can tell you from personal experience that the reality on the ground is different from the one you portray.”

I think that gets at my point better than anything. I seriously doubt that any of the folks who work at Amazon corporate would come to our building right now. Their only experience of us is through imaginary, and symbolic means, they don’t have any chance of knowing those of us on the front line as human beings. This is a recipe for dehumanization, which, I would argue is precisely what occurs on a regular basis at Amazon, and leads to a callous disregard for the value of human life. The point isn’t so much whether or not the workers are right about whether enough is being done to protect them — the point is that workers deserve the dignity of having a voice in their working conditions. The point is that you, as a bureaucrat in Seattle shouldn’t be able to make decisions about my life without my having a mechanism for providing feedback, and having that feedback seriously considered.

Fear and Loathing: The end of the ‘American Dream’

Most folks who know me well know that my right arm is covered with a tattoo depicting the opening scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Not a lot of people know it’s significance to me. For me, the key to understanding that novel is in understanding the implications of it’s subtitle: “A savage journey into the heart of the American Dream”. In understanding Las Vegas as the ‘heart’ of it, we understand that it is inherently a gamble. But the other aspect of Fear and Loathing that resonates with me is the metaphor of the opening scene.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are those goddamn animals?”

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

What is significant here is the recognition, a mere two paragraphs into the book, that we each occupy our own psychic space. There is the recognition that my imaginary world may not be the same as yours. And indeed, perspective is a key aspect of Thompson’s concept of Gonzo journalism. Thompson’s refusal to claim objectivity as an author is a courageous move that captures the gestalt of what Zizek means when he says:

[A] truly radical utopia is not an exercise in free imagination. Like, you sit down, don’t have anything wiser to do than to imagine possible ideal worlds. It’s something that you do literally as out of an inner urge. You have to invent something new when you cannot do it otherwise. True utopia for me is not a matter of the future, it’s something to be immediately enacted, when there is no other way. Utopia in this sense simply means: do what appears, within the given symbolic coordinates, as impossible. Take the risk, change the very coordinates. And I’m not talking here about something crazy. Even big classical well-known, even some times conservative acts, have this utopian dimension.

I would suggest to you that what I was doing when I refused to leave the break room on May 1st also contained this ‘utopian dimension’. I was aiming to change the coordinates of the conversation to ensure that my main concern of workers’ ability to organize at Amazon is respected. I submit that in fact this was in keeping with the Amazon’s leadership principles: I was “Insisting on the Highest Standard”, I was “Thinking Big”, I was demonstrating a “Bias for Action”, and most of all I “Had Backbone, Disagreed, and Committed”. Reasonable people can disagree about that, but what must be unequivocally stated is that a human being who asserts their fundamental rights shouldn’t have to fear being subject to discipline for doing so — at Amazon or anywhere else.

Or as George Ciccariello-Maher put it:

Lacking the reciprocity necessary for the dialectic to enter smoothly into motion, these disqualified nonbeings have no choice but to initiate a one sided struggle to gain it.

“Human capital”

This is an actual Amazon job posting from LinkedIn

This isn’t just an Amazon problem. It’s a problem that’s larger than any one company, or any one country. It’s an idealogical problem. It’s inevitable that capitalism dehumanizes us because it organizes itself around capital. I think it’s important to recognize that capital, from the latin root ‘caput,’ meaning “head,” has the same root as “cattle”, and “chattel”. All of these words have come to mean property, in time. I submit to you that it is not insignificant that Amazon views it’s employees as “human capital”.

What The Reality of the Virtual aims to teach us is that the beliefs that we hold, especially those which we’re unaware of, shape our psychic spaces in ways that define our reality. I think a really powerful example of that comes from the dog whistle language that executives used to try to discredit Chris Smalls. It’s no accident that the things that came to mind for them to say were “not smart or articulate”, “immoral” and “arguably illegal”. These are the same concepts that have been associated with black bodies again and again, since the creation of ‘race’ as a concept. Zapolsky claims he didn’t know Smalls was black — but I submit to you that it was very likely a belief he held without knowing he held it. That’s just how implicit bias functions — beliefs are imprinted on us before we have a chance to even think about them. I have no doubt that Mr. Zapolsky is not a racist at heart — but his language definitely was.

Which ultimately get’s to the core of my point. Brad Porter’s response to Tim Bray’s post is so offensive because it’s just so tone deaf. The assumption inherent in his point of view — the one that ignores entirely that the critique is about the firing of whistleblower and instead focuses on “150 process improvements” — is that Amazon executives, many of whom never have, and never will set foot in our buildings should make life or death decisions about our lives without our having any input.

In the midst of a pandemic, at the very least, the “human” part should win out over the “capital” part of ‘human capital’. But that is impossible under an orientation which centers itself around ‘capital’. Property is what matters, and so everything get’s reduced to being property, and more property is always better. This ideology is exemplified by the thinking in Micheal R. Strain in “The American Dream is Alive and Well” who poses the following hypothetical:

Imagine you could wave a magic wand and double the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans. Would you do it? I imagine your answer is yes.

Now, suppose that in order to increase the incomes of people at the bottom by a factor of two, you had no choice but to increase the incomes of the top 20 percent by a factor of 2.5. Would you still wave the wand? If so, you may be less concerned about inequality than you think.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like a crucial piece of information is missing here. Do the bottom 20% of Americans have enough to eat? Will they after you wave your magic wand? The question isn’t of relative wealth — nobody is arguing that rich people shouldn’t be rich because we’re not rich. The question is of relative need — we’re arguing that rich people shouldn’t just continue to get richer when the rest of us are struggling to have our basic necessities met. I think capitalists call it “the law of diminishing marginal utility,” or something like that.

By the time anyone else reads this, we will have passed the grim threshold of 100,000 coronavirus deaths in America. A telling statistic is that 1 in 4 black people say that they know someone who has gotten sick or died from coronavirus, while only 1 in 10 white people say the same. It’s also telling that many of the folks making decisions about health and safety are white, while many of the folks who have to bear the consequences of those decisions are people of color. Literally on the same day that warehouse workers unlimited UPT ended, AWS workers were told that they could work from home until October.

To my mind, it’s hard not to believe that the same underlying reason is the cause for the persistent diversity problem in Silicon Valley, the brutal police killings of black people, the devastating toll that poverty takes on our community, and the dehumanizing treatment of Amazon’s frontline workers. On some level Amazon believes we are “not smart,” that we’re “immoral,” and “criminal,” otherwise, why haven’t we “made it” given all the opportunity available? We must be lazy. We must not have any skills

I’d like to offer a different perspective. You know that Career Choice program that Amazon touts as helping workers gain skills to get better jobs? I’m an instructor at one of the companies Amazon is partnered with for that program called Nucamp. This week, I’m teaching my first course, on Node, Express, and MongoDB. Also, earlier this year I incorporated my own business. I’m neither dumb, nor inarticulate, nor lazy, nor immoral, nor a criminal.

I’d ask all Amazon executives to recognize that it is patently ridiculous for anyone to claim to have perfect knowledge of any thing. As Zizek puts it:

There always is one universal truth of a certain situation. But this truth is accessible only from a specific, partial, engaged, engaged in the struggle, standpoint. So it’s not that we arrive at the universal truth by abstracting from our particular engagement, from our particular interests, the idea being: each of us has it’s own interests, positions, but the truth of a situation emerges when we can step, as it were, outside ourselves and look at the situation more objectively, the way it really is. No, on the contrary! We should fully assume the paradox of universal truth being accessible only through a partial, engaged position.

As such, humility is in order — especially when lives are on the line. No person has a right to decide for someone else what their life is worth, and no person should have to suffer the indignity of being forced back to work in the midst of a pandemic. It is all but impossible to know that you and only you have a firm grasp on truth, and so our actions should reflect that. Amazon’s executives should display some humility.

This humility is precisely what Gonzo journalism aims at, and I think its a mindset that’s necessary to move us beyond this moment in social organization. We have to decide that people matter more than money. No human should die for someone else’s profit. No human should have to work without having a say in the conditions of their labor. These are matters of morality and justice. Our lives are inherently valuable, regardless of the value of our labor as capital.

I thought it odd, at first, that Tim Bray had chosen to write that “Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.” ‘People’ seemed like a more natural term. I see now that it was deliberate choice aimed at drawing attention to the fact that we are indeed more than just capital. Its a shame that we need to affirm that, and that black lives matter, but it seems those affirmations are more necessary today than ever. A study from Harvard late last year found that :

The extent of reported discrimination across several areas of life suggests a broad pattern of discrimination against blacks in America, beyond isolated experiences. Black-white disparities exist on nearly all dimensions of experiences with public and private institutions, including health care and the police. Evidence of systemic discrimination suggests a need for more active institutional interventions to address racism in policy and practice.

On June 19th, workers here in the Bay Area, and across the country will hold a vigil for all the workers who have passed from COVID 19. We chose that date because of the significance it holds in the black community, as the day of emancipation for formerly enslaved people. What should be a day of celebration, however, is rendered a solemn day of mourning and reflection, because it seems that we are still invisible to the people who hold power over our lives. We’ll project the faces of those who have died onto Amazon buildings as a reminder that they were human, and that their lives were valuable, and that Amazon executives’ inability to see them as such doesn’t absolve those executives of their responsibility to keep those humans safe.

We’ll also be calling for implicit bias training for any Amazon employee who supervises any other employee. COVID-19 exposed the problems of our economy, and our treatment as essential workers but they existed before the pandemic, and they will exist afterwards. This crisis gives us the visibility to be able to speak now, but we wont dematerialize after it’s over. The essential workers you’re celebrating now will still be essential after the pandemic— but they’ll most likely stop being recognized as such. We have to learn that wealth isn’t virtue and poverty is not a sin. There is dignity in every job, and every person’s contribution to society matters.

In The Grand Illusion: how the pandemic exposed we’re all just pretending, Lynn Steger Strong writes:

A thing, though, about perpetuating misperceptions, about pretending — because you’re busy surviving, because you can’t stop playing the rigged game on the off-chance somehow that you might outsmart it, because you can’t help but feel like your circumstances must somehow be your fault — is that it makes it that much harder for any individual within the group to tell the truth.

Individual shame and an individual desire to succeed in ruthless systems has kept many of us quiet about this country’s failures. They’re now so blatantly apparent.

One of the things I hope this crisis makes space for is more of us acknowledging and saying out loud that our losses and our failures aren’t our individual faults. I hope we might begin to say out loud all the ways the system has failed us. To admit as a group that we are being slaughtered and exploited, that our bodies are overworked and undervalued, it takes the onus off of any one of us. It can and should make us feel less shame and less fear.

I hope that this statement will be a rallying cry for workers around the world to stand up and recognize their worth. Without us “job creators” can’t claim to have created any jobs. Without us, there is no GDP. We must reject the notion that it is even possible for one human being’s work to be valued at many thousands of times the value of another human being’s work. We must instead embrace the notion that we make better decisions the more diverse we are, and the more we make space for every voice to be heard.

David Zapolsky’s utterance was the obscene shadow of capitalist ideology, in much the same way that the way that I was treated was the obscene shadow of Amazon’s desire to be anti-union, without being anti-union. Based on how I’ve been treated, and the other stories from around the country, it seems clear to me that Amazon is retaliating against whistleblowers. As a shareholder, and an employee, I call on the Chairman to conduct a thorough investigation into whether Amazon’s culture fosters, or covers up instances of retaliation.