With the holiday season just around the corner, the pressure to spend money and buy gifts is all around us. The last few years have added another dimension to get you in the shopping mood with Black Friday. As the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, this seems to be the official jumping off point for the spending season. One of the key retailers offering deals is Amazon, the ubiquitous global marketplace which just recorded $9.9bn in profits. But this profit-making comes on the back of an exploitative business model that erodes local economies while disregarding the rights and well-being of workers, communities and the environment.
Warehouse workers and drivers for Amazon are regularly subjected to a high-pressure environment, with little regard for their health or rights. They are expected to meet unrealistic productivity targets in unsafe warehouse conditions with injury rates nearly double that of their competitors, often at poverty-level wages. Worker turnover is deliberately kept high and the company blocks attempts to form unions.
On the environmental side, Amazon not only promotes massive overconsumption through its convenience-focused shopping model but in a 2021 UK investigation it was also found to be illegally destroying merchandise, with millions of returned or unsold items shredded and sent to the landfill each year. And despite making a pledge in 2019 to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, at the rate it is currently reducing emissions, this would take until the year 2378.
With its global monopoly over online shopping, Amazon directly threatens the survival of small and medium-sized businesses, leading to local shops closing down and resulting in the erosion of local communities. Despite its 50 billion euros in revenue in 2022, Amazon has not paid any taxes for the last five years in Luxembourg, the headquarters of Amazon Europe, thanks to careful tax structuring. This means millions of euros in taxes that should be supporting the communities where Amazon is located going unpaid while company shareholders only continue to benefit from growing profits.
The Make Amazon Pay Movement
In 2020, the Make Amazon Pay movement was born as a reaction to these exploitative practices. It now brings together over 80 diverse organisations fighting for social and environmental justice, over 400 parliamentarians and thousands of citizens from around the world. Their commitment is to make Amazon take responsibility when it comes to wages and working conditions, their environmental impact and paying taxes. They are calling on Amazon to:
Improve workplace conditions: This includes increasing pay, hazard pay, adequate break time, suspending harsh productivity measures, extending paid sick leave, and allowing independent health and safety commissions for workers without representation.
Provide Job Security: This includes ending casual employment, establishing transparent procedures for voicing concerns, and reinstating workers fired for speaking up or organizing.
Respect Workers' Universal Rights: This includes ending union-busting, granting union access without retaliation, global bargaining, ensuring workers' rights in supply chains, and sharing power through democratic governance.
Operate Sustainably: This includes committing to zero emissions by 2030, terminating fossil fuel contracts, addressing environmental racism, and ending sponsorship of climate change denial.
Pay Back to Society: This includes paying taxes in full, ending partnerships with discriminatory authorities, stopping anti-competitive practices, ensuring transparency over consumer data, and halting the development and sale of mass surveillance devices and software.
Come and join others around the world
in denouncing Amazon’s practices and demanding that governments hold the company accountable!
This Black Friday, November 24th, 2023, the movement is organising strikes and protests in over 30 countries around the world to demand that Amazon pays its due. In Luxembourg, a strike will take place at 12pm at Place Hamilius in Luxembourg City, backed by local organisations Rise for Climate Luxembourg, OGBL, ASTM, Collectif Tax Justice Lëtzebuerg, etika, Déi Lénk, déi jonk Lénk, vélorution Esch, Confédération Internationale Solidaire Écologiste, Greenpeace and CELL.
Turn to your local economy as an alternative
What else can we do as individuals to create a shift away from Amazon’s exploitative profit-making model? What would our lives look like if we instead embraced a model based on local, intentional, regenerative consumption? Several paradigms have been developed that take this approach, such as the Economy for the Common Good, an economic model that emphasises a good life for everyone on the planet as its main goal. Another well-known model is Doughnut Economics, which emphasises living within planetary and social boundaries, where human needs such as housing, water, food, and a living wage are met while staying under a defined environmental ceiling to avoid further harm to the planet. What both models have in common is a shift away from GDP growth as a marker of prosperity to ensuring that both people and planet can thrive.
At CELL we have a long history of supporting local citizen-led initiatives that create positive change and resilience within communities. From community gardens that create social links and enable increased self-sufficiency through food production to Repair Cafés, which encourage using items longer through careful repair rather than constantly buying new, these projects help to bring back a layer of local citizen participation within our economies.
This trend goes beyond Luxembourg, as citizens around the globe work to regain control over their local economies and put sustainability, solidarity and well-being at the forefront. These projects can take many forms, from alternative currencies, participative cafés, cooperative supermarkets, community-supported agriculture farms and more, but what they have in common is a holistic view of well-being, which prioritises a different measure of profit, based around positive outcomes for the environment, individuals and society.
To further support the transition to a local economy of well-being, we are bringing the change-making Start-up de Territoire programme to Luxembourg, under the name of Boost Lokal Lëtzebuerg. Through a series of workshops and events, we will support citizens in collectively creating local economic solutions to meet local needs. Over 13,000 citizens from 15 territories across France have already contributed to their local economic transition through the development of 240 projects, and we look forward to further supporting the emergence of local businesses in Luxembourg that will contribute to increasing local resilience while creating solutions to social and environmental issues.
This Black Friday, let's stand in support of those fighting to make Amazon accountable while making the decision to consume with intention, choosing to buy only what we need and supporting those local businesses and initiatives that keep our communities thriving.
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