jeff bezos devil
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, richest man in the world
There's been a lot of news coverage about online retail behemoth Amazon lately, in particular with regards to its treatment of employees. Since that UK report about a 13-year-old girl finding a note with "Help me please, PMP staff are evil" scribbled on her package invoice, a follow-up report looked into workers' conditions at Amazon's UK distribution centers:
It has been a year since workers at the largest Amazon warehouse in Dunfermline were found camping out in tents in the woods near the motorway, in an attempt to save some money.

Once again, Amazon is back in the news.

A report by the Sunday Mirror published in November exposed the "brutal" work conditions at an Amazon warehouse in Tilbury, England. According to the Mirror, employees were pushed to the brink by "impossible targets," 55-hour weeks and timed toilet breaks.

Fuelling the outrage sparked by the Mirror's investigation, the management at the Tilbury warehouse reportedly attempted to boost morale among the staff by awarding top-performers with chocolates, worth 7p a piece.
I don't know about you, but if I'm working a 55-hour week with timed toilet breaks, shipping expensive stuff people don't need, while camping in the woods near the highway because I'm too broke to afford housing, a cheap piece of chocolate really isn't going to do it for me.

Well, it gets worse:
The three main employers in Dunfermline are Sky News, Amazon and the Dockyards. Now that the government has terminated a $1.01 billion contract with Babcock International, the Rosyth Dockyards were forced to make 200 employees redundant. The demand for a stable job in the region has spiked.

Despite this, many people we asked said they would not go back to Amazon, even if there were no other option.
So basically, the economic situation in Dunfermline is pretty dire and even though many are financially desperate, they still wouldn't return to Amazon.com to work. Says a lot, don't you think?
On an eleven-hour shift, employees are permitted two fifteen-minute breaks, as well as half an hour for lunch. The warehouse is the size of eleven football pitches, and employees must walk through security queues to leave the building. Many employees we spoke to found the breaks to be heavily timed and very stressful.

"I worked there for four and a half years. The last year was probably the roughest because the breaks got a lot stricter. You get 15-minute, half an hour break on an eleven-hour shift. If you were one or two seconds late then they would come and find you and ask why you were so late. We started going through 'Daps', which is like a feedback system. Verbal warning, second warning, final warning, dismissal. If you get a warning you will probably get a disciplinary.

I would never go back to them. If you work there you can be classed as just a number.

I've got a knee issue, due to working there. Working in the docks, I lifted something and did some damage to my knee. Instead of taking time off I just continued working on it, and now it is irreparable."

- Ryan, 23
Ryan's not the only one describing sweatshop-like working conditions, either:
Even if we're 3 minutes late we get a warning. I knew a guy that was 2 minutes late, because there was a blizzard outside. His manager was not angry, but because he had been late before they had no choice but to sack him.

Julie, 40
Former Project manager at Amazon
I found that at times, the targets were not achievable. My scanner was telling me to collect 140 items an hour, but I was fully aware that whilst going full speed, I was only picking 110 items. The beeper drove me crazy, I heard it in my dreams.

I was there for 9 months. That's the maximum you can do. They told me I could reapply after 6 or 7 weeks, but they didn't accept my application. I've been unemployed since.

I was gonna go back out of desperation, but they wouldn't have me!

Gerald, 37
Ex-Picker at Amazon Dunfermline
And it gets worse:
According to the news outlet, one worker even had to be taken to hospital by an ambulance when they collapsed on the job.

Others simply slumped asleep where they stood, exhausted from the physically demanding job that sees them walking at least 10 miles a day.

To get a job at the Amazon warehouse in Dunfermline, Scotland, workers must apply through the agency, which handles everything from transport, to payment, and sick leave. Such recruitment agencies are especially good at employing seasonal workers to handle Amazon's busy periods, namely, Black Friday, and the Christmas period.

These workers will be expected to work in the warehouse for just a few months at a time. They are given ten hour shifts (day or night), four days a week- and sometimes will be asked to work longer- Amazon's representative says that all overtime is paid.

Often, seasonal workers will be bussed in from cities as far as Glasgow or Dundee - a two-hour bus ride at least. At the end of the season, contracts will be terminated, and employees can choose to reapply after waiting 4-6 weeks.

The result? Overexhaustion and job insecurity.
It's more than a little reminiscent of the treatment of Foxconn workers making Apple iPhones and iPads in China:
One worker told the newspaper: 'Sometimes my roommates cry when they arrive in the dormitory after a long day.'

She said they were made to work illegally long hours for a basic daily wage, as little as £5.20, and that workers were housed in dormitories of up to 24 people a room.
...
Anti-suicide nets were put up around the dormitory buildings on the advice of psychologists.
Another amazing thing about Amazon is that it has never turned a profit (read: no stock dividends to stock owners), so undoubtedly a large number of its ventures lose money. Their 'Prime' program, with free shipping for anything and free movies and TV? That has got to be losing money.

So why do it? Because by cutting costs left and right they can beat the competition. Do that for long enough, as they have been doing for years, and they'll crush all competition. What happens when stores near you can no longer compete with Amazon? Nearly every retail store (and even a number of other business ventures), whether they realize it or not, are competing with Amazon. All Amazon needs is a large retail operation (like its recent purchase of Whole Foods) and to put enough malls out of business and buy them up on the cheap to setup micro-warehouses with drone deliveries.

At that point, they can then raise their prices to whatever they want, and pay and treat their employees any way they want, because they'll be the only game in town.

And that isn't the only evil thing Amazon's been doing:
The AWS Secret Region will allow the 17 intelligence agencies to host, analyze and run applications on government data classified at the secret level through the company's $600 million C2S contract, brokered several years ago with the CIA. AWS already provides a region for the intelligence community's top secret data.
It would appear that Amazon is now running the server infrastructure for all of the 'Deep State's' nefarious operations.

And while they're at it, they're scrubbing negative reviews for the latest book by the "Original Swamp Thing", Deep State puppet Hillary Clinton:
In what many have dubbed a flagrant intervention by Amazon itself to seemingly boost the rating of Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened, the Telegraph first reported, and subsequently many others observed first hand, that Amazon has been monitoring and deleting 1-star reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book "which was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released."