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Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar want schools to abolish “school lunch debt” and feed all children at school free of charge. In a decent society, that would be uncontroversial — yet every Republican and many Democrats haven’t signed on.

Children have a right to eat a good meal before they’re expected to pay attention to their classes.
(John Moore / Getty Images)

Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar, along with seventeen colleagues in the Senate and seventy-four in the House, have just introduced legislation to “end child hunger in schools by offering free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all students, preschool through high school, regardless of income, eliminating all school meal debt, and strengthening local economies by incentivizing local food procurement.”

The Universal Free School Meals Program Act of 2023 would, in other words, make sure that every student is treated the same at the school cafeteria and none of them accumulate “school lunch debt” — a combination of words that wouldn’t exist in a remotely decent society.

If you’re wondering who wouldn’t be in favor of that, a glance at the names missing from the cosponsor list gives you your answer:

The majority of Democrats in the House and Senate, plus all Republicans.

The Heritage Foundation Versus Hot Meals for Children

We already had universal free school meals as a temporary measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, the conservative Heritage Foundation warned that the program was “neither targeted nor likely to be temporary.” They quoted the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who quipped, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

There’s some truth to Friedman’s complaint. Once a social program has been shown to work well and make ordinary people’s lives better, there’s a “danger” that it will be difficult for politicians to reverse it. Sadly, in this case Friedman was wrong. The temporary school meals program ended last September.

Heritage’s commentary, written by the foundation’s Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy Jonathan Butcher and former senior research fellow Darren Bakst, argued that providing “welfare” to students who didn’t need it was “wasteful” and “fiscally irresponsible.” They didn’t even try to argue that the actual sums of money involved in providing hot meals to every child who wants them were exorbitant — the article includes no dollar figure. Instead, they seem to find it obvious that it’s “irresponsible” to feed children before vetting their parents’ finances to make sure that they can’t afford to pay.

And in addition to this terrible irresponsibility, they argue, universal free school meals are unfair! “[T]he universal free meals system will take money from low income families and then use it to subsidize high income families who have no need for such welfare.”

This argument could apply to the public school itself as easily as to school lunch. A bolder version of Butcher and Bakst could reason that giving low-income students reduced tuition or exempting them from tuition entirely is one thing, but to simply let the children of doctors and lawyers attend public high schools for free amounts to taxing low-income people to pay for the education of high-income people. How unfair!

If they actually cared about the fairness argument, their minds would be put at ease by a reminder that if universal public goods are funded through progressive taxation, the wealthy end up shelling out much more than the equivalent of what they receive.

And as a matter of practicality, means-tested programs are far more politically vulnerable than universal ones. Many people are less motivated to preserve programs that they don’t think they’ll benefit from — and they may actively resent them if they fall into the inevitable gray zone of “could use the help” but not quite poor enough to qualify a “low-income.”

Compare the predictable backlash to attempts to cut Social Security to the way Bill Clinton was able to nix the AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program in the 90s with little pushback — even though shuttering the program had grisly consequences for many low-income mothers. Or the way Republicans were able to pass symbolic repeals of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) many times during the final years of Obama’s presidency without being punished by voters, whereas even conservative parties in countries like Canada and the UK have to at least pretend to support maintaining their countries’ universal health care programs.

Don’t Single Out Poor Children

While I find these counterarguments compelling, if the conversation stops there I don’t think we’ve gotten to the core of the issue. Children have a right to eat a good meal before they’re expected to pay attention to their classes. They should be able to do so without jumping through hoops or being socially stratified.

My late friend Michael Brooks once wrote about the anxious look he’d see on his mother’s face when she was about to pay for groceries with her SNAP card — the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, popularly known as “food stamps.” When I read that, I thought about the hundreds of times I went through the school lunch line when I was a kid and heard the cafeteria worker ask each kid, “Free or reduced lunch?”

Even then, that viscerally bothered me. It seemed obvious that asking children to publicly announce their parents’ income level at school was wrong. I don’t remember what happened if anyone just forgot their lunch money — I don’t think the abomination of “school lunch debt” was a feature of the East Lansing public school system back then — but why on earth should anyone have to worry about any of this?

Even if you believe, as I very much do not, that inequality among adults is justifiable on meritocratic grounds, surely an absolute baseline that any halfway decent person could agree to is that children should all be treated the same while they’re at school.

And yet.

Democrats and Republicans Versus Hot Meals for Children

It’s to be expected that the market-worshipping ghouls at the Heritage Foundation would be against feeding children without first scrutinizing their parents’ bank accounts. It’s far more revealing that none of the alleged populists in the GOP are cosponsoring the Universal Free School Meals Act.

I don’t see J. D. Vance’s name on there. Or Marco Rubio. Or Josh Hawley. Or any other Republican. And seventeen Democratic senators — plus Bernie, an independent who caucuses with Democrats — adds up to only about a third of the Democrats in the Senate. The proportion of House Democrats cosponsoring is similar.

And again: these are the numbers for a bill to feed children. A bill to eliminate “school meal debt.”

A society where any of this is controversial is deeply sick.

In 1967, Milton Friedman launched a counterrevolution in economics that overturned the Keynesian theory of inflation. Three years later, economist James Tobin issued a powerful theoretical rebuttal — but in the economics mainstream, it’s been all but forgotten.

Economists Milton Friedman (L) and James Tobin (R). (Bettmann / Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

Milton Friedman revolutionized macroeconomics with his 1967 presidential speech to the American Economics Association (AEA), which presented a theory of the so-called natural rate of unemployment for the first time. That speech, which played a major role in discrediting the brand of Keynesianism that prevailed in postwar liberal economic policy thinking, remains one of the most frequently cited papers in all of economics.

Much less well remembered is the rebuttal to Friedman’s ideas issued by another future Nobel Laureate economist in another AEA presidential address, four years later: Yale University’s James Tobin. Tobin’s dueling theory of inflation held out the possibility of an alternative path for economics and macroeconomic policy, but it has seldom received the same recognition, or the same scholarly interest.

Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with Thomas Palley, coeditor of the Review of Keynesian Economics and former AFL-CIO assistant director of public policy, about why Tobin’s inflation theory matters today, and why the issue of inflation continues to perplex both the economics mainstream and the Left.

Seth Ackerman

You have always been a critic of economics orthodoxy. A few weeks ago I interviewed James Forder, who wrote a book I’m a big fan of — I’m sure you know it — called Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth.

In that book, Forder exposes as a myth the story everyone is told about inflation in the 1960s and 1970s: about how a blinkered, Keynesian-dominated economics profession had this very naïve view of inflation and didn’t understand the importance of inflation expectations in determining inflation, and as a result they let inflation get out of control.

What’s interesting to me is that the supposedly “naive” view that is alleged to have been so widespread in the ’60s is actually not so different — in its conclusions — from your own view.

Over the years you have developed a theoretical basis for the view that there is a potentially stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation that policy makers can exploit. In other words, policy makers can choose to have somewhat higher inflation and somewhat lower unemployment, or they can choose the opposite sort of policy, and either one can potentially be a stable policy choice.

I want to ask you about those ideas, but first I’d like to hear your take on what the economics establishment currently says about inflation, and why you disagree with it.

Thomas Palley

Well, the first thing to note about inflation is that there are many different kinds of inflation. They all have different logics and different effects, and that’s something that is not taught in textbooks but ought to be. It’s also something that the economics profession doesn’t really get, or at least does not emphasize sufficiently.

I distinguish between six major kinds of inflation. One is demand-pull inflation, which is the story of “too much money chasing too few goods” — that’s the nutshell way of talking about it.

A second form of inflation is conflict inflation, which is conflict between capital and labor over the distribution of income.

A third form of inflation is supply-side inflation, which concerns global commodity price shocks. Here, the classic example is the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s.

A fourth form of inflation is imported inflation, when inflation is caused by exchange-rate depreciation and a rise in the price of imports — and I suppose to the extent that our current inflation is supply-chain inflation, it could be interpreted as fitting in this category.

The fifth form of inflation is what I call high inflation. This is often associated with large budget deficits and dysfunctional politics where a government needs funding, but it can’t get it together to fund itself with appropriate taxation, so budget deficits are the way they do it, which produces inflation.

Lastly, the sixth form of inflation is hyperinflation, which is a rare event. It’s usually associated with wars in which the supply side of the economy has been destroyed, or with failed states or kleptocratic governments that have destroyed the conditions for doing business.

The Phillips curve is about demand-pull inflation. The controversies raised by Milton Friedman were about the Phillips curve, which means that they are about demand-pull inflation.

The orthodox story that is told today is that there’s a temporary, short-run, negative trade-off between unemployment and inflation — or at least that the economy generates a pattern of outcomes in the short run that looks like such a trade-off. But if policy makers try and exploit that trade-off, it will crumble, and they will be forced to go back to what is called the natural rate of unemployment — only now with a higher inflation rate than before and no reduction in unemployment.

Friedman did a service by framing the argument. The problem is that I think he came out on the wrong side of that argument.

Basically, that view is the legacy of Milton Friedman. Though I am critical of the Friedman view, I still think he made an important contribution. He focused on the issues that were at stake, which are: how are wages set, what is the role of inflation expectations, and is there a systematic trade-off between inflation and unemployment that can inform policy, especially monetary policy. He did a service by framing the argument. The problem is that I think Friedman came out on the wrong side of that argument.

Seth Ackerman

How so?

Thomas Palley

Well, I think there is such a thing as a systematic Phillips curve. And if James Forder thinks there isn’t, I would disagree with him. Now, I am aware of Forder’s argument that Friedman engaged in some strawman rhetoric. But Friedman’s challenge was basically reasonable. Why do I say that? Well, if you go back to the early 1960s, there was a widespread belief that there was a systematic trade-off between inflation and unemployment that policy could use. People believed in the “structural Phillips curve.” Friedman questioned the long-run existence of that trade-off using very conventional economic theory.

Now, he also said that economists had forgotten about inflation expectations. And that’s where the strawman argument creeps in, because economists certainly were aware of inflation expectations, and they were also aware that expectations could shift the Phillips curve. That’s very clear in the famous 1960 article by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. If you read it, they do talk about inflation expectations being important, and how changing inflation expectations would eventually affect the position of the Phillips curve.

That said, economists had not fully worked through the logic and implications of that, and that’s what Friedman did. So, to repeat, Friedman showed that when you used conventional theory and you added inflation expectations and took them seriously, the Phillips curve would slowly dissolve if policy makers tried to take advantage of it. Instead of getting lower unemployment with higher inflation, in the end you would just get higher inflation and unemployment would return to its so-called natural rate regardless.

Seth Ackerman

It sounds like what you’re saying is that if you believe in a stable long-run unemployment-inflation trade-off, it doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t understand the role of inflation expectations. Whereas Forder perhaps too easily leaves an impression that one automatically implies the other.

Thomas Palley

Yes. Friedman’s work clearly did shake things up: economists did believe that there was a policy-exploitable trade-off, and that’s why what he said was so controversial. So my read on Friedman is that he overstated the claim that economists were unaware of inflation expectations, but on the other hand — and this is what’s important — he showed that if you used conventional economic theory about how wages are set, you didn’t get the Phillips curve that economists were working with.

So he showed that their macroeconomics was inconsistent with their own theory. And the logic is very simple. Conventional theory says that wages are set to balance the labor market and ensure full employment. If you follow that logic through, if policy tries to overstimulate the economy beyond the point of full employment, then wages will just rise faster to restore the balance, and you just end up at the natural rate of unemployment again, but now with persistent higher inflation. I don’t think economists had really pieced that all together.

Now, this is where Friedman gets lucky. In 1967 he makes this argument about the Phillips curve dissolving. And then lo and behold, it suddenly starts to dissolve. The Phillips curve that people had been watching in the early 1960s, which was a very nice curve that seemed to offer some very palatable policy trade-offs, suddenly began to dissolve — it started to become steeper and to move.

Friedman gets lucky. In 1967 he makes this argument about the Phillips curve dissolving. And then lo and behold, it suddenly starts to dissolve.

And one reason was surely because of inflation expectations kicking in. But there were also other reasons. And that’s why I made those comments about different kinds of inflation. So, for example, income-distribution conflict kicked in. The 1960s and early 1970s were increasingly a period of conflict between capital and labor over the profit share.

And then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had a commodity price boom, which was followed by the huge OPEC oil price shocks. Those supply shocks also had the effect of amplifying the conflict inflation.

Under those circumstances, the Phillips curve essentially dissolved, because inflation was being determined by so many factors. And that dissolution was taken as proof that Friedman was right.

Now, here’s the twist. As I interpret it, the economics profession willingly went along with the story that Friedman was right. And there’s a reason for that. Friedman had based his case on conventional theory. And the economics profession is not in the business of challenging conventional theory. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It’s in the business of defending conventional theory.

The Phillips curve was always an observed empirical relationship, a statistically fitted relationship. The challenge was always going to be to provide a theoretical explanation of that observed relationship. Friedman showed that economic theory didn’t have an explanation that supported a policy trade-off and that, therefore, there was need for new theory. The Left didn’t have a theory either, even though it wanted to believe that the trade-off existed. All the Left had was a conflict theory of inflation. And that’s where James Tobin comes in.

The economics profession is not in the business of challenging conventional theory. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Seth Ackerman

Right. So what was Tobin’s intervention in the inflation debate?

Thomas Palley

Tobin was the one economist who tackled the problem and really looked for a new theoretical explanation. And I have to say, I was a graduate student at Yale and took his macroeconomics class, and his work has deeply informed my own thinking.

Tobin’s basic idea is that we need to think of the economy as consisting of many sectors, or what you might think of as many small economies that are aggregated together into a national economy. Each sector is being hit by random disturbances. Demand and spending are shifting between these sectors. And this is going on all the time. At any moment, some sectors are at full employment, and others are below full employment.

Tobin realized that inflation might be a way of helping the economy rebalance faster. This is the vision he lays out very clearly in his AEA presidential address in 1971.

The problem is that sectors below full employment have a hard time rebalancing, because there’s resistance to wage cuts — and for very good reasons. I’ve written about this. First, employers are always looking to cut wages no matter what the conditions are. That’s a fundamental piece of the structure of capitalism. So how can you trust an employer who says, “I need to cut wages because business conditions are bad?” How is a worker going to be able to trust that? Employment is a very conflicted relationship, and as a result it’s hard to push wage cuts through, even if they are needed. Second, workers are debtors. For instance, most of us have mortgages, so wage cuts increase the burden of debts, and they’re going to be resisted for that reason.

The secret sauce is to increase demand everywhere. That restores full employment in sectors that have unemployment, but it causes inflation in sectors already at full employment. And that’s where you begin to get the possibility of a trade-off. The more demand you throw in, the more sectors will be at full employment, the faster inflation will be — but also fewer sectors will have unemployment because they’ve adjusted faster back to full employment.

Seth Ackerman

But then the obvious question is, why wouldn’t Friedman’s story about inflation expectations kick in at that point? People see higher prices, that gets incorporated into wage bargains, and inflation just keeps accelerating.

Thomas Palley

Well, that’s exactly right. Tobin never quite figured out how to answer that. And I would say I regard that as being my small contribution here. What you can say is that in sectors with unemployment, workers know full well what the inflation rate is. They’re not fooled. They can open a newspaper, they watch TV, and they’ll get the inflation rate. But if you’re in a depressed sector, you may decide to settle for slightly less of a wage increase. You won’t be fully compensated for inflation, and thereby you’ll effectively take a small wage cut relative to the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, the sectors at full employment will fully incorporate inflation expectations.

In sectors with unemployment, workers know full well what the inflation rate is. They’re not fooled.

The key is recognizing that the degree to which sectors incorporate expected inflation in their wage settlement will depend on local conditions. You get less feed-through of inflation expectations in depressed sectors, and you get full feed-through of inflation expectations in sectors at full employment.

One way you might illustrate this is the metaphor of elevators and escalators. Mainstream economists think of labor markets as being like elevators. You have a shock to the local labor market. The next period, the local labor market resets wages, and it quickly goes back to full employment. So the labor market is like an elevator. An elevator shoots back up to full employment — quick adjustment.

The implicit Tobin view is that labor markets are like escalators. You have a shock; the local labor market then slowly adjusts back to full employment. Faster demand growth is a way of speeding up the escalator so that you get to full employment sooner. But the cost is inflation in those labor markets elsewhere that are already at full employment.

Of course, for economic theory the issue is to precisely identify that argument and show how it works, which is where technical modeling enters and gets tricky. That took time, and that’s part of the tragedy. Tobin was very quick out of the gate in 1971 with a counter to Friedman’s argument in his presidential address. But the precise argument and formal modeling of it took a lot longer. And by then, the economics profession had sort of moved on and was not in a mood for listening.

Seth Ackerman

So far have you managed to interest other economists in this kind of research program?

Thomas Palley

No, they’re not interested in my particular argument, but they have picked up on a related argument by George Akerlof and his coauthors.

One thing I will say on this point is that one of the great pities is that progressives never really embraced Tobin and his view of the economy. Because if you take the approach that I do, where there have to be different theories of inflation to describe different types of inflation, his thinking fills a gap in their thinking. It provides an explanation of the Phillips curve trade-off, which most progressives believe in but lack an explanation of.

However, progressives in the 1970s and 1980s did not join with Tobin. In my view there are two reasons for that. One reason is that Tobin was quite mainstream in his thinking on some aspects of economic theory, especially income distribution. He believed in the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of income distribution — which I don’t believe in, by the way — which contributed to suspicion and rejection of Tobin by the Left. A second reason is that the Left insists on seeing all inflation in developed economies as conflict inflation. The Left tends not to appreciate different types of inflation, and that’s also been a cause of difference between me and my progressive colleagues.

Seth Ackerman

How do you see the current inflation situation?

Thomas Palley

If I had been at the Fed in 2022, I would also have been voting for raising interest rates. In my view, it’s not just inflation that warranted higher interest rates. An even more important reason was asset-price bubbles and house-price inflation. Asset-price bubbles end in busts, and asset-price inflation is a very unfair way to distribute the fruits of economic activity. It’s not a good way to run an economy, and it’s not good for working families.

Asset-price bubbles end in busts, and asset-price inflation is a very unfair way to distribute the fruits of economic activity.

I’ve worked in Washington for over twenty-five years, and I’ve never yet come across a progressive who has argued for raising interest rates. I think that may be because progressives always view inflation as conflict inflation, which makes them against raising interest rates. In conflict inflation raising rates is tacitly siding with employers. In contrast, I carry in the back of my mind many theories of inflation, and one of them is Tobin’s Phillips curve theory. Given that, I’m much more open to the possibility that an increase in interest rates can be needed to tame excess demand. I think that is relevant to current conditions, along with the asset-price bubble problem.

Seth Ackerman

Yet you also advocate a higher inflation target.

Thomas Palley

Yes. We may need to tame inflation and we may also need a higher inflation target. That is not inconsistent. In my own work, I talk of the “backward bending Phillips curve,” which generates an optimal rate of inflation that I call the minimum-unemployment rate of inflation or MURI — the rate of inflation that will deliver the minimum unemployment rate. I think that is what policy should aim for. And I would say it’s somewhere between 3 percent and 6 percent. That’s quite a wide range, but we can take a midpoint, say around 4 to 5 percent.

If you push inflation above 5 percent, it’s quite likely that your Phillips curve is going to start bending backward, and you’re going to lose some of the benefits of inflation. The precise level is something that you’d only find out by experimentation. But a long time ago I did a short empirical paper that basically tried to make the argument. What I found was that the duration of spells of unemployment declined with higher inflation, which is proof of the escalator at work. If inflation is speeding up the escalator, unemployment spells will be shorter because you get to the top faster.

One of the ironies of the moment is that, in my view, we’re in the inflation sweet spot but we’re trying to push it below the sweet spot.

Seth Ackerman

So your views may have coincided with Larry Summers’s views at some earlier point, but at this point, where he really wants to see the labor market get a lot more slack, that’s where you depart from him.

Thomas Palley

Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, I often find myself caught between sides on these issues. I think Larry Summers was right on the need to get going and raise interest rates — though also for additional reasons than those that he gave. But now he’s in danger of being wrong by pushing too far.

Conversely, progressives were wrong in opposing interest rate increases in 2022. But at some stage they will be right if the Fed persists with raising rates — and I have to say, at 5 percent I begin to get a bit anxious. Right now, there’s good reason for an interest-rate pause.

On Thursday, May 11, a grim discovery was made at an Arby’s restaurant in New Iberia, Louisiana. An employee of the restaurant uncovered another employee’s body in the eatery’s freezer.

The New Iberia Police Department was immediately called to the scene and began their investigation. Authorities have not released the employee’s identity and do not suspect foul play. Sgt. Daesha Hughes, a spokesperson for the police department, said the case is still being investigated.

The Arbys in question released a statement claiming their full cooperation with the police. According to their statement, the restaurant cannot further comment on the matter due to the current active investigation.

How this employee ended up in the restaurant’s freezer is a mystery. Furthermore, many questions still need to be answered.

What started as an ordinary day quickly became an unexpected tragedy when a woman’s lifeless body was found inside a restaurant’s freezer. Although the authorities are currently still investigating the situation, it goes without saying that the people of New Iberia are hoping to find closure soon.

Сви чланци Глобалног истраживања могу се читати на 51 језику тако што ћете активирати дугме Преведи веб локацију испод имена аутора.

Да бисте добили дневни билтен Глобал Ресеарцх-а (изабрани чланци), кликните овде.

Кликните на дугме за дељење изнад да бисте …

The post Da li bi vaspitači trebalo da postavljaju granice adolescentima? appeared first on Global Research.

Mia Corte, a 20-year-old student at the University of Georgia, experienced a sudden and unexpected storm that uprooted a tree, critically injuring her last Tuesday afternoon, as reported by Fox 5.

Mia was sending a video of the storm to her boyfriend just moments before her phone died at 5:04 PM, thought to be the exact time the tree landed on her. Medics quickly rushed her to Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital, where she was treated for severe head trauma and extensive bodily injury.

Mia is a rising junior and communication sciences and disorders major at UGA. Her parents told the outlet that they consider her a brave spirit and a real fighter, which is exactly what she needs to make a recovery.

While the neurologists advise Mia to take a break and wait four to six weeks to do nothing, she is determined to take her classes online this summer. They have emphasized that she has a long road ahead of her.

The Corte family is amazed by the amount of love and support they have received from the Athens community, UGA, and the hospital staff.

Mia Corte, a young UGA student, experienced a heavy storm that brought a tree upon her, critically injuring her last Tuesday. Doctors, police officers, and hospital staff from the Athens community have come together to show compassion and dedication to Mia’s healing process. Despite her severe injuries, Mia remains hopeful, determined to continue her studies online this summer.

On May Day, South Korean construction union leader Yang Hoe-dong took his own life by setting himself on fire rather than accept the state’s anti-union charges against him. Yang is a brutal casualty of the South Korean president’s war on labor.

South Korean construction union leader Yang Hoe-dong. (KCTU via Labor Notes)

A South Korean union leader has ended his life, enraged in anger and humiliation as the government attempted to bring racketeering charges against him over union activity.

On the morning of May Day, Yang Hoe-dong, a chapter leader of a national construction workers’ union, set himself on fire at a courthouse where he was summoned to a hearing for the review of an arrest warrant for him. He was pronounced dead at the hospital the following day.

The death was in protest of attacks by the government of President Yoon Suk-yeol on the 160,000-strong Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU) and its rival union since February, when Yoon declared some of the unions’ activity “construction thuggery” and tried to eliminate it.

South Korea’s construction industry is marred generally by organized crime and corruption. There are two national unions: the KCWU, an affiliate of the 1.1 million-member independent Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU); and the KUCLU, which was expelled in January from the smaller and more conservative Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) for its leaders’ embezzlement of union funds. To a lesser extent, it is also tainted by mob interests.

The remarks by President Yoon, himself a former prosecutor general, gave a further green light to the police, who had already launched a two-hundred-day crackdown on construction-site irregularities starting in December 2022.

By the end of March, twelve members of the two unions were under detention and sixty-three were being prosecuted. Unionists made up more than 77 percent of the 2,863 individuals investigated or questioned during the first half of the intense police campaign.

The police were rewarded for treating unionists as mobsters. Out of nineteen merit-based promotions for police officers, six were awarded based on their roles in the crackdown, according to the independent daily Kyunghyang, which cited police data.

Union in the Crosshairs

The Yoon government appeared to have set its sights on the KCWU because it is one of the fastest-growing and most strident branches of the KCTU. Between 2016 and 2020, the construction workers’ union more than doubled in size from seventy-eight thousand members to 159,000, helping the parent KCTU to replace the FKTU as the country’s largest union league.

A combination of a red-hot real estate market and hard work by organizers like Yang led the leap in growth. Most of all, the KCWU, formed in March 2007, was well positioned to benefit from two landmark wins.

In 2001, a twenty-eight-day national work stoppage by tower crane operators won the first-ever national collective bargaining agreement for construction workers. That laid the groundwork for a rudimentary form of a closed-shop labor contract two years later, mandating contractors to hire union workers exclusively.

The KCWU was the only national union that walked off the job in solidarity with a national strike by truckers in November of last year.

Although it often goes unsaid publicly, the conservative government looks askance at the KCWU because of some leaders’ alleged ties to the Jinbo Party, a regrouping from the Unified Progressive Party, outlawed in 2014 by the Constitutional Court for alleged connections to North Korea.

In March, the police executed search warrants on two local offices of the KCTU on allegations that the union made illicit donations to the Jinbo Party. In an editorial in April, Chosun Ilbo, the country’s largest conservative daily, criticized the KCWU for allegedly keeping a Jinbo leader on the payroll of a construction project despite her absence from the site. Conservatives abhor the infusion of labor militancy with what they regard as pro–North Korea fringe politics.

In a by-election in the same month, the Jinbo Party won its first-ever seat in the National Assembly.

Legacy Practices and Vicious Legislation

To date, the massive crackdown has turned up little evidence of corruption tied to the KCWU. Still, the Yoon government could jail its leaders by criminalizing legacy practices at construction sites.

In South Korea, the multilayered labyrinth of subcontracts often shortens construction time to risky levels, forcing workers to work longer and dangerously — while it exempts construction conglomerates from accountability.

In the city of Gwangju, the facade of a high-rise condominium under construction collapsed in January 2022, killing six workers and three passengers of a bus hit by debris.

The project, initiated by HDC Hyundai Development Company, had lost at least three months of construction time after a series of subcontracts before it finally landed with a mob-influenced contractor who further cut corners. HDC Hyundai, the country’s ninth-largest contactor, was only fined 400 million won ($302,000), compared with its $11 billion market volume.

Long before they had a union, tower-crane operators and other workers had negotiated “monthly stipends” — akin to a combination of overtime and risk allowances — on top of their regular pay, in return for working longer or flouting the safety code to meet construction schedules. In February, the civil court ruled that the stipends were part of “normal pay.”

Also, many chapters of the construction unions need contractors to pay their full-timers like Yang during projects as part of collective bargaining, because it is these full-timers who convene and recruit workers for construction sites — often union and nonunion alike.

The Yoon government has brought unprecedented criminal charges against these two practices, invoking two notorious statutes. Yang and his union comrades were charged under the Law on Punishment of Violent Acts, South Korea’s answer to the United States’ Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, and the penal code on the obstruction of business, first introduced by the Japanese colonial master to ban industrial action during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945.

The Korean RICO, which carries prison sentences of up to twenty years, has been scarcely used directly against labor unions because any such charge would likely contradict the right to collective bargaining. The government and corporations, meanwhile, regularly use the legacy penal clause, also still in effect in Japan but rarely used there, to suppress union activity, as it stipulates punishment for “a person who damages the credibility or obstructs the business of another person by spreading false rumors or by the use of fraudulent means.”

The Yoon government appears bent on impairing national unions’ bargaining power by stripping them of union status. In March, regulators treated a KCWU chapter as a business organization of contractors and fined it 169 million won ($129,000) for antitrust infringements.

Fair Game

It was humiliation, not fear of prison, that drove Yang to death. “I am setting myself afire today because my rightful union activity is regarded [by the government] as an obstruction of business and racketeering,” he wrote in one of the notes he left, this one addressed to his fellow union members. “My self-worth can’t tolerate this.”

“Why do many people have to die or be jailed . . . for approval ratings for Yoon’s prosecutorial dictatorship?” Yang wrote in another note to the country’s four opposition parties, pointing to the prosecutor-turned-president’s labor-bashing to rally his conservative base. “Please put an end to the Yoon regime,” he implored. “Please free the innocent detainees.”

Yoon was elected last year on an anti-labor and pro-business platform, pledging to reform labor practices and pensions. While the two areas are in dire need of updating in light of an aging population and the rise of precarious jobs, Yoon’s reforms are aimed at helping employers at the expense of the livelihoods of ordinary workers.

Legislatively, few can push back on his agenda. The main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), which controls a majority of the three-hundred-seat national assembly, is focused solely on keeping its top leader out of jail for bribery. Despite varying degrees of left and populist leanings, nine legislators of the remaining three minor parties are content with being auxiliary to the DPK.

A third note from Yang to his family remains undisclosed.

A Union Man

Yang began to work as a rod buster — shaping the steel rebar rods and mesh used in construction — after graduating from high school. In 2019, he joined a KCWU chapter in the northeastern province of Gangwon. Three years later, he became a district organizer.

Yang’s last six months were very taxing, both emotionally and financially, as many contractors severed ties with the KCWU, citing government pressure or a cooling construction market. Yang often shared his own pay with union members who were in more desperate need of employment. He is survived by his wife and twin teenage daughters.

The US and other Western governments cozied up to the Sudanese coup leaders who have now plunged the country into violent chaos. The only true hope for peace and democracy in Sudan lies with the popular resistance committees that are organizing against war.

People fleeing war-torn Sudan queue to board a boat from Port Sudan on April 28, 2023. (AFP via Getty Images)

Over the last month, Sudan has been convulsed with violence as a power struggle between two rival military leaders erupted into full-scale warfare. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands more injured, with more than three hundred thousand Sudanese displaced from their homes.

The rival claimants to power are Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. The two men previously joined forces in October 2021 to stage a military coup and clamp down brutally on Sudan’s revolutionary movement that was struggling for democracy. Now they have turned their guns on each other.

The descent into violence discredits the approach of the US and other Western governments that legitimized the coup instigators and sought to build a negotiating process around them. This did not begin after the coup: since 2019, international diplomats had strongly supported a partnership setup that kept the two generals in power, claiming that it would result in a transition to civilian rule.

But the resistance committees that brought down the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir are organizing on the ground to protect communities from the ravages of the latest conflict. It is their efforts that are sowing the seeds of a better future for the people of Sudan.

Descent Into War

For weeks, the militarization of the Sudanese capital Khartoum had been escalating significantly. Soldiers and military vehicles belonging to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were already a familiar sight in the capital and many other Sudanese cities, even before the coup of 2021 took place. The RSF is a paramilitary force that has its origins in the Janjaweed militias deployed in Darfur.

The descent into violence discredits the approach of the US and other Western governments that legitimized the coup instigators in Sudan.

Yet the recent escalation was different. It stood in stark contrast to the official news of progress in negotiations between the military and civilian ex-partners of the failed transitional government. The key matters for discussion included the issue of merging the SAF and the RSF.

On the morning of April 15, fighting broke out between the SAF, under al-Burhan’s command, and Hemeti’s RSF. In less than four hours, the army’s fighter jets were bombing the capital. It is important to understand that both parties to the fighting have their buildings located in the middle of residential areas. That includes the army headquarters and several RSF buildings that had been turned into barracks, which made the capital a ticking time bomb.

The slogan of the protesters, “army to the barricades, RSF to be dissolved,” was no longer simply a call for the military factions to be removed from political decision-making. It was a demand for the physical removal of the military and all militias from residential areas as well.

Popular Power

For more than a year, since the coup on October 25, 2021, the Sudanese resistance front has organized weekly protests led by neighborhood resistance committees. The demonstrators chant slogans calling for free education and health care, public safety, the army’s return to barracks, and the dissolution of the RSF (in Arabic: صحة تعليم مجان والشعب يعيش في امان والعسكر للثكنات والجنجويد ينحل).

The international diplomats who invested their efforts in advocating and facilitating talks and agreements with the coup perpetrators judged these demands to be unrealistic and immature. However, the resistance committees continued their work on the ground, protesting in the streets to reduce the ability of the coup regime to legitimize itself, as well as engaging in a countrywide deliberation process charting the future they seek for Sudan.

Since the coup, the Sudanese resistance front has organized weekly protests led by neighborhood resistance committees.

More than eight thousand neighborhood resistance committees engaged in the process that produced the Revolutionary Charter for the Establishment of People’s Power. This was a document that included a road map for rebuilding the government from the bottom up, starting from local councils, all the way to a national legislative body that would select and oversee the executive.

The committees presented this agenda as a path to sustainable peace that would address the core issues of the Sudanese people and allow them equal access to political decision-making. Career politicians from the national and international elites ignored or even ridiculed their vision.

Self-Aid

When the fighting broke out, it was the experiences and tools of popular organizing that came to the rescue of the Sudanese people. Khartoum’s neighborhood resistance committees issued a joint statement on the second day clarifying their position: “We are not impartial as we are engaged in peaceful struggle against the militarization of our country.”

The SAF and the RSF have both engaged in propaganda campaigns to equate their own cause with that of the Sudanese people and their revolution.

The statement branded al-Burhan and Hemeti as enemies of the Sudanese revolution and urged the people to organize to provide for themselves. This remains the popular view, even though the SAF and the RSF have both engaged in propaganda campaigns to equate their own cause with that of the Sudanese people and their revolution.

The fact that the SAF and the RSF have borrowed the language and slogans of the revolution to advocate for their war is a clear sign of how the revolutionary organizations, while ignored by most international bodies, have transformed politics in Sudan. Yet these propaganda campaigns have encountered little success, as the reality of people’s needs on the ground remained the priority for the resistance front.

No Quick Victory

Fighting continued despite SAF statements promising a quick win over the “rebels,” while the RSF boasted about its progress against the “coup forces.” In reality, there was no speedy end to the fighting in sight.

The Sudanese army has controlled the lion’s share of the country’s budget and resources for decades.

The RSF took over more areas in the capital, including hospitals, areas where medical supplies were being stored, and power-supply stations. The SAF showed minimum regard for human life as it focused on the use of air strikes, with homes and schools bearing the brunt of the war.

The army’s priority was to regain control over the presidential palace and the national radio station. It did not make the same effort to evict RSF forces from hospitals, power stations, or other institutions that actually have a direct impact on people’s lives and well-being.

The Sudanese army has controlled the lion’s share of the country’s budget and resources for decades. It has revealed itself to be yet another governmental institution weakened by corruption, inefficiency, and the rise of a private sector substitute — in this case, the RSF militia.

“No to War, Yes to the People”

On the ground, neighborhood groups were created on messaging apps such as WhatsApp, focusing on the provision of services for the residents of their neighborhoods. This work included providing updates on what shops and bakeries were open and the availability of water and electricity sources, as well as information on safe routes and assistance with evacuations from high-risk areas.

Resistance committees have combined the slogan ‘no to war’ with practical assistance for the Sudanese people, relying on their own power.

As the fighting continued and the fragile infrastructure of Khartoum collapsed, these groups started operating previously closed health centers as a substitute for hospitals that were now impossible to reach. As the capital’s residents fled to other regions, similar groups and neighborhood resistance committees around the country set about organizing to provide the displaced people with housing, food, and medication when needed.

Along the roads linking Khartoum to other states, groups of youngsters stationed themselves offering water and snacks for travelers and inviting them to stay in their villages. When thousands of displaced Sudanese found themselves stuck at the Egyptian border in the north with no international organizations present to assist them, several popular initiatives came to their support. The resistance committee of the nearest city, Dongola, organized a convoy to reach the border and provide for them.

Back in Khartoum, the newly formed emergency rooms communicated with technicians to restore power supply in areas damaged by the war. These examples and many others show that on the ground, resistance committees have combined the slogan “no to war” with practical assistance for the Sudanese people, relying on their own power.

Diplomatic Disasters

International diplomats also fled the city, moving to the new temporary capital of Port Sudan. Without having critically examined their previous efforts, they continued talks with both combatants, announcing one failed ceasefire after another. The Sudanese people ridiculed their efforts, joking about how each “ceasefire” simply resulted in more violence than the previous one.

A truly realistic and sustainable approach is being created by the people of Sudan in the face of the war.

It was the very same diplomats who foisted a failed “partnership agreement” with the military upon the Sudanese people, as well as the Juba peace agreement, from which we can draw direct links to the coup. Having legitimized the generals with their coups and wars, they still somehow consider themselves experts with the capacity to end the violence, although they have never been held accountable for their previous failures. This makes any hope for a positive intervention from the international community tenuous to say the least.

This statement holds true not only for Sudan but also for many other conflict zones where the corrupt logic of international diplomacy has prioritized deals with war criminals over addressing the root causes of injustice and conflict. In the name of “realism,” diplomats supported a setup that left the leaders of the SAF and the RSF in control of Sudan’s weapons and wealth while somehow expecting that they would not utilize that control to expand their power.

A truly realistic and sustainable approach is being created by the people of Sudan in the face of the war. As the Sudanese people take control of their own lives and resources, the power and wealth available for the generals to fight over will diminish. In this revolutionary scenario, there can be an end to the war as popular power organizes itself into a countrywide resistance front.

Support for the Sudanese people in this struggle will never come from the existing international organizations, which have no interest in real democracy that serves the popular will. The people of Sudan can only ask for help from fellow revolutionaries and fighters for peace and justice, demanding accountability and ethical guidelines for the work of international diplomacy. The backing of our comrades around the world is vital to ensure that no international intervention imposes further destruction on Sudan. The central slogan remains “no to war, yes to the people.”

Working at Amazon isn’t just physically taxing, it’s dangerous. Despite years of scrutiny and years of company spin, Amazon still has a serious injury rate more than double the rest of the industry.

Workers sort out parcels in the outbound dock at an Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California on August 31, 2021. (Watchara Phomicinda / MediaNews Group / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)

May is here, which for the investor class means the return of the annual shareholder meeting, in which the leadership of public corporations addresses the one group to which they are theoretically answerable. For Amazon investors, at least during the long reign of founder Jeff Bezos, a highlight of the season has always been the CEO’s letter to shareholders, typically issued in April. Not at all content to offer up the usual anodyne reassurances to investors, Bezos regularly exceeded expectations, dispensing savory bits of execupreneurial wisdom eagerly consumed by the business press and by fellow strivers the world over.

This began to change two years ago, for an ominous cloud had appeared over the company’s carefully managed reputation. A September 2020 exposé by journalist Will Evans had revealed to the public what had long been apparent to the hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s warehouse workers: the firm’s novel techniques of labor extraction were inflicting a terrible toll on the health and well-being of its legions of pickers and packers.

As Evans reported, the rate of serious injury in the warehouses had steadily climbed in recent years, reaching an unprecedented peak of 7.7 per hundred workers in 2019, nearly double that of the industry standard. A second independent analysis, released by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) in June 2021, further demonstrated that the company’s extraordinarily high clip of worker injury is directly related to the punishing work rate inflicted on its workers.

Thus Bezos’s 2021 letter, his last as CEO, as well as Andy Jassy’s first effort as new CEO, issued last April, were distinguished by a new tone of defensiveness, as company leadership attempted to respond to a gathering storm of negative press.

Over the past two years, Amazon has focused its defense on three particular arguments, none of which stand up to even casual scrutiny.

“We Don’t Set Unreasonable Performance Goals”

First, the firm simply disputes the statistics compiled by the SOC, instead providing its own set of alternative facts. A particularly clumsy example is that the company includes its own workforce when computing the “industry average,” permitting Jassy to insist that the firm’s injury rates are “about average.” In 2022, for example, Amazon employed 36 percent of US warehouse workers, yet was responsible for no less than 53 percent of recordable injuries. A far more honest assessment would compare Amazon’s serious injury rate (6.6) and that of the remainder of the industry (3.2).

Second, when the company does acknowledge the safety problem, it brazenly denies what is obviously its source: “we don’t set unreasonable performance goals,” Bezos claimed in his April 2021 letter. And even more counterintuitively, the company has consistently maintained that the solution to a problem caused by innovative techniques of labor extraction is . . . more innovation. Thus Jassy, in his 2022 letter, asserts that what is needed is “rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent,” and further reassures investors that the firm will continue “learning, inventing, and iterating” until the problem is resolved. What he did not own up to is that Amazon’s rate of serious injury actually rose in 2022 by 13 percent.

Amazon has resorted to blaming workers themselves, in particular the hundreds of thousands of new people brought on during the past few years of rapid expansion.

Third, and most invidiously, Amazon has resorted to blaming workers themselves, in particular the hundreds of thousands of new people brought on during the past few years of rapid expansion. Since the great majority of the new hires are “new to this sort of work,” and since Amazon’s number crunchers have determined that most injuries occur within the first six months of employment, it is only natural that, as Jassy informed shareholders at the 2022 meeting, “your rates tend to go up.”

If this is indeed true, then it would seem that the company would have every incentive to retain as many of its warehouse workers as possible. Why expend so much effort to train up “industrial athletes” if most of them don’t stick around for the long haul? And yet turnover rates in the warehouses are astronomical; as the New York Times reported in 2021, even before the so-called Great Resignation, the company’s rate reached as high as 150 percent annually, meaning the entire workforce is replaced every eight months.

A measure of Amazon’s commitment to “Burn and Churn” is the “Pay to Quit” program that Bezos introduced in 2014, in which hourly employees are annually offered a payout — $1,000 initially, increased yearly up to a maximum of $5,000 after five years — to move along. (Facing the prospect of running out of human fuel, Jassy suspended the program for most employees in January 2022.)

Profits Over Safety

In retrospect, the May 2022 Amazon shareholder meeting probably represents the high tide of criticism of the firm’s labor practices. The blowback had reached such intensity that Amazon faced a record fifteen shareholder proposals, many of which concerned labor and safety issues. These included a call for board representation from an hourly worker, a request for a report on the company’s compliance with freedom of association standards as established by the International Labor Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a proposal for an independent audit of working conditions in Amazon warehouses, and something of a Hail Mary demand from an enterprising Texas warehouse worker for the immediate suspension of all productivity quotas in the interest of safety.

But all fifteen proposals, each vigorously opposed by company leadership, were comfortably defeated — the demand to overturn the whole system of labor extraction was voted down by no less than 99.8 percent of Amazon investors.

If a solid majority of Amazon shareholders were untroubled by the company’s disgraceful safety record, they found the matter of the stock price more concerning. Although the firm had posted record profits for 2021 — more than $33 billion — disturbing trends had begun to appear in the second half of the year, triggering a precipitous fall in the stock price, from a peak of $186.12 in July 2021 to $104.10 by the May 24, 2022 meeting.

If a solid majority of Amazon shareholders were untroubled by the company’s disgraceful safety record, they found the matter of the stock price more concerning.

While there were many reasons for the plunge, much of it can be attributed to the lifting of COVID restrictions. Company leadership appears to have presumed that the meteoric, lockdown-driven growth in its consumer division was here to stay — that US consumers would not return to Walmart or Kroger. When the opposite happened, retail sales plummeted, and suddenly all that feverish expansion in the fulfillment network had become a burdensome drain on profits.

It should be stressed that criticism of the company’s injury mills has hardly abated in the twelve months since the May 2021 meeting, generating increased scrutiny from the government. At present, the company is under investigation from an unprecedented array of state institutions, including numerous state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) branches, the federal OSHA office under the Department of Labor, and the Southern District of New York. Wherever these agencies have looked they have found an abundance of violations; federal investigations in five states between December 2021 and February 2022 netted the company a raft of citations, but Amazon has dug in its heels, appealing each and every one of them.

While all this was dutifully reported by the business press, the orientation of coverage began to change in the second half of 2022, as more and more reports of the company’s falling profitability began to appear. Shortly after the meeting, for example, Amazon announced a net loss of $2 billion for Q2, compared to a 2021 Q2 profit of $7.8 billion. With little improvement in the third and fourth quarters — the firm would reveal a net loss of $2.7 billion for 2022 as a whole — rumors began to swirl that Bezos himself would soon return to save the day.

Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon. (Lisi Mezistrano Wolf / Wikimedia Commons)

Somehow, some way, mighty Amazon had become a money-losing operation again, and it was Jassy himself bearing the brunt of the blame. But at the same time, all the bad financial news served to distract from the issue of injuries, and if he had failed spectacularly in resolving the latter, there were many relatively easy measures he could take to address the former.

Like so many of his fellow tech chieftains, Jassy began to respond in November by announcing a plan for mass layoffs in the corporate sector: by April 2023, the company had eliminated no less than twenty-seven thousand employees, and a new round is currently underway. Wildly cheered on by Wall Street, the stock price — which in December had dipped all the way into the eighties — began to recover, and by the end of March it was back above $100, where it remains as of this writing.

“In Denial”

And yet the matter of the company’s shameful injury record was still out there, and given how poorly the firm had responded the past two years, a new strategy was needed. One of the cleverer moves of the SOC had been releasing its 2022 report on April 13, thereby preempting Jassy’s first shareholder letter, published the following day. Learning from its mistakes, this year Amazon preempted the preemptor, issuing a new edition of its own safety report on March 14. An exercise in spin, statistical manipulation, and outright lying, the “Delivered With Care” report managed to garner little if any attention, although as shall be discussed, this was probably the intention.

The SOC responded on April 13 with its own annual report, “In Denial: Amazon’s Continuing Failure to Fix Its Injury Crisis,” providing a comprehensive critique of “Delivered With Care” and managing to drum up at least some interest from the business press. Based on its own analysis, the SOC had to concede that Amazon can claim a reduction in its rate of serious injury, from 6.8 in 2021 to 6.6 in 2022 — a little less than 3 percent lower.

But there is significant reason to be skeptical of even this modest improvement, since the joint federal OSHA/Southern District of New York investigations found significant evidence of underreporting, resulting in a raft of subpoenas for documents relating to potential fraud (Amazon continues to fight the subpoenas in court). And even if the 6.6 figure holds up, it is still more than double than the rest of the industry.

Even if the 6.6 figure holds up, it is still more than double than the rest of the industry.

Meanwhile, the content of Jassy’s second shareholder letter, published on April 14, suggests that the CEO has moved on to other concerns. Nowhere does the matter of workplace safety appear, nor does any mention of employee relations in general, save for an announcement that corporate employees must return to the office for a minimum of three days a week. First come the excuses: souring macroeconomic conditions, heightened competition, headwinds over at Amazon Web Services, etc. Then come the typical reassurances that company leadership is on top of things, that every effort is underway to return the firm to profitability.

As always, the emphasis is on “invention,” on the new sectors the company will soon come to dominate. Amazon is getting in on the chip boom. Advertising revenues are about to explode, as the firm’s ingenious algorithms outpace those of its competitors. Our own satellites will soon illuminate the not-yet-wired world.

Rather more concerning, at least to the multitude of warehouse workers, is the other side of the profitability equation, i.e. the reduction of costs. A year ago all the talk was of the herculean efforts — backed by $1 billion of new investment — to address safety issues. Here’s Jassy, summarizing his obsessive commitment to task:

When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team. . . . At our scale . . . it takes rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent to get to where you want. We’ve been dissecting every process path to discern how we can further improve. . . . we’ll keep learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results. We won’t be satisfied until we do.

One year later, priorities have clearly changed. All that energy is now to be devoted to a very different enterprise, that of restoring profitability:

Over the last several months, we took a deep look across the company, business by business, invention by invention, and asked ourselves whether we had conviction about each initiative’s long-term potential to drive enough revenue, operating income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital.

The deep look certainly did not spare the warehouses, which are singled out as particularly egregious offenders:

A critical challenge we’ve continued to tackle is the rising cost to serve in our Stores fulfillment network (i.e. the cost to get a product from Amazon to a customer) — and we’ve made several changes that we believe will meaningfully improve our fulfillment costs and speed of delivery. . . . Over the last several months, we’ve scrutinized every process path in our fulfillment centers and transportation network and redesigned scores of processes and mechanisms, resulting in steady productivity gains and cost reductions over the last few quarters. There’s more work to do, but we’re pleased with our trajectory and the meaningful upside in front of us.

Another Year

That these efforts to boost productivity might conflict with the firm’s purported number-one priority in its warehouses — the safety of its workers — is a question no longer of concern to Jassy. If at the upcoming shareholder meeting, scheduled for May 26, he is once again asked about the matter, he’ll surely say something like this: “The safety team is all over that. See their recent report.”

Herein lies the heart of the problem: even operating a fulfillment network twice as dangerous as its competitors, Amazon simply cannot turn a profit on rapidly delivering packages for free or with minimal fees. For the consumer division to make money doing so, it will need to tighten the screws on its workers even more, extracting ever-more labor from their ailing bodies.

Perhaps the company can defy the laws of nature. Perhaps it can reengineer “scores of processes and mechanisms” in the interest of efficiency without simultaneously inflicting a greater toll on its pickers and packers. But it will be another year until we find out.

The ideal solution would be unionization across the entire fulfillment network, which would enable workers to negotiate a reasonable, safe, and humane work rate.

In the meantime, we have clearly reached an impasse. In a couple weeks, the shareholders will gather again, and the same activist groups will present their proposals for change. But it’s difficult to see how results could be better this year, given the firm’s financial struggles, which will surely take center stage. A better bet would be state intervention — new legislation, a serious clampdown from OSHA — but Amazon has thus far fended off these challenges with relative ease.

The ideal solution would be unionization across the entire fulfillment network, which would enable workers to negotiate a reasonable, safe, and humane work rate. But from the company perspective this simply cannot be allowed to happen, for even under the current regime of brutal labor extraction, Amazon appears to be incapable of turning a profit.

Amazon is operating injury mills — more than thirty-six thousand of its workers suffered serious injury last year. The company has clearly determined that such numbers are acceptable. Do the rest of us agree?

Amazon Responds

Since Jacobin started reporting on Amazon’s shareholder letters back in 2021, we have annually reached out for comment. After two years of ignoring our requests, the company came through this week. Here are our inquiries and Amazon’s responses:

1) In his 2020 shareholder letter, former CEO Jeff Bezos indicated that he was introducing a new leadership principle, that of making Amazon “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But when the leadership principles were updated on July 1, 2021, this was changed to “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.” Why was this change made? Is Amazon no longer committed to being Earth’s Safest Place to Work?

When Jeff introduced the ideas of “Earth’s Best Employer” and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” in the letter, he did not say anything about these being leadership principles. He talked about them as a “vision for our employee’s success.” Here’s what he said, lifted directly from the letter: Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success. We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.
Separately, three months following the shareholder letter, Amazon announced our two new leadership principles. If you read the description of the leadership principle “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer,” you’ll find that safety is included in the definition, which states “Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.”
Our commitment to continuous safety improvement is reiterated in Amazon’s 2022 safety report, which was released in March. The report states “Our goal is to be the safest workplace within the industries that we are typically designated.”
Andy Jassy has also underlined the importance of safety numerous times, including at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, in a CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with CNBC’s Jon Fortt.

2) Also in his 2020 letter, Mr. Bezos noted that in his new role as Executive Chair, he was eager “to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But we have been unable to find any media reports that Mr. Bezos has indeed devoted any of his time over the past two years to the matter of worker safety. Could you provide details on his activities in this critical area?

Amazon has done significant work to improve safety performance. We began releasing Delivered With Care, our safety, well-being, and health report, in 2022 and released it again this year (which you can download here). The report includes some of the following highlights:

From 2019 to 2022, we saw our recordable incident rate improve by almost 24%. This includes an 11% year-over-year decline in our recordable injuries from 2021 to 2022.
Since 2019, we reduced the number of injuries resulting in employees needing to take time away from work by 53%.
In 2022, we engaged with over 1.4 million employees to understand safety sentiment and areas of improvement.
From 2019 to 2022, we invested $1 billion in safety initiatives unrelated to COVID-19, and in 2023, we are investing another $550 million in safety initiatives. This is in addition to the $15 billion in COVID-related costs we incurred to make more than 150 significant process and procedural changes to help protect our employees and partners during the pandemic.
We have reduced collision rates in our U.S. Delivery Service Partner network by 35%

In 2023, Amazon became one of the first to sign on to the Department of Transportation’s nationwide call to action to reduce deaths on the roadways. Amazon committed another $200 million to continue upgrading safety technologies across our fleet of trucks and vans, including additional investments in collision avoidance technologies, strobing brake lights, and in-vehicle camera safety technology — just to name a few.

3) Since we began reporting on Amazon’s workplace injury record, the company has regularly referred to the fact that it employs more than 6000 safety professionals; Mr. Bezos cited the figure of 6200 in his April 2021 letter. Given the recent mass layoffs at the company — 27,000 roles eliminated with a new round currently underway — is this figure still accurate? How many positions have been eliminated in the safety division? What is the current figure?

Amazon’s current number of workplace health and safety professionals is more than 8,000 globally.

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