The Daily Beast reported in March 2019 that between 2013 and 2018, emergency services responded to 189 calls from 46 Amazon warehouses in 17 states, all linked to suicidal employees. Workers attributed their psychological depressions to employer-imposed social isolation, aggressive surveillance, and hasty and dangerous working conditions in these logistics centers. A former staff member told the Daily Beast: “It`s this isolated colony of hell where people regularly collapse.” [292] Amazon`s sale of counterfeit goods has received widespread attention, as purchases marked as made by third parties and those shipped directly from Amazon`s warehouses have been found to be false. This includes certain products sold directly by Amazon itself and marked as “Shipping by and sold by Amazon.com.” [226] Counterfeit charging cables sold on Amazon as alleged Apple products have been shown to pose a fire hazard. [227] [228] These counterfeits included a wide range of products, from large bills to everyday items such as tweezers, gloves[229] and umbrellas. [230] More recently, this has expanded to Amazon`s new food services. [231] It was reported that counterfeiting was a problem, particularly for artists and small businesses, whose products were quickly copied for sale on the site. [232] › AWS Terms of Service – these additional terms apply to your use of certain services Twitch is a live video streaming platform primarily focused on video game content. The service was originally founded as a spin-off of a general interest streaming service called Justin.tv. Its importance was overshadowed by that of Twitch, and Justin.tv was eventually shut down by its parent company in August 2014 to focus exclusively on Twitch. [163] Later this month, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $970 million.
[164] Through Twitch, Amazon also owns Curse, Inc., an operator of video game communities and a provider of VoIP services for games. [165] Since the acquisition, Twitch has started selling games directly through the platform[166] and has begun offering special features to Amazon Prime subscribers. [167] Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides individuals, businesses, and government agencies with on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs on a pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide distributed computing capacity and software tools across AWS farms. One such service is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides users with a virtual cluster of machines that is always available on the Internet. AWS virtual machines emulate most of the attributes of a real machine, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing. local memory/RAM; Hard Disk/SSD storage; a selection of operating systems; networking; and pre-installed application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM). In September 2006, Amazon launched a program called FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), which allowed it to manage the storage, packaging, and distribution of products and services for retail sellers. [102] The National Labor Relations Board noted that Amazon illegally fired two employees in retaliation for efforts to organize the workers. [260] After a majority of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, voted against membership in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union in April 2021, the union requested a hearing in the NLRB to determine whether the company had created “an atmosphere of confusion, coercion, and/or fear of retaliation” prior to the union vote.
[261] In July 2020, Amazon, along with other tech giants Apple, Google, and Meta, were accused of maintaining harmful power and anti-competitive strategies to suppress potential competitors in the market. [330] The CEOs of the respective companies appeared on a conference call before U.S. lawmakers on July 29, 2020. House Subcommittee on Antitrust Law. [331] In October 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Amazon of abusing a monopoly position in e-commerce to unfairly compete with sellers on its platform. [332] In a March 2022 letter to bipartisan leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden`s Justice Department approved a bill prohibiting large digital platforms like Amazon from putting their competitors` products and services at a disadvantage compared to their own. “The Department of Justice views the rise of dominant platforms as a threat to open markets and competition, with risks to consumers, businesses, innovation, resilience, global competitiveness and our democracy,” the letter reads. [333] A protest at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island on March 30, 2020, led to the firing of its organizer, Christian Smalls.
Amazon defended the decision by saying smalls was supposed to be in self-isolation at the time and that protest management was putting its other workers at risk. [188] Smalls called this response “ridiculous.” [190] New York State Attorney General Letitia James is considering legal retaliation for the dismissal, which she called “immoral and inhumane.” [188] She also asked the National Labour Relations Board to investigate Smalls` dismissal.