Post by AyG on Feb 6, 2021 7:20:06 GMT 7
The following is from today's Quartz Daily Brief. I read it and thought "spot on":
“If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal,” Jeff Bezos told Amazon employees this week in a memo announcing the end of his reign as CEO. “People yawn,” he added. “That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.”
If only Bezos had tried to induce yawns as an employer, too. He might have, for example, made it de rigueur for large companies to help employees in entry-level jobs work their way into a solid middle-class life, with strong wages and fair benefits. Talk about boring.
Bezos wouldn’t have received as much attention as he has by earning over $90 billion during a public health crisis of biblical proportions, one in which at least 20,000 of his employees were infected with Covid-19. He could have averted outrage over Amazon, currently valued at $1.7 trillion, stealing $61 million in tips from its Amazon Flex delivery people.
If he had accepted unionization drives at Amazon and its Whole Foods grocery chain, Bezos wouldn’t have seen his leadership team outed for attempting to run a smear campaign targeting an organizer. He could have avoided getting called out by the media—after raking in billions by serving customers who wanted to shop online in a pandemic—for trying to block mail-in voting during a potentially historic union election set to begin at a fulfillment center in Alabama next week.
Cracking the code that allows capitalism to work for everyone and not the few, on Amazon’s massive scale, would not have been yawn-worthy at first. Ensuring that, for example, none of the company’s hourly employees qualified for food stamp programs would have been huge news. Then, in time, it might have persuaded other businesses to adopt similar models, leading to new norms, and, finally, the high praise of a gaping yawn.
—Lila MacLellan
If only Bezos had tried to induce yawns as an employer, too. He might have, for example, made it de rigueur for large companies to help employees in entry-level jobs work their way into a solid middle-class life, with strong wages and fair benefits. Talk about boring.
Bezos wouldn’t have received as much attention as he has by earning over $90 billion during a public health crisis of biblical proportions, one in which at least 20,000 of his employees were infected with Covid-19. He could have averted outrage over Amazon, currently valued at $1.7 trillion, stealing $61 million in tips from its Amazon Flex delivery people.
If he had accepted unionization drives at Amazon and its Whole Foods grocery chain, Bezos wouldn’t have seen his leadership team outed for attempting to run a smear campaign targeting an organizer. He could have avoided getting called out by the media—after raking in billions by serving customers who wanted to shop online in a pandemic—for trying to block mail-in voting during a potentially historic union election set to begin at a fulfillment center in Alabama next week.
Cracking the code that allows capitalism to work for everyone and not the few, on Amazon’s massive scale, would not have been yawn-worthy at first. Ensuring that, for example, none of the company’s hourly employees qualified for food stamp programs would have been huge news. Then, in time, it might have persuaded other businesses to adopt similar models, leading to new norms, and, finally, the high praise of a gaping yawn.
—Lila MacLellan