Amazon does not create jobs; it destroys them

Here's a good-news story!

Amazon is bringing 800 jobs to Caledon! They'll be shipping books, electronics, and toys from this "fulfillment centre." (BTW google "working conditions at Amazon warehouses" and you'll get a new appreciation for George Orwell. Fulfilment isn't what fulfillment centres are about.)

Caledon's good-news story follows a mere two months after Ottawa got a similar good-news story. They'll be getting a fulfillment centre too! According to local MP Andrew Leslie, "it will employ approximately 1000 people (in) good middle class jobs..."

God bless Amazon! They're spreading their good middle class jobs all over the place!

The euphoria is almost palpable!


Alas, MP Andrew Leslie apparently has no inkling of what a middle class job looks like. Leslie retired from the Canadian Forces with the rank of Lieutenant General. That's a job that pays over $20 thousand  -  per month! Between his CF pension and his MP gig (base salary $172,000/yr) the double-dipping Leslie is a bona fide one percenter!

Amazon warehouse employees, on the other hand, are what you'd call the working poor. They're paid a whisker over minimum wage. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos (net worth 143 billion USD) is fiercely anti-union. A substantial portion of his US work-force requires food stamps to get by. This is not what any reasonable person would call a "good middle class job."

Here's another thing to consider; Amazon has twice the revenue per employee as its most efficient bricks-and-mortar competitor, Walmart. That's another way of saying that for every warehouse job Amazon creates, at least two jobs will disappear in the bricks-and-mortar retail sector. Amazon comes not to create jobs, but to destroy them!

Walmart "associate" is not a middle class job either, and I'm under no illusions about Walmart being a workers' paradise, but I've never heard of Walmart employees peeing in bottles because they'll fail to meet their quota if they take a bathroom break, or of ambulances waiting in the parking lot to ferry employees to the hospital as they drop from exhaustion.


But here's even worse news; nowhere in the various mainstream news stories on these new Ontario warehouses, does any reporter (you know, those bold sleuths who pride themselves on speaking truth to power) so much as hint that there might be a dark side to all this good news.