Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo
Amazon warehouse workers protest outside the JFK8 facility on Staten Island.
First Response
On Monday, as part of a continuing wave of wildcat strikes by low-wage workers across the nation, employees at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island walked out for a second time, after several more workers at the facility contracted the coronavirus. Christian Smalls, the organizer who was fired for leading the first walkout, returned to participate in the second.
Amazon has promised more safety steps for its workers, including temperature checks at facilities and masks for workers. But Amazon’s reputation, and its regard for employees who are more loyal to their personal health and the health of their colleagues than the company, was cemented by the release of a leaked memo from general counsel David Zapolsky. In it, Zapolsky called Smalls “not smart or articulate,” and outlined a strategy to make him the face of a PR narrative where he was endangering staff by organizing instead of practicing social distancing. For the record, I personally received PR emails to this effect from publicists outside the company who were obviously hired by it.
Amazon being ruthless in its anti-union efforts, indifferent at best about worker safety, and deflecting its own failings onto others is nothing new. The shock of the company’s coronavirus record, and its blatant and likely illegal smearing of a worker and organizer, is palpable. But the episode reflects how Amazon has insinuated itself among the mainstream left, making it difficult for those organizations to retain credibility.
This has burst forward with an open letter from over 110 lawyers, law students and law professors to the American Constitution Society, the analogue to the Federalist Society on the right, intended to be a bench-builder for liberal jurists. Andrew DeVore, an Amazon vice president and associate general counsel, sits on the ACS board of directors. He reports directly to Zapolsky, who wrote the memo, and he is in charge of Amazon’s “labor and employment” operations, among other things.
“The events in Staten Island really brought to the foreground how callous Amazon is,” says Leo Gertner, a labor employment lawyer who helped organize the letter. “Somehow Amazon’s labor violations didn’t disqualify [DeVore] from being on the board of this organization.”
ACS has an entire project on their website with legal resources around worker protection, and on March 30—one day before Amazon fired Chris Smalls—ACS released a podcast about how state and federal governments can protect workers on the job. Russ Feingold, the new president of ACS, participated in that podcast.
It’s not just ACS whose credibility has been compromised by the presence of top Amazon lawyers. The New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights law firm, gave Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky an award at their February 2020 dinner. “There isn’t a lot said about Amazon in the public interest lawyer world,” Gertner says. Zapolsky held a fundraiser at his home for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, attended by the former Vice President, in November. “I’m in the House of Amazon here,” Biden said at the event. Amazon employees have given Biden over $71,000 in itemized contributions this cycle.
Biden’s campaign failed to respond to a request for comment, as did the American Constitution Society.
Big Tech has burrowed into liberal circles for a while—Amazon’s top spokesman Jay Carney was Barack Obama’s press secretary, for example. It makes it harder to speak the truth about Amazon’s harms to workers and society when sitting elbow to elbow with top Amazon executives and lawyers. “You deviate from what you set out to do if you make nice with people busting unions,” says Gertner. “This is all being brought to a head as corporations become more virulently anti-worker.”
Check This Out
I was on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson discussing a variety of COVID-related issues; listen here. I was on the Brad-cast with Brad Friedman, also on various issues; listen here.
Here’s some of what we’ve cooked up recently at the Prospect:
An incredible roundtable from top economists Joe Stiglitz, Jamie Galbraith, Heather Boushey, Josh Bivens, and Gerald Epstein on the macroeconomic crisis from the coronavirus, and how to stop us from sinking into Depression.
John Shattuck on Viktor Orban’s power grab in Hungary.
Harold Meyerson on the return of the breadline.
Jonathan Guyer with a cri de Coeur on protest in the age of Trump.
Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven with a fantastic feature on the ongoing, significant vacancies at the VA, and how this inhibits the agency’s role in the fight against COVID-19. Must read.
This is Not an Election
What’s happening in Wisconsin today is the product of two of the most despicable rulings in American jurisprudence. Yesterday, Governor Tony Evers, who didn’t cover himself in glory by initially supporting the April 7 election amid a pandemic, finally filed an executive order postponing in-person balloting, and expanding vote by mail. But Republicans immediately took this to court, and the partisan court, on a 4-2 party-line vote, overturned the governor’s order. Hours later, the Supreme Court, also along party lines, reversed a federal district court ruling expanding the timeline for absentee ballots to arrive at county clerk offices. Mind you, tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters have not yet received ballots, which have to be postmarked today to count. This is pure disenfranchisement.
The Court, ashamed of itself, didn’t sign the ruling, and tried to claim in the penultimate paragraph that it “should not be viewed as expressing an opinion on… whether other reforms or modifications in election procedures in light of COVID-19 are appropriate.” Murderers don’t like to announce their guilt. But that’s absolutely what this is. In the middle of a stay at home order in Wisconsin, the courts, at the behest of Republicans, forced citizens—their own constituents—into dangerous congregations to assert their voting rights. Lines are already long, as pollworkers backing out has consolidated locations. There are typically 180 polling places in Milwaukee; today there are five. There’s one polling place for 72,000 people in the city of Waukesha.
This is entirely about a state Supreme Court election on the ballot today. (Daniel Kelly, the Republican incumbent seeking a ten-year term, recused himself from the ruling, but not before essentially endorsing it on Twitter. If his vote were needed he would have provided it.) Republicans believe their voters will march into the slaughter amid their cajoling, while Democrats won’t urge their voters to put themselves at risk. So they will win a totally illegitimate election, “consign an unknown number of Wisconsinites to their deaths” in the words of state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, and continue their stranglehold on the judiciary.
This is a dangerous signal for November, as election law expert Rick Hasen points out. Conservatives on the judiciary will wave through whatever is necessary to keep their party in power, and Republicans will kill indiscriminately to keep that power. This isn’t an election, it’s an abbatoir. And it’s time to get loud about it.
Holding Small Businesses Hostage
On Monday, Wells Fargo announced that it would only be able to process $10 billion in loans through the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses, giving desperate small business owners who bank with them an obscure reason for this. “Wells Fargo continues to operate under existing asset cap limitations,” the company told customers in rejecting additional applications.
That asset cap is a punishment, placed by the Federal Reserve due to Wells Fargo’s rampant lawbreaking, from issuing fake accounts to overcharging customers on mortgages. Wells desperately wants that cap lifted, allowing them to add risk to their balance sheet or swallow up competitors. And they see an opportunity here to deny small businesses in need of help, and appeal to the Fed that their hands are tied. It’s shadow lobbying, holding the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the balance. It’s truly disgusting.
Meanwhile the solution to Wells Fargo’s alleged woes with the asset cap have already been resolved. The Federal Reserve will buy the loans, creating a secondary market and taking the assets off of banks’ books immediately. This eliminates any issue with the asset cap for Wells. The Fed could go even further and issue a ruling that small business loans, which are risk-free and government-backed, don’t count against any asset calculation; that’s perfectly reasonable to do.
Wells doesn’t want to hear this, because it prevents the hostage-taking situation they’ve cleverly set up. Indeed, Wells reiterated on Monday night that it will accept no further applications, despite the Fed loan-buying program (the tell is that the bank will donate all processing fees from the PPP; this isn’t about making money to Wells, it’s about getting that asset cap lifted). In reality, there’s nothing stopping Wells from serving more small business customers except its own greed.
Today I Learned
- Leveling off in New York and other hotspots? (Reuters)
- More on FEMA’s airbridge program, which is transporting supplies on behalf of private distributors, to whom it gave an antitrust exemption. (New York Times)
- The U.S. is not the only country in the world hoarding PPE; the whole world is doing it, in particular China. (New York Post)
- Bharat Ramamurti is a good pick for the pandemic bailout oversight panel. (Bloomberg)
- Here’s that inspector general’s report on dwindling hospital supplies. (Office of the HHS Inspector General)
- Matt Taibbi sets the table for the fraud to come. (Substack)
- How South Korea is stepping tentatively into bringing back baseball. (ESPN)
