Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  Eventually, the team settled on a plan that called for notifying all employees in a building, via text messages and robocalls, only after a case had been confirmed through testing. There was further handwringing over how much to reveal about the positive individual’s job and shift in the facility, without violating their privacy or fueling rumors and speculation on social media. The team instituted a plan that involved using warehouse video footage to perform contact tracing. Workers who had been in close contact with the infected individual then received follow-up instructions from HR to quarantine at home, with pay.

  It was a reasonable solution amid challenging circumstances, but the sheer volume of cases among Amazon workers that spring bred further confusion and frustration among employees. They complained that they weren’t specifically told how many infections there were or given enough detail to gauge their own exposure. One employee involved in the conversations around notification guidelines compared it to “building an entire fleet of ships while you’re trying to get across the Atlantic.”

  The absence of reliable data about cases inspired some employees, in classic Amazon style, to try to fill the breach themselves. Jana Jumpp, a fifty-nine-year-old associate at SDF8 fulfillment center in south Indiana, left work at the start of the pandemic and spent her time poring over unofficial Facebook groups for Amazon fulfillment center workers and collating unreported cases and rumors to try to keep her colleagues apprised.

  In May, Jumpp gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes about her efforts to track and report case data that Amazon declined to share. The piece, which included an interview with Chris Smalls, was punishing, particularly about the company’s reluctance to release any information about infection rates in the FCs. Dave Clark was trotted out alone to face the formidable Lesley Stahl; he affably maintained that the number of overall Covid-19 cases wasn’t a useful figure, since Amazon believed most employees were infected in their communities, not at work.

  But by the fall, Amazon had reversed course amid growing pressure. It reported that around twenty thousand of its 1.3 million frontline employees had tested or been presumed positive for Covid-19. The company argued that its preventative measures had made that figure far lower than could be predicted based on the infection rates in local communities. It also noted that not a single competitor had released similar data, or for that matter come under commensurate criticism from public officials and the media.

  Nevertheless, Jana Jumpp, like Chris Smalls and the founders of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, was fired. Amazon also dismissed Katie Doan, a Whole Foods employee who tracked coronavirus cases across its supermarkets; Bashir Mohamed, a Somali FC worker in Minnesota, who had agitated for greater safety protections; and Courtney Bowden, a Pennsylvania worker who passed out buttons advocating for paid leave for part-time employees.

  The company insisted that it was not retaliating against these employees for speaking out. In each case, Amazon spokespeople described an internal policy that had been violated, such as social distancing or the guidelines against talking to the media without the company’s authorization. But that was difficult to believe. While Jeff Bezos and his colleagues had bristled at external criticism over the years, they seemed to find it completely intolerable when it came from inside the company. It was as if they feared that an incendiary spark from within their own ranks might finally ignite the long-feared inferno of a disgruntled and activist workforce.

  * * *

  Tim Bray could no longer stay at Amazon in good conscience. For five years, Bray, a fedora-wearing software developer and one of the creators of the influential web programming language XML, had worked at AWS as a vice president and distinguished engineer, a member of the company’s technical high priesthood that parachuted into troubled projects. Bray was getting assailed by his friends on the progressive left; how could he remain at a company that fired whistleblowers with impunity and was portrayed as having a reckless disregard for the safety of its workforce?

  It turned out, he couldn’t. In early May, Bray quit his job and wrote a stinging rejoinder on his personal website, arguing that the firings were unjust and that Amazon’s careless view toward its workers reflected a flaw in the company’s genetic makeup. “Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets,” he wrote. “It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”

  I caught up with Bray a few months later via video conference from the home office he had been working from on his motorboat in Vancouver. He was sheepish about the good job and haul of unvested stock he had left behind but took at face value the flood of social media posts by workers alleging unsafe conditions. He said the firings of activist employees had affected him deeply. “Firing whistleblowers was just a different level,” he said. “It felt ethically so far beyond the pale. It’s just not something you can explain away as a company playing hard by the rules. It’s not something I could live with.”

  During the brief media fracas over Bray’s blog post, Amazon’s PR department had discreetly reached out to reporters and pointed them to a rebuttal, posted on LinkedIn by another distinguished engineer at Amazon named Brad Porter. Porter disputed Bray’s insinuation that the company was slow in rolling out safety precautions and objected to his claim that the company treated its workers as commodities to be used up and discarded. “If we want people to choose to work for Amazon helping deliver packages to customers, job number one is to convince those valuable employees that you are doing everything you can every day to keep them safe,” he wrote.

  Still, Porter’s retort, as well as Amazon’s reaction to the criticism of its Covid-19 plans, missed the substantive elements of Bray’s conscientious objection. Bray believed the testimonials of the activist employees reflected understandable anxiety at a harrowing time. But Amazon, in its reflexive defensiveness, didn’t see regular people with genuine concerns but the invisible hand of its opposition, such as organized labor groups. “Sometimes in the noise, it’s hard to tell when it’s our employees talking and when there are some of these paid third-party groups that are, you know, amplifying things,” Dave Clark told me. “There’s a group of people who love us no matter what we do, and there’s a group of people who really don’t like us, no matter what we do.”

  Bray was also making an important argument not just about Amazon but about the U.S. and how it fails to protect its most vulnerable workers. He had come to believe that employees and contractors at Amazon and other companies badly needed enhanced legal protections from the federal government.

  In many European countries, for example, workplaces of a certain size have legally mandated Works Councils, which are independent of labor unions but give employees a voice in major developments at their facilities. There is no such thing in the U.S., where dramatic changes to workers’ lives can be made thousands of miles away—and if they don’t like it, they have no recourse except to quit and find another job, or speak up publicly and risk getting fired.

  Other prosperous countries have livable minimum wages and government-mandated benefits such as paid sick leave and parental leave, equal treatment protections for part-time workers, and restrictions on working hours. In the U.S., where the federal minimum wage remained at a trifling $7.25 an hour, those were viewed by many lawmakers and some business executives as unaffordable luxuries and a tax on the competitiveness of U.S. companies. As a result, many workers were left to drift in the Covid-19 crisis, clinging to their paychecks and employer-based health insurance if they had it, fearing for their jobs, and with no choice but to put their lives and the safety of their families at risk.

  “Amazon is a symptom of a larger problem,” said Bray from his motorboat. “I’d like to talk to companies the way I talk to my kids. ‘Play nice!’ But that’s not going to work. What you need are regulatory frameworks. If you dislike the way the warehouse people are treated, there should
be regulations that rule that out.

  “We are in a situation where it is perfectly legal to treat line employees like shit,” he continued. “So that is going to happen. Because if you don’t, your competitor will.”

  * * *

  By the end of 2020, as Covid-19 continued to inflict a deadly toll across the world and in the U.S. in particular, a new kind of normalcy was reestablished inside Amazon. It was time to take stock.

  Amid the general misfortune of that year, almost perversely, Amazon had flourished. Despite its significant investment in Covid-19 testing and safety measures, the company recorded its most profitable year ever, and its annual revenues surged 37 percent to over $380 billion. In the fall, with a new wave of infections spreading across the U.S. and Europe and the fulfillment centers ingesting more workers than ever, Amazon employed one million full- and part-time workers for the first time.

  With teleconferencing and distance learning substituting for business travel and in-person interaction, usage of AWS, a key part of the internet’s unseen infrastructure, soared. Homebound customers interacted more often with Alexa and turned to the voice-activated assistant for solace amid the unending isolation. Prime Video thrived, with hits like the violent superhero drama The Boys and the comedy Borat Subsequent Moviefilm further establishing Amazon Studios at the forefront of the Hollywood vanguard, along with Netflix and rising competitors such as Disney+.

  By the end of the year, Amazon boasted a $1.6 trillion market cap and Jeff Bezos was worth more than $190 billion. His wealth had increased by more than 70 percent during the pandemic. It was both a breathtaking achievement and a startling juxtaposition with the economic devastation and strife in Amazon’s fulfillment workforce wrought by the virus. The playing field of global business, already slanted toward Amazon and the other technology giants, had tilted even further in their favor as smaller and local companies perished in droves.

  At Day 1 tower in Seattle, an era was ending. In January, Jeff Wilke, the fifty-three-year-old CEO of Amazon’s consumer business, had told Bezos he wanted to retire over the next year. But as the pandemic intensified, he asked his boss not to worry about his departure for the time being. “I’m going to be here until we are really confident that the company is stable and that we understand the world that we’re operating in,” he said. By August, he was comfortable that Amazon had endured the worst, and decided to announce his departure.

  Wilke had architected the fulfillment network during the dot-com bust, the lowest ebb in Amazon’s history, then oversaw the disparate services in its sprawling e-commerce division. He was also widely viewed as a champion of the more humane elements in its hard-edged culture. “Jeff’s legacy and impact will live on long after he departs,” Bezos wrote to the company. “He is simply one of those people without whom Amazon would be completely unrecognizable.”

  Unsurprisingly, Wilke nominated Dave Clark to take over his role. After the triumphs of building Amazon Logistics and navigating the coronavirus crisis, Clark became the retail CEO under Bezos and in January 2021 would write a letter to the new presidential administration of Joe Biden, offering Amazon’s help in vaccine distribution. It would be up to Clark’s successors in operations, whose instincts had not been similarly forged in the chaotic trenches of the fulfillment centers during Amazon’s formative years, to manage its sprawling operations with a mix of dispassionate proficiency and empathy for the struggles of the frontline workforce.

  Many other longtime execs also stepped away quietly—either because they were exhausted by the ride, already inordinately wealthy, or because they sought the more energizing confines of a smaller company. Among the departures was twenty-two-year Amazon veteran Jeff Blackburn, the senior vice president who had overseen Amazon Studios and the booming advertising division. In their place was a new guard, which included several inductees to the S-team, among them Christine Beauchamp of Amazon Fashion, Colleen Aubrey from advertising, and Alicia Boler Davis from operations. They joined Beth Galetti in finally beginning to change the contours of an expanded twenty-five-person leadership group that for years had been marked by a conspicuous lack of gender and racial diversity.

  As for Bezos, with Amazon’s pandemic response largely set, he could finally set into motion a new set of plans. In February of 2020, he had pledged to donate $10 billion in grants to scientists, activists, and climate groups, as part of a new philanthropic effort he called the Bezos Earth Fund. The Covid-19 crisis delayed that, and in the meantime, MacKenzie Scott surprised the world, first by speedily committing nearly $6 billion in unrestricted grants to various Black colleges and women’s and LGBTQ rights groups, and then by getting remarried to Seattle chemistry teacher Dan Jewett, who also signed the Giving Pledge. The juxtaposition with her ex-husband’s incipient philanthropic efforts was stark.

  Over the fall of 2020, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started videoconferencing with climate and conservation groups. Executives at these organizations said that the couple asked insightful questions and earnestly solicited advice about how they could make a difference. After they reached out to a wider cohort of nonprofits, including smaller grassroots organizations that worked on causes such as protecting low-income neighborhoods from pollution, they may have been surprised by the reception: some of these groups were distrustful of Bezos’s money and cautious of affiliating too closely with the CEO of a company that had a reputation for mistreating workers.

  One recipient, the NDN Collective, an organization devoted to creating sustainable solutions that empowered indigenous people, would receive $12 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, and afterward release an extraordinary statement that read in part: “We will not tiptoe around the fact that Amazon and Jeff Bezos in particular have been rightfully criticized for unjust working conditions, corporate bailouts, and for directly contributing to climate change in the world.” Other grassroots groups insisted they be treated as relative equals to the large environmental groups that were slated to receive $100 million grants, like the Environmental Defense Fund and World Resources Institute. Five such environmental justice organizations would receive a total of $151 million.

  But a few groups went further and demanded that Bezos contribute to climate organizations that also advocate for fair labor standards. With some of these talks growing more complex and contentious than perhaps he had expected, Bezos asked Patty Stonesifer, a longtime Amazon board member and former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to intercede. Environmental groups recalled how she took over the process that fall, helping to add organizations like the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund and the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice to the list of grantees receiving Bezos’s largesse. She also gently ended the dialogue with groups like the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program that adamantly viewed labor rights as an integral component of climate justice.

  The announcement of the first $791 million in grants from his Earth Fund, on November 16, 2020, showed that Bezos was finally turning his legendary intellect and colossal fortune toward the greatest challenge of his generation. Even though skepticism from environmental groups had dogged his best intentions, he wasn’t going to change the way he operated after a lifetime of remarkable success.

  This attitude applied to how he closely managed the newest and most promising endeavors inside Amazon, even as his stature continued to grow. Just as he had nurtured the projects that became Alexa and the Amazon Go stores, he helped to develop Project Kuiper, an ambitious plan to launch satellites that would provide high-speed internet connectivity to people around the world. Amazon’s $10 billion project directly challenged the Starlink satellite system already deployed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two companies battled before regulators over portions of the radio spectrum and lower Earth altitudes where signals are strongest; once again, it pitted two of the wealthiest people in the world against each other in another high-profile competition.

  Similarly, Bezos continued to oversee Amazon’s play in the roughly $4 trillion U
.S. healthcare market. This included Amazon Pharmacy, a long-gestating service that allowed Amazon customers to order prescriptions online, which the company introduced publicly that November as Covid-19 raged on in the U.S. Other elements of their health efforts were the Fitbit-like Halo smart band, unveiled in August of 2020, and Amazon Care, a smartphone app-based service that offered Amazon employees in Washington State virtual consultations with physicians, and which Amazon was just beginning to roll out to other companies. Bezos believed there was significant potential for disruption and innovation in healthcare and met regularly with a secretive group inside the company, dubbed the “grand challenge,” whose purpose was to generate and pursue ideas in the field.

  Bezos remained consumed with identifying promising new business opportunities that could significantly improve his company’s already robust fortunes. He also continued to cede more authority over the older divisions to key deputies, like Andy Jassy and Dave Clark. And on February 2, 2021, in a historic announcement, Amazon disclosed that he would also cede something else: his job as CEO. Atop its quarterly financial report, the company announced that later in the year, Bezos would transition to executive chairman and hand over the chief executive role to Jassy, the longtime leader of AWS, who long ago was his first full-time technical advisor.