Winning Slowly

In which we quite aggressively tackle Amazon’s corporate treatment of its workers, and launch into a discussion of corporate ethics and responsibility. We also note that though we critique Amazon’s practices, we recognize that it has good effects in the world, some of them significant. The question is: at what point to the externalities associated with those benefits make dealing with any given company morally unjustifiable? Links The original piece which sparked this discussion: “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” “Why the New York Times’s Amazon story is so controversial, explained” (Vox) – with a scathing and accurate comment on blue-collar workers as the real problem for Amazon: The real workplace scandal at Amazon — and in the economy writ large — isn’t the treatment of white-collar workers with plenty of options. It’s the treatment of blue-collar workers with none. Most of Amazon’s workers, after all, aren’t highly paid engineers or marketers sitting in a Seattle office. Th