May 8, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

This week we’re sharing a new report on worker injuries at Amazon, an issue I used to report on closely.

I've spoken to dozens of Amazon workers about their experiences at warehouses where they repeat the same rote operations hundreds and hundreds of times to make sure that Americans can get their packages ever more quickly.

Some of those workers have told me about how Amazon keeps track of any “time off task,” a measure often used to discipline or even fire workers. Almost all of the workers I’ve interviewed have mentioned, unprompted, the fears they have that they could be permanently damaging their bodies on the job.

How do these issues tie into our focus on inequality? Well, for starters, Amazon’s workers — despite making so little working full-time that some have had to resort to living in cars — are making their execs outrageously wealthy. Amazon has become our nation’s second-largest private employer. Amazon’s workers could hardly be more central to our labor movement’s struggle for a fairer society.

As always, if you have any thoughts, criticisms, or compliments, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me by responding directly to this email. 

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Fighting to Keep Fellow Amazon Workers Safe on the Job

This week’s frontline face: Ron Sewell, an Amazon warehouse associate in East Point, Georgia. 

What he’s doing to help create a more equal world: Sewell has been organizing with United for Respect, an organization dedicated to reforming the retail industry. The group has recently collaborated on a National Employment Law Project report that highlights the grueling conditions at Amazon warehouses.

In 2023, over six of every hundred Amazon workers suffered an injury on the job.  Most of those injured needed time off to recover or a new task assignment.

Pressure from advocates like Ron Sewell, who teaches safety at his facility, has led to a congressional push to restrict the onerous work quotas that result in Amazon employees pushing themselves past their limits.

What makes the issue so important to him: “It’s part of my job to teach safety and ensure warehouse associates follow safety rules,” says Sewell, “but management is more concerned with speed and reaching unreachable quotas —  what they call ‘making rate.’ That’s their #1 priority, and that has management and workers bypassing safety rules and working in the danger zone.”

Let’s Tie Industrial Policy to Care Policy to Help Fix the Child Care Crisis

Millions of American families today are struggling to pay for child care, what with the average price for licensed providers now running nearly $11,000 a year. Prices this high can be a huge barrier for workers, particularly women, forcing many of them to cut back on hours or drop out of the workforce entirely. 

A new federal program is aiming to help break down these barriers by requiring firms getting government subsidies to submit plans to meet workers’ child care needs. So far, only firms taking in over $150 million in subsidies via the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act have to submit these plans. But this start could become a model for using the power of the public purse to expand child care options.

The Century Foundation’s Lea Woods and Julie Kashen have been closely monitoring two CHIPS grantees, Intel and Micron, and they see some hopeful signs for the future. Read their analysis for Inequality.org below. 

Our Well-Heeled and Our Personal Well-Being: A New Take

Just what exactly happens when a society becomes substantially more unequal, when a few become fabulously richer than the many? Defenders of our deepest pockets have a ready answer. What happens when wealth starts concentrating at a society’s summit? Nothing, they assure us, that we need worry about. But new, cutting-edge psychological research is offering up plenty of reasons for worrying about escalating inequality. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

From North Dakota, a Champion of Billionaire Solidarity Emerges

This week’s dour deep pocket: Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota and a possible 2024 vice-presidential running mate for Donald Trump.

What has Burgum sour: The reality that not every U.S. billionaire is supporting Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

“If you’re a billionaire and you care about your shareholders, you care about your family, you care about your grandkids,” Burgum declared last week in a Fox News interview, “you should be voting for someone that’s going to bring prosperity to America and peace to the world.”

Burgum, Forbes notes, has dumped at least $4.6 million into a super PAC working to unseat GOP opponents of his state agenda. That agenda’s latest centerpiece?

“It is time for us to say goodbye to the state income tax once and for all,” Burgum announced in his 2024 “state of the state” address.

The last word: Last July, after Burgum went on Meet the Press and blasted the “Red Tape Ideology” of America’s trade unions, four North Dakota union leaders wasted no time responding: “We see things as working people and Burgum sees things as a billionaire businessman.”

Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro, Where Your 2023 Taxes Went: A People’s Briefing, Institute for Policy Studies. Every April many people in the U.S. file tax returns. Eventually they get to know whether they’re getting a refund or will be made to pay more. But how many of us know where our tax dollars really go?

Jan Miyasaki and Sarah Anderson, Progressive “2025 Agenda To Inspire Action,” 8 O'Clock Buzz. A discussion of the sweeping domestic agenda proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The world millionaires club shrunk slightly in 2022 because of high interest rates and inflation. But the number of people with net worths of at least $1 million — not including their primary residence — still sits up 81 percent since 2012. The growth rate for the total global population over the same time period: 11 percent. For an interactive version of this chart and more on inequality, check out the link below.

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