Activists, immigrants and Amazon employees demonstrated against the e-commerce giant on its annual Prime Day, protesting against its labor practices and its involvement with US authorities’ deportation efforts.
The protests on Monday began in seven US cities, coinciding with the yearly sale that made the company more than $4bn in 2018.
Activists say Amazon should not be profiting off the yearly sale event while its workers struggle for better work conditions and its technology is being used to deport immigrants.
Protesters delivered to Jeff Bezos’s home in Manhattan on Monday 250,000 petitions calling on Amazon to cut ties with government agencies responsible for deportation. Protests will also take place in Seattle and San Francisco.
Amazon Web Services hosts Department of Homeland Security databases that allow the department and its agencies to track and apprehend immigrants. The company is also in talks to expand a partnership to host new DHS biometric databases that store more extensive data, including eye color, tattoos and other identifiers.
A spokesman from Amazon Web Services told the Guardian the company has offered legislative suggestions regarding responsible use of artificial intelligence and requested more clarity surrounding its potential misuse. In February 2019, Amazon proposed guidelines for facial recognition technology.
“As we’ve said many times and continue to believe strongly, companies and government organizations need to use existing and new technology responsibly and lawfully,” he said.
Reporting live from the Amazon protest. pic.twitter.com/m1SXmHLf6V
— Manoli Figetakis (@MFigetakis) July 15, 2019
Prime Day launched in 2015 to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary and has grown into an increasingly profitable two-day event as Amazon’s reach expanded. Amazon is now worth more than $1tn and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world with a net worth of more than $120bn.
The expanding power of Amazon has led to increased scrutiny of worker conditions, as fulfillment center employees complain of long hours with few bathroom breaks and unpaid labor. Amazon increased its minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018, but workers say the company should provide more resources and ease production quotas.
In addition to the immigration-related protests against Amazon, warehouse workers plan to walk out of the company’s fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, for six hours on Monday to demand better working conditions.
White-collar tech workers at Amazon traveled to Minnesota in solidarity with the warehouse workers, a number of employees who organize as part of a working group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said.
“Lending our support to our co-workers in [Minnesota] is a natural part of our climate justice priorities,” the group said. “We cannot create a sustainable, long-term approach to addressing the climate crisis without addressing the structural, racial and economic inequities that are part of our system of extraction – of energy, material, and human labor – that has caused the crisis.”
On Thursday, hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the annual Amazon Web Services summit in New York , demanding the tech firm cut ties with government agencies that take part in immigrant deportations.
“Boycotting Amazon is not enough – we must demand this corporation change the ways in which it is functioning in our country and in the world,” said Maritza Silva-Farrell, the executive director at New York City-based labor and social justice organization Align, adding that the actions are especially important as Amazon faces federal antitrust action, testifying in Congress about whether its size and power prevents fair competition in the technology industry. “Consumers have a very important role to play here.”