...with having rights
Well this is interesting:
Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.
Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.
The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.
The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.
This is one of the big problems with viewing companies — any sort of companies — as the potential heralds of a better future: they're essentially amoral entities. Their job isn't to make the world better, it's to do a task in a way that makes them a lot of money. The bigger the company and the longer it endures, the more this is the case. All Steve Jobs' ideals didn't prevent Apple from using Chinese companies so hellish their workers committed suicide in droves.
I've made this point before, but it's worth repeating, because it's what I find most disturbing about the reverence Silicon Valley sometimes receives. It's not that tech companies don't make some really useful things, but their core purpose is entirely venal. "Don't be evil" and "think different" are nice, but expendable. If keeping the cheap labor in line requires hiring fascists, then so be it.
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