Amazon has entered the healthcare sector and employers are putting people on “Amazon Care” -- Amazon boycotters: is there recourse?
Amazon has entered the healthcare sector and employers are putting people on “Amazon Care” -- Amazon boycotters: is there recourse?
As a self-respecting environmentalist, I #boycottAmazon (rationale; ¶6 covers relevant environmental problems with Amazon and thus why boycotting Amazon is a useful individual action).
I just read about Amazon entering the healthcare sector (in the bottom of the linked article), and that employers are subscribing to offer employees health benefits through that. Naturally, I find this despicable. IIUC, if you rightfully boycott Amazon then by extension you lose employment opportunities at employers who limit healthcare benefits to those of Amazon. Correct? Or am I missing something?
The most effective way to fight back against this dystopian crap is to unionize so that the union can reject sub-par health care plans.
I don't think I could fault an individual person for accepting a job that uses Amazon as a healthcare provider. Hopefully, you could channel the same principles that would lead one to boycott Amazon into unionizing your workplace so that you can actually have a say in the healthcare plan.
Unionizing is a collective action. Not that there’s anything wrong with collective actions. But a boycott on Amazon is not the sort of thing that I would expect to gain momentum on across a workforce unless Amazon Care were to actually offer a quite poor quality health plan. Don’t workers’ unions tend to just advocate for the worker’s own personal benefits? I imagine someone showing up to a union meeting to propose prioritizing the environment would likely get marginalized and pushed out. The best they could probably get away with is motivate the union to compel an employer to offer more plans to compete with Amazon Care.
The beauty of individual actions is that you can make a snap change with instant effect (however small) without interference. It seems in this case it requires an organized collective effort to merely reach a position by which some people can make their drop in the ocean individual action.
Although I have to wonder if it could work as simply as my Coca-Cola boycott, where I simply asked for more options with no support. Maybe I would make that a condition of hiring me. “I’ll accept your job offer as-is except I require a non-Amazon health plan as a precondition”.
For anyone curious about how this might play out, take a look at Telus Health. Telus is a Canadian telecom company that has branched out into several health care businesses, from clinics to building and hosting¹ electronic healthcare records. There are currently battles over whether it is legal to force prescription fulfillment through Telus providers.
That's right, a telecom company, that most reviled, least trusted sector of the economy, is trying to take over healthcare in a country with a (mostly) single-payer, tax-funded, (mostly) free at the point of delivery, public healthcare system. And they're doing so successfully.
Amazon is actually late to the game.
(1) I don't know for sure that they are hosting the records, but the fact that the word "Telus" shows up in the url makes it seem like like a reasonable conclusion.
From an environmental perspective, Amazon is much better than most big box stores due to efficiency.
Did you read ¶6 of the linked page? E.g.
“Amazon is destroying millions of items of unsold stock every year, products that are often new and unused, ITV News can reveal. (That article covers the UK, but an insider tells me it's happening in the US too)”
Amazon overstocks their warehouse and then has to prioritize the space for the most profitable stock. They destroy everything that does not make the cut. That strikes me as very inefficient. I think any perceived efficiency draws from the sort of work environment that causes employees to pee in jars. That’s not really the kind of efficiency that benefits the environment.