Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Amazon is an employer in a first world country, and must comply with its labour laws. There has been no suggestion that it does not.
|
If I had the time, I think I could, with Google, find evidence of labor law violations in
every company with tens of thousands of employees.
Knowing every big company has good and bad corners, how do they compare overall? This is a judgment call based on a combination of survey information and impressionistic evidence.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I would hazard a guess that most of Amazon's critics on this aspect of their operations have no qualms buying products produced offshore in far worse conditions than at Amazon, even if the worst of the Amazon Horror stories were completely true.
|
I would hazard a guess that a lot of them are buy-American types, or the EU equivalent. I guess we need a poll on this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Firstly, the 1984 incident was a blot on their record which will take some time to live down.
|
Amazon has no problem with that book.
All they were doing was upholding copyright.
From where I sit and read, Amazon has a wonderful freedom to read record in the US. They sell books that are strongly critical of both the US government and of Amazon itself.
However, the fact that Amazon freely operates in China, while Archive.org, Facebook, Google, and the New York Times are all blocked, suggests some questions to ask. I just searched Amazon.cn (their China site) for Jung Chang, a best-selling British author of books on modern Chinese history, who is critical of the government there, and nothing comes up:
http://www.amazon.cn/s/ref=nb_sb_nos...k%3AJung+Chang
I do think there is potential for Amazon to, over time, improve. One thing that might change my opinion of Amazon is if it used its technical expertise to push forbidden titles past censorship firewalls and into countries with significant freedom to read deficits, such as Russia, China, and some of those in the Middle East.
Amazon does not have a laser-like focus on profit. They can do this.