Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 2

2.0 Summary of the issue .............................................................................................................................. 4

3.0 Business Ethics Theories Analysis ......................................................................................................... 5

3.1 Utilitarian theory ................................................................................................................................. 5

3.2 Kant’s theory....................................................................................................................................... 7

3.3 Theory of rights................................................................................................................................... 9

3.4 Ethics of care..................................................................................................................................... 12

4.0 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 13

5.0 References ............................................................................................................................................. 14

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1.0 Introduction
Amazon is an American multinational technology company headquarters in Seattle, Washington
that offers their service on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, artificial intelligence
and many more. Amazon has its own websites, software development centers, customer service
centers and fulfillment centers in many locations around the world.

Amazon has been measured as one of the major tech companies such as Google, Apple, and also
Facebook. This company also has been classified as biggest internet business by profits throughout
the world. Amazon has known as the second biggest employer in United States and one of the
world's most respected multinational corporation.

Besides that, Amazon was established by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, in the year of 1994.
At first, Bezos named his company as Cadabra in the year of establishment but later on he altered
the name from Cadabra to Amazon for the company`s website launch in the year of 1995. The
owner of the business believed to have look through a wordlist for a word that starting with
alphabet “A” for the worth of alphabetic placement. Later on, Bezos chooses the name Amazon
because it was “exotic and different”. Not only that, also to be a reference to his strategy for the
corporation’s size to imitate of the Amazon River, as it was one of the major rivers in the world.

The major reason to change their business name from Cadabra to Amazon was because the
company’s first lawyer, named Todd Tarbert, influenced Bezos that the current name sounded
similar to “Cadaver,” especially while speaking over the phone. Not only that, Bezos also preferred
the name “Relentless”.

At first, Amazon got taking place at Bezos’ garage and the servers that the business used required
so much power that Bezos and his wife could not run a hair dryer or a vacuum in the house without
blowing a fuse. In the first month of its introduction, Amazon had successfully sold books to people
in all 50 states and in 45 different countries.

Amazon first started their business only as an online marketplace for books but after some time
this company have been enlarged their business by starting to sell electronics, software, video
games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. After number of years, in 2015 Amazon
exceeded Walmart as the greatest retailer in the United States by their company market

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capitalization. Two years afterwards, this company developed Whole Foods Market for US$13.4
billion, which massively improved Amazon's company.

In the year of 2018, CEO of Amazon publicized that their company will deliver goods in two days’
time where this multinational corporation has surpassed 100 million subscribers worldwide for
their short and excellent service.

Currently, Amazon provide many products and services. They basically deal out downloads and
streaming of video, music, movies and audiobooks through its Amazon Prime Video, Amazon
Music, and Audible subsidiaries. Not only that, Amazon also do Amazon Publishing, a film and
television studio, Amazon Studios, and a cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services known as AWS basically contains renting data storage and computing
resources which also known or called as cloud computing, over the Internet. Very first AWS
concept were propelled in the year of 2006 in order to offer online amenities for websites and other
online customer chains. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud known as EC2 and Simple Storage
Service known as S3 are the strength of the Amazon business’s huge and rising collection of Web
services.

Moreover, Amazon produces offers Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo devices. In
addition, Amazon subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, Whole Foods Market, and IMDb. Not to be
forgotten, this company also sells housewares, books, toys and many other goods by either being
an intermediate person or selling their goods directly.

Presently, this company is directed by four main principles which are customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term
thinking. Amazon builds their future as they strive to have a positive impact on customers,
employees, small businesses, the economy, and communities. Amazonians are smart, passionate
builders with diverse backgrounds and goals, who share a common desire to always be learning
and inventing on behalf of our customers.

Midst of numerous controversies, this multinational corporation has been condemned for high
technology of all time by overreaching it. Amazon known as a major competitive and challenging
work culture, tax avoidance, and anti-competitive practices.

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2.0 Summary of the issue
Amazon has been blamed of treating their warehouse employees like robots. According to Emily,
G. (2019, July 18th) Time; a group of workers stated that “We are humans not robots!” at an
Amazon warehouse in Minnesota protested in March and on July’s Amazon Prime Days. I wasn’t
prepared for how exhausting working at Amazon would be where walking 15 miles a day and
doing hundreds of squats. But as the physical stress got more manageable, the mental stress of
being held to the productivity standards of a robot became an even bigger problem.

Technology has enabled employers to enforce a work pace with no room for inefficiency. The scan
gun been used to do job used to monitor and timed. Upon completion of a task, the scan gun not
only immediately gave a new one but also started counting down the seconds had left to do it. It
will alert a manager if employee had too many minutes of “Time off Task.”

Employees only expected to be off task for only 18 minutes per shift where each staffs working
hours will be eleven and half hours a day which included using the bathroom and other things.
Employees allowed for 30 minute unpaid lunch.

I felt as if the company wanted us to be robots never stopping, never letting our minds wander off
task. I felt an incredible amount of pressure to repress the human “failings” that made me less
efficient than a machine. (Amazon in response said that this is not an “accurate portrayal of
working in our buildings” and that it is “proud of our safe workplaces.”). Amazon was obsessed
with safety and generally did have better wages and benefits, even before it raised its minimum
wage to $15 an hour.

Amazon is the apex predator of the modern economy; as with Walmart in the ’90s, anyone who
wants to compete with it will have to adopt its labor practices. According to Amazon, its U.S.
workforce will reach 300,000 employees this year, many of whom work in blue collar jobs.

Human workers are still necessary. We remain vastly superior to machines at conversation,
creativity, visual recognition and fine motor control, and we’re still a little cheaper. But we’re not
as good at highly inflexible, repetitive tasks as machines and algorithms.

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3.0 Business Ethics Theories Analysis

3.1 Utilitarian theory

Utilitarian Theory of Ethics is one of the most influential teleological ethical theories. It is applied
widely by economist to make rational decisions. An action is right if it tends to promote happiness
and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness not just the happiness of the performer
of the action but also that of everyone affected by it. In the notion of consequences the Utilitarian
includes all of the good and bad produced by the act, whether arising after the act has been
performed or during its performance. The utilitarian principles involves four distinct theses which
is Consequentialism, Hedonism, Maximalism and Universalism.

Analysis of the issue from the perspective of Utilitarianism

Good consequences

-Amazon have been satisfying the customer’s needs in many ways as they are reaching for high
achievements in upcoming years

-They even made an invention of introducing a device named 'Alexa' which is enabled in each and
every device.

-This attracted customers in many ways and customers started to make a queue for this products
which makes and large amount of profit for amazon.

-Moreover, talking about their customer service is much more important here as amazon has one
of the best online fast delivery system.

-Amazon made higher profits as they sell their products for lower cost.

-Amazon also reported earnings for its third fiscal quarter of 2019 revenue which was $70 billion
and their net income of $2.1 billion which they made more than in 2018.

-Customers can receive the product to their doorstep in a blink of an eye. That is how fast they
were to settle people down and making them feel satisfied.

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Bad consequences

- Amazon is treating their workers as robots and not even giving them some rest.

- If they do so, Amazon has to face of losing their workers as of their treatment.

- Maintaining the company with few workers makes reduce the quality in their work and they have
to even lose their customers as well.

- Workers can even sue Amazon as they didn't cover up their medical expenses as per their workers
agreement.

Therefore, what amazon did is ethical because there are more good consequences than bad
consequences. Amazon is gaining more profits and reaching their goals in the current
circumstances so as it is they are proving that what they do is absolutely right and ethical.

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3.2 Kant’s theory

Kant’s Ethics of Duty theory is a deontological theory which had many principles that insisted that
moral action requires conformity to moral principles and perform a duty towards others. Kant also
believed that there was a supreme principle of morality, and he referred to it as The Categorical
Imperative.

•The first categorical imperative argued to act only according to that maxim by which you can at
the same time will that it should become a universal law, this imperative reinforces that our moral
actions should not be guided by our own inclinations, but guided by a sense of duty to the universal
law. One’s absolute moral truth must be logically consistent, free from internal contradiction. It
also requires us to put ourselves in the place of the receiving party before acting.

•The second categorical imperative stated to act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own
person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. With this imperative, an
action is morally right for a person if and only if in performing the action, the person does not use
others merely as a means for advancing his or her interests, but at the same time respects their
capacity to choose freely what they want.

Analysis of the issue from the perspective of Kantianism

Amazon failed to act according to the moral conduct by monitoring every single action they made
during work and non-work hours in the company which shows they have no respect or
consideration for their employees and with this they have eliminated any professionalism the firm
has and violating Kant’s supreme principle of morality.

Amazon didn’t perform its duty toward its employees as it only kept squeezing every work hour
out of them and giving them monitored breaks which made all their employees very frustrated as
the company didn’t even pay them well for all of the hard work they did.

Amazon made an obvious breach for the universal law which states that labors and employees
should not exceed their mental and physical endurance during the job which amazon failed to
follow.

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Amazon didn’t put themselves in the place of their employees because the actions that are practiced
in their firm aren’t fair and if it was the other way around amazon manger wouldn’t like to be
treated as robots

Amazons employees aren’t being treated with humanity as they are robbed from their simplest
rights by being treated as robots who only work with taking a monitored breaks that are being
recorded showing that they only care about increasing their revenue on the account of their
employees.

We can conclude that amazon have failed to follow any of Immanuel Kant theories and five
principles. Therefore, Amazon is being very unethical.

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3.3 Theory of rights

Theory of rights can be defined as there are certain things or certain ways that we cannot do against
people as they are holders of moral rights. In other words, to have rights is to be allowed to act on
our own or to be treated by others in certain ways without asking permission of anyone. Figure 1
below, shows various types of rights. Legal rights can be defined as those that recognized and
enforced as part of a legal system or law. General Rights can be defined as humanity in general.
This type of theory of rights relates with the general residents or the community as a whole.
Meanwhile, Specific Rights are entitled through contracts or agreements to individuals.

Figure 1

Analysis of the issue from the perspective of Theory of Rights

As per the news reported in Minnesota, US, Amazon was mistreating their employees in multiple
ways; where these case was not only reported in these warehouse but also in multiple branches of
theirs. With this kind of constant incident at a number of their warehouses, most of the above
rights concerning their staffs are being dishonored.

3.3.1 Legal Rights

With those unethical act of Amazon by treating humans like robots there are certain rights that are
enforced as a part of the law. On the authority of Britain law, The Health and Safety at Work Act
1974 (HSWA or HASAWA) will be the major of legislation. This act stated above basically
explains that bosses have to carry out health checkups; to know whether their employee is healthy

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or ill and if yes what type of sickness they have and why they have it. Amazon has to carry out
health checkups for the amount of work they are putting up on their employees.

In the news above, the warehouse employee have stated that a person has to walk 15 miles a day
and with hundreds of squats during their particular shift which will be 11 hours. 15 miles
approximately will be 24.1 kilometers. This situation above, explains directly on how an
employee`s health could be damaged or can cause harm. This situation encompassed difficulties
regarding the nonstop automatic job assigning, other physical and mental stresses caused by
Amazon warehouse in their working atmosphere. Even after this much of work being assigned to
these warehouse employees, Amazon’s management does not take any actions towards those
complaints thus those health checks were evaded. Which caused a number of their warehouse
workers encountered health issues.

3.3.2 General Rights

Amazon’s way of treating their employees as robot shows clearly that they does not respect their
employees as a human beings and violating certain general rights. In the news above, it is stated
that out of eleven and half hours of work Amazon proximately only provides 18 minutes of break
for their employees including toilet break, filling up water, relaxing and so on.

Moreover, employees are allowed to only take unpaid lunch break for 30 minutes of period.
Amazon management also made their employees to work in endless pressure for long hours
without even being thoughtful about the worker`s physical and mental health. Amazon`s only
target was to deliver goods within two days’ time as their companies new strategy they
implemented in order to compete current competitors and satisfy their customers demand. Where
this situation above exactly explains that Amazon`s mistreatment towards their employees was
totally against the humanity.

3.3.3 Specific Rights

Amazon act very unethical in a way where their organization`s higher managerial have conveyed
refusal and overdue in giving the workers medical allowances after the workers had been wounded
during working hours. According to Amazon`s job agreement, medical allowances are legally
bound to every worker if they get injured in workplace. Besides that, several of the injured workers
have specified that Amazon did not provide the Short-Term Disability allowance completely to

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their workers. Under Amazon`s job agreement, Short-Term Disability allowance must be given
for certain amount of time until the injured worker get back from medical leave that has been
provided by medical facility that Amazon has fixed. This behavior of Amazon shows on how
unethical they have behaved towards their employees.

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3.4 Ethics of care

Ethics of care is basically a deontological theory which relates to virtue of caring after someone.
It can be as caring for someone who requires our support because of some limitations that the
person is experiencing. Caring after someone is an act of humanity towards to someone who really
need the care, help, support and love. This means to care after someone who requires our support
because of some limitations that the person is experiencing. For example, a student and teacher. If
a student is going through tough time in family and very stressful because of the situation that he
facing; as a teacher being there for the student, supporting him, cheering him up, and give extra
attention simply shows that the teacher care after the student. This situation above can apply in
many situations as organization, friend, school, hospital and many more.

Analysis of the issue from the perspective of Ethics of care

According to the workers protest at an Amazon fulfilment center in Minnesota, a group of workers
argued that Amazon is treating them like robots. Amazon has been focusing on their productivity,
without bothering how they treat their workers. The workers supposed to be the company’s
priority, hence, during that time Amazon must care after him. In this situation, we can say that
Amazon is unethical in terms of Ethics of care because employees weren't given proper break
times, where the workers only had 18 minutes break in a 12-hours shift. Also, reported mandatory
overtime, especially around the holiday season and the managers of Amazon forcing their
employees to work 12-hour shifts five or six days in a row Amazon did not care after the workers
enough to grant them their breaks and happy time to spend with their family and friends during
festive and holy seasons.

Amazon, however, does not care after the workers as much. The workers work to generate income
for Amazon in order to have high revenue which then the managers should care after the workers.
If the workers are taking breaks which may lower productivity levels and results in lateness of
orders as said by Amazon then we might be said that Amazon is unethical towards their workers
by not caring after their workers.

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4.0 Conclusion

In conclusion, what Amazon did was unethical because each and every employees prefers and
deserve a working environment that is physically and emotionally safe to them, where they can
actually focus on their job responsibilities and obtain some fulfillment, rather than worrying about
dangerous conditions, harassment, or discrimination in the workplace. But Amazon treats their
employees like robots, provides them only few minutes break for eleven and half hour shift, does
not provide medical allowance as promised, only provide unpaid lunch and many more other things
which clearly proves that this organization being very unethical and treating humans not even with
slightest amount of respect instead they are very selfish to just make revenue and be a bigger firm.

Amazon is treating employees in disrespectful manner and no organization has the rights to treat
the person they hire as robot just because they pay certain amount of allowance. It is very essential
for Amazon to change this kind of organization culture. This behavior of amazon is making the
customers to not purchase anymore as nobody wants something with good quality by putting a
human being life and health at stake. Not only that, this company is losing all the reputation it has
collected through years of hard work. Hence, when there is a satisfied workforce there will be an
increased in quality and productivity in delivering their service, which leads to appreciative
customers and increased profitability.

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5.0 References

- Emily, Guendelsberger. (2019) I Worked at an Amazon Fulfillment Center; They Treat Workers
Like Robots.

Retrieved from: https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/

-Sarah, Butler. (2018) Amazon accused of treating UK warehouse staff like robots.

Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/31/amazon-accused-of-

treating-uk-warehouse-staff-like-robots

-HSE. (no year) Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.

Retrieved from: https://www.hse.gov.uk/legislation/hswa.htm

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