Make Amazon Pay

Joint letter by 401 parliamentari-

ans from 34 countries around the
world
TO:
Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon Inc.
410 Terry Ave N, Seattle
WA 98109, United States

3 December 2020

Mr. Bezos,

We, elected representatives and public officials from around the

world, hereby put you on notice that Amazon’s days of impunity are
over. Last Friday, 27 November, workers, activists, and citizens around
the world joined forces to demand justice from Amazon. Today, we
pledge to stand with this movement in every congress, parliament,
and statehouse where we work.

In short, we write to you now with a single commitment: to Make

Amazon Pay.

The world knows that Amazon can afford to pay its workers, its
environmental cost and its taxes. And yet – time and again – you have
dodged and dismissed your debts to workers, societies, and the planet. 

Your great wealth is based on the skills of your workers and the care
they receive from their friends, family and communities. These are
the very people who risked their health and that of their loved ones to
supply goods to consumers and make you enormous profits. But while
your personal wealth has risen by around US $13 million per hour in
2020, these workers enter dangerous working conditions, enjoy little
or no increase in their pay, and face retaliation for their efforts to
defend themselves and organize their colleagues.

We pledge again, alongside your workers, to Make Amazon Pay.

Your company’s rise to dominance has come with extraordinary costs

to our environment. While you have personally acknowledged the
climate emergency among the defining challenges of our era, Amazon’s
carbon footprint is greater than two-thirds of the world’s countries.
Your plan for emissions reduction is both insufficient to stay within
the environmental boundaries of our planet and difficult to trust given
Amazon’s record of broken promises on sustainability and financial
contributions to climate change denial.

We pledge again, on behalf of our planet, to Make Amazon Pay.

Finally, you have undermined our democracies and their capacity to

respond to collective challenges. Your monopolistic practices have
squeezed small businesses, your web services have disrespected data
rights, and you have contributed a pittance in return. For example,
in 2017 and 2018, Amazon paid zero US federation corporation tax.
Through your global tax dodging, you damage the public provision of
health, education, housing, social security and infrastructure.

We pledge again, for our constituents, to Make Amazon Pay.

We urge you to act decisively to change your policies and priorities to

do right by your workers, their communities, and our planet. We stand
ready to act in our respective legislatures to support the movement
that is growing around the world to Make Amazon Pay.

Yours sincerely...