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https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316376
Google and amazon are just a runaway train and any competitive that cross their path never ends well. These businesses are at suck a competitive advance.

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this article explains how it is harder for other companies to compete with amazon considering how this industry is so big

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Google employees branded together to form a union alliance.

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Google employees worldwide have teamed up to form an international union alliance.

Alpha Global is spread across 10 countries, including the US, UK, and Germany.

Officials accused Google of "suppressing speech and cracking down on worker organizing."

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Google employees have banded together to form an international union alliance, weeks after the formation of the minority Alphabet Workers Union in the US.

This new international entity, called Alpha Global, has been formed with the UNI Global Union, a movement representing more than 20 million workers worldwide, and which is active in 10 countries, including the US, Germany, Sweden, and the UK.

It isn't clear how many temporary or contract workers with Google have joined Alpha Global, and it is likely to be a small fraction of the company's workforce at this stage. The Verge, which first reported the new union alliance, reports that the new entity won't have any legal bargaining power with Google.

Similarly in the US, the Alphabet Workers Union is a minority union meaning it cannot bargain with management and is not recognized by the US National Labor Relations board. It has more than 600 members, out of Google's estimated 130,000 contractors and temp workers.

Still, the emergence of Alpha Global indicates that white-collar workers at big tech firms are looking to cement an emerging wave of organization.

In a joint statement published on Monday, Alpha Global's officials said: "[Many] Alphabet workers have started on a path to unionization and collective bargaining. Workers are building democratic organizations to represent their interests, to struggle collectively, to create a structural counterbalance to corporate power, and to build a movement of tech workers across the industry."

They accused Google of "suppressing speech and cracking down on worker organizing while consolidating monopolistic power."
Are you a current or former Googler with more to share? You can contact this reporter securely using the encrypted messaging app Signal (+447801985586) or email (mcoulter@businessinsider.com). Reach out using a nonwork device.
"A just Alphabet has wide-ranging implications for our democracies and societies. That is why we are joining together to demand fundamental human rights for all workers in Alphabet operations, including the right to form or join a union and the right to bargain collectively."

So far, the Alphabet Workers Union has proven to be something of a PR headache for Google. It has particularly spoken out about the departure of Timnit Gebru, technical co-lead of Google's ethical-artificial-intelligence team, after she said she was fired. It also criticized the subsequent, related investigation into Margaret Mitchell, another senior AI ethicist within Google's ranks.

In a statement, Kara Silverstein, Google's director of people operations, told Insider: "We've always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace. We'll continue to engage directly with all our employees."

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Google employees around the world have formed a new international union alliance called Alpha Global

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Google employees worldwide have teamed up to form an international union alliance. Alpha Global is spread across 10 countries, including the US, UK, and Germany. Officials accused Google of "suppressing speech and cracking down on worker organizing." Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/08/inside-facebook-second-class-workers-who-do-hardest-job-are-waging-quiet-battle/
Facebook treatment of workers

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The main idea is about how apple had knowingly used child labor for 3 years though claiming to have high standards for their workers.

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Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties, despite the company’s promises to hold itself to the ‘highest standards,’ report says

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Ex-employees told The Information that Apple kept working with suppliers, despite repeated labor law violations, when cutting ties was more costly.

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Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties, despite the company’s promises to hold itself to the ‘highest standards,’ report says

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Ex-employees told The Information that Apple kept working with suppliers, despite repeated labor law violations, when cutting ties was more costly.

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Amazon workers treated like robots in the warehouses.

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I Worked at an Amazon Fulfillment Center; They Treat Workers Like Robots

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Column: I used to work at an Amazon fulfillment center. The company treated us like we were robots.

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This article explains that smaller businesses keep getting unrecognized, and they are running out of money to pay for google advertisements.

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When asked about Google, Bryan Clayton voices a familiar lament among small-business owners.

"You keep getting squeezed further and further down the search results page," said Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, a company that operates an app to help homeowners find lawn care. "As a startup, you don't have a million-dollar advertising budget."

The Justice Department sued Google for anticompetitive behavior on October 20, saying the company's dominance in online search and advertising harms rivals and consumers.

But owners such as Clayton have a different beef. What's unfair about Google, they say, is the way it gives the greatest prominence in search results to companies that spend the most on advertising.

Companies covet the top spots in Google search results - the first page of rankings, and the top of subsequent pages. But if too many companies vie for one of these spots, the cost can jump out of reach for a small business - just like the price for prime-time TV commercials.

Google controls about 90% of global internet searches, a major point in the U.S. government's lawsuit against the internet giant. Business owners' concerns about the cost of advertising aren't directly related to the lawsuit, although the company's dominance of the search market has been alleged to be a factor in driving up the price to buy ads in its vast digital marketing network.

But even if prices were lower than they are now, larger companies with more money to spend, in theory, could always outbid smaller businesses vying for the prime advertising spots on Google.

Getting seen on Google

Businesses have two main ways of trying to get their listings high in Google rankings, both of which are based on how much they can bid on certain keywords that consumers use for their search.

One type of ad is seen at the top of the search result pages; the cost for the ads depends on how often a computer user clicks on the ad and how much a company is willing to pay per click. The more a company can pay, the more likely it will get a prized spot in search results. Google has different types of ads, and whether an ad appears locally or nationally can also affect pricing. So can the time of day an ad appears.

There's also what's called a paid search, where companies bid on keywords to get a higher ranking within the main search results. For example, a sporting goods store might bid on words like "baseball" and "hockey" in hopes of landing higher in search results for those words and getting seen more easily by customers looking for equipment for those sports. The problem businesses face is they can't outbid competitors with deeper pockets. So a sporting goods store that can only afford to pay $2 for a word would lose out to stores able to pay $10.

Mark Aselstine has spent as much as $30,000 a year on Google advertising, but he's not sure his wine gift basket company will be able to afford Google ads this holiday season. He expects the already competitive time of year to be even more intense this year due to the coronavirus outbreak, as more wine retailers seek customers over the internet and use Google advertising to make themselves more visible.

"I don't think we'll run a single Google ad this year. I suspect it will be well out of our price range," saidAselstine, owner of Uncorked Ventures, based in El Cerrito, California.

If Aselstine can't afford Google, he has alternatives. Microsoft's Bing search engine, cheaper but not as popular among computer users, is one. Aselstine can also increase his use of Google's unpaid search. Like the paid version, he'd seek to use keywords in his ads that prospective customers are likely to search for; depending on the words he chooses, he might get a good ranking, although it will still fall below ads and paid listings.

"Cost of doing business"

R.J. Huebert, who buys Google ads on behalf of the law firms, manufacturers and a credit union that are his clients, also sees ad prices going up because of the competition. But, said the owner of HBT Digital Consulting, "I think it's the cost of doing business."

Huebert, whose company is based in Pittsburgh, sees Google as an important tool for small businesses because of its reach. And when people begin a search on Google, they're already interested in a product or service. They have what's known as high intent: a high likelihood that they're going to make a purchase. And they're more likely to buy than someone who happens on an ad as they scroll through Facebook.

Aselstine said he'll advertise on Facebook and Instagram if he can't afford Google, although he's likely to get more sales from people who search on Google.

"Those people are more ready to buy that day," he said

Clayton, the GreenPal CEO, spends about $100,000 a year on Google advertising. That's a big number for a small company (GreenPal has 23 employees), but Clayton lists home-service giants Angie's List and HomeAdvisor that have much bigger advertising budgets among his competitors. GreenPal, which is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and serves homeowners in most of the states, spends about $3 or $4 per click for ads.

But, Clayton said, "It's getting harder to advertise - the price keeps going up and up."

Tommy Fang tried Google to advertise his year-old market research company, but the cost far outweighed the business he hoped it would bring in.

"We ran a couple of ads and the economics just didn't work out for us," said Fang, co-founder of New York-based Eureka Surveys. The company runs a website where people can take part in surveys.

Fang is looking at other possibilities, such as the advertising Apple sells for mobile devices. However, Fang's business, which involves finding participants for corporate surveys, is focused on PCs, where he says people prefer to answer survey questions.

Yet some small businesses don't flinch at the higher prices. Advertising on Google makes sense even for some of Huebert's law firm clients who often spend between $8 and $12 a click and as much as $35 because they can make the money back from a single case.

But said Huebert, "If you're selling $5 socks, it doesn't make sense to pay $35."

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Small businesses say they can't afford to compete on Google

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When asked about Google, Bryan Clayton voices a familiar lament among small-business owners. "You keep getting squeezed further and further down the search results page," said Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, a company that operates an app to help homeowners find lawn care. "As a startup, you don't have a million-dollar advertising budget."

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https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120314/who-are-amazons-amzn-main-competitors.asp

Other big name retailers are not able to compete with amazon

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Amazon (AMZN) competes head-to-head for market share with some of the largest corporations in the world. While Amazon started out as an online retailer of books, it has grown over the decades to become the largest e-commerce company by revenue in the United States.

In its quarterly and annual financial statements, Amazon breaks down where it receives its revenue into five major categories:

Online stores

Physical stores

Third-party seller services

Subscription services

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Below, we'll describe each of these revenue streams and list which companies are Amazon's biggest rivals per category.

Online Stores

This category includes product and digital media sales from Amazon's e-commerce website. The company offers its customers a wide selection of durable and consumer goods along with digital-format products, such as e-books, videos, software, music, and games.

Amazon's competition in this segment includes LightInTheBox Holding Co. (LITB), Overstock.com (OSTK), Vipshop Holdings Ltd. ( VIPS), JD.com (JD), Wayfair Inc. ( W), and Etsy (ETSY).

Physical Stores

Although sales from online purchases represent the bulk of the company's revenue, Amazon greatly expanded its presence in the physical retail space with its 2017 acquisition of grocery retailer Whole Foods Market.﻿﻿ Amazon also operates four other types of physical stores: Amazon Books, Amazon 4-Star, Amazon Go, and Amazon Pop Up.

In the physical stores category, Amazon competes with Best Buy (BBY), Costco (COST), Target ( TGT), Walmart Inc. ( WMT), and Big Lots (BIG).

Third-Party Seller Services

Third-party vendors sell their products using Amazon's online marketplace platform. Amazon's popularity as an e-commerce site enables many third-party sellers to reach a wider customer base and grow their businesses. For this service, Amazon charges commission fees, shipping fees, and related fulfillment costs.

In the third-party marketplace business, CEO Jeff Bezos has stated Amazon's main competitor is auction site eBay.

Subscription Services

Amazon sells a variety of subscription services. Its most popular paid subscription service is Amazon Prime, which has 150 million members around the world as of Jan. 2020.﻿﻿ The company also sells subscriptions for e-books, audiobooks, digital video, and digital music.

Amazon's main competitors in the subscription services sector are media game-changer Netflix ( NFLX); Apple ( AAPL) with iTunes; and Google (GOOG) with its Play Store.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the company's cloud platform, offering 175 services such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, storage, and analytics. AWS customers include startups, enterprises, and government agencies.﻿﻿

Amazon's main competitors in the web services sector are Alibaba Group ( BABA), Oracle ( ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and Google (GOOG).

The Bottom Line

Amazon is a well-diversified company that benefits from several profitable revenue streams. The company specializes in disruptive innovation and can afford to fund forays into new industries in order to take market share away from its competitors. Amazon ended the fourth quarter of 2019 with sales up 21% to $87.4 billion.﻿﻿

The company reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion for the first time ever in September 2018.﻿﻿

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Who Are Amazon's (AMZN) Main Competitors?

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Amazon (AMZN) competes head-to-head for market share with some of the largest corporations in the world. While Amazon started out as an online retailer of books, it has grown over the decades to become the largest e-commerce company by revenue in the United States.

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The article says that workers are treated inhumanly and like machines the article also states "It has also uncovered an "anti-suicide" pledge that workers at the two plants have been urged to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year." Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.

■ Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.

■ In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.

Amanda DiDonna

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https://www.kens5.com/article/news/local/competing-with-amazon-online-retailers-small-businesses-malls-shape-out-for-holiday-season-strategies/521-19d7adb8-d6a9-45e3-9c69-a30381a39ef6

Small Business who don't have only stores are suffering with the competition from Amazon because during the pandemic more people are buying their Christmas items only instead of going to stores.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/technology/personaltech/apple-privacy-labels.html

In this article it talks about apps and privacy settings. This is essentially making less competition with other app developers. Shown within some of the data you can see how 3rd party apps such as spotify compared to apple music needs more of your data. This would make apple look like the better choice, however as much as we don't want our personal data being used sometimes its needed so while apple music might not need certain data compared to spotify on your apple iphone, apple can be collecting the same data elsewhere. By showing these types of stats they can be misleading to consumers and creating less competition.

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Amazon workers in Alabama won thr right to be able to vote in the union becuase they where getting paid little.

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At an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., 5,800 workers have won the right to vote for union representation. The National Labor Relations Board has authorized a mail-in election starting Feb. 8, with ballots due by March 29.

If a majority of workers vote yes, their victory will be a historic moment in the struggle of U.S. low-paid, part-time and gig workers against sharpening capitalist exploitation. The campaign by Bessemer workers in their "right-to-work-for-less" state is comparable in its potential to the epic union organizing of General Motors - then the world's largest corporation - in the 1930s.

A win in this "right-to-work-for-less" Taft-Hartley Act state would establish the first-ever U.S. union within the world's largest online retail company owned by the world's richest centi-billionaire. Jeff Bezos. As of January 2021, Bezos' net worth is $190 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Amazon is seeking to delay and obstruct the vote. The company appealed NLRB authorization of a mail-in election and is demanding workers vote in person - despite a COVID-19 positive test rate exceeding 20% in surrounding Jefferson County. (bnnbloomberg.ca, Jan. 22)

Bessemer - located next to Birmingham - is an impoverished former steel-producing town, where one-quarter of the people live in poverty. It is a majority Black city, with a 75% African American population. (worldpopulationreview.com)

The BAmazon Union, as local organizers dubbed it, seeks recognition as a local of the Retail Workers and Department Store Union. RWDSU has a significant Southern membership, with 6,000 in the Mid-South Council based in Birmingham.

Alan Grant, an RWDSU organizer, said in a Facebook message that response to the organizing drive has been "incredible." He described the union authorization card as being about "dignity, respect and fair treatment." The NLRB stipulates at least 30% of workers in a unionization drive must sign cards for the Board to authorize an election.

Some two dozen unionized workers from nearby warehouses and poultry plants have strengthened organizing efforts at the warehouse. Michael Foster, a poultry plant worker, says: "I am telling them they are part of a movement that is worldwide." By late December, more than 2,000 workers had signed cards indicating they wanted an election, the union said. (NY Times, Jan. 25)
Why Amazon workers want a union
BAmazon Union's key goal is to gain bargaining power, especially in "safety standards, training, breaks, pay, benefits." The workload and pace of work in Amazon warehouses is physically and mentally grueling.

The website emphasizes: "We face outrageous work quotas that have left many with illnesses and lifetime injuries. With a union contract, we can form a worker safety committee and negotiate the highest safety standards and protocols for our workplace." (bamazonunion.org)

Amazon is especially vulnerable to organized labor action during the current pandemic. Increased online shopping makes warehouse workers more essential than ever - and gives workers more leverage and incentive to organize against the bosses. Amazon can't stockpile packages, since a strike or job protest would spell disaster for its "instant shipping" promise.

Amazon's anti-worker campaign will surely continue. The company has fired multiple workers during protests and organizing attempts. (Workers World, "Interview: Amazon worker battles billionaire Bezos," April 7, 2020)

But Alabama has a militant tradition of worker organizing, especially by Black workers. From 1928 to 1951, the Communist Party USA organized throughout Alabama - from the Sharecroppers Union to the Metal Workers Industrial League. (Workers World, "Lessons of 'The Hammer and the Hoe,'" Dec. 21, 2017)

On Jan. 25, the National Football League Players Association, the union that represents more than 2,000 NFL players in the U.S., endorsed the BAmazon Union drive.

BAmazon Union's Facebook page shows that its organizing energy is spreading to other Amazon workplaces in the South. One post read: "I shared your latest video with some local Amazon workers I know who are pro-union here in Kentucky. This country needs strong unions. Now more than ever!"

It is critical to show solidarity with Alabama's Amazon warehouse workers - and with Amazon workers organizing globally!

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Alabama Amazon workers accelerate struggle for a union

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At an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., 5,800 workers have won the right to vote for union representation. The National Labor Relations Board has authorized a mail-in election starting Feb. 8, with ballots due by March 29. If a majority of workers vote yes, their victory will be a historic

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Amazon spends another $500 million on bonuses. 

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Amazon spends another $500 million on bonuses. 

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Amazon workers are being paid at least double minimum wage in the US. On top of their wages they are being paid large bonuses.  Amazon has made other advances to end the current strike by taking "Climate Pledge commitment to be net zero carbon by 2040, and paying billions of pounds in taxes globally"  which was one of the main points of the strikes

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Hailey Sandorfi

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https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/biden-to-sign-executive-orders-on-climate-change-.html

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Google says its political action committee, NetPAC won't be giving any money in the 2022 midterm elections to any member of Congress who voted earlier this month to overturn the Electoral College results showing Joe Biden had won the presidential election.
Big Tech Companies still have a lot of influence in government even to the point of picking and choosing who they want in congress.

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Google says its political action committee, NetPAC won't be giving any money in the 2022 midterm elections to any member of Congress who voted earlier this month to overturn the Electoral College results showing Joe Biden had won the presidential election.

"After the disturbing events at the Capitol, NetPAC paused all contributions while undertaking a review," Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement to CBS News. "Following that review, the NetPAC board has decided that it will not be making any contributions this cycle to any member of Congress who voted against certification of the election results."

Nearly 150 Republican lawmakers voted to toss out the election results hours after supporters of President Trump rioted at the U.S Capitol to protest the outcome, resulting in the deaths of five people.

Eight Republican senators objected to the election results, with seven voting to discard the results from Pennsylvania while six objected to the results from Arizona. A total of 138 House Republicans voted not to count the results from Pennsylvania, while 121 did so for Arizona's results.

The eight senators who voted against the certification, including vocal leaders like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, did not receive any contributions from Google's PAC in the 2020 election.

However, it gave Cruz $5,500 for his 2018 reelection, according to FEC records.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, has received tens of thousands of dollars from NetPAC over the last decade. Every year since 2016, it has given $5,000 to McCarthy's congressional campaign.

In the last election cycle, from January of 2019 to November 2020, Google's political action committee handed out over $1.8 million to various candidates and political groups, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

But the riots at the Capitol gave tech giants like Google and other large corporations pause. Amazon said it would suspend political contributions to lawmakers who voted to overturn the results, Facebook is putting contributions on hold during a review of its policies, and Microsoft announced Sunday it would discuss the matter with employees and arrive at a final decision in February.

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2021 storming of the united states capitol

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Google's PAC won't give to lawmakers who objected to Electoral College results showing Biden won

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Google says its political action committee, NetPAC won't be giving any money in the 2022 midterm elections to any member of Congress who voted earlier this month to overturn the Electoral College results showing Joe Biden had won the presidential election.

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Andrew
The article talks about how amazon is not treating their workers properly during corona. Amazon prefers to make more money by pushing out as many order as possible rather then following guidelines for their employees to be safe.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us.

At 5:30 every morning, Rosie, an Amazon worker at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, checks her text messages to see if she's received more bad news: yet another colleague infected with Covid-19, on top of the at least 50 people at her facility who she says have already gotten sick.

As an older employee, Rosie is at higher risk of developing serious complications from the disease than many of her younger coworkers. Her two children beg her to quit.

"It's frightening, but you have to put on a smile and you go to work because you need the income," Rosie, who is being identified by a pseudonym because she fears losing her job for speaking to the press, told Recode in late May.

While she's grateful for the safety precautions Amazon has introduced at its fulfillment centers in the past two months, like providing masks and hand sanitizer stations, she's alarmed by what she says she saw and heard around her: dirty air filters that aren't replaced, a visibly ill colleague who vomited in the bathroom - even after passing the mandatory temperature checks the company instituted in early April - and workers standing close together in the morning when they're waiting to get shift assignments, even though the rules specify workers must always stay 6 feet apart.

On a follow-up call in late June, Rosie said that since management canceled morning meetings, there is no longer crowding before shifts, and conditions have improved, but not entirely.

"It affects your nerves, your mental state, your way of thinking - because you have to be cautious in everything you do now," Rosie said. "It's like I'm risking my life for a dollar. It's twisted."

Last month, Rosie was shocked to hear that a colleague who she heard was in his 20s - practically "a kid," she said - had died of Covid-19. Management never informed Rosie, and she suspects many others didn't know either. Instead, she said, she learned the news from a coworker's Facebook post.

Management's attitude toward the death was "hush-hush, underneath the rug - along with how many people have the disease," Rosie told Recode. "This is how this company runs this organization."

An Amazon spokesperson disputed Rosie's account, saying the company communicated the news about the colleague's death in person to everyone working at the warehouse. The spokesperson also said Amazon has made it clear that all employees who feel ill must stay home and that they have several paid and unpaid leave options.

But Rosie's story is just one of several similar accounts thathave emerged from workers inside Amazon fulfillment centers since the pandemic started in March, prompting an unprecedented series of internal scandals, employee protests, and public petitions that have united some of Amazon's corporate and warehouse employees against their employer for the first time. In turn, this unrest has attracted scrutiny from top politicians over the company's labor practices, and threatens to harm Amazon's reputation in the eyes of the hundreds of millions of people who shop on the platform every year. It also reveals inequalities in the economy that Amazon has flourished in, an economy that the e-commerce giant is also shaping as its size and influence expand.

Amazon, the second-largest private US employer after Walmart, pays its fulfillment center workers a $15 minimum hourly wage and offers superior benefits when compared to some major competitors. But many of the company's workers still say they are struggling to stay afloat, and they have such limited work options that they keep showing up to sort, pack, and deliver shipments for Amazon even as they fear the company isn't doing enough to keep them safe during a global health crisis.

In interviews with Recode, dozens of current and former Amazon employees, from the warehouse level to senior corporate managers, shared previously unreported details about the inner workings of the company, inconsistent enforcement of health and safety protocols, and the tactics they say the company has employed to tamp down tensions rising among its workforce.

Amazon seems to be well aware that its treatment of workers during the pandemic matters. Externally, the company has launched a public relations campaign that includes TV commercials and a documentary TV series to drive home a message to customers that keeping the "retail heroes" in its warehouses safe is its top priority.

But internally, employees told Recode that Amazon has responded to workers' complaints by cracking down on dissenters. The company has fired at least six employees who were involved in recent worker protests or who spoke out about working conditions at Amazon, including several who were visible leaders within the company on worker issues. Sources told Recode the company has also reprimanded at least six other employees during the same period who were involved in recent protests.

Amazon has said that it terminated the employees in question for repeatedly violating internal policies on social distancing, internal communications, and conduct with colleagues. It denied retaliating against employees for their criticism of the company.

Top Amazon executive Dave Clark, who oversees Amazon's global warehouse network, told Recode in May, "I've been here 21 years, and I have never seen anybody punished or terminated or anything for speaking out or having a contrary opinion or debating something. And that continues to be the case."

Courtney Bowden, a former Amazon warehouse worker in Pennsylvania who was fired in March shortly after organizing her colleagues to demand paid time off for part-time employees, disagrees. Bowden says Amazon's stated reason for firing her was for getting into a dispute with a coworker. "Amazon thinks that they can control all these workers speaking out by firing them," Bowden told Recode in mid-March. "What they don't understand is that the amount of people doing this is just going to grow, grow, grow."

Clark also told Recode that the company led many of its competitors in rolling out Covid-19 safety measures such as mandatory masks, temperature checks, and enforced social distancing in warehouses. In interviews with Recode, even warehouse employees who were critical about Amazon's Covid-19 safety practices said they have seen some signs of improvement since mid-March.

But workers told Recode that other, deeper issues that existed before the pandemic have only gotten worse - namely, that how Amazon responded to workers' pandemic complaints exemplifies how workers have limited power or voice in how their employer treats them.

What's at stake

The internal conflicts at Amazon, coupled with growing outside scrutiny, have put the company - and its customers - in a fraught position.

The e-commerce giant with a $1 trillion valuation has become a symbol of the longstanding economic and racial inequalities in the US that the pandemic has exaggerated. The virus disproportionately kills more Black Americans than other ethnic groups; 80 percent of Amazon's US warehouses are located in zip codes that have a higher percentage of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people than the regional average, according to a recent analysis by the employee activist group AECJ.

Like many other white-collar tech workers in the US, most of Amazon's corporate employees have been able to work from home. Meanwhile, Amazon's warehouse employees, who have historically been more racially diverse than its corporate employees, have to show up in person. And as millions of other Americans have lost their jobs and are struggling to afford necessities, Amazon and companies like it are reaping record sales and hiring hundreds of thousands workers to staff their facilities, deliver products, and risk exposure to a virus that's already killed more than 125,000 people in the US as of late June.

Before the pandemic, millions of Americans already relied on Amazon for the convenience of its one- or two-day shipping. Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders and the temporary shuttering of many physical retailers only increased dependence on the company: Amazon sales and Prime membership subscriptions shot up from January to March.

"The American psyche is so selfish that it doesn't matter what goes on in there. It's, 'Just get my package to me.'"

But reports of the company's labor issues have raised uncomfortable questions. Is it possible for Amazon to maintain what its CEO Jeff Bezos calls its "obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer" while also protecting its employees? Would customers pay more and accept slower delivery times if it meant Amazon would support and pay its workers more? Do we want to live, work, and shop in an economy where more and more businesses are emulating Amazon's business model, and where more people depend on fast-paced warehouse and delivery work to make their livelihoods? Or will politicians, Amazon's own employees, and, most importantly, consumers demand changes from the company - and the economy in which it thrives?

These questions aren't entirely new. Well before the pandemic, Amazon was seemingly unstoppable despite reports of grueling and sometimes dangerous conditions at its warehouses. In the past 25 years, the company has grown from a scrappy online bookstore to one of the world's most valuable companies, with its reach extending beyond e-commerce to streaming television, brick-and-mortar grocery, and cloud computing.

"When we talk about Amazon, we're really talking about the future of work," Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents workers at major retailers such as Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and H&M, told Recode. "Other employers feel that if they want to survive, they have to find a way to change their working conditions to replicate Amazon. And that's exactly what we don't want - we don't want Amazon to be the model for what working is going to be like, of what the future of work is going to look like."

In light of the pandemic's life-or-death consequences, assessing the future of work and Amazon's role in it is more urgent than ever.

The company does not publicly share the total number of its workers infected with Covid-19, although it has directly messaged warehouse workers individually when there is a person with a new case at their facility. Former Indiana warehouse employee Jana Jumpp started a project to crowdsource these messages from workers. She says she's confirmed nearly 1,600 cases of Amazon warehouse employees with Covid-19 since March, and at least nine workers who have died of the disease. That case total would represent well less than 1 percent of Amazon's US warehouse workforce, but without Amazon's confirmation, it's still unclear how widely the virus has spread among its employee base.

Amazon declined to comment on Jumpp's reporting to Recode, but Amazon spokesperson Kelly Cheeseman told Recode the company uses "a variety of data to closely monitor the safety of our buildings and there is strong evidence that our employees are not proliferating the virus at work."

Jumpp says she's getting a steady stream of reports of at least 10 to 20 new cases a day from Amazon workers across the US, which she compiles in a spreadsheet.

"If the public really knew what was going on in the facilities, they might think twice about shopping on Amazon," Jumpp told Recode.

That's because what happens inside Amazon's warehouses doesn't just affect its employees. It will impact the rest of us, too.

And the company's customers will impact its practices.

External surveys show that Amazon's customer reputation began slipping during the pandemic, though the causes of this shift are not yet clear. The share of people who said they have a positive impression of Amazon dropped from 74 percent in January before the pandemic hit the US to 58 percent in May in two similar, separate polls of more than 1,000 people conducted by Survey Monkey with Fortune and Recode, respectively.

Another recent poll by RBC Capital Markets showed a similar trend: Amazon customers are reporting record-low levels of customer satisfaction, despite making more frequent purchases.

For now, it's hard to say if we're seeing more negative customer feedback about Amazon because people encountered inventory shortages and delivery delays due to the coronavirus, or because they're troubled by criticisms of Amazon's labor practices, or some other reason. If it's merely shopping inconveniences prompting the shift in customer perception, the company may be motivated to push its employees harder, and return to pre-Covid-19 levels of worker productivity as quickly as possible. But if the shift relates to Amazon's ethics as an employer, the company has a deeper issue to solve for, and what it does next is likely to have significant implications for the rest of the US economy.

"If the public starts supporting the protests, if the customers start boycotting Amazon, then customers form a significant form of power," Thomas Anton Kochan, a professor of industrial relations at MIT, told Recode. "The ultimate arbiters of this debate will be the public, not Amazon and not the workers themselves."

Three months of unrest and counting

If it's still uncertain how customers will ultimately respond to Amazon and how it handled the pandemic, what has become clear is that the past three months have shaken up Amazon's internal culture, which one employee described as an "artificial internal class system" that has until now separated corporate employees from fulfillment center workers.

As reports emerged of the company firing and cracking down on workers agitating for better conditions at fulfillment centers, a growing number of the company's engineers, product managers, and designers have become embarrassed, worried, and angry. For the first time, they're joining forces with their colleagues at the warehouse level to publicly criticize their employer, and some say they lost their jobs because of it. Meanwhile, prominent politicians like Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren are pressing the company on its firings of workers across corporate offices and the warehouse floor alike.

"People want to be proud of the company, but they are feeling quite ashamed and deciding whether they can change [it] from within or need to leave," one longtime corporate Amazon employee told Recode in late April.

"At the end of the day, I want to know what kind of company does Amazon want to be: a company that allows discourse and dialogue between employees, or a company that suppresses dissent?" another Amazon employee told Recode in late April.

Since March, workers have issued two petitions with more than 6,000 combined employee signatures demanding better pay and benefits, and they've held at least eight protests at over a dozen fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and delivery stations.

Amazon's response to its warehouse and corporate employees' concerns seems to have only agitated employees more. In public statements and internal meetings, the company seems to be treating the scrutiny of warehouse conditions like a PR problem rather than an opportunity to find and fix potential operational flaws.

"We have our critics, both here in the United States and around the world, who - some are completely inconvincible," top Amazon spokesperson Jay Carney said during an internal video Q&A with corporate employees in early May, of which Recode obtained an audio recording.

"Look, you have situations where we have a protest at a fulfillment center and we have more organizers than actual Amazon employees out on the street." Carney went on, "I think the total number of protesters in the city and states has been less than a fraction of a half of a fraction of a percent of our employee base, but some of the media coverage suggests that that's not the case."

Cheeseman reiterated what the company previously said in a statement in regard to worker protests: that the "overwhelming majority" of Amazon employees have not participated and that the walkouts had "no measurable impact on operations."

"We encourage anyone interested in the facts to compare our overall pay and benefits, as well as our speed in managing this crisis, to other retailers and major employers across the country," Cheeseman told Recode.

Amazon offers full-time warehouse employees the same health care insurance and 401(k) options as corporate employees. At the start of the pandemic, it also led other companies by being one of the first to grant workers a $2-per-hour wage hike, and it doubled overtime pay and provided unlimited unpaid time off. (All of these pandemic-related policies ended on June 1, prompting loud pushback from some employees.) In late June, the company announced it will pay a one-time bonus for the month of June to front-line employees and some contractors, amounting to around $500 per full-time Amazon employee and $250 for part-timers.

"Our focus remains on protecting associates in our operations network," Cheeseman said.

Amazon has nearly 600,000 full-time and part-time employees in the US, the vast majority of whom work in its warehouse network, so the hundreds of workers protesting are indeed only a tiny percentage of its workforce. But one corporate employee who doesn't consider himself an activist and hasn't been involved in any recent protests told Recode, "Many workers do not feel comfortable walking off a job for a protest, especially in this climate. So the voice of organizers should be heard as representative of the workers they're organizing for."

Of course, Amazon's many employees have a range of perspectives on how their employer treats them in general and how it's handled their safety during the pandemic. Some value how Amazon pays all employees a $15-per-hour minimum wage, as well as how it offers health care and dental insurance, and highly subsidized tuition or vocational training to further employees' careers.

"Amazon is a good job in many ways: great benefits, it pays good, there are opportunities for overtime, to go to school," said Jumpp.

Others empathize with the company and the extraordinary challenges Covid-19 has created for it.

But a significant number of Amazon's employees, in warehouses and in its headquarters, feel it has let them down, and that's fueling their criticism of the company.

The growing dissent among Amazon's corporate workforce followed a few key moves Amazon made in the early days of the pandemic: First, the company fired Christian Smalls, a warehouse worker in Staten Island, New York, who led an early protest against the company in March.

Then company executives, led by top lawyer David Zapolsky, strategized in an executive meeting attended by Bezos about how to downplay Smalls's complaints by characterizing him as "not smart or articulate." Then, when Zapolsky's notes from this meeting leaked to the press and corporate employees began to protest and question Amazon's actions on internal company listservs, the company fired three key corporate activists in mid-April and began restricting employees' ability to communicate on large listservs. It paused enforcing these restrictions after Recode reported on them.

Amazon workers told Recode in April they were particularly concerned by what they saw as racist overtones in the notes from the executive meeting focused on Smalls, who is Black. Amazon told Recode in April that Zapolsky was unaware of Smalls's race when he made the comments.

Since then, workers' unease has grown because four of the six workers Amazon has fired since March are people of color.

Cheeseman, the Amazon spokesperson, told Recode that the company "works hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm for each and every one" of its employees.

"We do not tolerate any kind of discrimination in our workplace," said Cheeseman.

John Hopkins is another worker who says Amazon targeted him in May for his activism at work. The company lifted his suspension in June after an internal health and safety investigation; since then, he has continued to be vocal about what he sees as retaliation and racial injustice at Amazon.

Hopkins told Recode it didn't matter that Zapolsky said he wasn't aware of Smalls's race when he said Smalls wasn't articulate.

"Ultimately, he [Zapolsky] didn't have to be aware of his [Smalls's] race - he should have been aware of the chances," Hopkins told Recode. "Regardless of whether he knew specifically, he has to know the number of African American workers in warehouses is far larger than in AWS [Amazon Web Services]. The chances he was going to say that about a Black worker are higher."

"Race permeates everything. These aren't disconnected issues; what's at the heart of them all is implicit bias," Hopkins added.

Amazon said it fired Smalls because he violated social distancing policies while he was on paid quarantine leave, and that it terminated the corporate employees after they violated company policies around internal communications. "There are also plenty of [employees] who are regularly talking to reporters and publishing different things that, you know, I disagree entirely with," Clark, the Amazon executive, told Recode. "But they come back to work every day, are paid well, and nothing negative happens to them."

The six recently fired employees have all disputed Amazon's explanations for their terminations.

"It's not okay that Amazon did that and fired that employee [Smalls]; those things aren't normal," one former Amazon engineer who recently left the company told Recode in late April, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. "I'm not okay with going to work every day and continuing my day job while things are happening in the background. I need to show support for other people in the company."

Smalls's case also caught the attention of politicians like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who have launched investigations into the incident, as well as Sen. Booker, who has sent several letters pressing Bezos on the matter.

"What's disturbing to me is that you have people who are, frankly, just speaking toward the crisis, and they're seeing retaliation that is unacceptable," Booker told Recode in early May. Since Booker wrote the letter about Smalls, the company has fired several more warehouse workers involved in activism. "These firings further marginalize employees who already feel really pressured."

While Amazon's termination of visible activist leaders both within company headquarters and at its fulfillment centers has scared some employees, they haven't stopped organizing. The firings further angered and encouraged critical employees to move discussions off corporate platforms so they can discuss their ethical qualms about their employer more discreetly - and freely.

"I think temporarily people will be discouraged from speaking, but it's not going to silence their inner concerns," one employee told Recode in late April.

"People before were saying, 'Oh, maybe Amazon's not so bad,' but when they see the silencing, and the censorship, and the firings, and the not listening - that is the last straw for a lot of people," former longtime Amazon corporate employee Maren Costa told Recode. Costa and her colleague Emily Cunningham were fired on April 10, shortly after they both shared a petition started by Amazon warehouse workers about the risks warehouse workers face during the pandemic. Amazon told Recode that the pair were terminated for violating Amazon's internal policies, including one that bars employees from using company resources to solicit their coworkers for signatures.

Both Costa and Cunningham were active leaders of an internal employee group that pushes the company to become more environmentally friendly, called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ). After they were fired, Costa and Cunningham helped host two virtual panel discussions between warehouse workers and corporate employees about safety standards at warehouses, environmental policies, and unionization. Around 400 employees attended each event, according to the organizers.

"We are definitely on the right side of history," Cunningham told Recode in late April. "Even those of us that have more privilege doesn't mean we're immune to the real harm that is already coming our way. ... There's only so much insulation unless you're an extremely rich billionaire."

Dozens of warehouse workers Recode spoke with emphasized the importance of corporate employees like Cunningham and Costa speaking out on their behalf.

"While warehouse and tech workers are treated differently in many ways by Amazon, recent events have clearly shown how we're still in the same struggle, like against retaliation from Amazon for exercising free speech," Ted Miin, a warehouse worker at the DCH1 facility in Chicago and member of the worker group DCH1 Amazonians United, told Recode in early May.

This newfound unity between front-line and office workers reflects a growing gulf between the company and segments of its workforce, who say the company's leaders - both in its headquarters and those managing its warehouses - are disconnected from the challenges workers lower in the company face.

"People before were saying, 'Oh, maybe Amazon's not so bad,' but when they see the silencing, and the censorship, and the firings, and the not listening - that is the last straw for a lot of people"

When you consider the scale of Amazon's vast network of warehouses - which includes 110 fulfillment centers in the US and hundreds of smaller sorting and delivery facilities - as well as the machine-like efficiency required to keep this operation running, that's not surprising. The pandemic has just raised the stakes.

"Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential," Tim Bray, a former VP-level engineer at the company, wrote in a now-viral public blog post he published in late April after quitting in protest of Amazon's firings of Costa, Cunningham, Smalls, Bowden, and other whistleblowers. Bray called management's decisions "chicken shit" and accused the company of fostering a "climate of fear" among its workers. (Bray later deleted the "chicken shit" language after he said people he respected told him it was "mean-spirited.")

The day after Bray posted his note, Brad Porter, the company's vice president of robotics, defended Amazon's measures to protect its workers in a LinkedIn post. In it, he cited technological solutions his teams have been rolling out: using AI to make sure workers are social distancing, installing thermal cameras to check workers' temperatures, and developing mobile ultraviolet sanitation to kill Covid-19 in warehouses.

But, as several employees wrote in internal emails that Recode obtained and in public comments on LinkedIn, Porter sidestepped one of the main focuses of Bray's critique: that the company is allegedly retaliating against workers who question the company's treatment of fulfillment center workers.

"This Linkedin post has honestly left me a little sick for several reasons, because it just shows how keenly and brazenly VPs do not get it," wrote one Amazon employee in a May 6 post on an internal corporate listserv that Recode obtained. "The fact that Brad Porter does not once mention the fired employees - something Tim Bray clearly and plainly states to be the reason for his resignation - in his exculpatory post makes things very clear: they don't see this as an issue."

Others pointed out that Porter's solutions were largely technical fixes to a very human problem.

"Even if we eventually have all the technology in place for a COVIDfree workplace, if people don't feel safe to speak, that's not a safe space," wrote another employee on the same listserv.

Amazon was a tough place to work before. The pandemic has made it worse.

How Amazon is handling workers' dissent is just one part of the problem, workers say. The scale and pace of its operations have always had downsides, but now the pressure of a pandemic is making them more visible.

Amazon has long been known for hiring bright, data-focused managers in its warehouse network to help increase efficiency while keeping costs down. The result has been a world-class logistics operation that offers affordable next-day delivery to millions of Americans. But there are drawbacks to that data-obsessed approach, too: quotas and metrics that don't account for an employee having a bad day - or not feeling well - and some managers who are more comfortable evaluating numbers than human emotions.

"Algorithms can be very, very dangerous ... and that's where Amazon is right now," a former senior HR manager at Amazon told Recode. "There is no other company on the planet that is more efficient. But the downside is ... you take people who don't have life experiences, or just don't have empathy, and it becomes very easy to look at data as the end-all, be-all, as opposed to as a guide."

Cheeseman refuted that characterization and referenced two emails that Clark sent to warehouse managers during the pandemic, which expressed the importance of keeping employees healthy and safe.

"To be abundantly clear, your most important job right now has nothing to do with a metric," Clark wrote to managers in a March 14 email that Amazon showed Recode. "It's walking your floors, talking to your teams, supporting them if they need help or have [any] questions, and ensuring all the safety measures we have rolled out are implemented and followed."

Amazon seems aware that some of its warehouse managers focus too narrowly on meeting fulfillment goals, even if it won't talk about it publicly. The company previously developed a computer system, Recode has learned, that periodically prompts some warehouse supervisors to get out from behind their computer and go interact with their front-line staff. Similar to how employees criticized Porter's response to Bray's resignation note, it's an Amazonian solution to a very human problem.

"We do have mechanisms to remind our teams what's important to us, and that does include recognizing and connecting with associates," Cheeseman said.

"We have our critics, both here in the United States and around the world, who - some are completely inconvincible"

Amazon wasn't always so intensely focused on performance metrics. A longtime former corporate employee, who was an HR manager focused on warehouses, told Recode they saw a major shift in that direction at Amazon around 2010.

"When I joined, it was very apparent to me that the leaders in the facility really cared about the people," the former HR manager said. "The Amazon that I left in fulfillment was ... not that way."

Part of the change this former manager saw can be attributed to an increased reliance on performance data, as well as the implementation of so-called standard operating procedures. "We almost overindexed on processes," said the former HR manager, while also acknowledging the business upsides to adding more structure to warehouse work.

But the other factor in the shift was the type of warehouse leaders the company recruited as Amazon expanded to meet exploding customer demand. "It was all about just drive, drive, drive, and there were not a lot of very kind leaders," according to the former manager.

A former Amazon data science engineer focused on warehouse metrics told Recode, "I knew that every single time we developed a tool, we are just adding pressure.

"The pressure to be consistent and perform every single second there is tremendous," the engineer added. "Not everyone is the same."

Despite the note Clark sent warehouse managers in mid-March urging them to prioritize safety measures above delivery metrics, several employees told Recode as recently as late April that some of the company's rigid middle managers in fulfillment centers were slow to empathize with the unique setbacks of working during a pandemic and were enforcing strict work quotas.

An Amazon worker at a fulfillment center in New Jersey, who spoke to Recode on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job, said in late April that the pace demanded in her warehouse made it, in her view, impossible to properly social distance: "When you're picking an order, the bins and pallets ... they're all close together, and they're used by multiple people at one time. And if you're not picking up certain items within a certain time frame, you're penalized." The same worker told Recode that by early May, management at her site had improved on safety issues at the warehouse - making bin aisles one-way for foot traffic, and easing up enforcement of worker productivity rates.

Miin, the worker in Chicago, told Recode in early April that the company was inconsistently enforcing social distancing requirements in the fulfillment center where he worked. In a follow-up interview in late June, Miin said he thought the warehouse was still facing the same issues.

"When we're protesting conditions, they bring up the 6-feet rule. But, of course, they don't bring that up when people are trying to work hard and fast inside the warehouse - those rules are ignored," Miin said.

Cheeseman said the company denies these accusations. "That's not true," she wrote to Recode. "We have a policy related to social distancing and we are enforcing it across all sites." Cheeseman said the company has implemented several ways to monitor social distancing, including spending $85 million to move existing employees into new "social distancing ambassadors" roles.

Interviews with employees at other Amazon warehouses from late March through June indicate that at some facilities, management meticulously and successfully enforced social distancing. But according to Recode's interviews with more than 30 employees across the company's entire network, not every warehouse was operating at the same level.

At many Amazon warehouses, social distancing is rigidly upheld: "At my building, the safety committee is always on top of everybody about being safe and wearing your mask," one Amazon associate at the ACY5 fulfillment center in Swedesboro, New Jersey, told Recode in late May, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job for speaking to the press. "Even if you're 5 feet apart, they're always yelling at you to be 6 feet apart."

The associate said she has ample access to masks, wipes, and hand sanitizer, and that overall she feels safe at work. But she said that circumstances seem to vary from warehouse to warehouse. She said her facility had only had one confirmed employee case of Covid-19 so far in May, whereas she heard another site nearby in West Deptford, New Jersey, has dozens of cases. (Jumpp's report shows over 20 recorded cases at the West Deptford site as of late June.)

"It's like a chain restaurant, like a Chili's or something - each franchise may be run differently," the Amazon associate said.

In an interview with Recode in mid-May, Clark, the Amazon senior vice president, said he doesn't agree that there were significant inconsistencies in the company's response to the pandemic. "I'd love to say that we were perfect. But I don't think anybody had a playbook for this thing," Clark said. "We've learned as we've gone, and I think we've executed incredibly well."

Patrick Penfield, a professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University, told Recode he thinks Amazon is working hard to protect its workers from the coronavirus.

"The problem is this coronavirus is something we've never ever encountered before - this is the dilemma," Penfield said.

Clark told Recode the company faced challenges in parts of March "where in every part of the supply chain - even the medical community - getting enough sanitizer and some of those things were very challenging.

"But for weeks we've been in a place where we've procured enough supplies where at every piece of the operation, we now have overages to support what teams need," he said in the second week of May.

Amazon has not been alone in struggling with the challenge of keeping the coronavirus out of its facilities.

Walmart was forced to temporarily close a Pennsylvania warehouse in early April after a rapid rise in Covid-19 cases over a short period. Amazon's biggest retail rival also faced Covid-19 outbreaks in several of its supercenter stores, including a Massachusetts location that was temporarily shuttered after 23 employees there tested positive. The activist group United for Respect says that at least 22 Walmart associates have died of Covid-19. And a dozen US state attorneys general wrote to Walmart in early June with demands over what they say has been a subpar coronavirus response when it comes to the health and safety of Walmart employees and customers.

Costco, too, has come under fire from some of its employees for not standardizing health and safety protocols early enough in the US despite having stores in Asia, where the virus appears to have first spread.

Indeed, government lockdown measures in the US began on a city-by-city basis, creating confusion for companies with a presence in hundreds of municipalities across the country. Even so, Amazon says it began reworking its US warehouses ahead of national guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to allow for social distancing based on World Health Organization guidelines it was already following in its European facilities.

In Clark's interview with Recode and in Amazon statements to other media outlets, the company has argued that it took protective measures earlier than many of its peers, and, though it would not specify which ones, it seemed to allude to Walmart. Amazon began issuing masks to US warehouse employees on April 2; while Walmart did so around the same time, the brick-and-mortar giant did not make them mandatory until April 17.

On April 30, Amazon vowed to spend $4 billion over three months to invest its profits on things like mass Covid-19 testing and expanding paid sick leave for its employees. As of May 13, Amazon announced that it had supplied 93 million sanitizing sprays and wipes, more than 100 million masks, and more than 2,000 new hand-washing stations across its fulfillment center network.

And though Amazon ended its pandemic pay increases and unlimited time off in June, Clark told Recode that employees still have several other leave options, including ones that apply to parents with school-age children or employees with preexisting conditions. As of mid-May, Clark said more than 10,000 employees have used those other time off options, though Bloomberg reported in June that some warehouse employees are having trouble accessing these options because of a highly automated, and overwhelmed, human resources operation.

But even with all the precautions that Amazon has implemented since mid-March, the coronavirus continues to spread in the US, and it's still infecting Amazon's workers. Workers told Recode that Amazon's refusal to disclose exactly how many people are infected at each site makes showing up for work more stressful than it needs to be.

"People want to be proud of the company, but they are feeling quite ashamed and deciding whether they can change [it] from within or need to leave"

When there are confirmed Covid-19 cases in its facilities, Amazon said that it reviews video footage to identify every person an infected worker has been in close contact with and then notifies those individuals so they can go on paid leave. "We alert every person at the site anytime there is a confirmed diagnosis," Amazon has said in a statement. "This alert includes when the person with the confirmed diagnosis was last in the building."

Clark told Recode that he believes a better metric for determining whether Amazon warehouses are safe is the number of employees it quarantines after they come into close contact with a coworker who later tested positive. Internal data shows that as of the first week in May, Amazon has only needed to quarantine one additional employee for every four confirmed cases, Clark said.

"It means that the infections that we see ... usually come from spread within a community, not inside the building."

The company said it also interviews those who test positive to see whether they have had close contact with coworkers outside of work, too. But several employees told Recode they worked closely with someone they know was later confirmed to have Covid-19, and had not heard anything from the company, even several days after potential exposure.

Amazon's Cheeseman said the company uses CDC guidance for what constitutes exposure - standing within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes - or local health guidance if it's stricter. She added that employees have several ways to escalate concerns if they think they were exposed.

When Recode asked dozens of warehouse workers if they thought Amazon was any better or worse than competitors like Walmart in how they treat workers, many said that those companies could be just as bad. But they said they expected more from Amazon and its leadership because of the company's success.

"What really makes me mad is that Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men on the planet," said Billie Jo Ramey, a worker at the DTW1 fulfillment center in Romulus, Michigan, on a call with reporters in April. "He can afford to keep us safe."

What happens next

More than three months after the pandemic transformed Amazon from being a convenient service to an essential one providing supplies to millions of homebound Americans, the company has found itself in a delicate situation. Amazon itself calls its workers "heroes." But many of these warehouse heroes - and their corporate colleagues - are angry with their employer in ways they've never been before.

"It's a new moment when hundreds of workers are taking action and when tens of thousands more are signing our petitions and expressing their solidarity online," Dania Rajendra, director of Athena, a coalition of nonprofits and organizations scrutinizing Amazon's business practices, told Recode. "People who are not the executives of extremely wealthy corporations are realizing they're in this together."

While unions have succeeded in organizing some of Amazon's European workforce, no US facility has been unionized. The last attempt, in 2014, ended with a small group of Amazon technicians at a Delaware facility voting against unionization. In the past, Amazon has staved off attempts at warehouse organizing by monitoring and discouraging any preliminary signs of worker solidarity talk on the shop floor and by conceding on some of workers' demands before they escalate further.

This time, quelling organizers' efforts won't be so easy - but Amazon has long been preparing for the potential of unionization, which a former Amazon executive told Recode in April "is likely the single biggest threat to [Amazon's] business model."

As early as the 2000s, Amazon began tracking the potential for unionization at each of its warehouses, building a heat map in Excel to identify "hot spots" in its fulfillment network, a former senior leader in Amazon's human resources department told Recode. This calculation was based on at least dozens of metrics, including employee survey data, timing of the last pay raise, the safety record of the facility, and even the financial strength of local unions, the former HR manager said.

According to this employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Amazon tracked these details to determine "where do we swoop in to figure out if there's a problem with leadership or maybe there's one particularly toxic employee who is really causing chaos." Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired in 2017, now employs a similar union tracking system, Business Insider reported in April.

Cheeseman said she couldn't confirm or deny the existence of the Excel-based unionizing-tracking tool because employees who would have overseen it no longer work for Amazon. But she acknowledged that Amazon does "monitor closely sites where employees have issues and concerns to make sure we're solving them."

Several current and former Amazon warehouse employees told Recode there have been more recent talks of unionization among rank-and-file employees, but also widespread fear that doing so could cost workers their jobs or other repercussions.

"When I worked there, I joked that if I even said the word 'union,' I'd be kicked out. We called it [unions] the 'u-word,'" Jumpp said. "There's a lot of talk about unions, but I don't know if they'll work or not."

While established unions like United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and RWDSU have been informally helping Amazon warehouse workers in pushing for better conditions, the first real step toward unionization - actively announcing a bargaining unit and calling for a vote - hasn't happened yet.

Even if Amazon workers are still a long way from officially unionizing, their organizing and the public attention it's drawn provide an opening to politicians ready to seize an opportunity to rein in the unparalleled power the company has consolidated in the past decade.

On May 12, a group of 13 US state attorneys general pressed the company for data on Covid-linked worker infections.New York City's Commission on Human Rights and the New York state attorney general are investigating Christian Smalls's firing. Some Republican lawmakers, like Sen. Josh Hawley, meanwhile, have used the pandemic as a time to push the company on antitrust issues, arguing that their business practices are destroying mom-and-pop businesses.

The House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating Amazon and the three other Big Tech giants (Facebook, Google, and Apple), recently asked Jeff Bezos to testify on issues including how Amazon competes with its own marketplace merchants. Bezos said he would show up, under certain conditions. And the Federal Trade Commission has been conducting an informal probe of Amazon since last year. These investigations, if they result in regulation or new antitrust laws, could present an existential threat to Amazon's grip on the online retail market.

And Democrats like Sen. Booker are using Amazon as an opportunity to mount a full-throated defense of stronger labor rights in the US more broadly, drawing on the larger economic anxieties Americans face during the recession.

"I strongly believe that we must make sure that labor has a voice, has the right to organize, and has the power to bargain and strike," Booker told Recode. "If not, we are going to see the country continue in this dull and perverse direction. ... It really is a worrisome trend that you're seeing in this country where people who are working hard every day are finding themselves economically compromised, economically fragile."

Booker and the other politicians who scrutinize Amazon do so because they know the company affects far more people than the hundreds of thousands it directly employs. Amazon delivered nearly 3.5 billion packages globally last year - and that figure doesn't even count Amazon orders delivered by partners like UPS or USPS. This has helped make Bezos the richest man in the world; meanwhile, most Americans haven't received a meaningful raise in decades.

Until significant political action or regulation on Amazon comes - if it ever does - labor organizers are trying to shame the company into action, like when Sen. Bernie Sanders helped pressure Amazon to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour back in 2018, or how in 2019, local activists, labor groups, and politicians in New York City pushed Amazon to withdraw its plans to build a new headquarters in Long Island City.

"It's very difficult to see this [employee activism] movement dying out when to a certain degree it's successful," said an Amazon corporate employee who is active on worker organizing around climate change and warehouse worker rights.

And then there's the impact of all this on Amazon's loyal and ever-growing base of customers. If they start to perceive Amazon as a company that, on the whole, is weakening rather than strengthening the working class, will their allegiance to two-day shipping and Prime subscriptions change? If customers demand changes from Amazon, could it raise the bar for labor not just at Amazon but at other retailers that imitate the company's business practices in order to compete with it?

Amazon is "a technological leader, the first place where most Americans turn to shop online, and a hugely influential political power," former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told Recode. "So its employee practices are watched and likely to be emulated by every other big American company. When it treats its workers badly, those tawdry practices reverberate across the country."

Some workers are skeptical that customers will care, no matter what happens in Amazon's warehouses.

"The American psyche is so selfish that it doesn't matter what goes on in there," said one longtime Amazon warehouse worker in Lexington, Kentucky, who's been internally vocal about what he feels is a lack of sanitation at his facility. "It's, 'Just get my package to me. Just get my package to me.' The company is feeding off of that because on the walls and inside the facility it specifically states, 'We are customer-obsessed.'"

For now, customers are by no means rushing to cancel their Prime subscriptions, even if polls indicate that their overall perception of the company is declining. But worker unrest presents a long-term reputational problem for Amazon. Major tech companies like Facebook, Uber, and Google have all made missteps in recent years, from failing to protect user data to allegedly covering up sexual harassment issues, that have stained their reputations and sometimes cost them revenue.

Worker unrest at Amazon has higher stakes, though: It has ramifications for the rest of the economy. Amazon has been ascending to dominance for years, and the pandemic has sped it up. What do its employees, who are a key part of this success, deserve? And what power should they have in shaping the direction of the company?

"I think the state of affairs in our economy is that people are used to it being broken and not working for them," said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler. "That's the way the economy has been for some time, and not just due to Covid. But workers should be able to have higher expectations, to have power and strength as working people. To go to the table [with management] and say, 'We should be in this together.'"

Even after all their agitations for change during the pandemic, Amazon workers are still fighting to be heard.

During his interview with Recode in May, Amazon's Clark twice brought up Smalls, the warehouse worker whose firing sparked other employees' anger toward the company. Despite the internal and external criticism Amazon faced over how its top lawyer called Smalls "not smart or articulate" in a leaked memo, Clark used Smalls in the interview as an example of what dissenting workers have done wrong.

In a recent interview with Recode, Smalls reflected on the significance of the memo that propelled him into the media spotlight.

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"When the leaked memo came out, it exposed who Jeff Bezos is as a person, who's around him, who's giving him counsel - the types of conversations that they have about their employees, and their focus on smearing me. That tells you right there they don't care about us," said Smalls. "It's never going to be Amazon v. Chris Smalls. It's Amazon v. the people."

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that empowers you through understanding. Vox's work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts to all who need them. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3.

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Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us. At 5:30 every morning, Rosie, an Amazon worker at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, checks her text messages to see if she's received more bad news: yet another colleague infected with Covid-19, on top of the at least 50 people at her facility who she says have already gotten sick.

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The executive actions include establishing climate change as a national security priority, conserving at least 30% of federal land and oceans by 2030 and canceling new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, according to a review of the orders released by the administration.

Biden’s executive agenda will also focus on creating green jobs and union opportunities as well as environmental justice for communities disproportionally impacted by climate change.

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‘We Didn’t Sign Up for This’: Amazon Workers on the Front Lines

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‘We Didn’t Sign Up for This’: Amazon Workers on the Front Lines

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Some workers feel that Amazon inadequately responded to the pandemic. They said there was overcrowding in warehouses and not proper sanitization.

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Employees want more wipes and less crowding in sanitized warehouses.

Christian Smalls, a former Amazon worker, in Newark on Thursday, after he was fired from his job at a fulfillment center in Staten Island. Credit... Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

As if in the darkest children's fable ever told, the undisputed winner of the current plague turns out to be the man who already had everything, the king whose empire appears intent on consuming the entire map. This week Jeff Bezos, the richest man on earth, saw the year's first financial quarter close with Amazon stock up more than 5 percent, trading at $1,950 a share, during a period in which the Dow had its worst overall quarter since 1987.

If Amazon previously had us addicted to its services as convenience, it now has us reliant on them as necessity. It may be that before the emergence of the coronavirus, you were trying to break the habit - making a greater effort to shop at the stores in your neighborhood. But now those stores are closed, some of them forever, while the presence of other human beings delivers its own terror, and so Amazon has come to seem more like a utility, as essential as a municipal water supply.

Over the past two weeks I have easily bought more from Amazon than I had during the previous 20: laundry detergent, Neosporin, books, tea, hand weights, instant oatmeal, a recorder that my son needed for his music class at school.

In order to meet the demands of a country in which homes must suddenly be retrofitted to accommodate classrooms, co-working spaces, gyms, hair salons and so on, Amazon announced last month that it would hire 100,000 additional workers in its fulfillment centers and delivery networks, jobs for which many people will be desperate, given the decimated state of the retail and service industries.

What awaits these workers? It would be easier to make peace with the company's crisis-fueled colonization of the marketplace if we could be assured that hourly workers were reaping big rewards given the risk of the jobs. But instead workers feel unsupported in the most fundamental ways.

Though the company has increased pay by $2 an hour, employees around the country at Amazon warehouses and its subsidiary, Whole Foods, have been staging walkouts to demand better health protections during the pandemic.

For years, Amazon has resisted the efforts of organized labor. On Monday the company fired a dissenting worker, Christian Smalls, at a fulfillment center in Staten Island. He was let go almost immediately after he led a group of colleagues from the building during lunch hour in protest of what they saw as the company's inadequate response to the crisis. They were calling simply for the building to be temporarily closed and more stringently sanitized and for workers to be paid during the hiatus as several had become sick.

Not content merely to fire Mr. Smalls, executives planned to exploit him as part of a public-relations strategy meant to deflect attention away from safety issues. Internal notes from a meeting of executive leaders at Amazon obtained by Vice News reveal the company's general counsel David Zaplosky calling Mr. Smalls "not smart or articulate" and thus a useful tool in its ongoing plan to besmirch unionization efforts.

"We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer's conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal," Mr. Zaplosky wrote. referring to Mr. Smalls, "and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety."

The Staten Island warehouse employs 5,000 people who come from all over New York and New Jersey. The potential multiplier effect is especially worrisome in this instance because the facility, 12 miles from the ferry that links Staten Island to Manhattan, is not easily accessible and many employees are forced to take several modes of public transportation to get there, in commutes that often last 90 minutes or more.

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Mr. Smalls at the Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island on Monday. He was fired after the protest. Credit... Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Amazon disputed that Mr. Smalls was terminated for his agitation. A spokeswoman for the company, Kristen Kish, said rather that he was let go because he had returned to work to conduct the demonstration even though he was in the midst of a paid 14-day quarantine after coming into contact with someone at the facility who was sick. "We terminated his employment for putting the health and safety of others at risk and violations of his terms of his employment," Ms Kish said.

Soon after the demonstration, Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, and Mayor Bill de Blasio called for an investigation into Mr. Smalls' dismissal. By Wednesday, the country's most prominent union heads and more than 40 local political leaders demanded that Amazon reinstate Mr. Smalls.

In a letter to Mr. Bezos, the labor leaders also addressed concerns that conditions at Amazon warehouses were unsafe: workers there were "reporting crowded spaces, a required rate of work that does not allow for proper sanitizing of work spaces, and empty containers meant to hold sanitizing wipes.''

It was during the first week in March, Mr. Smalls told me, that he began to notice various colleagues coming to work seeming unwell: fatigued, lightheaded, nauseous. He took his concerns to the human resources people in the facility, he said, who told him that the company was following guidelines established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that there were no confirmed cases of Covid-19 at the warehouse.

Mr. Smalls - a 31-year-old father of three who was reasonably worried about becoming ill himself - took several days off without pay, drawing $500 from his 401(k) to get by in the interim.

Later in the month, one of his colleagues, Barbara Chandler, tested positive for the coronavirus. She was advised by those in human resources at the facility to keep the news on the "down low,'' she told me. Frustrated by what he perceived as the company's lack of transparency, Mr. Smalls made it his mission to disseminate information about cases of Covid-19 at the warehouse.

Amazon insists that its focus is worker safety. In a statement on Thursday, Dave Clark, senior vice president of worldwide operations at Amazon wrote: "Nothing is more important to us than making sure that we protect the health of our teams, and we've been working around the clock since the early days of the outbreak to make changes to our processes and procure the necessary supplies for this. To date, we've made over 150 significant process changes to ensure the health and safety of our teams."

Given that Amazon has still not closed the Staten Island facility for a few days of intensive cleaning, Mr. Smalls has been writing Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, hoping he will mandate a shut down.

There is a precedent. Last week Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky ordered the temporary closure of a midsize Amazon fulfillment center there after three workers tested positive for the coronavirus. On Wednesday, workers at another facility near Detroit staged a walkout calling for the company to let workers go home while the warehouse got an intensive disinfection.

Rather than disrupt the flow of merchandise out of its Staten Island warehouse, not all of which would meet criteria for urgency, Amazon instead began screening the temperatures of employees entering the facility on Sunday, an initiative it has since scaled up at other facilities, but one that does little to safeguard workers from those who might have contracted the virus but remain asymptomatic.

Like many of us who are so grateful for the efforts of Amazon workers to bring us what we need right now, the company's public relations strategy has invoked language of bravery and valiance to describe the labor of people who in so many cases have been exploited by an economy that has given them few opportunities.

Dismissing the notion that many employees were aggrieved by Amazon's handling of the pandemic, Ms. Kish pointed out that, "the vast majority" continue to show up every day and do "heroic work."

Mr. Smalls sees things differently. "They keep saying we're like the Red Cross," he told me. "We're not. We're regular people and we didn't sign up for this."

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'We Didn't Sign Up for This': Amazon Workers on the Front Lines

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Employees want more wipes and less crowding in sanitized warehouses. As if in the darkest children's fable ever told, the undisputed winner of the current plague turns out to be the man who already had everything, the king whose empire appears intent on consuming the entire map.

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Biden to sign major executive orders on climate change

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Biden to sign major executive orders on climate change

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The executive actions include establishing climate change as a national security priority, conserving at least 30% of federal land and oceans by 2030 and canceling new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, according to a review of the orders released by the administration.

Biden’s executive agenda will also focus on creating green jobs and union opportunities as well as environmental justice for communities disproportionally impacted by climate change.

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President Joe Biden on Wednesday is set to sign several executive orders to tackle climate change and transition the country to a clean energy economy, the White House said.

The executive actions include establishing climate change as a national security priority, conserving at least 30% of federal land and oceans by 2030 and canceling new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, according to a review of the orders released by the administration.

Biden's executive agenda will also focus on creating green jobs and union opportunities as well as environmental justice for communities disproportionally impacted by climate change.

The administration said the climate actions will build modern and sustainable infrastructure while restoring scientific integrity in the federal government. The orders further the president's agenda to cut carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
More from CNBC Environment:
Biden rejoins the Paris climate accord in first move to tackle global warming
2020 was one of the hottest years on record, tied with 2016
Biden, who has staffed the White House with a historic number of climate experts, signed an order last week to rejoin the U.S. into the Paris climate accord, a landmark agreement among nations to curb their emissions. He also canceled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the U.S.

The president plans to deliver remarks and sign the orders at 1:30 p.m. ET. Biden's special climate envoy John Kerry and national climate advisor Gina McCarthy are set to brief reporters on the administration's plans.

The Biden administration will also convene the Climate Leaders' Summit on April 22, which will gather global leaders to discuss climate change issues. The summit will likely be remote during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Biden to sign major executive orders on climate change

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President Joe Biden on Wednesday is set to sign several executive orders to tackle climate change and transition the country to a clean energy economy, the White House said.

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Julianne Cendali               How 5 Tech Giants Have Become More Like Governments Than Companies  

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Julianne Cendali               How 5 Tech Giants Have Become More Like Governments Than Companies  

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The 5  biggest tech companies in America which are Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and are more like governments then tech companies because of the amounts of income and the effect they have on American people including the effect they had on the election. These companies are going to affect the way people work and make money and the way we live in the future like self-driving cars and different technologies that are becoming more and more advanced.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's difficult to get jazzed about smartphones and social networks when they might be ruining the world. That's what my guest, Farhad Manjoo, writes. And he's been covering tech for 20 years. For the last three, he's written the New York Times column "State Of The Art" in which he explores how the latest tech ideas are shaping the future. Now he's writing a series about the Frightful Five. That's his name for tech giants Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which make up half of the top 10 most valuable companies on the American stock market and which Manjoo says collectively influence just about everything else that happens in tech, as well as the rest of the global economy. He's also writing a book about the five.

Farhad Manjoo, welcome to FRESH AIR. What makes the Frightful Five frightful? What did they have to do to get on your list?

FARHAD MANJOO: So what makes them frightful, first of all, is that they are very, very big. And they play a huge role - they all play sort of huge roles in our lives kind of personally and at a kind of society-wide level. So if you live kind of a modern American life, it's impossible to, you know, to live without all of them for most people. And more than that, they sort of are being asked to do and they kind of know more about us than any corporations in history. They're more - they've become kind of more like governments than companies with the amount of money they have, with the kind of power they have over democracy in society.

We're seeing that with the way that, you know, news on Facebook and Google affected the election, with their impact on the economy, you know, the way they're disrupting kind of how retail works, with their impact on jobs and inequality. And eventually, you know, they're all working on artificial intelligence. And their technologies will affect probably most of our jobs. Most of the ways that people make money now are going to be changed by technologies that these companies make.

GROSS: Yeah. And when you say that they're like governments, they're sometimes more like governments than corporations, you point out that they're doing things that government - that our government used to do in terms of innovation. What are some examples that you're thinking of?

MANJOO: Yeah. So, you know, many of the technologies that we use today at kind of their earliest levels were started by grants for the Defense Department or just kind of basic science research. Now a lot of that is being done by these companies. Artificial intelligence is kind of the primary example. These companies are going to be building the future of transportation in the United States, in the world. You know, they're building self-driving cars. They're building drones. They're building kind of the infrastructure of the United States - the infrastructure of the next 20, 30, 40 years in ways that we used to look to kind of governments to do.

You know, Amazon has a fleet of planes, drones. It is in the kind of shipping business. It affects stores around you. Much of the kind of physical world around you is being shaped by, you know, that one company. And you can point to kind of similar ways that all the other companies are shaping the world around you in ways that are sort of huge economically and socially and that are kind of unavoidable. Like essentially - in one of my pieces, I wrote that they kind of blanket the entire society in their technology, and you can't really escape them.

GROSS: When we talk about Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, we're also talking about companies that most people don't know are owned by these five mega tech companies. So what are some examples of things that we might not associate with Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft but really are part of them?

MANJOO: Right. So Facebook, for example, also owns Instagram - one of the most popular social networks in the world. It owns WhatsApp, which is I think the most popular messaging app other than a couple that are in China. And, you know, it owns Facebook, which reaches 2 billion people a month. Google, in addition to kind of the Google search engine, it has a whole suite of mapping technologies. So there's Google Maps, but there's also Waze, another popular app for getting around. Google owns YouTube. Amazon, in addition to Amazon the store, it owns many different kind of media and publishing properties, so Audible, which has audio books. Amazon also owns Zappos the shoe company. It sort of owns this suite of different e-commerce sites.

And Amazon is sort of doing more than shopping now. One of its huge ventures is artificial intelligence. And you can personify it through their device called the Amazon Echo, which you put in your house and you talk to. It's your assistant. So, you know, these are examples of companies and products that are part of the five. And they really exemplify the way the five are going into - you know, they're really stretched far horizontally. Kind of every product or service that you might want to use, you're going to touch one of these companies.

I think Google is the most - is the perfect example of this. So what Google did a couple years ago is they switched from being Google, Google incorporated to Alphabet. So Alphabet is a holding company, many people may not have heard of it. Every time I write about Alphabet I have to very - I have to specify that we're actually talking about Google. But what Alphabet is is it's a holding company that has Google. Google is its sort of biggest property, but then it has a whole bunch of other companies you may not have heard of.

One of them is like their research lab called Google X, another is something called Google Brain, which is a company that is looking at ways to have artificial intelligence do things like medical diagnosis. There is a self-driving car company called Waymo. There's another health company called Verily. There's sort of a suite of companies that are under this alphabet umbrella related to Google. So they get all their money from Google but, you know, in the future, the plan is that Google as an entity will be just one of many different companies owned by this larger company that will, you know, affect everything that we do.

GROSS: So like the origin stories for like Google, Facebook and Apple, they're all about like a guy or a couple of guys in a garage or dorm room dreaming up these great ideas that lead to something remarkably innovative. But now you're saying now that these companies that they dreamed of are so big, they're actually in some ways suppressing innovation - the innovations of other, you know, men and women in their dorm rooms or garages dreaming up ideas. So in what ways do you think that these companies now sometimes suppress innovation?

MANJOO: This, I think, is the huge change in how the tech industry works now versus how it worked back when some of these companies were starting up. It's still possible to come out to Silicon Valley and start, you know, some new app, some - create some new piece of hardware that lots of people like and that takes the world by storm. But there's now kind of a ceiling on how successful your idea can be, and the ceiling is kind of determined by these five companies.

So one of the things that these five companies have done kind of masterfully is create these platforms that startups have to use to get to customers. So they all own these cloud-storage services. So Amazon is an example. If you want to store your media online - so, for example, all the movies that you watch on Netflix are actually stored on Amazon servers - so every time you use Netflix, Netflix is kind of paying Amazon for that kind of storage.

GROSS: I have to tell you, I was really surprised when I read that. I didn't know that.

MANJOO: Yeah. It's surprising, first of all, because they're such different companies. You wouldn't really know - you wouldn't really think that they would have that kind of connection. And then they're also competitors. Netflix makes original TV shows and so does Amazon. And so, you know, in this way, Netflix has this dependence on one of its competitors. There are lots of different examples of this though.

There - you know, all app makers have to put their apps in the Apple app store or the Google app store. And when they sell in those apps, 30 percent of that money goes to Apple or Google. They all have to advertise on Facebook or Google to get customers because that's become the way to advertise on digital platforms. And so any new app - Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, all the other sort of smaller companies online - have to go through these five to get to their customers. And what ends up happening is that other companies succeed, but always these five benefit off of that success.

GROSS: So what's an example of how one of these big companies dealt with a new startup or a new innovation that might've been competitive or appealing?

MANJOO: Yeah. The best example we've seen recently is sort of what's happened to Snapchat. So Snapchat is a very popular and really innovative idea. So Snapchat is an app where primarily teenagers, young people, send messages that disappear. So they don't last forever. You send a picture and kind of a caption to your friend. They see it for a little while, and it disappears.

And the other thing you do on this app is you make something called a story, which is like a slideshow of your day. And after a day, your friends see it and then it goes away. And these were very popular. And Facebook, which is obviously the leader in social networking, they noticed the popularity of Snap, and several times they tried to buy the company. Facebook offered Snap $3 billion, and Snap turned them down. And then earlier this year Snap went public on the stock market, and it was sort of this huge event for them. You know, this is the next step in kind of the evolution of their company.

And right after that, Facebook copied Stories, this format that's very popular on Snapchat. It copied it to essentially all of Facebook's platforms, and basically overnight the version of Stories in Instagram, in Facebook's company, became far more popular than Stories in Snapchat. And ever since then Snapchat's stock has suffered, and analysts and other people I talked to have a much kind of dimmer view of the future of that company than they did before because Facebook is gunning for them, and it's just really hard to see how they can kind of get out from under that competition.

GROSS: So you see that as an example of how one of the big companies can suppress or co-opt the innovation of a startup?

MANJOO: Yeah. It's the role of startups in the modern tech economy is to provide, you know, ideas for the big companies to kind of run with and make money from. And the other thing that the startups do is they pay a lot of money for the goods and services that the big companies provide. So half of Snapchat's revenues actually go to Google because Google hosts the actual content on Snapchat.

So in this weird way, you know, Snapchat is paying half of its revenues to Google, one of the five. It's being copied left and right by another of the five, Facebook. And it's trying to make money in the Internet ad economy, and the biggest players in the Internet ad economy are Google and Facebook. So it's also competing with them for advertisers. It's a really unenviable position to be in.

GROSS: Well, let's take a break here, and then we'll talk some more about what my guest, Farhad Manjoo, calls the frightful five, which is Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. He writes the tech column "State Of The Art" for The New York Times, and he's doing a series on this group that he calls the frightful five. We're going to be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Farhad Manjoo, who writes about tech for The New York Times. He writes the "State Of The Art" column, which explores how the latest tech ideas are shaping the future. And he's now writing a series about big tech companies, the ones he calls the frightful five - Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

Now, you say the frightful five are so big, and yet they're not regulated by the government and they don't really fit into the standards that we measure monopolies by. Like, they don't conform to monopoly standards. So what's different about these tech companies from companies that we might consider a monopoly?

MANJOO: So one of the differences is that they're new and they're growing in new markets. And in those markets, it's sort of - in some ways it's kind of too early to call them the winners, according to regulators. And other ways, they've sort of grown really quickly, but many people see sort of more room to grow. So it's, according to regulators and others who study these markets, kind of perhaps too soon to say that they've won.

But for example, you know, Amazon has disrupted essentially all of the retail business, like, everyone from Walmart to, you know, every mom and pop shop has some fear and strategy for responding to the threat of Amazon. But if you look at kind of the size of Amazon and the scope of the entire retail business, it's not that big. It's not even half of all online sales, and it's something like 8 percent of all retail sales in the United States.

So it's growing very quickly, and it has built this infrastructure for kind of the future of commerce. It's built all these warehouses and this very efficient way of shipping goods to people. And everyone who understands e-commerce understands that, like, the future of retail in America belongs to Amazon. But at this point, it's small. And so for regulators who worry about...

GROSS: Wait. Small when measured against overall retail numbers and...

MANJOO: Right. So yes. So at this point...

GROSS: 'Cause there's nothing small about Amazon so (laughter)...

MANJOO: (Laughter) You're right.

GROSS: ...Sounds like a contradiction.

MANJOO: Yeah. But at this point it's, you know, it's about a quarter of the size of Walmart. It's growing very quickly, growing faster than than Walmart is, but it's only a quarter of the size of Walmart. It just beat out last year sales of Costco, and it is a very small percentage of overall retail.

So if you're a regulator worried about kind of monopolies, a monopoly threat, it's difficult to kind of look at traditional ways of measuring monopolies, like how much market concentration there is. Or another thing you'd worry about is, is this company big enough that it's able to kind of control prices? Well, Amazon is not that big. It's not sort of, you know, if you're worried about suppliers of goods being priced out, you really would worry about Walmart more. I mean, Walmart is sort of known for low prices and its demands on suppliers to constantly lower their prices.

And so for regulators who are worried about the dominance of a single company on a sector, Amazon presents this real puzzle for them. In fact it's such a puzzle that progressives and people on the left who've studied antitrust say that we need a whole new slate of laws and regulations to contain Amazon and to regulate it than we do now. The fundamentally kind of antitrust laws that we have today don't work for Amazon.

GROSS: So what kind of laws are they thinking about?

MANJOO: So there was this - one of the interesting things I discovered in looking at these five companies is that there's been this sea change in America in how we think about dangerous kind of corporate dominance. And before the 1980s, we were essentially a lot more strict in the United States about corporate size. And you know, the government was a lot more interventionist in preventing mergers that may affect how a market works.

And what happened in the 1980s is that, you know, a group of economists and lawyers known as the Chicago School and the Reagan administration kind of completely changed how we looked at corporate dominance in America, especially about sort of the danger, how we thought of the dangers of monopolies. And so the upshot of that is they looked mostly at price when determining whether a merger could go through, whether a company could get bigger. And they didn't look at sort of non-price effects like customer service or the effect on suppliers or the effect on the environment or adjacent industries.

If you look at price only, you won't - you're not likely to kind of stop Amazon because one of the benefits that Amazon has had is that investors sort of have been betting on kind of constant growth from Amazon, and as a result they don't really expect Amazon to be very profitable. Amazon is sort of famously not profitable at all because it reinvests everything it makes into building out more warehouses and building, you know, to getting bigger for the next year.

And so Amazon really doesn't have to raise prices. It constantly lowers prices. It has this effect on the rest of the of the retail business that results in lower prices. So if you were looking at prices alone, you would say this is a great company. It's great for customers that this company is kind of constantly lowering prices and forcing everyone else to lower prices. Under the kind of current view of antitrust, Amazon seems like a positive force rather than a negative force.

But if you go back, according to, you know, the people who want us to rethink how we do antitrust, if you go back to kind of a pre-1980s view of this structure and this market, you would see that Amazon is sort of, you know, getting its kind of corporate tentacles into a large part of the economy, into shipping, and how warehouses work and robots. Things that will allow it to dominate in the future that we're kind of just not good at regulating at this point.

GROSS: My guest is Farhad Manjoo, who writes The New York Times tech column "State Of The Art," and he's writing a series about the tech giants he calls the frightful five - Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. After we take a short break, he'll talk about the dark side of Google and smartphones and why he set up cameras in his home that record everything his family does in the living room and dining room. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Farhad Manjoo, who writes The New York Times tech column "State Of The Art" about how the latest tech ideas are shaping the future. He's now writing a series about the tech giants he calls the frightful five - Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. The frightful five are also the subject of a book he's writing. He says there's an ongoing debate about whether they should be regulated, but they're hard to regulate because they're so different from the type of corporate giants that antitrust laws were designed for.

So, you know, one of the things people are wondering, like, should this be regulated is, fake news. And, you know, Facebook and Twitter are responding to concerns about fake news and where are ads coming from. So Twitter has issued, like, new guidelines for what it's going to do. You want to run through - Twitter's not part of your frightful five, but it's still pretty big, and it's important in the context of what we're talking about. Do you want to just run through some of the things they plan on doing?

MANJOO: Yeah. Both Twitter and Facebook sort of had these - posted these guidelines earlier, which is they plan to - they say they plan to show you who's running these ads, who's sort of - who's paying for the ads and to be more transparent about other ads that those people have posted. So If you - so one of the problems that we've seen is that, you know, these kind of shady groups that are not kind of identified - you don't know where the money is coming from. You don't know what their agenda is. You don't know what other advertisements they've run.

They've been able to kind of place these ads all over Facebook and Twitter and kind of affect the news and, you know, protests and kind of just society in America under these guidelines that companies are rolling out voluntarily. But you know, there might be legislation to this effect. That will be less possible because you'll be able to - it's plausible you'll be able to kind of find out who's running these campaigns.

GROSS: In terms of Facebook, aren't they considering, like, working with fact-checking partners and labeling stories that are disputed as fake news?

MANJOO: Yeah. So one of the real difficulties about looking at these companies is that in some ways, regulating them, making them better gives them more power. So Facebook is now - so Facebook's news feed is sort of one of the most popular places for getting news in the world. It's you know - combined, more people read it than, you know, all the major newspapers in the country, the TV networks. It's extremely influential.

And right now there's very little fact-checking that Facebook does, which is, you know, what led to this proliferation of fake news and these kind of echo chambers that people have. The solution to that could be that Facebook decides it's going to partner with fact-checking companies, and perhaps it might do fact-checking itself. And Facebook would sort of be in some way the arbiter for what's right and wrong on Facebook. That may help with the fake news problem. I think it's unclear at this point.

But the kind of upshot of that is, on the other hand, you get Facebook kind of acting as something like the ministry of information for kind of every country in which it operates, where, you know, it might be able to decide, like, this is true, and this is not true. How it'll make those decisions and who it'll employ to make those decisions I think is a big question. And, like, suddenly it's going to have this power, and it's going to come about perhaps as a solution to another problem that it itself caused.

GROSS: So throughout this interview, we've been hearing a lot of your, you know, kind of criticisms about these five companies. And we should say you're hardly a technophobe. And reading about how you have your house wired (laughter) - you've got, like, everything in your house. You've got, like, all the gadgets and all the new, like, Internet of things kind of things. So let's start with, like - you wrote a column about how you've basically made your home into a reality show because your living room and - is it dining room...

MANJOO: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Are wired with cameras that - kind of like a lot of public bathrooms, when you walk in in those bathrooms, the lights turn on. When you walk out, they turn off because they have, like, motion sensors. And that's how these cameras are wired. So describe for us the setup that you have with these cameras and why you're doing it.

MANJOO: OK, so I'll describe the setup first. So they're - it's sort of in the public places of our house so, I mean, not the bedrooms - so the dining room, the living room, the kitchen.

GROSS: And not the bathroom (laughter).

MANJOO: Not the bathroom, yes. And there are a bunch of cameras. I think there are five now. And they kind of get all angles. And the reason I'm doing it is because I have two kids - young kids, 7 and 5 - almost 5. And you know, like everyone else who raises kids today, I take a lot of photos of them and a lot of videos, but I always feel like I'm missing stuff. They're extremely, like, cute. And I'm busy, and they say things, and I - and, like, I always worry that I'm just, like, missing their lives.

So I got this idea because I saw some researchers had done this. Like, psychology researchers had a videotaped their own children to kind of look at their language development. And I thought, wouldn't that be super interesting to do that, to just have memories of my kids? It took a lot of lobbying of my wife, who is just not a tech person at all. And she, you know, was worried about the privacy implications and just, like, the idea of being surveilled in your house.

Eventually I convinced her. I managed to kind of get her buy-in. We've been doing it for about a year now. And it'll be interesting, you know? It'll be really just, like, fascinating to me to watch those videos in the future and to show my kids those videos, you know, like, if my daughter who's now 5 is, like, 25 and to show her, like, what she looked like and what she said. And you know, I'd love to have memories of my own childhood from then. And I think they will appreciate that in the future.

GROSS: OK. So part of what I'm hearing here is you saying, like, you're too busy to watch your kids grow up, so you retire, you'll be able to watch the TV version (laughter).

MANJOO: Yeah. I mean, I'll cop to that. It's - that is a slightly cynical way to put it, but I don't think it's wrong. I mean, I think in many instances, we do now miss out on our children. I try not to. And you know, one of the things this helps me with is I don't have to pick up my phone to take videos of them. I can sort of just be in the moment. Like, we were - I was playing video games with my son last night, and he, like, said - you know, he was just, like, very - it was just very interesting and memorable for me to watch him, like, learn how to play this video game. And I would like to see that again (laughter) at some point. And so the idea of having that is - and it just feels like I'm capturing these memories that will one day be useful.

GROSS: So have you been using those videos to settle arguments such as, no, I did tell you about this; you say I didn't, but I'm telling you I did, and now we will watch the tape and prove that I am right?

MANJOO: It has been tempting.

(LAUGHTER)

MANJOO: I have wanted to do that. I've just resisted 'cause I don't - especially with my wife, like, I don't want to have the video sort of come between us. I have used it as, like, a disciplinary tool with my kids. So like, I've told my son, you know, like, not to start a fight with his sister. And then, like, I've sort of slyly mentioned I will be able to see if you did, you know, if they're alone in the room or something. And that's the kind of extent that I've used it - just kind of as a warning that I can look back at what's happening.

GROSS: So my understanding is - right? - that the system that you have, the camera system - it records for a week, and then it deletes everything at the end of a week except for the things you've asked it to save.

MANJOO: Yeah, that's how it works. It's like a surveillance camera at a convenience store, you know, it has a loop.

GROSS: (Laughter) Just what everybody wants in their home.

MANJOO: Exactly. It has a loop, a seven day, you know, storage of everything you take. So when something memorable happens, something I just want to capture, I write a note to myself of the time in my phone. And then once a week, I look at the videos. I go back to that time, and then I save those videos.

GROSS: So what's a moment you're really glad you were able to preserve on video?

MANJOO: It's the small things. So it's like we're having dinner and my daughter says something completely unexpected, like, makes a joke for the first time - like, this has happened - you know, says something that makes the whole rest of the family laugh. And she's 5. And so that's like - it happens once for the first time. And it like surprised her. And she got kind of embarrassed about it. And she didn't know that, like, making everyone laugh was like a good thing, was like something that people wanted to do. She thought that we were laughing at her.

It was like a cute moment and a touching moment. And, you know, ordinarily, like, we'd just forget that. You just never have that moment. And now I have that. It's just like - dinners - really interesting things happen at dinner, I've realized after this. And just having those moments is going to be really fun in the future.

GROSS: So your kids are 7 and 4 now. Do they understand that cameras are recording them? And if so, does it make them self-conscious?

MANJOO: They do understand that cameras are recording them because I've shown them the videos. It hasn't made them self-conscious. What's actually happened is it's sort of done the opposite. It's made them performative. So my daughter will like - like if we play a song, she'll like go to the camera and sort of do a dance for the camera.

And I think this is the influence of YouTube. They watch YouTube. And on YouTube, there's, you know, kids their age performing for cameras. Like, they have their own sort of YouTube shows. And because my kids watch YouTube and have these cameras that they know sort of are recording things that can be on YouTube, it seems like they act like - they try to act like YouTube stars, like people are watching them and they're trying to cultivate an audience.

GROSS: Well, I think about how really different that was from like when I was growing up and the only people who were on video were people on TV. And there were only a few channels, so very few people were on TV. And it just seemed so, like, remarkable and impossible. And it's just amazing how like in a few decades how radically things can change. I know I'm stating the obvious, but it's no less remarkable even though it's obvious.

MANJOO: Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with that. I mean, I really wonder what my children's sort of conception of celebrity is going to be. They follow a YouTube star who's - it's weird even calling someone a YouTube star. He has - he's, you know, I think around 10 years old. And he has a following of, I think, a few million people on YouTube. And he just does kid stuff. Like he plays and he plays with toys and plays video games. And other kids watch him do this.

We were on vacation in Hawaii, and we passed a kid that my kids swore was that kid, the sort of the YouTube star. And it was as if they had seen like, you know, the biggest celebrity. Like, they were shy. They were talking to each other about, like, whether that was him. They wanted to like go and search for him and get his autograph. It was like, you know, very cute and wondrous to see, but it was something I'd never heard of in like in my own definition would not sort of qualify as a celebrity, as someone worth meeting. But for them, he was like the biggest star of all time.

GROSS: Also interesting. (Laughter) OK. If you're just joining us, my guest is Farhad Manjoo. And he writes the "State Of The Art" column at The New York Times, which explores how the latest tech ideas are shaping the future. He's now writing a series about the tech companies he calls the Frightful Five - Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. He's also writing a book about these companies. We're going to take a short break and then be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Farhad Manjoo, who writes the "State Of The Art" tech column for The New York Times and is now writing a series of articles about the tech companies he calls the Frightful Five - Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

So throughout this interview, we've been hearing a lot of your, you know, kind of criticisms about these five companies. And you write, it's difficult to get jazzed about smartphones and social networks when they might be ruining the world (laughter) and that technologies that we were most excited about 10 years ago are now implicated in just about every catastrophe of the day.

MANJOO: Yeah. It is difficult for me to get excited about technology anymore. Like, you know, I write a column about technology. And like, as a result of that, I get to try out basically everything there is. And it's sort of been my dream job because I like wanted to do that. I'm interested in the future, and I'm interested in sort of what's going to happen with all this new stuff. But my sort of default position about whether this stuff is going to be good or bad in the world has changed.

So in the past, my kind of reflexive bias of a new piece of technology was - tended toward optimism. You know, I had the feeling that probably it's better than the stuff we have now, and because it's better than the stuff we have now, it's going to kind of make us more efficient or help us like connect with people. And that has to be good.

And, you know, that's the way - that's sort of the default position of, I think, everyone in Silicon Valley. Like, people who run these companies have this idea that any new piece of technology is probably going to be good. And my own view has shifted on that. I think that we should all be more skeptical of the unseen and longer-term potential dangers of these technologies before we kind of rush to embrace them.

And my default view is no longer sort of optimism. It's more - it's, like, skepticism and just a more balanced view of, like - like, this thing could be big. It could be important. But it could be important in positive ways and plausibly very negative ways and that we should consider sort of both of those things.

GROSS: What's an example of something that you initially thought was really positive and you came to see the dark side of it? I'm sure there's many examples to choose from here (laughter).

MANJOO: (Laughter) Yeah. I mean, a really kind of clear example is Google, the search engine. So it just sounds - it sounds obvious that providing the world information for free on demand is going to be good. Like, throughout human history, we have been better when we learn more, when we get more information, when we produce more, when we share more. That's sort of the story behind public libraries and, like, encyclopedias and just books and printing in general.

And so you would imagine that having that be accessible to the whole world would just naturally be good. And there are many arguments that, you know - there's sort of a lot of benefit I think from having Google as a search engine and having all this information. But on the other hand, there's no doubt that Google has led to, you know - has fed the rise of conspiracy thinking in America.

Like, anyone can produce some piece of content that questions some completely valid fact about the world. They can put together a lot of information that suggests there's another point of view. Like, there are people who believe that the Earth is flat. And they can make YouTube videos about it, and they can make web pages about it. And then a lot of people start talking about it, and that starts trending on Google. Like, you will search for 9/11 or, like, whether the Earth is flat or not, and you will find at the very, you know, in prominent locations on Google this other view of the world.

And you can get sucked into that and you can start believing things that are completely not true as a result of this tool that was made to enlighten the world. So you know, that's, like, an example of, you know, something that people thought would be obviously good. And it's just much more complicated than we initially thought.

GROSS: OK, well, (laughter) you have an interesting job. Thank you so much for telling us about it.

MANJOO: Thanks so much for having me. This was really fun.

GROSS: No, my pleasure. Farhad Manjoo writes The New York Times tech column "State Of The Art" and is writing a series on the tech giants he calls the "Frightful Five: Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon." He's also writing a book about them. After we take a short break, Justin Chang will review the new film "The Square," which won the top prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. This is FRESH AIR.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How 5 Tech Giants Have Become More Like Governments Than Companies

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's difficult to get jazzed about smartphones and social networks when they might be ruining the world. That's what my guest, Farhad Manjoo, writes. And he's been covering tech for 20 years.

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Anthony Balber                  Top 10 reasons to work at google  

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Anthony Balber                  Top 10 reasons to work at google  

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Google offers on-site physicians, nurses, medical services, and health care coverage to keep its employees happy and healthy. "Googlers "can travel without worries; employees are covered with travel insurance and emergency assistance on both personal and work-related vacations. Big industries and tech companies have really evolved since the gilded age especially in the aspect of the treatment of there workers. Back than many Big industries did not care for the treatment of there workers they only cares specifically about the product and the money the product gives them.

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2020 Was The Worst Year Ever For U.S. Hotels. Here's What's Next

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2020 Was The Worst Year Ever For U.S. Hotels. Here's What's Next

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2020 was the worst year for hotels on record because of the pandemic.44% of hotels had up to 1 billion rooms unsold and made almost zero profits.It is stated that hotels won't have a full recovery until 2025 and have rates like 2019.

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The U.S. hotel industry suffered its worst year on record in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic severely crimped business travel and Americans gave up on vacations to stay at home.

Hotels hit all-time lows in occupancy and in revenue per available room last year, according to data provider STR.

With an occupancy rate of just 44%, the industry surpassed 1 billion unsold room nights for the first time in history, eclipsing the 786 million that went unsold during the global financial crisis in 2009.

And with revenue per available room down nearly 48%, the industry is expected to show close to zero profit for 2020, according to STR.

And in 2021, conditions will remain poor before they start to improve.

The first half of the year will look much like 2020 as Americans start to line up for vaccine shots, according to STR and the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

But in the second half of the year, pent-up demand for experiences could finally be unleashed, bolstering the industry and offering a first glimpse of post-pandemic life - though not nearly enough to yank the industry out of turmoil.

"We, along with airlines and restaurants, were the first hurt and the worst hurt," says Chip Rogers, the president and CEO of the AHLA. "As most other businesses come out of this, we're still going to be hurting for a while."

There is room for hope. Hotel industry insiders are especially looking forward to the summer, anticipating a repeat of last year, when Americans finally hopped into their cars and drove, searching for a change of scenery and a break from Zoom calls.

Demand was strong as travelers took advantage of low hospitality prices and booked rooms at roadside hotels and motels even past Labor Day, which traditionally marks the end of summer.

Still, increased leisure travel in the second half of the year won't save hotels from a tough 2021, as corporate travel is expected to remain depressed.

Business travel accounts for 60% to 65% of all revenue in the industry, Rogers says.

Hotels in city centers with convention halls were among the hardest hit in 2020 as business conferences went virtual. A report from the AHLA says that in 2021, business travel will still be down 85% compared with two years ago.

And overall, the hotel industry is bracing for years of potential pain.

According to the AHLA,travel won't return to 2019 levels until 2024.

But even that projection for recovery in 2024 comes with an asterisk, because while the number of rooms sold may make a comeback, room rates will not return to 2019 levels until 2025, according to Jan Freitag, the national director of hospitality market analytics at CoStar Group, which owns STR.

Tough as the outlook appears, Freitag says the industry is trying to maintain hope.

"The story that hotel people tell themselves right now is that this could be the Roaring '20s, that there's all this pent-up demand," says Freitag.

"There's more money in banks waiting to be spent because already we've bought everything we need," he adds. "What we couldn't do was have experiences. Once the vaccinations hit, that will allow us to experience again, and the floodgates will open."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2020 Was The Worst Year Ever For U.S. Hotels. Here's What's Next

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The U.S. hotel industry suffered its worst year on record in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic severely crimped business travel and Americans gave up on vacations to stay at home. Hotels hit all-time lows in occupancy and in revenue per available room last year, according to data provider STR.