The company Amazon invests in mindfulness, but not in the work environment. But those who drive out the goods do not get pee breaks, according to the columnist.
Foto: Matt Rourke
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As part of the company Amazon’s goal of becoming “the earth’s safest workplace”, the company introduced AmaZen this week.
A telephone booth where the employee who not only has pain in the body, but in the soul, can go through various mindfulness exercises that are presented on a computer screen.
In a film that was then deleted by the company, we see the Zen cure in the middle of a warehouse. A mattressed cell, not much bigger than a normal-sized Swedish refrigerator, for those of you who happened to go crazy with capitalism during the working day. The square meter roof has a background of blue sky. On small chipboard shelves are some depressing potted plants of the type you find at a really cheap spa. You can go there and “charge your internal battery”.
“Amazon takes our health very seriously,” says an employee in the press release.
It all sounds like taken from a dark science fiction dystopia. The company has made itself known for pressuring its employees to work harder and harder. The breaks of two fifteen minutes a day in a warehouse in New York were not even enough to get between the work floor and the rest area. Kiss breaks took place as time allowed. Occupational injuries were frequent and the only security the company previously implemented according to the employees is more surveillance cameras. As recently as 2020, an Amazon employee told the Guardian “I’m not a robot.” Another stated that “you can be fired for anything”.
Someone up there must have heard the complaints and then thrown the problem statement at a laughing mirror.
The creator behind AmaZen, Leila Brown, has a “holistic” perspective on health. That is, man is a whole rather than a complex of separate entities. What that means is a bit unclear to me, but is certainly much appreciated by a school sister at a Waldorf school.
In Sweden, holistic medicine has, among other things, had a mainstream impact within the influencer ranks on Instagram with a focus on women’s health. The scientific result is somewhere in line with astrology as the only monitoring of the outside world. The level of education is a mail order degree from Barbados, then you also become a teacher. We would like to believe that druid flum and zen should possess some kind of higher or ancient wisdom, but the results can be completely devastating.
Do you want to get pregnant? Turn off the bedside lamp and stop drinking coffee. Do you have cancer? Test crystals and herbs! Do you feel that you are suffering from the stress that comes with underpaid work on an assembly line and that life is completely meaningless? Step into our telephone booth, turn on the mindfulness movie and light a scented candle.
Many of these whims are certainly completely without evil intent, but end in reality surpassing our wildest dark fantasies. Unfortunately, such is capitalism. In its most aggressive form, it is exploitative. Underpaid labor with precarious forms of employment. Pollution. Cemented class divides. In its most progressive form, however, it risks becoming naive on a par with Marie Antoinette’s “why can’t they eat cakes?”
Amazon seems to have succeeded with some sort of combination. You do not improve the working conditions of your employees. Those who drive the goods can continue to sit and freeze in their cars, where they repeatedly click on an app in the hope of getting a ride. Those who work at the warehouses do not get more pee breaks, higher salaries, safer employment or more free time.
What the employees got instead is a small box they can sit in and cry in, if they need to hide from reality and the boss’s cameras for a while.
I hope they also use it if there are problems with pee breaks.
MOREOVER was I Care a Lot among the better I put in film way this year. Rosamund Pike’s character has put in place a system to become a good husband for pensioners and then sell everything they own. Black humor on the verge of horror. Brilliant film idea where with fifteen minutes left I did not know who I was really working on.
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This is an opinion piece and the content is the writer’s or writers’ own views.
