Jeff Bezos Could Learn a Thing or Two from His Ex-wife
Mackenzie Scott giving her Amazon billions away is pitch perfect for the times.
There comes a time in every centibillionaire’s life when he says to himself, it’s time to help those who weren’t given the same I was given when I was born — a good start with decent parents, a decent education, white skin, and the ‘right’ sex to conquer the world without people questioning my ‘ambition’ at every turn.
Or not.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world.
He gained considerable more wealth because of the coronavirus.
And now, after ruining my grocery store with rage-filled Instacart shoppers and turning the vibe from chill to a cold-warehouse-feel with cheerless employees, putting both small and large bookstores and every other kind of retail brick and mortar out of business, he’s stepping down from his company, Amazon, as CEO, before things get really awkward and uncomfortable.
On the other hand, his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, in stark contrast, has been giving her billions away — directly making a difference in the lives of people targeted by systematic racism and sexism. And with her second round of giving, helping those displaced by a global pandemic.
Full disclosure: I’m a capitalist.
I believe that individuals should benefit directly from the fruits of their labor, frugality, and ingenuity.
However, I also believe in social justice and economic reform, in the power of social safety nets provided by the Government. Think, Canada, where a checkout person working in a grocery store has the same access to quality healthcare and education for his kids as the well-off person coming through his checkout line. To catch the people left behind. I studied economics, by the very nature of capitalism, people will be left behind.
One can be both impressed by the guy below becoming the richest man in the world through hard work, imagination, and daring,
and also think he should do more.
While Jeff Bezos isn’t responsible for the US Government’s shortcomings, he is responsible for the workers at Amazon. Part of Bezos’s success was built on their backs, making it the behemoth it is today.
Warehouse employees work in conditions that make them sick because of Covid-19, working too close together and not the mandatory 6 feet apart.
You don’t have to solve the world’s problems, but don’t you have some responsibility to the people who made you a centibillionaire? And where are you taking all that money anyway? Dude, you can’t take it with you.
And while wanting to establish a settlement on the moon with your space exploration company Blue Origin in your Bond-villain outfit (see above image — right half) is both exciting and bold, how about taking care of the people down here on earth, the people who helped make you so wealthy.
Your ex-wife can show you how.
Wealth built on crisis
Jeff Bezos, along with other billionaires like Apoorva Mehta, CEO of Instacart, and John Tyson of Tyson Foods, expanded their fortunes while tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, incomes, and sometimes their homes.
Covid-19 has increased the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.
While millions of Americans have lost jobs due to the pandemic, the combined wealth of just ten billionaires has increased by more than $127bn since last March.
Those billionaires include the principal owners of Amazon, Instacart, Walmart, and Tyson Foods — increasing economic inequality in the US, which was already — pre-pandemic — a huge problem. Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased about $74bn since the pandemic. Billion. Not million. It has increased $74bn, which a “B.” An increase of 65%.
Because of the pandemic, four centibillionaires, Bezos, Bill Gates, Zuck, and Elon Musk, now have a net worth of about $550bn combined. The whole group of US billionaires has a combined wealth of 4tn (with a ‘T’), double the wealth of the bottom half of all US households.
That is wealth inequality.
Like Amazon, some of these companies, which have seen tremendous growth, are aiding in providing goods and services to people stuck at home, dodging the virus. We can be express gratitude for that; Amazon helps deliver food and products right to our front door, so we don’t have to go to the store and be exposed to the virus.
But we can also question whether some of those enormous profits due to unprecedented times of crisis, should be given to the workers who are in danger of getting sick because they’re providing these services while reaping none of the profits.
The monies companies are making — large amounts — are not reflected in the pay or the protection of the workers who are making these services possible for the public.
When you put everyone out of business, or a pandemic does, you benefit
As Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies points out, companies like Amazon benefit from their competition effectively shutting down because of a pandemic.
One of the first things you learn in economics is competition regulates the system — prices and profits. No competition, you get to charge whatever you want — that’s called a monopoly. And while Bezos will never admit to Amazon being a monopoly, when you put everyone out of business, that is exactly what you have.
While it is wonderful that companies like Amazon have the system down to deliver us food and services, they aren’t sharing those enormous gains with their workforce. They are essentially sending their workers into the viral line of fire while owners reap enormous rewards in an unprecedented circumstance.
The heads of these companies — Bezos, Mehtaa and Tyson especially — could protect their frontline workers, acknowledge the great risk their workers are taking in providing services we rely on by paying them higher wages.
What Amazon could do:
- Provide paid hazard pay.
- Give workers access to good healthcare.
- Paid family leave.
- Share in the wealth that they are creating for these companies.
If these companies can’t figure out how to do that, the Government should play an essential role in mandating higher wages, paid healthcare, and paid family leave when sick.
Amazon’s poor warehouse conditions
Rina Cummings, who works at Amazon’s New York City warehouse on Staten Island, is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of 1,800 Amazon packages an hour — 30 per minute.
“Workers such as Cummings helped Amazon achieve its best-ever Christmas this year. Faster shipping drove Amazon’s revenues to $87bn for the fourth quarter of 2019, adding another $12.8bn to founder Jeff Bezos’s $128.9bn fortune.”
Amazon’s high injury rates were found to be three times the national average for warehouses, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Amazon’s solution to this report was to install video monitors around the warehouse that tell workers safety is the company’s number one priority, claiming the OSAH report was not accurate and implementing no real change for its workers.
Workers have a pack rate target they must hit, and if they don’t, they are fired.
Raymond Velez worked as a packer at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse from October 2018 to November 2019. He was required to pack at a rate of 700 items per hour. He said workers are regularly fired for missing rates. “That’s all they care about. They don’t care about their employees,” Velez added. “They care more about the robots than they care about the employees.
One worker quit after three days in an Amazon warehouse — where workers are tracked by algorithms — because it reminded him of jail. He said, “I would rather go back to a state correctional facility and work for 18 cents an hour than do that job,” Lacewell continued. “I’m sure Mr. Bezos couldn’t do a full shift at that place as an undercover boss.”
The spread of Covid in Amazon warehouses remains high
Last October, by Amazon’s own admission, more than 19,000 workers, or 1.44% of the total, contracted Covid that year. Between March 1 and September 19, Amazon counted 19,816 presumed or confirmed Covid-19 cases across its roughly 1.37 million Amazon and Whole Foods Market frontline employees across the US.
At least 20 workers have died from Covid, and probably more.
Tyson has had over 11,000 infected.
Trader Joe’s is famous for treating employees well; Amazon is on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding treatment of its employees.
A common sense solution
Recently, Amazon hired 350,000 new workers and is wedging them into the same warehouses and infrastructure where it is impossible to practice social distancing and proper protection.
Chuck Collins, the author of Born on Third Base, and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, has a great idea — an emergency pandemic wealth tax on billionaires.
This will never happen because billionaires pay millions of dollars to hide trillions of dollars in tax shelters.
But still, that doesn’t mean an emergency pandemic wealth tax is a bad idea. We have a group of 650 people whose wealth has gone up a trillion dollars since last March. So, give them an extra tax on the windfall profit that they only have because of the pandemic. Tax a portion of their “pandemic gain” and invest it in something that will help people, like the economic recovery package — one way to pay for these things is to tax the very people at a higher rate who have gained a tremendous windfall from an unprecedented crisis.
Jeff Bezos — the first centibillionaire
A centibillionaire is a person with assets over a 100 billion dollars. Musk, Gates, Zuck all joined the centibillionaire club since the pandemic. Centibillionaire is a new word, with Bezos the first to achieve this moniker.
There are approximately 46.8 millionaires in the world. They own $158.3 trillion of wealth, according to the Global Wealth Report. This is not a good economic indicator for everyone else; it is a troubling sign that too much wealth is in the hands of the few — a very small few.
Meanwhile, Mackenzie Scott
MacKenzie Scott, the former spouse of Jeff Bezos, has raised the bar for the Giving Pledge billionaires. Thus far, she has given $6bn (billion!) of her fortune in gifts for 2020/2021 alone to organizations that focus on racial and economic disparities.
“In her statement on Medium, MacKenzie Scott announced $1.67bn in direct grants to 116 charities, mostly addressing racial injustice and other aspects of inequality. While only 3 percent of her wealth, that this money will not be parked in a DAF or private foundation is significant (that we know of).”
Scott pledged in her first giving announcement “to give the majority of wealth back to the society that helped generate it, to do it thoughtfully, to get started soon, and to keep at it until the safe is empty.”
Shortly after her divorce from Bezos was final, Scott took the Giving Pledge with a statement that she plans to give almost all the wealth away.
Jeff Bezos has not taken the Pledge.
Her approach — Scott is departing from traditional philanthropy
Scott is moving her money directly to charities instead of setting up the typical legacy foundation that billionaires fund to keep their grandkids and their grandkids’ kids wealthy for generations.
She acknowledges that “people with experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions.”
Giving with humility
Scott is giving in a different way. She’s enlisted the right advisors from communities of color who are not wealthy but understand the issues in underrepresented and other marginalized groups to identify grant recipients.
Her first wave of giving was primarily to racial justice groups. The recent $4.2bn she gave away is going to the “works of mercy” — foodbanks, shelters, YWCA’s, and groups on the front lines of the pandemic — like the very workers her husband is taking advantage of.
Scott’s “no strings attached” approach
Scott is going about it another way — she is giving away her money with no strings attached.
Often when organizations receive a grant from a wealthy donor, it’s for a particular purpose, and that purpose might not be what an organization needs to survive, but instead would go to something that is most “fundable.”
With Scott’s “no strings attached” approach, the recipient group doesn’t have to pledge to use the money for a specific purpose. She is allowing the group to use their best judgment as to where the money is most needed and communicating with humility that she doesn’t understand all the issues but trusts the organizations she’s giving to, to do the right thing with it.
MacKenzie Scott’s pledge is pitch-perfect for the times
Scott hasn’t wasted money by creating a vast infrastructure with overpaid advisers, she is just giving her money where it’s most needed. Her response — to give money unfettered — is pitch-perfect to the times and in striking contrast to her ex-husband’s reaction. Short of providing hazard pay to Amazon workers — which is the source of her wealth — she’s made a bold move to do direct giving.
Unlike the four centibillionaires (minus Gates, he gives a lot as well) at the top of Forbes’s billionaire list, Scott recognizes the urgency of the moment by stepping up in a way that others have not, who are choosing instead to render useless their vast treasures by sitting on them during a crisis.
Part of Scott’s statement,
“There is no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.”
Bezos could learn a thing or two from his ex.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.