Ethics and Law: Amazon Inc. Business & Marketing Essay.

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Ethics and Law: Amazon Inc.
Introduction
Amazon.com Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Seattle. The company uses the Internet to engage in a variety of activities including e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing among others. When Amazon was founded in 1995, its mission statement was “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” However, in its annual report for 2019, Amazon announced a new mission statement which is to “serve consumers through online and physical stores and focus on selection, price, and convenience.” Being a Fortune 500 company, Amazon has attracted both praise and criticism. The major criticism has centered on the ability of the company to adhere to ethics in the manner it treats its employees.
Ethics
Employees
In Amazon, supervisors micromanage the employees. The company expects its employees to meet strict targets and deadlines. This forces the supervisors to micromanage the workers to achieve the set targets (Murninghan). The employees have little contributions to the decisions of the superiors. They instead have to follow instructions from the supervisors. The employees have little input in the workplace. The management does not value the contribution of junior workers. This means that the ideas of the workers are not valued. Micromanaging the workers forces them to follow the demands of the supervisors, even when it violates their values.
Additionally, the work environment is unfavorable for both white-collar workers and those in the warehouses (O’Brien). For white-collar employees, the working hours are extremely long. The standards are “unreasonably high” forcing employees to spend long hours in the company hence less time with their family. Complaints about supervisors demanding workers to rely on text messages during the night are numerous. At the same time, workers have complained that the supervisors try to reach them while they are on vacation or during weekends. Such an amount of pressure means that workers are forced to spend more time in the workplace and less time attending to other personal issues like family.
Additionally, staff members have to bear with long and regular meetings known as “business reviews.” In these meetings, employees are encouraged to tear each other apart. They are also allowed to send feedback to each other’s bosses. The tactic is often used to sabotage one another and to force employees to submit to the demands of the company. At the same time, annual evaluations are undertaken to determine the performance of the workers. The evaluation then ranks the workers from the best to the worst. While there is nothing wrong with a company evaluating its staff members, the evaluation process should be fair. However, in the case with Amazon, the evaluation does not consider the personal challenges employees were facing like illness. Some employees returning from serious surgeries and other treatments have often received lower ratings. This is unfair considering tha...