Issues with Amazon.
Amazon's main ethical problem areas:
Labor: Systematically high injury rates tied to productivity quotas, paired with aggressive union suppression — including illegal firings, intimidation campaigns, and millions spent on anti-union consultants.
Surveillance/Privacy: Ring's new facial recognition feature scans and stores the faces of anyone who walks past a customer's door — delivery workers, neighbors, passersby — without their consent. This is a privatized surveillance network with no opt-out for the public.
Environment: Amazon touts climate commitments while refusing to disclose the Scope 3 emissions from its retail supply chain — the largest portion of its actual footprint. The disclosures cover what's convenient, not what's significant.
Market Power: Amazon simultaneously runs the marketplace and competes within it, hosts competitors on AWS, and dominates logistics. The top offense is using its position as a platform to advantage its own products over third-party sellers.
Tax: Extensive use of legal jurisdictional arbitrage to minimize tax liability — shifting the fiscal burden onto smaller competitors and ordinary citizens while relying on the public infrastructure those taxes fund.
Sources:
Labor
U.S. Senate HELP Committee investigation (2023–24), available at help.senate.gov. OSHA citation records (public). NLRB rulings on Amazon (2022–25), including the Jassy statement and the Gerald Bryson reinstatement order.
Surveillance/Privacy
Senator Markey's October 2025 letter to Andy Jassy (markey.senate.gov). Electronic Frontier Foundation statements on Ring Familiar Faces (eff.org). Class action lawsuit: Sigwalt v. Amazon, filed June 2026, U.S. District Court, Seattle. CBS News coverage, June 2026.
Environment
Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow shareholder proxy memo, filed with the SEC (2025), available at sec.gov (Amazon proxy filings, form PX14A6G). This directly documents the Scope 3 disclosure gap.
Market Power
FTC v. Amazon, filed September 2023, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. This is the primary legal document laying out the self-preferencing and marketplace dominance claims. The FTC complaint is publicly available at ftc.gov.
Tax
For Europe: European Commission state aid investigation into Amazon's Luxembourg tax arrangements (concluded 2017, litigated through 2023). For the U.S.: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) reports on Amazon's effective federal tax rate, available at itep.org.
