As you read this, workers and citizens around the world are striking and protesting against Amazon. Today’s global day of action is more than a protest. It is a worldwide declaration that this age of abuse must end.

Amazon is one of the symbols of this age of abuse. That’s why we come together to take it on. The $1.5 trillion company’s empire spans the globe, active in almost every step of capitalist production and exploitation. It is remaking how the economy works in the 21st century squeezing every last drop it can at every turn. The Amazon business model squeezes workers, communities and our planet.

Despite tripling its profits in its most recent financial report, Amazon still subjects its workers to intense stress and management by algorithm and tries to stop them organising in a union.

The company uses its lawyers, lobbyists and plays countries off against each other to pay incredibly low rates of tax.

Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos’ PR machine paints Amazon green. But the company is set to miss its much-vaunted 2040 net zero target by over 300 years.

And Amazon has no qualms with supporting systems of violence and oppression. The tech giant is part of a contract with the Israeli state and military for high end cloud computing capacity, making the company directly involved with Israeli apartheid, the occupation and the genocidal campaign waged against the Palestinians.

Today, we stand together to Make Amazon Pay for these crimes in over 150 actions in more than 30 countries. Highlights include:

• In the UK, Italy, the US, Spain and Germany, warehouse workers and drivers are on strike in over 50 Amazon facilities.
• Climate activists in Japan, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom and Canada hare protesting at Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities to challenge Amazon’s contracts with fossil fuel companies and the companies climate damage. Amazon’s emissions are more than 75% of countries.
• In more than ten cities across India, thousands of workers are rallying in a coalition that unites warehouse workers, gig workers and small sellers.
• Bangladeshi Garment workers took mass action in Dhaka to demand a minimum wage of $209 per month, an end to police harassment, which has seen trade unionists killed, and demand that Amazon signs up to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety.
• In Cape Town, Save our Sacred Lands with San and Khoi contingents are protesting at Amazon’s regional headquarters, which was built on their ancestral land. They are honouring their ancestors and the thousands of murdered Palestinians with a cleansing ceremony and planting Palestinian flags and an olive tree. Their powerful challenge to Amazon’s colonial nature and complicity in Israel’s crime is echoed in other actions around the world, including at AWS’ Amsterdam headquarters, Tokyo and Nairobi.

Watch and share our video of today’s actions and together, let’s build the movement to Make Amazon Pay.

Latest from the Movement

A weapon more tremendous than war

Economic sanctions have become a favourite US foreign policy tool to confront its adversaries and punish so-called “bad actors” around the world. The US government will say that they are an alternative to war — a targeted measure to take out bad guys without firing a bullet.

But the hidden history of economic sanctions shows that they can be more lethal than any gun, gas, or megaton bomb — a weapon, in the words of US President Woodrow Wilson, “more tremendous than war.”

For Episode #3 of the International, a video partnership between the Progressive International and Jacobin, Dr. Ammar Ali Jan uncovers that history — and explains how this tremendous weapon actually works. Watch it here.

Palestine

As Israel’s unrelenting, genocidal assault on Gaza reaches increasingly brutal proportions, protests and actions in solidarity with Palestine continue around the world.

In recent weeks, PI members such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource Organizing Center have organized major actions, including a blockade of California’s Bay Bridge — a key artery for traffic to Los Angeles.

On 29 November, the United Nations’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, movements around the world are calling for a mass mobilization. The Progressive International joins that call and invites its members and allies everywhere to march for a ceasefire and for Palestinian liberation.