The culture war, which is directed by the corporate state and includes the “diversity” agenda, is largely a distraction that pits identity groups against one another while it quietly consolidates corporate hegemony.
Amazon might not air-condition its warehouses in the middle of summer (that would hurt the bottom line), but it makes up for its steaming sweatshops by embracing gender diversity — because perspective, something, embrace human, something something, all equal but some more equal than others:
Amazon seeks diverse perspectives and encourages its communities to embrace that we are all human, all different, and all equal.
In that pursuit, there’s a new sheriff in the Amazon company town: Dayna Howard, who serves as the “Director of Learning and Development” (Orwellian nonsense that means “Director of Compliance”).
Before joining Amazon, Dayna cut her teeth as an administrator for private prison behemoth Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In the tradition of military contractor Blackwater, CCA changed its name in 2016 to CiviCore after a series of scandals. Executives assume the sheepish public is too stupid to understand how rebranding works.
On her LinkedIn page, Dayna boasts of the efficiency with which she previously processed the human inventory for her private prison bosses at CCA:
Re-vamped inmate admission process and revised all processing documentation [that] resulted in a 20% reduction in inmate processing time and a reduced error rate.
Obviously, Amazon appreciated her talents for intaking prisoners and shuttling them to and fro with ever-greater efficiency, and so it recruited her to run similar intake operations at its own quasi-prison factories. The major through-line between Amazon and private prisons is that they operate on the same principle: extract, accumulate, and consolidate capital from human resources by whatever means necessary.
In the context of private prisons, this is obvious: they traffick in prisoners as their product and are subsidized by the state to imprison them. The more prisoners they can house and the less overhead they use to do so, the greater their profit — at public expense. Publicly subsidized, privately profitable.
In the context of Amazon, we’re talking about a corporation that theoretically operates in a competitive free market. But theory diverges from practice. In the ultimate vision, Amazon would be the sole remaining employment option available. It will, through bribery and other means, use the gears of the state to flush out any remaining competition. If the current trajectory continues, the future Amazon won’t be a part of the economy any longer; it will be the economy. This is the endpoint of the corporate state, and there’s nothing free market about it.
Clearly, this is an unattractive proposition to average people, so the agenda must be concealed through various means. These include playing word games and shuffling diverse administrators into key positions to satisfy the identity-obsessed left, distracting dueling factions in a culture war, and preventing any meaningful resistance.
So, Amazon doesn’t call its near-slave-labor sweatshops “near-slave-labor sweatshops.” Instead, it camouflages reality by using the PR-tested term “Fulfillment Centers,” which suggests a rich, rewarding, warm environment where workers and customers alike realize their dreams.
Similarly, Dayna’s new position as de facto slavemaster is termed “Director of Learning and Development,” because flowery language obfuscating reality is at the heart of the corporate state ethos.
A company girl through and through, Dayna previously served as the corporation’s head of loss prevention until her recent big promotion that allowed her to devote her talents once again to her true passion: trafficking in humans for corporate shareholders.
Here, she explains that she’s a “Proud Amazonian”:
Dayna’s most impressive feature, of course, is that she’s — at the risk of being transphobic by assuming her gender based on secondary sexual characteristics — a woman.
So, apparently, are many other “loss prevention” managers on Amazon’s “Security Team,” which until recently included Dayna.
As you can see, in addition to their laudable gender diversity, Amazon’s Security Team/prison guard staff is exceptionally racially diverse.
Justin, the diverse “Site Leader” of Amazon’s “Global Security Operations Center,” explains the importance of women overseers on his Amazon plantation as embodied in the company’s “Women in Security Affinity Group”:
In order for us to better service our customers out in the field, we have to execute at the highest possible standard across Amazon’s leadership principles. As a manager and a leader, I can’t do that without casting a wide net and capturing talent… and much of that is within our female talent base across the industry.
Translation: when women run sweatshops, it’s loving and liberal.
While a worker making $15/hour gets patted down on the way out of the warehouse/dungeon to make sure he didn’t slip a screwdriver into his pocket because the company he works for views everyone on its staff as a latent criminal, he can take comfort knowing the whole thing is directed by a woman.
He can rest easy, knowing a woman is now in charge of withholding legally mandated overtime pay. The law doesn’t apply to women executives.
Apparently, though, somehow, all that glorious gender diversity hasn’t alleviated Amazon’s 159% attrition rate (compared to the national average in the warehouse and transportation sector of 46%-59%) or stemmed the tide of growing labor union organizing in its warehouses/Fulfillment Centers/techno-plantations.
Unfortunately for Amazon’s new “Director of Learning and Development,” she might learn that keeping employees at work and silently obedient isn’t as easy as it is at a literal prison when their employment is voluntary.
Woke women overseers, Dayna may come to find, can only do so much to retain a workforce when they’re forced to urinate in bottles for near-minimum wage because they can either take a bathroom break or meet their quota — but not both.
It turns out that breaking through glass gender ceilings won’t go as far as management hopes to compensate workers for heat strokes in 114-degree warehouses — lending new literality to “sweatshop.”
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