Jeff Bezos is Evil, Part MCMLXXVI

In response to potential sick-leave shortages at Whole Foods as a result of the coronavirus, Jeff Bezos, wants the rank and file workers at the organic grocery to donate some of their sick days to a pool.

Bezos’ net worth is somewhere around $110 Billion dollars.

If he wanted to donate just ¼% of his fortune to handling this, he could get sick days equivalent to at least 9000 man years.

This isn’t even a rounding error, and he wants to coerce his low played employees into giving away their paid time off:

When progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders say “now is the time for solidarity” amid the coronavirus outbreak, they likely do not mean that employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—should be asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to their co-workers who have either contracted the deadly virus or been forced to take time out of work because of what is now a global pandemic.

But that is exactly what executives with the grocery chain are asking its employers to do, even though Bezos’ could effectively give them unlimited paid sick leave during the current national emergency without barely a scratch in his bank account.

In a letter sent to employees earlier this week, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey explained that one of the options available to workers was for them to “donate” their “paid time off” (pto) days to a pool that other workers could draw from.

Journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley, who broke the story with reporting for Motherboard, notes that “as a subsidiary of Amazon, the world’s biggest company, Whole Foods could easily afford to pay its hourly employees for sick days taken during the coronavirus outbreak without breaking the bank. Instead, the company has put the onus back on workers, and they’re not happy about it.”

You know, if I were on the jury of someone accused of murdering him, I would be hard pressed to vote for a conviction.

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