Cadwalladr and Bloodworth make fun of the term “associate” which Amazon applies to its workers, and which both Cadwalladr and Bloodworth describe as “Orwellian.” While I prefer the term “worker,” I have a hard time working up much outrage over this. It certainly doesn’t strike me as particularly sinister or dystopian or totalitarian. Among the words the Merriam-Webster dictionary uses to define “associate” are: “worker,” “employee,” “business partner,” “colleague,” and “entry-level member of an organization.” All of those sound like reasonable terms to apply to a newly hired Amazon worker. Bloodworth’s description of punishments dished out to Amazonians who break company policy as “draconian” is overwrought and his grievances are sometimes just unreasonable. He worked for Amazon for a total of three weeks but complains that his boss became upset when he took a sick day off. Maybe this is a generational thing, but my father always told me, “Never take a sick day during your first year of employment with any company, no matter what.” My wife and I have literally gone years between sick days. In the ’80s, I worked for a title insurance company that gave out a $500 bonus at the end of the year to any employee who hadn’t taken a sick day, and I earned that bonus five or six years in a row. If Bloodworth believes Amazon is inhumane for looking askance at a worker who asks for a sick day during his first three weeks on the job, then he and I live by different work ethics.

As for safety concerns, well, warehouses are hazardous environments and, somewhere today, an Amazon employee is likely to be injured. But I can attest to the fact that Amazon takes employee safety extremely seriously. Employees are briefed on safety before every single shift. We are required to wear high-visibility vests and protective gloves at all times. Traffic managers ensure that the vehicles continuously coming and going do not endanger employees. The conveyor belts are all equipped with emergency shut-off cords, which any employee can pull at any time should the need arise. Any Amazon employee who violates a safety regulation is likely to find himself without a job in a hurry. We have a fully stocked first-aid center. Our managers are obsessed with keeping us properly hydrated. Free bottled waters and electrolyte-enriched popsicles are located in ice chests all over the facility.

Bloodworth says he worked 10-and-a-half-hour days at Amazon, which sounds pretty brutal. Maybe they do things differently in the UK, but my Amazon sortation center is very flexible about the hours it offers. When I was applying for the job online, Amazon allowed me to create a schedule tailored to my needs. They asked me how many hours a week I’d like to work, and which days of the week suited me best. They asked if I preferred to work evenings, overnight, early mornings, days. After compiling this info, they gave me a shift that fits me like a glove. I work four and a half hours a day, five days a week. My shift begins at 6:30 am and ends at 11 am. But, when I need a bit more money, I can go to work at 5 am and pick up an extra 90 minutes of work pretty much whenever I want. Many of my co-workers add hours to their days whenever they are in need of a little extra cash, and we can take voluntary unpaid time off just about whenever we like.

James Bloodworth worked 35 hours a week. In America, at least, a full-time job consumes at least 40 hours a week. A 35-hour working week doesn’t sound especially harsh to me. And if he was working three 10-and-a-half-hour shifts per week at Amazon, then he worked just nine shifts during his time there (eight, if you subtract the sick day he took). I’ve worked about 70 shifts since I started at Amazon, and I still wouldn’t presume to offer myself as an expert on the conditions of the entire workforce. But I have seen enough to know that the picture painted by tourist journalists is highly misleading and unhelpful. Amazon is not a perfect employer. I have a litany of gripes I’d be happy to share with you sometime. But I also have complaints about the small bookstore I work at in the evenings. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have complaints about their employer. Progressives tend to clamor about exposés that portray large multinational corporations like Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s as nothing more than cold-hearted exploiters of the working class. This type of thing does no one any good. If Amazon is going to be castigated publicly every time one of its 650,000 employees has a bad day, it may well decide to automate as many positions as possible and do away with most of its human workforce.

The problem with exposés like those mentioned here is that they don’t tell us how Amazon warehouses stack up against, say, warehouses operated by Home Depot (a former employer of mine), Starbucks, the New York Times, the Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Barnes and Noble, or even Warner Media (the parent company of John Oliver’s television home HBO). We don’t know how many employee complaints a company with 650,000 workers can expect in a typical day or month or year. On July 1, the same day that Slate ran a largely uncritical story about Oliver’s anti-Amazon tirade, it published a highly critical story by Daniel Engber about the way (primarily right-wing) media outlets had reported on an alleged spike in American tourist deaths in the Dominican Republic.

When Engber actually took a look at the statistics for himself, he found that, not only is the Dominican Republic probably not experiencing a spike in American tourist deaths this year, it may actually be experiencing fewer tourist deaths in 2019 than in an average year. He recapped some of the more hysterical reports and then noted:

What a morbid waste of everybody’s time. Whether we’re talking about 12 deaths, or 25, or even 50, it’s wrong to treat the mere proliferation of these tragedies as proof that US tourists are in danger. If we want to know for sure that something is amiss—or even to make an educated guess about the same—we’ll need to have a baseline death rate for comparison. How often do Americans usually die while drinking whiskey in their rooms in Punta Cana? Or, to be less specific: How many US tourists die during a normal year of visits to the Dominican Republic?

Engber combed through governmental research as well as academic research. He asked questions, crunched numbers, and displayed an admirable skepticism for the dominant media narrative. In other words, he practiced responsible journalism.