"Maybe This is Too Cool" - After years of layoffs and pay/resource freezes, Amazon execs treat themselves to a private Foo Fighters concert worth millions
It is a musician's business to know who they are performing for and why - and the more famous they are, the more it starts to matter. Grohl knows this.
The people on here who is excusing this with "capitalism bad except when people I like is doing it" arguments is just demonstrating how empty "liberal values" get when push comes to shove.
For those not upset and see the band "just playing a gig", what would be a line that you personally would consider too far? Would you be ok with them doing a private show for Netanyahu and his cabinet? Would a private show for Trump and his Republican lackeys be ok? How about Nestle CEO and its board, but none of its workers? Would a private show for the Proud Boys be ok if they had a "dump truck full of cash"?
The ruling class needs a very poignant reminder that their perceived value is entirely manufactured by the working class, on whose shoulders they stand. These people have no real value if the people they exploit are able exert their own agency.
Fuck these parasites. And as a matter of course, fuck the foo fighters.
To think this is a problem with just Amazon is silly. This is every American corporation. The executives of every major corporation in this country treat themselves very very well on company dimes while their workers all languish in starvation wages. The only way to fight this is to raise the minimum wage to something that is livable for the average worker. The government needs to force these companies to behave. They will never and I mean abso-fucking-lutely never choose to treat their workers with respect and dignity by paying them a decent living wage.
And the politicians that are in all of their pockets will never ever go against their corporate masters. The only way to make them listen is to get every single American to acknowledge that this is something that is needed and then push their politicians to do it or threaten their jobs by voting for someone else. This goes for both Democrats and Republicans, not quite equally but there's definitely a few Democrats that need to be replaced.
FF (fuck 'em) whoring themselves for Amazon execs isn't the main story here. It's the disgusting exploitation of labor for profits. Organized destruction of unions and workers rights had made this tale an everyday, everywhere occurrence. Long ago there was a time when the news would report about main street and wall street as being more intertwined. Today their well being is in opposite directions. From symbiotic to parasitic.
It seems to prefer coercion as a method to keep people producing rather than inspiring them and earning their best.
Ambush style layoffs remove the feeling of safety, making people desperate to prove they shouldn’t be next. With this approach, Amazon embraces a timelessly blood-curdling rationale: nothing concentrates the mind like a credible threat.
Annual attrition targets for a fixed percentage of people every year create a survival mentality. No one wants to be the slowest gazelle when the lion comes around again, so everyone runs faster. Classic coercion.
This is no different than seeing all of them old farts at the golf course. Taking breaks from fucking everyone underneath them over just to swing at a few holes they'll probably be tired half way of playing.
Yup, this is really maximize shareholder value. I can totally see this teambuilding event doubling dividends. Wait? You said the company never pays dividends and rarely buys back its stock? Wow, I am really seeing those profits!
I can't find much about this gig online, but the Setlist.fm page lists this as a 'private event' for Amazon Web Services.
AWS is not the part of Amazon where employees have to piss in bottles. It's their cloud hosting subsidiary, and the most profitable part of the company. I also can't find any mention that it's just the executives of AWS either. It seems more likely to me that this would have been open to the employees of AWS in general as it is the most profitable part of Amazon and the crowd in the pictures seems quite big if it were only made up of 'AWS executives who like the Foo Fighters'.
I quit a company for this. We wouldn't give our star performers raises, but they somehow managed to pull off a 7 million dollar one week party for the whole company. It would've been something like 100k per employee had they just handed out bonuses.
We lost a wave of talent after that and their stock dropped 80%. I'm glad I cashed out when I did.