Hoarding and Human Rights

 Introduction

This essay examines the distinction between the creation and transfer of wealth through the lens of Amazon’s business model and its broader implications for economic ethics and human rights. It argues that legitimate wealth arises through two primary paths: the production of goods and services, or their distribution through trade and commerce. While Amazon has built its global dominance through the latter, its success depends largely on the labor, creativity, and productivity of others. By profiting from the margins of others’ work rather than creating value in itself, Amazon exemplifies a system in which wealth is redistributed upward rather than newly generated. The essay contends that this economic model, while efficient, raises profound moral and human rights concerns—particularly regarding the fair valuation of labor, the dignity of workers, and the equitable distribution of the fruits of human toil. In questioning Amazon’s claims to “create” jobs or wealth, the essay calls for a reexamination of how modern economies measure value, justice, and the rights of those whose labor sustains them.

First, Data and Statistics

Amazon frequently defends itself against criticism of harsh labor practices by pointing to two achievements: the vast number of jobs it creates and the wealth it has generated as a trillion-dollar company. Both claims are technically true, but they conceal more than they reveal about who actually benefits from Amazon’s growth.

Today, Amazon is one of the largest employers on Earth, with roughly 1.55 million workers worldwide. When the company highlights job creation, it emphasizes scale over quality. Many warehouse and delivery workers earn between $36,000 and $44,000 a year—an income that reflects hourly pay in the $17–22 range. The company notes its above-minimum-wage floor and benefits, but critics point out that conditions in warehouses are grueling, turnover is high, and injury rates remain a persistent concern.

On the wealth side, Amazon’s market capitalization reached about $2.35 trillion in 2025, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. Yet “market cap” represents investor valuation, not a pot of money the company can distribute. That valuation is also highly concentrated. Jeff Bezos, with an 8–10 percent stake, controls stock worth more than $200 billion. Vanguard and BlackRock, the two largest institutional investors, each hold stakes valued between $150–175 billion. Together, a handful of investors control vast sums of Amazon’s equity value.

The contrast with those who do the daily work of running fulfillment centers is stark. CEO Andy Jassy’s annual compensation package hovers around $40 million, roughly a thousand times more than the pay of the average warehouse worker. A simple comparison shows how skewed the distribution is: Amazon’s market value equates to about $1.5 million per employee, yet most of those employees see only a few tens of thousands in wages each year, while the lion’s share of equity value accrues to major shareholders and executives.

Amazon’s defenses—that it creates jobs and has built enormous wealth—are true on the surface but misleading in substance. The jobs exist, but they are often precarious and demanding. The wealth is real, but it is not broadly shared. Instead, it is concentrated in the hands of a small circle of investors and executives, leaving the company’s frontline workforce far from the trillion-dollar prosperity it is so often asked to showcase.

While corporate statistics often highlight growth, innovation, and economic contributions, they frequently obscure the deeper consequences of unchecked expansion. The case of Amazon provides a revealing lens through which to view these dynamics. By tracing the company’s rise—from its early days as an online bookstore to its current dominance across multiple industries—we can begin to understand how its business model, often praised for efficiency and scale, has also contributed to systemic harm. This includes the erosion of labor rights, the displacement of Indigenous communities through land use practices, and the undermining of sustainable economic ecosystems. As we examine the claims made by corporate leaders around job creation and wealth generation, it becomes clear that the success of Amazon, and companies like it, often comes at a steep human and environmental cost. The story of the bookstore is not just a nostalgic anecdote—it is a blueprint for understanding the broader impacts of corporatism on society.

Second, the True Origins of Wealth and Labor

Answering amazon’s claim of wealth creation

When Amazon points to its trillion-dollar valuation as proof that it has “created wealth,” the claim collapses under scrutiny. Amazon did not generate new wealth—it redirected wealth. The story begins with books. For generations, people bought books from neighborhood shops, some attached to cafés where communities gathered, talked, and read. These stores were not only retail outlets; they were cultural and social anchors, employing local families and circulating money back into the neighborhoods where they operated. Even larger corporate chains like Barnes & Noble were still grounded in physical spaces that communities could access directly.

Amazon disrupted this ecosystem, not by creating a fundamentally new product or service, but by re-routing the existing flows of commerce. It took advantage of digital ordering and public infrastructure—most notably the U.S. Postal Service—to ship books purchased online. The government workers who sorted, carried, and delivered those packages did the physical work, but Amazon claimed the margin. Each book purchased through Amazon was one less book sold at a local store. Over the span of fifteen years, as Amazon grew, half of our local physical bookstores closed (from about 13,136 stores (1995) to 6,448 stores (2010), in the U.S. alone). Thousands of community bookstores withered. Their revenues, once distributed across towns and small cities, consolidated upward into Amazon’s corporate accounts. This is not creation; it is extraction and transfer. Wealth that once circulated in communities—supporting local wages, rents, and even public life—was siphoned off to a single corporate entity. The disappearance of independent bookstores also meant the erosion of spaces that fostered literacy, conversation, and civic life. In human terms, this is not just an economic shift but a diminishment of cultural rights: the right to participate in community, the right to meaningful work, and the right to benefit from the value one helps to create.

The options available at the time make this clearer still. Amazon could have partnered with local bookstores, using its platform to amplify their reach rather than replace them. It could have operated as a digital infrastructure service, taking a modest fee to connect buyers to local sellers. Instead, it chose a model that centralized profits and externalized costs, concentrating wealth while dispersing harm.

Seen through the lens of human rights, Amazon’s claim to wealth creation obscures the losses borne by countless others. What looks like innovation from the top often feels like dispossession at the ground level. The real question is not whether Amazon created jobs or wealth, but whether the wealth that already existed—in communities, in public services, in cultural institutions—was respected, shared, and allowed to flourish. By that measure, the balance sheet tells a story not of creation, but of systematic transfer, and of rights diminished in the process.

Answering amazon’s claim of job creation

When challenged on its labor record, Amazon often insists that it “created” 1.5 million jobs. On the surface, the number is impressive. In practice, it is deeply misleading. The pattern is the same as with wealth: jobs were not created, they were displaced, rebranded, and stripped of their community roots.

Consider again the case of the neighborhood bookstore. These shops employed local residents—owners, clerks, students working part-time, families sustaining themselves from steady income. When Amazon’s rise drove those stores out of business, those jobs disappeared. Workers who once earned a living in spaces that connected them to their communities suddenly faced unemployment. The most readily available option? Work for the very company that eliminated their livelihood, now as a warehouse worker or a delivery driver.

But these new Amazon jobs are not equivalent. They are more precarious, more tightly controlled, and less rewarding. Instead of setting wages locally or working under an owner who lived in the same community, employees’ paychecks now come from a distant corporate center. Their labor is measured in units per hour, their bathroom breaks monitored, their hours extended or cut according to algorithms and quotas. Turnover rates soar, a sign that jobs are not sustaining but exhausting. Even if someone remains in Amazon’s workforce, the benefit of their effort no longer circulates back into their neighborhood—it accumulates in Seattle headquarters and Wall Street portfolios.

Seen in this light, Amazon’s jobs claim unravels. What looks like job creation is, in reality, job transfer, and often job degradation. A bookseller who once worked in a local store and now works in a warehouse is not an example of Amazon expanding employment. It is an example of Amazon capturing labor that already existed and reconfiguring it under harsher terms, with fewer community benefits.

Therefore, when Amazon points to the size of its payroll as evidence of its social value, the claim masks the deeper reality: these are not new opportunities freely offered, but positions made necessary by the destruction of alternatives. Amazon eliminated the jobs that once supported local economies and offered a sense of human dignity. Then it offered a replacement—its own jobs—on terms designed to maximize corporate gain, not community well-being. Far from being a gift of employment, this is a cycle of dispossession: destroy, absorb, control.

Answering amazon’s claim of innovation

Amazon’s defenders often celebrate Jeff Bezos as an innovator who invented a new economic model, a visionary who found a better way of doing business. But if we strip the story down to its foundation, the myth dissolves. Amazon began as a bookseller. And selling books was nothing new.

The true engines of what became Amazon—the internet and the technologies that enabled online commerce—were not Bezos’s inventions. They were the fruits of decades of public investment in research universities and government programs, largely funded by taxpayers. What Bezos brought to the table was not technological genius but access to private capital. Coming from a wealthy background and surrounded by friends and family who could afford to invest, he had resources that most aspiring entrepreneurs lacked. Combined with professional expertise in finance, he was well positioned to take an existing tool—the internet—and use it to capture a market that was already functioning in communities across the country. Given the developments that followed, it is reasonable to say that if it was not Bezos, it would have been someone else. Therefore, in this context, claims of innovation are greatly exaggerated.

The so-called “innovation” was not in discovering a new way to share or enjoy books. It was in using price-cutting as a weapon to drive competitors out. Bezos applied an age-old economic principle—described as far back as the 14th century—the eminent Islamic philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, argued that profit can come either from selling a few items at high margins or selling many items at slim margins. Bezos chose the latter: sell billions of books and later billions of other goods, each with only pennies of profit, and accumulate unimaginable wealth through scale. The model was not novel. The will to dominate was.

Far from being socially or environmentally superior, the online model was corrosive. It hollowed out communities by replacing neighborhood bookstores with impersonal transactions. It increased fossil fuel consumption through packaging, shipping, and delivery. And it concentrated power in the hands of one corporation, rather than distributing value through many small businesses.

In fact, the supposed “innovation” of online book sales eventually came full circle. After dominating and displacing independent bookstores, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore, Amazon Books, in Seattle in 2015. The company went on to expand to over 20 such locations across the United States. Yet by 2022, Amazon announced it would permanently close all of them, unable to sustain the very kind of community-rooted retail ecosystem it had once dismantled. This episode reveals the irony of Amazon’s model: its online dominance was never about inventing a better system, but about consolidating power until even its own return to physical bookselling could not survive in the landscape it had reshaped.

What is celebrated as innovation is better understood as appropriation. Bezos did not invent a new way of creating wealth; he redirected existing wealth toward himself and his company. He did not discover a better model of selling books; he weaponized scale and capital to eliminate those who had been selling books all along. The story is not one of genius invention, but of resource advantage, strategic aggression, and relentless pursuit of monopoly.

The fatality of a formular for excessive growth

From a systems thinking perspective, it’s not surprising that Amazon Books—Amazon’s venture into physical bookstores—failed after just seven years, despite the company’s immense financial power. When a system is deliberately designed to achieve a specific outcome, it often does so with ruthless efficiency. In Amazon’s case, the system was built to eliminate physical bookstores and replace them with an online retail model dominated by Amazon itself. That mission succeeded spectacularly—and it is precisely that success which made Amazon’s foray back into physical bookstores destined to fail.

This failure is not just ironic—it may also serve as a predictive signal. If other systems Amazon has built are later abandoned, such decisions could shape the company’s future, particularly in critical areas like logistics.

Amazon’s early success was built, in part, on labor subsidized by taxpayers: postal workers. In interviews years later, Jeff Bezos recalled loading his truck with books and dropping them off at the post office, leaving the rest of the delivery process to the government-run USPS. For much of its early life, Amazon relied on public infrastructure and later on special contracts with private delivery firms.

That began to shift in 2018, when Amazon started hiring seasonal workers to handle deliveries during peak periods. The model evolved rapidly—especially during the 2020 pandemic—into a full-fledged logistics operation. Amazon built its own fleet of trucks, hired drivers, and even contracted gig workers who rented their own vehicles to deliver packages.

This growing logistics infrastructure is directly connected to Amazon’s failed attempt to re-enter the physical retail space. For its delivery system to scale, Amazon must continue expanding its network of warehouses, vehicles, and workers. But this expansion faces serious challenges. Amazon has shown hostility toward organized labor, operates on razor-thin margins in its retail division, and faces increasing scrutiny from regulators investigating anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. In this environment, the cost of maintaining a physical footprint—whether through bookstores or logistics hubs—could become unsustainable. Amazon’s future may hinge on whether it can adapt these systems or if it will be forced to abandon or spin off parts of its empire into viable and unviable fragments.

 The Paths to Legitimate Wealth and the Recognition of the Value of Labor and Toil

Legitimate wealth arises through two fundamental paths: the production of goods and services, or the distribution of those created by others—that is, through trade and commerce. Throughout most of its history, Amazon has not been a producer in the traditional sense but rather a distributor, amassing vast wealth by facilitating the exchange of products conceived, manufactured, and authored by others. From its beginnings as an online bookseller to its current status as a global digital marketplace, Amazon’s success has been built on the labor, creativity, and productivity of others, from which it extracts profit through margins and scale.

For this reason, Amazon’s frequent claims to “create” jobs or wealth warrant closer scrutiny. It is more accurate to view its business model as one that transfers wealth and employment rather than creates them—since genuine creation involves bringing something into existence that did not exist before.

The implications of this model reach beyond economics and enter the realm of human rights. When a corporation’s profit depends on minimizing labor costs, eroding job security, and controlling market access, it inevitably affects the fundamental rights of workers and producers—the right to fair wages, safe conditions, and dignified work. Recognizing the true value of labor is therefore not only an economic question but a moral and human one: a society that allows wealth to accumulate without honoring the toil that makes it possible risks undermining the very foundations of justice, equality, and human dignity.