CCGL9067 Companies and People: Friends or Foes?

Journaling – Week 6
Name: Chung Yik Lun Anson UID: u3593621
Industry: Online Retailing Company name: Amazon.com, Inc.
Referring to the Chinese company credit system, the criteria to indicate the performance of
the company includes its environmental awareness, law-abidingness, and the quality of its
products. I believe the abovementioned values are crucial to evaluate the credibility of the
company. To show the conduct of the company holistically, I suggest that the system should
also consider the public perceptions towards it, and the measures of the company to fulfil the
social responsibility and protect the labour in consideration of different stakeholders’
interests.

As for public perceptions, Amazon symbolizes ease and efficiency. Despite the sheer size of
neutral narratives, there were at least 29% of the narratives regarding to Amazon were
positive, including ‘Future of Retail’ and ‘Consumers First’, implying that it leads the market
with its innovative and good brand image allowing it to score high in this aspect.

Nonetheless, Amazon, however as a transnational corporation, ironically does not comply

with many rationales. Amazon is alleged for depriving the employees’ rights and devastating
the natural environment. As for employees’ rights, Amazon was hit by successive lawsuits in
a week targeting on its tolerance on sexual harassment, racial and gender discrimination
inside the firm. In response, a New York pension fund called for an independent audit ‘to
assess the company’s policies and practices on civil rights, equity, diversity and inclusion’,
but the broad of directors attempted to dodge by urging the shareholders to vote it down,
unfolding the indifference of the company towards criminal behaviours breaching the
employees’ rights. As for environmental awareness, Amazon could only receive a C in the
Impakter Index because of its lack of clear KPIs for achieving sustainability and close
relationships with multiple oil and gas companies. Other than that, Amazon destroys millions
of unsold goods like MacBooks and face masks instead of donating them to the charity or
redistributing them, which has been observed in the Dunfermline Warehouse in Britain.
Although Amazon makes-believe that the goods will be recycled, it has been exposed that
more goods are being destroyed, damaging the environment and the credibility of the
company irreversibly. Therefore, it scores low in these aspects.

In fact, Amazon was infamous of its dishonesty in taxation as well. ‘Amazon Strategy’ is used
to describe corporations using the form of ‘loss carryforwards’ to reduce future tax liabilities.
For example, Amazon subsidiaries has created a huge amount of loss in non-American
businesses whist generated a larger amount of unrepatriated untaxed profits. The illicit profit
shifting is mainly conducted in Luxembourg owing to its centre location in Europe and
lenient business laws, reflecting the importance of the companies’ ‘nationality’ and ‘origin’ to
facilitate certain kinds of tax evasion activities.

In conclusion, Amazon, so as many multinational corporations, has a successful operating

method, but also has their dark sides. Thus, a credit system is needed to evaluate and regulate
their performance accompanied with the efforts done by the authorities so that the market can
be more equal for different business runners as well as other stakeholders.

References
1. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-corporate-social-credit-system-how-it-works/
2. https://www.protagonist.io/the-consumer-beliefs-driving-amazons-success/
3. https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/5/19/22444177/amazon-five-more-lawsuits-employees-
allege-race-and-gender-discrimination-charlotte-newman
4. https://impakter.com/bezos-amazon-green-or-pretending/
5. https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-
stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds
6. https://left.eu/content/uploads/2021/05/THEamazonMETHOD-1.pdf