Vice pumps up puny Amazon strike
March 17, 2022
Vice is terribly excited that the Amazon warehouse workers are on strike. Coordinated strikes even, surely the revolution is upon us. Five workers at one neighborhood warehouse in New York City. That’s the majority of the night shift in that warehouse, it’s one of the little local ones, not multiples of football fields size. Plus 26 from a similar place just around the corner and also, in a sign of how widespread this was, 30 more workers in Maryland.
Amazon employs some 1.1 million people in the United States at present. 61 of 1.1 million is 0.005%. So why is Vice getting excited about 0.005% of the workforce walking off the job?
The answer is in that progressive desire for the U.S. workforce to re-unionize. It’s just held to be a lovely thing, the answer to so many problems. We can all have our own views on that and probably should have our own views, whichever way they do tend. But the reason this is being reported is simply that the progressive media is desperate to see a sign, any sign, of it happening.
Just to create a silly example to provide some perspective. There are 48 million cases of sickness caused by food poisoning each year in the US. Or 130,000 a day among the 330 million of us. Or even, 0.04%, near ten times the portion of the Amazon workforce that went on strike. That means that, on average, among the 1.1 million Amazon employees there are 400 or so with food poisoning today. Or, you know, around and about that.
Vice hasn’t written a piece about the outbreak of illness, it’s written one about the ten times smaller walkout.
Vice is a substantial media operation these days. The cable channel reaches 60 million homes, there’s a substantial YouTube operation. The site itself gains 26 million visits a month. It is, in short, big enough to know better.
It’s not just how stories are written that betrays bias – here, the near breathless tone of how Amazon workers are striking! It’s also the choice of stories. 0.005% of people doing something really isn’t much of a story. But because they desire that re-unionisation so much they’re going to talk this up.
It’s even a bit sad how small the story is, seeing how desperately much they want it to be important.