Week 9 - Animal Crossing and Workers' Rights
We are one week into government mandated social distancing as a result of public fears over the spread of COVID-19. While everybody is trapped in their homes during this period of social isolation, people have been struggling to find ways to stay busy. Fortunately, this exile comes at the time of year when video game merchants are having big sales on older titles and releasing exciting new ones. One particular Nintendo release has been on the minds of gamers since it was teased at the 2018 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3):
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the first main title AC release in eight years. Millions of players were looking forward to receiving their preorders on March 20th, myself included. Retailers have seen a huge uptick in pickup and delivery orders to minimize physical contact as much as possible. Amazon has been hit particularly hard as the world's largest online marketplace. So much so that they delayed non-essential product shipments so employees could focus on filling the increased demand for health supplies, groceries, and things of that nature. I panicked; surely they would see the new Animal Crossing game was essential. Disappointingly, I received a notification that my shipment had been delayed by five days. My immediate reaction was anger at Amazon for being under-prepared. "If they just worked a bit harder, this wouldn't be a problem," I thought. It was as if I was possessed by the ghost of a middle aged woman wanting to speak to the manager. I shook off the uncaring thought, remembering that Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the universe and Amazon is worth over $1 trillion. My problem isn't with the workers stuck in these notoriously bad conditions, it is with the company who is putting them there.
Amazon's response to the sales increase is to hire 100,000 more employees and boost the company's minimum wage by $2 to $17/hour. Jeff Bezos' net worth currently sits at $116 billion. That means, using his money alone, he could raise each of his 850,000 employees' salaries by $10,000 a month and still remain a multi-billionaire. Or perhaps we could dip into Amazon's overhead; instead of spending money on short-range delivery drones, why don't they use those drones to navigate warehouse distribution instead of forcing workers to walk miles a day? We are given a false narrative: in order for us to be consumers, there has to be a team of humans working to supply our demand. What if we were able to shift the economy so that we did not have to worry about understaffed service jobs because we had capable, efficient robots to do them instead? I want to have my cake and eat it too, to be a consumer without worrying about the consequences my purchase will have on an overworked, underpaid human being. What about Animal Crossing AND workers' rights?
I think it was really interesting and useful to use the lens of Animal Crossing to explore the problems surrounding workers' rights during this pandemic. Amazon and other large companies continually present us with false dichotomies about the so-called necessities of the exploitation of workers. If we prioritized workers' rights as human rights, we would see an important shift in our society. We are made to see individuals as the faces of the companies and processes that they represent, when we should be shown how clearly millionaires and billionaires warp and influence the rhetoric around their companies every day. I've also found myself consumed by the middle-aged-woman-wanting-to-speak-to-the-manager energy and I'm always mad at myself afterwards, but it should be more accepted to also be angry with the heads of the corporations who frame workers' problems as their own fault.
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