Amazon Prime Day 2022: what are the best early deals right now?

Amazon Prime Day begins tomorrow, Tuesday 12 July, which will allow members to take advantage of incredible deals.

This Prime Day comes as the company works to improve its public image, facing mounting pressure from workers, who do not see that they are adequately compensated for the value their labor generates.

Many Apple products will be on sale through Wednesday 13 July. Those in the market for a new TV, Insignia and Pinoneer all have options on sale.

Amazon products on sale

Amazon produces many of the products that will be eligible this Prime Day. Competitors criticize the company for such practices as they have an unfair advantage to market their products as they are both a producer and the largest e-commerce retailer.

Child labor was used to build Amazon Dot and Echo

The Amazon Dot and Echo, two of the products that will be on sale, have been the topic of much controversy in recent years.

In January 2022, whistler blower Tang Mingfang, 43, spoke with The Guardian about his imprisonment after exposing exploitative labor practices by Amazon’s manufacturing contractor Foxconn at their factory in the Chinese city of Hengyang. Amazon Echos, Echo Dot, and Kindles were made at this factory. The documents passed to China Labor Watch by Tang, show how the company was using child labor and forcing students to work “illegally long hours.”

After Tang leaked the documents to Child Labor Watch, which were shared with The Guardian, he was arrested by the Chinese government.

In early 2022 he told reporters that he had been “beaten by his interrogators, handcuffed in stress positions until he could take no more, and signed a confession to the crime of infringing trade secrets.” Interestingly the validity and accuracy of the content leaked was not brought into question.

The documents passed to the US-based NGO showed the company was using summer internships to entice students to work in the factory. The terms that the students agreed to were aligned with the law: five days a week, eight hours a day. However, the documentation showed that interns were coerced into working overtime or nights to increase profit margin; this action was illegal.

“Interns who don’t work overtime will not only affect the production goal but also affect their willingness to work. Interns need to work overtime,” read the Foxconn documents.

One student, Xiao Fang, who was seventeen at the time, had agreed to work a normal and legal amount of hours. When pressured to work overtime or during the night, she told her manager she was not interested. After, the company contacted her teacher, who threatened her by saying that if she did not cooperate, her graduation and scholarships might be affected. The company also allegedly paid teachers who provided interns 2,500 RMB a month.

Tang reached out to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for support

Tang has asked Amazon for support to get his sentence lifted. Amazon conducted their own investigation and without Tang’s information, they may have never done so. The company has not made any public comments supporting Tang, who has penned a letter to Jeff Bezos to intervene on his behalf.

The Guardian also reported, that during their investigation Amazon found that many workers had been underpaid and the company was forced “to pay more than £165,000 in compensation for underpaying workers making Echo and Echo Dot devices in Hengyang.” Without Tang’s information, Amazon customers would have no way of knowing that the company would have felt the pressure to do the right thing.

Amazon, and many other major US-based companies, including Apple, have continued to use Foxconn, creating risks that their products are made using illegal and exploited labor.

Other products on sale

There are, literally, thousands of other products on sale that Prime members will be able to take advantage of. However, before clicking that “buy now” button, it may be worthwhile to think about where these products are coming from and the labor and environmental practice used in the production.

If this information is hard to come-by, it is often a sign that there could be something worth hiding.

Businesses can say that they ensure that their products are “ethically produced or sourced,” but this is an easy claim to make and a hard one to prove. This is especially true in the case of a retailer like Amazon where so many comapnies and firms are selling such a wide variety of products.

As consumers, it is critical to remember that just because the product is sold on Amazon does not mean that it was ethically or sustainably sourced. If the company cannot prevent the use of child labor in the manufacturing of their own products, why would they be conducting any sort of checks on supply chain and commodities of other companies they allow to be sold on their platform.