Athena

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Athena is a coalition of hard left activists associated with the Democratic Socialists of America and Liberation Road agitating against Amazon and other retail organizations. Dania Rajendra of United for Respect is the Director.

According to the New York Times, George Soros' Open Society Foundations "is providing some of the seed funding for Athena."[1]

Mission

According to their website,[2] Athena "is a broad coalition of local and national organizations representing working people, small business people, people of color, immigrants, and neighbors, along with activists, advocates, policy experts, and academics. We are coming together to create an economy where everyone can thrive, defend our climate, safeguard our communities from surveillance, and expand our democracy."

Coalition Members

New York Times

Athena Twitter Page (Screenshot)

Athena was first described by the New York Times on November 26 2019 by author David Streitfeld as a "grass-roots" effort.[3]

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon flourished over its first two decades with little opposition and less scrutiny. A new coalition and a report unveiled on Tuesday make clear that era is over.
The coalition, Athena, comprises three dozen grass-roots groups involved in issues like digital surveillance, antitrust and working conditions in warehouses. The goal is to encourage and unify the resistance to Amazon that is now beginning to form.
The report, from the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group that focuses on social and economic issues in Southern California, delves into the largely unexplored topic of what Amazon is costing the communities where it has warehouses. The short answer: a lot.
While the simultaneous arrival of Athena and the report are a coincidence, they are linked by their attempts to understand and ultimately influence Amazon’s push into almost every aspect of modern life. The internet conglomerate hired 97,000 employees over the summer, nearly the total employment of Google. The report is bluntly titled “Too Big to Govern.”
“This is a company functioning at a scale that was previously left to government,” said Tom Perriello of the Open Society Foundations. Founded by the billionaire George Soros, Open Society Foundations is providing some of the seed funding for Athena. The coalition is raising $15 million to cover its first three years.
“It has incredible impact,” Mr. Perriello said of Amazon. “Who could possibly shape its future and direction?”
Amazon, like Facebook, Apple and Google, has drawn the attention of Washington regulators, state attorneys general and at least a few politicians in the last year. The central question being asked about all of the companies: When does a tech platform become too big and powerful, ultimately hurting the society it once dazzled?
In Amazon’s case, the situation is particularly complicated. Its aspirations long ago exceeded online retail to encompass fresh groceries, devices that connect your home to the internet, front-door and neighborhood surveillance, professional services like plumbing and contracting, health care, government procurement, internet infrastructure and Hollywood entertainment. Just about everything, really.
Amazon declined to comment for this article.
Athena springs out of several unexpectedly successful grass-roots efforts to rein in Amazon’s power.
Last fall, the retailer was forced to begin paying a $15 hourly minimum wage nationwide. In February, it abandoned plans to establish a new headquarters in New York after opponents mobilized against Amazon and the politicians who had approved the deal. This month, an attempt to stack the City Council in Seattle, the company’s hometown, with members more acceptable to Amazon backfired with voters.
These setbacks could be attributed to many factors, but one of them was the influence of labor and immigrant organizations. Now some of those groups are joining together under Athena.
“We’re learning from what makes Amazon back down, and looking to replicate that as much as possible with as many people as possible,” said Dania Rajendra, the Athena director.
Athena will be run from New York, but the real work will be done out in the field where most of the member organizations are. They include the Awood Center, a Minneapolis nonprofit that has organized Amazon workers from East Africa; Warehouse Workers for Justice, which is based in Chicago; and Fight for the Future, a group that focuses on digital issues, in Massachusetts.
In a separate move on Monday, Fight for the Future and other groups called on Congress to investigate Amazon’s surveillance products, including the Ring front-door monitor and Rekognition facial tracking software. The products threaten “our privacy and civil liberties, especially in brown and black communities,” the groups said.
The effort against Amazon will not be easy, said Lauren Jacobs of the Partnership for Working Families, a coalition member in Oakland. Amazon is projected to have $238 billion in sales this year with 750,000 employees.
“This is a David and Goliath story,” she said. “David took what he had and turned it into a winning strategy. We’re taking what we have — the voices of the members of our various organizations, our collective knowledge and experience and deep understanding of the economy around Big Tech, and the experience we’ve had with making this company shift its behavior — and trying to build a more humane economy.”
Athena’s $15 million budget is modest for the scale of change it hopes to bring about. “This is grass-roots democracy,” said Barry Lynn of Open Markets Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank and coalition member focused on antitrust issues. “There’s no money in it. Just people.”
Mr. Perriello of the Open Society Foundations said updating protest movements for the digital era was an interesting challenge.
“Uncertainty is now baked into the model,” he said. “You don’t know where the fight is going to be two months from now or two years from now. So you need the ability to organize citizens of very different political stripes across geographies and across demographics, where traditionally you had to organize in place.”
The name Athena is associated with democracy, freedom and wisdom. But it has another advantage for the coalition.
“We didn’t want to have Amazon in the name — People Against Amazon or whatever — because part of the strategy is to offer a better vision for how the economy could work,” said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit in Maine that opposes corporate concentration and advocates local community development. “To be for something, not just against.”
Sheheryar Kaoosji of another coalition member, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center in Ontario, east of Los Angeles, said Athena was not planning a boycott of Amazon but more interested in trying to sway it — including its employees and customers.
“Half the households in America have an Amazon Prime account,” Mr. Kaoosji said. “That gives them a huge amount of power to change the company.” His group is dedicated to improving conditions in what is sometimes called “the goods movement sector.”
The resource center is in California’s Inland Empire, where the work gets done to process those packages that appear on porches in Santa Monica and Newport Beach as if by magic.
Amazon workers and Amazon customers exist in two different worlds, the Economic Roundtable said. The report calculates that a little over half of Amazon warehouse workers in Southern California live in substandard housing. And for every $1 in wages, they receive 24 cents in public assistance.
“Every day, ships, trucks, trains and airplanes bring an estimated 21,500 diesel truckloads of merchandise to 21 Amazon warehouses in the four-county region,” the Economic Roundtable report said. It calculated that Amazon trucks last year created $642 million in “uncompensated public costs” for noise, road wear, accidents and harmful emissions.
Almost as an aside, the report indicated how adept Amazon, with a stock market value of nearly $900 billion, is at getting funding from California and local communities. This included $25 million from the California Film Commission to subsidize six productions, including the third season of “Sneaky Pete,” an Amazon crime drama, and $1.2 million from the California Office of Business and Economic Development toward an office building in Irvine for programmers.
The report noted on its title page that it was underwritten by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which represents more than 800,000 members of 300 unions. The Economic Roundtable said that did not affect the results.
Among the report’s suggestions: that Amazon raise its minimum wage to $20 an hour, that it require its logistics subcontractors to do the same, that it provide child care at its warehouses and that it build affordable housing in its logistics communities.
The report draws on California Public Records Act requests filed with communities with Amazon facilities. Many of them nevertheless came up empty. The report noted that very little of Amazon’s business was known to anyone but Amazon. Communities are in the dark.
“Our conclusion is that it’s time for Amazon to come of age and pay its own way,” said Daniel Flaming, a co-author of the report. “This means paying its full costs to the communities that host it and the workers who create its profits.

Athena

Dania Rajendra's Twitter Bio (screenshot)

Maya Shwayder of Non Perele wrote about Athena on 27 November 2019:[4]

The biggest shopping season of the year is upon us. And just in time, a new anti-Amazon initiative has revved up. As first reported in the New York Times,[5]the coalition Athena launched Tuesday: it comprises more than 30 grassroots groups that represent everyone from digital activists to media types to warehouse workers, all united to take on the 800-pound gorilla that is the world’s largest retailer. Athena says its goals are to prevent worker abuse and shield their communities from Amazon’s detrimental effects.
But, this is Amazon. Amazon offers Prime shipping, which 48 percent of Americans have, and Americans love nothing more than easy consumerism. We’re also facing down the beginning of the 2019 holiday shopping season. According to Bloomberg, Americans spent $7.9 billion online on Cyber Monday last year, with Amazon reaping much of the profits. The New York Times reported the company’s projected sales for 2019 will be somewhere around $238 billion. In the meantime, Amazon paid $0 in federal income tax on an $11 billion profit in 2018.
We can take a guess as to what’s going to win in the battle of capitalism versus grassroots, pro-worker initiatives in 2019 America, especially come Black Friday. But activists speaking to Digital Trends said that the timing of the launch isn’t what matters: they’ll be here far beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday to try and change the culture around Amazon.
Dania Rajendra, the director of Athena, told Digital Trends that she hopes the December holidays will actually drive home the point that the coalition is trying to make. “I’m still going to buy presents,” she said. “The holidays are a time when we reflect, as well as make sure that we’re expressing our affection for one another with stuff — that’s cool too. I think people can think about both.”
“Amazon is unique in its scale and the scope of its activity,” said Katie Wilson, the general secretary of the Transit Riders Union in Seattle, one of the more than 30 organizations that have joined the coalition. “The way it’s moving into different sectors of the economy, from making inroads with groceries, to big picture issues around privacy and surveillance, basically every aspect of our lives is more and more touched by one corporation that has unaccountable power.”
Amazon responded to these accusations in a statement provided to Digital Trends, saying that the new group is made up of “self-interested critics, particularly unions and groups funded by our competitors” who are taking advantage of the increased attention on the company over Black Friday.
“It’s no coincidence to us that this group would emerge now because large shopping events have become an opportunity for our critics, including unions, to raise awareness for their cause – in this case, increased membership dues,” the statement said. “These groups are conjuring misinformation to work in their favor, when in fact we already offer the things they claim to be able to provide.”
It is not clear whether Athena charges membership dues.
Both Rajendra and Wilson said that Athena was here for the long haul, and Rajendra confirmed to Digital Trends that the organization is looking to raise $15 million over three years to fund its activities. “We’re here for the people who are in the crosshairs of this mega corporation,” said Rajendra. “We feel the urgency now.”
“These holidays are a moment when we as a community spend time with our families and think about what matters more than money,” she said, “and it felt like a good time to make the conversation coalesce.”
Wilson said that Amazon was not “contributing meaningfully to solving the problems it creates,” a statement borne out by data in a new report from the Southern California-based nonprofit group Economic Roundtable.
The report outlines exactly how harmful Amazon has been to the communities it’s in, at least in Southern California. According to the report, Amazon received $850 million in public subsidies from the communities in SoCal; 93 percent of those are year-over-year subsidies, as opposed to one-time cash infusions. Amazon also paid exactly $0 in federal income tax last year on its $11 billion profit. Meanwhile 14 percent of Amazon warehouse workers were living below the poverty threshold, and 31 percent are living just above it, the report found. Many of them still need public benefits to survive.
Amazon also comes into communities with the promise of job creation. The report says that because of this promise of good jobs and a stronger economy, often communities will push forward with new warehouse construction, despite heavy negative environmental impact. But, the authors continue, this promise “does not stand up to scrutiny” — i.e., Amazon provides neither good jobs, nor does it boost anyone’s economy but its own. And furthermore, Amazon workers are left without health insurance, without food to feed their families, and without homes.
Into this fray steps Athena, which flat-out calls Amazon “dangerous to our communities, our democracy, and our economy.”
“Our premise is that large corporations like Amazon have too much power and are in the way of how we solve those problems as a democracy,” said Rajendra.
Boycotts are not what they’re necessarily going for here, said Wilson, and Amazon has too much money to be taken on financially. She pointed to Amazon spending $1.5 million in an attempt to influence a recent Seattle city council election, an unprecedented amount of money for that type of campaign. “We’re never going to have that money, so we have to build up our power in other ways,” she said.
“This will help to better coordinate against the kinds of problems and threats that Amazon poses,” Wilson said. “I am excited to learn from and work with folks around the country to figure out the future in a way that is giving power to the people.”

References

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  1. ↑ Activists Build a Grass-Roots Alliance Against Amazon accessed November 30 2019
  2. ↑ Athena accessed November 30 2019
  3. ↑ Activists Build a Grass-Roots Alliance Against Amazon accessed November 30 2019
  4. ↑ The anti-Amazon movement is gaining steam. Will Black Friday shoppers care? accessed November 30 2019
  5. ↑ Activists Build a Grass-Roots Alliance Against Amazon accessed November 30 2019
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