Amazon is known for its shameless tax avoidance, workers’ rights abuses, environmental impacts and much more. The company has been the subject of an Ethical Consumer global boycott call since 2012.
We’ve summarised the key ethical issues to consider when it comes to Amazon.
Our research highlights many ethical issues for Amazon, including: tax conduct, company ethos, workers' rights, tech sustainability, climate change, conflict minerals, agriculture, palm oil sourcing, packaging, and animal products. The company scored 40 points or less in each of these categories.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see the full detailed stories, and Amazon's overall ethical rating, please sign in or subscribe.
We launched a boycott of Amazon in 2012 over its tax avoidance. This was called because in 2011, as the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon generated UK sales of £2.9bn yet paid only £1.8m in corporation tax. The correct figure should have been over £8 million at the full rate of corporation tax at that time.
Things have become much worse since then.
In 2021, fuelled by the pandemic, Amazon reported a near 200-percent rise in profits, yet taxes paid by the company barely increased on the previous years.
Research by Ethical Consumer calculated that, in 2021, up to half a billion pounds (£500,000,000) could have been lost to the UK public purse from the corporation tax avoidance of Amazon.
To make matters even worse, it was reported in June 2023 that Amazon received a tax credit of £7.7m. This means that in 2022, Amazon’s main UK division not only avoided paying taxes, it took from the pot that tax-payers filled.
As a surprise move, after two years of not paying any corporation tax, in 2023 Amazon paid an estimated £18.7million. This was about 4% of the amount it was likely due. In other words, in 2023 Amazon could have retained about £433 million worth of taxes from UK public services.
Amazon lost points for excessive executive remuneration. Andrew R Jassy, the president and CEO, received a total of $212,701,169 in 2021, which was reduced to $1.3 million in 2022. Two other executives however received over $40 million (£38m) in 2022.
An average Amazon warehouse worker in the UK earns just under £14 an hour.
Amazon also recently got involved in nuclear power. It announced in October 2024 that it was investing half a billion pounds to build a small modular nuclear reactor to fulfil the growing energy needs of its data centres run by its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS).
It also lost points for membership of various lobby groups such as the World Economic Forum, Eurocommerce or the Business Roundtable. These organisations tend to exert undue corporate influence on policy-makers in favour of market solutions that are potentially detrimental to the environment and human rights.
For these reasons, Amazon scored 0/100 in our Company ethos category.
Amazon is renowned for its poor treatment of its workers.
The Centre for Law and Work together with Berkeley University of California published a document in 2022 pointing out that in spite of all Amazon’s claims, “it absolutely does not” comply with international labour standards.
On many occasions Amazon has aggressively opposed unionisation and organising efforts at its warehouses. In July 2024 in a historic vote, Amazon workers very narrowly rejected a union in its Coventry warehouse. Labour union GMB, which led the unionising efforts accused Amazon of union busting. It claimed that anti-union messages were spread and anti-union seminars were held ahead of the vote. The Amazon workers in Coventry, supported by GMB, intend to continue to strike for better pay and union rights while GMB says it won’t give up.
Amazon has so far successfully beat unionising efforts. In trying to prevent collective bargaining within its workforce, Amazon has reportedly spent $14 million (£10.8 million) on anti-union consultants in 2022.
In October 2021, 1400 UK delivery drivers sued Amazon seeking employment rights, including minimum wage and holiday pay. In March 2023 Amazon tried to dismiss the lawsuit but a judge ruled that it could proceed.
Amazon suppliers don’t receive better treatment either from the company. Amazon was listed in the UK’s Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) survey for the first time in 2023. The GCA is responsible for encouraging, monitoring and enforcing compliance with the Code and thus for regulating the relationships between the UK's largest grocery retailers and their direct suppliers. Perhaps unsurprisingly Amazon jumped straight to the last place of the list with almost four times as many accusations of code violations as the next company up. And its performance declined in 2024.
Amazon scored 0/100 in our workers rating.
Amazon sources conflict minerals and cotton without adequately stringent policies for protecting human rights. This is a concern because these products are at risk of being sourced from places where human rights abuses occur, including Turkmenistan (in the cotton sector) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (conflict minerals). Much more is needed than vague commitments to ensure the supply chain is free from violations.
In June 2023 Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in fines to settle alleged privacy violations. These involved its voice assistant Alexa and doorbell camera Ring. US’s Federal Trade Commission claims in one lawsuit that the tech company kept recordings of children's conversations with its voice assistant Alexa but failed to delete them – as it had promised it would – when parents asked it to do so.
Amazon agreed to pay another $5.8 million, because Ring had allowed employees and contractors to watch recordings of customers' private spaces, sometimes including bedrooms and bathrooms.
Amazon reports on its greenhouse gas emissions but it uses loopholes to make it look to be in a better shape than it really is.
Its scope 2 emissions are, for example, reported using the market based method which makes the figures smaller than they actually are. The trend in those emissions is worrying, says the Guardian which calculated that Amazon’s actual scope 2 emissions are 1.2 times higher than that claimed by the company.
Its scope 3 emissions also aren’t comprehensive. For example, its purchased goods and services only included Amazon-branded products. These account for only a small proportion of its corporate purchases, less than 40% according to Amazon’s own statistics. According to other sources, including the organisation Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, this number could be as low as a staggering 1%. This suggests that Amazon’s scope 3 emissions could be 100 times higher than claimed by the company. This approach by Amazon has been widely criticised and Amazon scores 0/100 in our climate change category.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s market leading cloud computing arm, currently owns about a third of the entire cloud market. In 2018 WikiLeaks revealed the location of over 100 AWS data centres around the world. Over fifty were in the US and several in known tax havens, such as Luxembourg, Singapore and most famously, Ireland.
According to Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA), data centres account for about one fifth of all electricity use in Ireland and it is predicted to increase to over a quarter by 2028. Although renewable electricity generation is on the rise, data centres expansion may outpace this.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice recently says that in spite of the company claiming that its operations are run entirely on renewable sources of power, in truth just 22 percent of power used by the company's data centres is from renewables.
Amazon scores just 30/100 in the agricultural category. It has no policy for genetically modified organisms, the use of pesticides, or agricultural run-off. It stated in its 2022 Sustainability report that it aims to reduce its agricultural impact but it largely discussed funding relevant projects as opposed to addressing its own impacts.
Amazon does address reducing water use in its supply chain. It has an active stewardship programme in its operations in India and it achieved a Water Neutrality Index (WNI) of 1. The WNI defines “water neutral” as the amount of water conserved being equal to the quantity of water consumed, with a score of 1.
The mass production of palm oil relies on the destruction of rainforests. This has wide ranging impacts including contributing to climate change, as well as loss of biodiversity and human rights.
Some of Amazon’s products come from a physically certified supply chain but less than 50% does, meaning that half of its palm is untraceable and could potentially be connected to abuses of rainforests and people.
It only scores 20/100 in our palm oil category.
As a company that relies on packaging, Amazon scores an appalling 10/100 points in this category.
It has no evidence of reducing packaging in its supply chain or the packaging of its products.
It has, though, reduced per-shipment packaging weight by 41% on average since 2015. Analysts however, believe that Amazon makes two million daily parcel deliveries worldwide. Recycling company Business Waste has called out the company and suggested that it takes cardboard boxes back from customers to increase recycling rates. In the UK a third of all the cardboard may end up in landfill. Business Waste believes that Amazon needs to take some responsibility for its packaging.
Amazon owns various tech products but only scores 30/100 when it comes to tech sustainability.
The repairability and warranty on its tech devices are all at the lower end of the scale. It does, however, use a fair amount of recycled materials. It says that some of its products are made from majority- or all-recycled content. Some for example contain 75% recycled plastic, 100% recycled yarn, 100% recycled aluminium, and 90% recycled magnesium. It also claims to have incorporated 50% recycled plastic into certain power adapters that ship with its devices.
Amazon has an all round inadequate animal welfare policy.
It has no policy on animal testing, sells products made of factory farmed animals and sells live animals, such as lobsters on its website. Fur coats made of racoons, rabbits and chinchillas are also for sale on its website.
It was criticised by PETA in 2023 for its “continued sale of Thai coconut milk even after learning of PETA Asia’s investigations revealing that monkeys are forced to pick coconuts in Thailand and are trained through fear of punishment, caged in isolation, and chained for life”.
It prohibits listings relating to endangered species, but only in line with the law, so it’s really doing the bare minimum when it comes to the wellbeing of other species.
More information on all these topics is on our Boycott Amazon page.
The text above was written in October 2024.
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