 Philip Green knighted in 2006 was once known as the King of the High Street. He fell from grace in 2015 when he sold the BHS chain for £1, leaving it with debt of £1.3 billion and a pension deficit of £571 million. That latter figure was particularly controversial due to how closely it mirrored the amount he had personally extracted from the business in dividends, rent and interest on loans. So the pension deficit was £571 million, Green had pocketed £586 million. As a reminder, this is an infamous clip of Green being challenged near his luxury yacht in the midst of that crisis. I'm going to call the police if you don't go. Sir Philip, people want to know why you're on holiday when they think that you're supposed to be sorting out the pension deficit. Will you go away? Why won't you tell to people? Will you go away? I will go away, you can squirt with me water. Go away! Why won't you just answer a couple of questions? Go away! Have you got a message for them? Which bit are you not understanding? Go away! Just go away! We're asking you questions! That's going to go in the f***ing thing. That was Philip Green after BHS went bust and today we learnt the rest of his retail business is on the brink of collapse. This is the headline from the BBC. It's Arcadia Group which owns Topshop Burton and Dorothy Perkins look set to go into administration. That would be risking 13,000 jobs. Green had been in talks of potential lenders to borrow £30 million to help the business through Christmas but those talks fell through and now it looks like the firm will be going into administration. We can go to that BBC article for some details on what has just happened. So they write, Arcadia admitted that the coronavirus had had a material impact on trading across our businesses. However, even before the pandemic, Arcadia's best-known names like Topshop were struggling against Nimbla online-only fashion retailers like Asos, Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing. Rival high street chains like Zara have invested heavily in their digital businesses while Topshop has been slow to catch up in its most recent account for the year to 1st of September 2018. So long before coronavirus, Arcadia had reported a 93.4 million pre-tax loss compared with 164 million profit in the previous 12 months. And it also said sales fell 4.5% to £1.8 billion. So it turns out, I mean, this is a similar story we're seeing throughout the pandemic where coronavirus is tipping businesses over the edge but usually when they were already going through problems as it was, the consensus seems to be that Philip Green wasn't really paying too much attention to this business whilst everyone else, not everyone else, but whilst other competitors were trying to adapt to a more online world, I suppose he was sitting back on his yacht, potentially tax dodging billionaires in Monaco aren't the best people to leave responsible for, you know, key businesses which employ over 10,000 people in this case. Going back to the role of Green in the retail chain, the BBC article also included this great bit of context which I think is quite important for understanding and what Philip Green is all about. So they're right, of the Greens. Much of their wealth is derived from a 1.2 billion dividend payments that Philip took from Arcadia in 2005, two years after buying the business. It was paid tax-free as his wife Lady Green is resident in Monaco and she is the ultimate owner of the company. So you can see there, he took over the business, paid himself within two years, 1.2 billion pounds in dividends. So that's money going directly from the company to him personally, going via his wife, presumably for tax purposes. She is a resident in Monaco, obviously that is somewhere where you do not have to pay much tax. Remember that, when that happened, he took that 1.2 billion pound from the company into Monaco. That was the year before he got a knighthood from Tony Blair. So it kind of tells you how the political establishment in this country was decrepit long before Brexit, which is what much of the liberal establishment press likes to tell you. That's when it all went downhill. So to know what we're going to be talking about is sort of the relationship between the collapse of Arcadia and the absolute dominant position that Amazon has found itself in during this pandemic. What does this trend show us about global capitalism but also its effect on workers on the planet? So let's go straight onto Amazon. We'll talk about both sort of at the same time. So on Amazon, Amazon share price has almost doubled during the pandemic. It is now by a long way the world's most valuable company. This August, its founder, Jeff Bezos became the first person ever to have acquired a net worth of over $200 billion, more money than any of us could possibly imagine spending. According to Forbes magazine, COVID pandemic had boosted his net worth by $87 billion. But now while the pandemic has been a boon for Bezos, it has been a struggle for his workforce. Nearly 20,000 Amazon employees are confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic. And the firm is also regularly under scrutiny for the relatively small figures it pays in tax. This Black Friday, the Progressive International have launched a campaign to make Amazon pay. And we talked about the Progressive International on this show before. It was launched this year by, among others, Yanis Varifakis, Rafael Correa, and Naomi Klein, also Noam Chomsky. And we'll be speaking to one of their spokespeople in a moment, David Adler, who we've had on this show before. First, let's take a look at the video that launched the campaign. I'm very proud of the culture that we have at Amazon. A former work heard, Amazon's Swansea Warehouse has told BBC Wales the staff are treated like robots. If you're giving great customer experience, the only way to do that is with happy people. Workers are so pressured to meet targets that they're forced to urinate in bottles. The Kota that demands this manager is to do 260 coli per hour. For that, we travel 30 km per day in these interpås, grown like 10 terrains of football. You can't do it with a set of miserable people watching the clock all day. With a computer tracking her pace per package, down to the second. 11 seconds was the gore. Is that hard to meet? Yeah. I like to use the phrase work-life harmony. For staff, it means no guaranteed set hours or job security and shifts that can be cancelled at the drop of a hat. You go in and then they'll say to you, don't come in tomorrow. So there's 10 hours I've lost. I don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees. Amazon remains non-union, in part by training its managers how to handle union efforts, like in this video. We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates. You will learn about the warning signs most commonly associated with early union organizing. Factories in Bangladesh with documented unsafe conditions in theory should be barred from accessing much of the US and European retail markets. But many have found a backdoor through Amazon. The toddler top, the journal traced from Amazon, was made at a Chittagong factory called Riverside Apparals that has been banned by the Accord for unsafe conditions. Let me assure you, this is the best planet and we need to protect it. Amazon employees say the company has threatened to fire some of them for publicly pushing the company to do more about climate change. Billionaires have seen their net worth soar despite the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon has reportedly confirmed it's going to stop paying its warehouse workers the extra $2 an hour and coronavirus hazard pay. 88 workers tested positive at an Amazon warehouse. I'm incredibly proud of the safety record of our sites. This is the inside of an Amazon distribution center in northern France. As you can see at this warehouse, there are no protective measures and staff are crowded into this one room. In the business world, Amazon is one of the big winners of the coronavirus crisis. Paid no federal income tax on more than 11 billion in profits. Executive stock options are allowing them to pay zero federal income tax. One and a quarter billion taxpayer dollars have been given to the tech giant in the form of government incentives. We want Amazon to respect us, to listen to us. You have no place in India and you cannot live here. But in France, a dispute with workers over safety conditions at their warehouses has seen the company shut down operations here. They took Amazon to court on health and safety grounds and won. You're going to be standing out here until we get a solution. Now we're going to get on David Adler. You're general coordinator for the Progressive International with Yanis Varoufakis, Noam Chomsky, etc. All the great and good of the global left. We've just shown the video that launched the campaign. Can you start by saying why Amazon, why now? I mean, obviously it's now the world's most valuable company. Is it kind of as simple as that? Go for the big one. No, I don't think it's as simple as that. I think that we see it, Amazon's a real test case for internationalism in the 21st century. Because yeah, sure, its size and scale put it at the very center of these global crises of worker precarity as the film highlights, as well as ecological breakdown and also the hollowing out of our democracies. So we've got these multiple dimensions of injustice that Amazon is committing. And what we tried to do in this campaign is bring together a planetary coalition that could unite those struggles. So that's about both scale and scope. Scale is essential because we have to match the scale of Amazon at the global scale with the scale of our activism. Amazon wins by pitting democracies, pitting our governments against each other in a ruthless game of racing to the bottom of regulatory standards, as well as standard wage arbitrage to get to the lowest common denominator for its workers. But it's more than that. There's so much of Amazon's impact that's simply out of sight and out of mind for most consumers, not just because they're interacting with the platform, but because its impact is felt far beyond the eye. So that's by going down the supply chain. So for example, one of our key partners in this process has been the Hawkers Federation of India, the Hawkers Joint Action Committee. And their claim is to say, look, we're not employed by Amazon. We don't work in Amazon warehouses, but our lives and livelihoods depend on the circular local economies that allow us to be in touch with the farmers and peasants of India and come to our local markets and sell our goods. And Amazon is in the business of destroying those local economies in service of its vertical and horizontal integration across the global economy. So we've got to move down the supply chain, but also across these different types of struggles. And of course, the ecological one is the final frontier of this effort, which is to say, this is where Amazon would want us to believe either it's not directly responsible or it's doing its corporate social responsibility to clean up for its carbon footprint. But we know that's not the case. Amazing statistic that we like to cite is that Amazon has a carbon footprint that's larger than two thirds of the world's countries. So this is a private transnational empire that has grown far bigger than any responsible planet would allow it with so little accountability as this sort of prisoner's dilemma escalates into sort of defection after defection by our own representatives who just refuse to hold Amazon accountable. And in the absence of that vacuum of accountability, that's where we come in as the progressive international alongside trade unions, social movements, climate activists around the world. To say enough, we're going to make Amazon pay its workers for its climate impact and back to society in a way that it's refused to over the past 25 years. I want to go on to sort of the theory of change in a moment, sort of how you're going to try and make Amazon pay. First of all, I just wanted to stop on that figure about emissions that I found interesting. I didn't know that. So you're saying Amazon's emissions are bigger than two thirds of the world's countries combined. And where does that, where do those emissions come from? Is that from the transportation of the goods? Is that from the production of the goods? Is that for the internet servers? Sort of where are, how are we seeing the damage that Amazon is doing to the environment? Where's that happening? Amazon is an iceberg. We only see a tiny piece of this infrastructure that basically powers Amazon's business model. And not just because it's globalized. So a huge part of that carbon footprint I mentioned is because it has these global supply chains. Amazon is not particularly interested in foreign to fork strategies or sustainability at any scale. So we've got this hugely costly in terms of its carbon costs, model of production and distribution across the global economy. But just as important is a piece that so few of us are really taken to account, which is the Amazon web services. If you really want to get to the crux of the Amazon's relationship to surveillance power, as well as environmental destruction, we've got to look at these massive service that Amazon is just chewing up carbon to run its Amazon web services. This is of course, what does all the kind of web hosting the stuff that teams up with local police departments to spy on you, this kind of thing that is very much out of sight out of mind. Through this campaign, we're trying to bring back into sight. But a lot of the carbon, Amazon made a commitment to decarbonize its Amazon web services. And then just a couple of years ago, I think last year, 2019, Greenpeace did an investigation where they were like, oh, shit, you're just not delivering on these decarbonization targets in terms of your Amazon web services. So this is the classic unseen and sort of undiscussed carbon costs of our digital lives, which seem impossible because I'm engaging with the computer, but Amazon is really as this giant web services empire continues to expand, hugely responsible for its carbon emissions. And now let's talk about your theory of change. So you're saying, make Amazon pay. You've talked about a planetary movement. I mean, what's it gonna look like? What are the pinch points? How do you put pressure on Amazon? Where's the leverage? So first of all, I see you smirking at the word planetary, but I reject your smirk and insist that, but more seriously, in the theory of change. So first of all, I think, let's review what's happening today in terms of this make Amazon pay campaign targeted at Black Friday, the day when Amazon makes just billions and billions for its executives and stockholders. Today, what we've built with our coalition partners is a rolling set of strikes from garment workers in Bangladesh to those hawkers I mentioned across India, to warehouse workers in Poland and tech workers in the United States. So we're not just linking together Amazon workers in different countries, it's also about bringing together the various strands of these struggles across borders. Now, we believe that in terms of the theory of change, it's on the basis of that movement, on the strength of that movement that we can actually begin to yield change. So instead of petitioning individual politicians to say, hey, you know, will you take on this giant? That which still is vulnerable to that prisoner's dilemma. I mean, we should take that to explain what I mean by prisoner's dilemma. You've got a situation in which Amazon says, we're either gonna set up shop here or we're gonna set up shop here. We're gonna have a factory here, we're gonna have a factory here. Which of you is gonna give us a bigger, sweetheart deal, lower taxes, lower regulatory standards. And that's what sets off this race to the bottom. So to cut off that race to the bottom, to initiate a race to the top as it were, we need to build a coalition that is operating at that scale that refuses to accept Amazon's game on its terms that we're going to allow our governments to be played against each other to the advantage of Jeff Bezos and Amazon as a corporation. And what's your goal, what's your outcome? So I mean, you're taking on Amazon, but obviously, I mean, would it be a success for you if it got broken up? If it stopped being the world's biggest company? Or do you think that actually by having a company which is so dominant, there's actually quite a lot of opportunity to, I suppose, sort of use reputational damage to sort of reform supply chains as you go across the world. If you're talking about just small businesses or Topshop here, Topman there, except, well, they're the same business, obviously. H&M here, Topman there. They're all sort of getting stuff from different factories. They can always say, oh, the other, our competitor is worse than us. So why are you complaining to us? We've got this sort of completely dominant, all-consuming company. Then does that mean that there's sort of an opportunity to pressure them into reforming supply chains for the better? Do you think that they could end up being, not necessarily a force for good, but a force which is at least somewhat ambivalent in the consequences that it has? I'd like to stop here and just acknowledge that as an American coming to England, the fact that you have a corporation called Boo-Hoo that people like a lot and buy clothes from, what is this? Why is this the case? I don't understand. I was listening to your clip earlier about Arcadia. Someone will need to explain to me how Boo-Hoo became a thing. Anyway, we'll put that to one side. Yeah, so there are different views on this. I mean, across the coalition. I don't think I would pretend to speak for a lot of our partners. And you should look for yourself at makeamazonpay.com to see who are coalition partners. They range from sunrise movement to major trade union federations like the ITUC, PSI, Public Services International, Unique Global Union who is a really close partner in this process, as well as more local trade unions and Amazon Workers International. I won't bore you with the full scope of the coalition, but my point is to say that there are different ranging policy priorities. But the theory of change has to take us from the movement side that's being built out across continents, across countries to take on Amazon in all these respective jurisdictions. And it has to begin to hold accountable our political forces and not just hold them accountable in these silo efforts, but also bring them together in a kind of legislative alliance that can say we've heard the demands of this planetary movement and now it's our turn to turn those demands into law. So our brains are so frazzled by this concept of true representational politics. Of course, that is how we want these democratic systems to work, that there is this demand, please by God, take, you know, we did polling on this. I mean, we got a great poll with surveys in the UK this week that showed that 69% of Britons think that Amazon is too powerful. And the vast majority of them think that they need to listen to the concerns of their workers and be responsive to their obligations to their workforce. You know, this is a popular policy and a popular set of demands that we're putting forward. So breaking up Amazon, of course, we need to take seriously the questions around monopolization. You know, we need to take seriously equally questions around democratization by taking the infrastructure they've built, taking platforms seriously as a way of providing goods and, you know, conveniently and efficiently for the people who need them. But I think the key thing for us right now is to find a way of holding accountable those politicians and political forces that claim to represent us to a movement that's now emerging all around the world to say, enough of letting this guy become the richest man in modern history. $200 billion is not fathomable to the human eye, let alone the human brain. I should put those around. Either way, it's impossible to even think about it today as well. And so it's about time that we started taking seriously this crisis of economic inequality and sort of hydra, you know, multi-headed relationship to ecology, precarity and other crises that are sort of underpin Amazon's successful business model. David, I have to apologize because I can't explain to you how Boohoo became a thing. It's just not my area of expertise, so you're going to have to ask another Brit that particular question. But it has been such a joy to speak to you this evening as ever, and we will watch with great interest how this campaign develops, what we've got in store over the next weeks and weeks and months. Of course, we want Amazon to pay as well, so, you know, Godspeed. It was really great to sort of hear about this campaign and there's many reasons why campaigns like this one, like the one being run by Progressive International, are really important. And, you know, the kind of consolidation of Amazon's power and the power of companies that are similar to Amazon is really significant, I think, over this particularly as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the recession that is coming in the aftermath of that. You know, we saw the first phase in this kind of shift of political economy of labor in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. We're seeing the second phase of it now. And it's a shift from a kind of bricks-and-mortar business model to the kind of digital data-driven platform industry. So this is obviously Amazon is the behemoth of this, but also things like Uber and Deliveroo, we've all seen have become really, really key players and it's almost become the only model that can survive the recession. And this is because of, you know, the kind of physicality of it, the fact that people can't go to retail, you know, to retail sites. But it's also to do with the fact that, you know, when we have these massive recessions, these companies that tend to have lower obligate, lower overhead costs because they are often categorized as technological companies rather than employers. So they get to scoot over all those employment regulations that, you know, it's expensive to give people healthcare and to give people maternity leave. So they have these lower overhead costs and this particular model that then sweeps in the areas that are devastated by job losses as a result of a recession and is able to basically have all of the power in that situation. So you find, you know, for example, in places like the Midlands, in the Midlands, for example, where, you know, in the wake of the industrialization, the wake of these job losses that have not been addressed by the public sector, someone like Amazon coming in with this promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, it feels like there's little that you can say no to. And the thing with this platform model is that they're characterized by these intensely oppressive algorithmic management models, fragmented work, workforces, so workers can't communicate with one another, can't sort of have a collective understanding of themselves as part of a workforce. And because of, as I said, their legal categorization, they can bypass a lot of employment regulation. And that's why we see these things like, you know, little to no toilet breaks, very manual, hard manual labor, zero hours contract. And it's very, these, these business models are very, very hard to unionize. It's very, very hard to change. And the fact that in the way, in the aftermath of this crisis, it's being used as a consolidation of that digital platform business model is very, very worrying in terms of building our workers' movements. So often we have found that these kind of reputational campaigns, campaigns at the consumer end are often the ones that can have a lot of impact and can help to shore up the unionization attempts within the workplace, because they are otherwise very, very difficult. So it's really, really good to see the progress of international taking on this campaign. And this really does signify a really significant shift in terms of how work is going to be organized in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. And Britain is especially vulnerable to this because there will be a lot of narratives that, you know, in the wake of Brexit, beggars can't be choosers. So it's very concerning how sort of these kind of digital platforms and these ultra fast fashion labels as well have been able to monopolize the space in the wake of the recession.