Bezos Attacks Toddler Safety

Jeff Bezos may be irked that he lags behind Elon Musk as the planet’s richest man, but he’s closing the gap between him and Elon when it comes to who’s the planet’s most dangerous oligarch.

Musk, of course, is running amok when it comes to crippling and closing government agencies, but Bezos put major points on that board earlier this month when his attorneys at Amazon filed a lawsuit arguing that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is unconstitutional. The CPSC is best known for its recalls of products that endanger infants and toddlers—defective scooters and cribs, flammable sweaters and swaddling clothes, that sort of thing. Not even Musk has had the chutzpah to go after CPSC, but Bezos, plainly hoping to eclipse Elon in at least one category, is made of sterner stuff.

During the past 12 months, the commission had ruled that Amazon had to recall products the commission had found to be unsafe, send out notices of the recalls to consumers who’d gone onto Amazon and purchased those goods, and refund those buyers who’d returned them.

Initially, Amazon contested only its responsibility for those dangerous products, arguing that, like FedEx and UPS, it was merely delivering them. The commission noticed, however, that unlike FedEx and UPS, Amazon not only delivered those products but sold them—hence, its liability.

This month, sensing perhaps that its argument that it was just a delivery mechanism was perhaps a bit weak, Amazon upped the ante by saying the whole damn commission was unconstitutional. Were a court to uphold that, not only would Amazon be off the hook but there’d be no agency with the power to recall hair dryers with a nasty habit of electrocuting their users or carbon monoxide detectors that failed to detect, no matter who, including the manufacturer, sold them.

In its suit, Amazon made two arguments. First, it backed Trump’s “unitary executive” contention that a president should have the power to hire and fire at will all the board or commission members who serve with fixed terms on regulatory agencies. In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that those fixed terms were constitutional and, by implication, that such boards and commissions had to have a degree of independence from the sitting administration. Second, Amazon also argued that because those boards and commissions could charge businesses and individuals with violations of rules and then have administrative judges rule on those charges, those agencies violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, even though any such rulings may then be challenged in federal courts, and frequently are.

That second argument is the basis of two other suits from Bezos and Musk, in which Amazon and SpaceX, respectively, have challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. As these suits predate Trump’s re-election, they’re not part of his war on the “deep state” as such, but rather just expressions of these two almost incomprehensibly rich guys’ loathing of worker voice and any rules that might constrain their autocratic rule of their empires. In its 90-year existence, the NLRB has ruled both for and against employers and employees, and it was only because Biden’s appointees to the NLRB actually chose to uphold the worker rights assured under federal law that Musk and Bezos chose to go after it. Bezos plainly resented the fact that the NLRB was prodding him to begin bargaining with Staten Island warehouse workers who’d voted to unionize three years before, while Musk blew a gasket at the NLRB’s ruling that he had no right to fire two SpaceX employees who talked about unions.

Again, Bezos may have thought he needed to regain ground lost to Musk in the worker-loathing sweepstakes. In late 2023, at a New York Times DealBook conference, Musk had flatly asserted, “I disagree with the idea of unions.” That was a high bar to clear, but Bezos cleared it with room to spare this January when Amazon responded to the workers in one of its Quebec warehouses voting to unionize by closing all seven of its warehouses in Quebec, thereby making 1,700 workers jobless, lest the union virus spread. The move called to mind a similar play by Bezos’s mentor in mega-retailing, Sam Walton, who, when the meatcutters in one Texas Walmart voted 7-to-3 to unionize 25 years ago, simply eliminated meat departments from every Walmart in Texas and five adjacent states. Any who may have thought the socioeconomic belief systems of Seattle were not those of Bentonville got a rude awakening: The autocratic extremism of mega-rich retailers knows no regional boundaries.

(As I’m writing this, Amazon has struck again, persuading Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to veto a bill passed by his legislature with heavy bipartisan support that would have regulated warehouses’ quotas for its workers. Such bills have become laws in a host of other blue states.)

But is Amazon really intent on matching (or exceeding) Musk’s companies by eliminating the agencies that protect the rights of workers and the safety of consumers? Amazon’s own board of directors includes some members not known for wanting to undo the New Deal as such (Jamie Gorelick, Patty Stonesifer) or for smashing the agency that identifies and recalls products unsafe for small children. Perhaps parents of small children, with a few toddlers in tow, might want to gather outside Bezos’s Beverly Hills or Washington, D.C., homes (both of which have received considerable press coverage) and burn some flammable toddler pajamas (not with the toddlers in them, of course). Not as dramatic as a Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze, I know, but it might just draw some coverage.