Individual Climate Action

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Discuss actions that we can directly take as individuals to reduce environmental harm.

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activistPnk

Amazon has entered the healthcare sector and employers are putting people on “Amazon Care” -- Amazon boycotters: is there recourse? (www.thebignewsletter.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by activistPnk to c/climate_action_individual

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As a self-respecting environmentalist, I #boycottAmazon (rationale; ¶6 covers relevant environmental problems with Amazon and thus why boycotting Amazon is a useful individual action).

I just read about Amazon entering the healthcare sector (in the bottom of the linked article), and that employers are subscribing to offer employees health benefits through that. Naturally, I find this despicable. IIUC, if you rightfully boycott Amazon then by extension you lose employment opportunities at employers who limit healthcare benefits to those of Amazon. Correct? Or am I missing something?

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[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The most effective way to fight back against this dystopian crap is to unionize so that the union can reject sub-par health care plans.

I don't think I could fault an individual person for accepting a job that uses Amazon as a healthcare provider. Hopefully, you could channel the same principles that would lead one to boycott Amazon into unionizing your workplace so that you can actually have a say in the healthcare plan.

[–] activistPnk 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Unionizing is a collective action. Not that there’s anything wrong with collective actions. But a boycott on Amazon is not the sort of thing that I would expect to gain momentum on across a workforce unless Amazon Care were to actually offer a quite poor quality health plan. Don’t workers’ unions tend to just advocate for the worker’s own personal benefits? I imagine someone showing up to a union meeting to propose prioritizing the environment would likely get marginalized and pushed out. The best they could probably get away with is motivate the union to compel an employer to offer more plans to compete with Amazon Care.

The beauty of individual actions is that you can make a snap change with instant effect (however small) without interference. It seems in this case it requires an organized collective effort to merely reach a position by which some people can make their drop in the ocean individual action.

Although I have to wonder if it could work as simply as my Coca-Cola boycott, where I simply asked for more options with no support. Maybe I would make that a condition of hiring me. “I’ll accept your job offer as-is except I require a non-Amazon health plan as a precondition”.