This pandemic year has brought record growth for Amazon. The third quarter of 2020 was its most successful yet — it announced a 37 percent sales increase on the same period last year. According to Forbes, the personal wealth of founder Jeff Bezos climbed by $70 billion between October 2019 and November 2020.

Amazon’s efforts to provide the infrastructure for everything from online shopping to cloud services have attracted attention from regulators in Washington and Brussels. Civic activists speak of breaches in employee rights, tax avoidance, misuse of personal data, a large ecological footprint, and role as a de facto regulator of other companies’ access to customers. One burst of attention came with the worldwide Make Amazon Pay strikes and protests on Black Friday, organized by the multinational Uni Global Union together with the Progressive International and other groups.

Here in the Czech Republic, we can buy from Amazon only through its German page — resulting in delays for customers, as well as relatively high prices. But if Amazon has less business here than local platforms, it certainly does have Czech employees, predominantly supplying the German market. As an investigation by Voxpot shows, the country serves Amazon as a kind of warehouse — and source of cheap labor servicing wealthy consumers across its Western border.