[brookst]

Using intermediaries to hire illegally makes it worse from a liability perspective. Amazon is too big and hires too many people to get away with “oh, we used agencies in all of our markets and audited nine of them and we’re shocked that they didn’t do diligence”. All it would take is one disgruntled hiring manager. And Amazon doesn’t have many gruntled ones.

[mschuster91]

At the scale of Amazon, law enforcement is no longer bound to the law, it's bound to politics.

Your average local employer with a few dozen people? If he fucks around enough to draw in the attention of OSHA, he will find out. Easy prey and without political connections he's toast.

But Amazon? This company is by direct head count the third-largest employer in the US, second-largest in both the US and worldwide if one excludes militaries [1]. Amazon is frankly too large to enforce laws against and so is similar-sized Walmart (who has been able to extort the government into subsidizing their poor wages with food stamps), too many livelihoods depend on the existence of the company.

IMHO, a lot of the Big Tech and F500 companies should be outright broken up. When a company grows so large that laws cannot be enforced or, worse, laws get willfully ignored because it's cheaper to risk the occasional fine and bad press, eventually the rule of law itself suffers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

[terminalshort]

How could it make it worse to have someone else to blame? Seems like it could only be better, or at worst exactly the same as not using the intermediary.

[brookst]

IANAL but I believe that gets you into conspiracy territory while also demonstrating that the intent was to break the law. At Amazon’s scale there would have to be a policy to do this, and discovery on that would be a nightmare.