As Australians are deluged with our annual inducement to open our wallets on Black Friday and raid Amazon’s retail forests for special deals, it’s worth reflecting where that money will flow.
As you prepare to go into your retail frenzy, remember the Amazon workers who race around warehouses picking orders at unsustainable work rates set by algorithms that remove every pause in their workday.
Amazon’s accountants are also racing around tax laws wherever they can. The Fair Tax Foundation found Amazon has the worst tax conduct among the tech giants, with cash tax just 11.3 per cent of its profit over the decade to 2019.
In Australia last year, Amazon paid just $125 million based on $6.6 billion in total income. That’s a tax rate of less than 4 per cent of income for this behemoth company.
A large proportion of Amazon’s global profits end up in a Luxembourg subsidiary, a nation where entities are taxed only on the income they make within the tiny haven.
This is the type of behaviour governments have been trying to regulate through multinational........