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How Jeff Bezos’s Surrender to Trump Freed Him to Dodge Labor Laws
One of the business world’s more nauseating capitulations to President Donald Trump has been that of the world’s third-richest human, Jeff Bezos (net worth: $264 billion). During the 2016 campaign Bezos was a Trump critic, pointing out that “saying that he may lock up his opponent erodes our democracy around the edges.” The newspaper Bezos owned, _The Washington Post_ _,_ broke the damaging story of Trump boasting on videotape that “when you’re a star, they let you do it … grab them by the pussy.” After Trump became president, Bezos said that it was “really dangerous to demonize the media, it’s dangerous to call the media low-lifes, it’s dangerous to say that they’re the enemy of the people.”
Trump retaliated in 2019 by denying Amazon a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon and giving it to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued, arguing this was an act of political retribution, and got the Microsoft award overturned; in 2022 the Biden administration divvied the contract among Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. By then, Bezos had become more circumspect. After the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Bezos offered no public condemnation, and in 2024 he barred the _Post _from endorsing any presidential candidate. That turned out to be a prelude to dumbing down and lurching rightward the paper’s editorial pages, then shrinking the news staff so drastically—all but eliminating once-substantial coverage of foreign affairs, sports, culture, and the D.C. region—as to remove the _Post_ from the first rank of American newspapers.
Bezos’s attention had turned elsewhere. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund, created an online Trump merchandise store, paid $40 million to license a puffer documentary about first lady Melania Trump ($28 million of which reportedly went directly to Melania), spent an additional $35 million publicizing the film, and plans a follow-up Melania series this fall. By May 2026, Bezos was telling CNBC: “I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.” It’s doubtful even members of Trump’s own administration believe that (though of course they’d never admit so publicly).
In his forthcoming book, _Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era_ , Jacob Weisberg argues that Bezos’s space company Blue Origin was the primary reason for Bezos’s pusillanimous surrender. “In the new privatized space race,” Weisberg writes, “fealty and favoritism would drive outcomes, as they did with everything else under Trump.” The Biden administration had awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion lunar lander contract that Bezos feared would be canceled as Trump brought into the White House his rival Elon Musk (who owns Space X). The Blue Origin contract was not canceled. Indeed, it and other Bezos-owned space companies this year received hundreds of millions in additional NASA contracts, even though the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is an Elon Musk guy.
Amazon, too, has benefited from the Bezos surrender. On September 1, Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House Government and the Workforce Committee, and John Mannion, a Democratic member of the committee, sent a letter to the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Crystal Carey, inquiring about two conspicuous retreats by Carey in a never-ending legal siege that Amazon has been fending off for years. At issue is whether Amazon may continue to pretend that workers who wear uniforms that say “Amazon,” drive vans that say “Amazon,” and deliver packages from Amazon do not work for Amazon and that Amazon therefore need not pay benefits, Social Security tax, unemployment compensation, minimum wage, etc., nor allow these workers to organize. Carey is allowing the masquerade of Amazon’s non-employment of these delivery personnel to continue.
The fight to end Amazon’s fissured-workplace scam (which, among other things, gives Amazon an unfair competitive advantage over the United Parcel Service, which employs its drivers) is being carried out on multiple fronts, at both the state and federal levels, using various legal tools, including antitrust law and two labor statutes, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. The two cases flagged by Scott concern the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, and therefore the National Labor Relations Board.
One case concerns 84 former Amazon drivers who operated out of an Amazon facility in Palmdale, California. Their ostensible sole employer was an Amazon contractor called Battle-Tested Strategies. In April 2023 the drivers organized themselves into a unit of the Teamsters; negotiated a new contract with Battle-Tested Strategies; and informed Amazon that it would have to renegotiate its contract with Battle-Tested Strategies to conform to the union contract, which among other things included a wage hike.
Amazon responded by terminating its contract with Battle-Tested Strategies. Teamsters Local 396 filed a complaint with the NLRB, arguing that Amazon employed the drivers jointly with Battle-Tested Strategies and refused to bargain in good faith. President Joe Biden’s NLRB general counsel agreed with the complaint; the matter was referred to an administrative law judge; and a trial began. (The NLRB general counsel acts as a sort of prosecutor.)
In April 2026, however, with the NLRB under the control of the Trump administration, a new general counsel, Carey, interceded with a “unilateral settlement agreement”—an unusual maneuver in which the general counsel reaches a settlement with one party in the dispute (in this instance, Amazon) over the objections of the other (in this instance, the Teamsters). The unilateral settlement gave the affected workers two weeks’ back pay, with Amazon admitting no guilt in the matter.
The second of the two cases involved an Amazon contractor in Atlanta, Georgia, called MJB LLC. In this instance, an NLRB complaint was filed by an Amazon driver named Hunter Richau. Richau said that after he complained that the boss welshed on a promise of bonus pay he was subjected to various threats by MJB LLC, including one in which MJB LLC’s owner said the company had been instructed by Amazon to “silence the loudest voices” (which, if true, would confirm beyond any doubt that Amazon jointly employed Richau). This case, too, was initiated under Biden and continued for some time under Trump before Carey was appointed general counsel (though unlike the Palmdale case it had not yet gone to an administrative law judge). In June, Carey once again interceded with a “unilateral settlement agreement,” opposed in this instance by Richau. This time, all Amazon had to do was post a notice promising to honor workplace rights.
In their letter, Scott and Mannion pointed out that in permitting Amazon to avoid admitting guilt, Carey was contradicting a memorandum on settlement agreements to which she’d agreed in February. Scott and Mannion also requested that Carey inform the committee of any additional unilateral settlements reached under Trump.
We don’t know who these other violators of labor law handed a get-out-of-jail-free card may be. But we know that Jeff Bezos is getting a good return on his investment in Donald Trump. Granted, Trump likely has no idea what these cases were about. But he did nominate Carey to be general counsel knowing that previously she’d been an attorney with Morgan Lewis and Bockius, a prominent management-side law firm. Among Carey’s clients at Morgan Lewis was Amazon. Carey promised at her Senate confirmation that she would recuse herself from any enforcement decisions or actions concerning Amazon. But a year later Carey claimed that her recusal expired before she was sworn in as general counsel! In effect, the Trump administration was telling Bezos: You play nice with us, we play nice with you.
