How Many Jobs Has Amazon Created

[Torie Crivello]

Ofall the places President Obama might give a speech on rebuilding middle-class jobs, an Amazon warehouse is an especially perplexing and troubling choice. Here are five ways Amazon is costing our economy and undermining real job growth.

Another way Amazon gets by with such a small workforce is by leaning on the services provided by brick-and-mortar stores. Through its mobile app, Amazon actively encourages consumers to try-out merchandise in stores and then buy online. This allows Amazon to free-ride on the value created by other businesses. Take books, for example. Amazon now accounts for about one-third of book sales. But, if you ask Amazon book shoppers where they learned about a book, only rarely is the answer Amazon. Far more often, according to research by Codex Group, they discovered the book while browsing in an actual bookstore.

Amazon provides virtually no jobs or economic benefits to the vast majority of communities from which it derives its revenue. This stands in stark contrast to local retailers. Several case studies have found that about $45 of every $100 you spend at locally owned stores stays in your community, supporting other businesses and jobs. (Local retailers buy many goods and services, like printing and accounting, from other local businesses; their employees spend most of their earnings locally; and so on.)

These deals are on top of the enormous financial advantage Amazon has enjoyed by virtue of not having to collect sales taxes in most of the country for the better part of two decades. That advantage is slowly coming to an end, but, over the years, it cost states and cities billions of dollars in lost revenue, while forcing local retailers to compete with one hand tied behind their backs.

The future Amazon has in mind for our country is a far cry from the middle class prosperity President Obama has been seeking. A better place to look would be along Main Street, among the new generation of independent businesses, small-scale manufacturers, local food producers, and others that are beginning to chart a much more viable path from here to there.

With Amazon S3 Batch Operations, you can perform large-scale batch operations on a list of specific Amazon S3 objects. This section describes the information that you need to create an S3 Batch Operations job and the results of a CreateJob request. It also provides instructions for creating a Batch Operations job by using the Amazon S3 console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDK for Java.

When you create an S3 Batch Operations job, you can request a completion report for all tasks or only for failed tasks. As long as at least one task has been invoked successfully, S3 Batch Operations generates a report for jobs that have been completed, have failed, or have been canceled. For more information, see Examples: S3 Batch Operations completion reports.

Specify the operation that you want S3 Batch Operations to run against the objects in the manifest. Each operation type accepts parameters that are specific to that operation. With Batch Operations, you can perform an operation in bulk, with the same results as if you performed that operation one-by-one on each object.

Direct Batch Operations to generate a manifest automatically based on object filter criteria that you specify when you create your job. This option is available for batch replication jobs that you create in the Amazon S3 console, or for any job type that you create by using the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or Amazon S3 REST API.

Regardless of how you specify your manifest, the list itself must be stored in a general purpose bucket. Batch Operations can't import existing manifests from, or save generated manifests to directory buckets. Objects described within the manifest, however, can be stored in directory buckets. For more information, see Directory buckets.

If the objects in your manifest are in a versioned bucket, specifying the version IDs for the objects directs Batch Operations to perform the operation on a specific version. If no version IDs are specified, Batch Operations performs the operation on the latest version of the objects. If your manifest includes a version ID field, you must provide a version ID for all objects in the manifest.

S3 Batch Operations prioritizes jobs according to priority numbers, but strict ordering isn't guaranteed. Therefore, don't use job priorities to ensure that any one job starts or finishes before any other job. If you must ensure strict ordering, wait until one job has finished before starting the next.

Specify an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to run the job. The IAM role that you use must have sufficient permissions to perform the operation that is specified in the job. For example, to run a CopyObject job, the IAM role must have the s3:GetObject permission for the source bucket and the s3:PutObject permission for the destination bucket. The role also needs permissions to read the manifest and write the job-completion report.

Specify whether you want S3 Batch Operations to generate a completion report. If you request a job-completion report, you must also provide the parameters for the report in this element. The necessary information includes:

You can label and control access to your S3 Batch Operations jobs by adding tags. You can use tags to identify who is responsible for a Batch Operations job, or to control how users interact with Batch Operations jobs. The presence of job tags can grant or limit a user's ability to cancel a job, activate a job in the confirmation state, or change a job's priority level. For example, you could grant a user permission to invoke the CreateJob operation, provided that the job is created with the tag "Department=Finance".

To track and monitor your job, you can also provide a description of up to 256 characters. Amazon S3 includes this description whenever it returns information about a job or displays job details on the Amazon S3 console. You can then easily sort and filter jobs according to the descriptions that you assigned. Descriptions don't need to be unique, so you can use descriptions as categories (for example, "Weekly Log Copy Jobs") to help you track groups of similar jobs.

By default, Amazon S3 automatically uses server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) to encrypt a manifest that's uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket. Manifests that use server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) are not supported. Manifests that use server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys (SSE-KMS) are supported only when you're using CSV-formatted inventory reports. Using a manually created manifest with AWS KMS is not supported.

If you submit an inventory report manifest that's encrypted with SSE-KMS, your IAM policy must include the permissions "kms:Decrypt" and "kms:GenerateDataKey" for the manifest.json object and all associated CSV data files.

When you're using a manually created manifest and a versioned bucket, we recommend that you specify the version IDs for the objects. When you create a job, S3 Batch Operations parses the entire manifest before running the job. However, it doesn't take a "snapshot" of the state of the bucket.

Because manifests can contain billions of objects, jobs might take a long time to run, which can affect which version of an object that the job acts upon. Suppose that you overwrite an object with a new version while a job is running and you didn't specify a version ID for that object. In this case, Amazon S3 performs the operation on the latest version of the object, not on the version that existed when you created the job. The only way to avoid this behavior is to specify version IDs for the objects that are listed in the manifest.

You can direct Amazon S3 to generate a manifest automatically based on object filter criteria that you specify when you create your job. This option is available for batch replication jobs that you create in the Amazon S3 console, or for any job type that you create by using the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or Amazon S3 REST API. For more information about Batch Replication, see Replicating existing objects with S3 Batch Replication.

To filter the list of objects to be included in an automatically generated manifest, you can specify the following criteria. For more information, see JobManifestGeneratorFilter in the Amazon S3 API Reference.

You can't clone most jobs that have automatically generated manifests. Batch replication jobs can be cloned, except when they use the KeyNameConstraint, MatchAnyStorageClass, ObjectSizeGreaterThanBytes, or ObjectSizeLessThanBytes manifest filter criteria.

If you choose S3 inventory report, enter the path to the manifest.json object that Amazon S3 generated as part of the CSV-formatted Inventory report, and optionally the version ID for the manifest object if you want to use a version other than the most recent.

If you choose CSV, enter the path to a CSV-formatted manifest object. The manifest object must follow the format described in the console. You can optionally include the version ID for the manifest object if you want to use a version other than the most recent.

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