TOP STORY this week as far as idling goes must be the New York Times’s superb essay on the brutal workplace culture at Amazon.

It seems that Amazon employees are encouraged to be constantly critical: of each other, of themselves, and of everyone else. Combined with a pressure to work eighty hour weeks, it’s not surprising that the NYT was able to assemble evidence for a pretty damning critique of daily life in one of the world’s biggest companies.

The piece mentioned Amazon’s horrific so-called leadership principles. These are the company’s own version of the Ten Commandments, fourteen mantras which staff must study.

I’m going to enter them for our Bad Grammar Award.

Here’s an example: “These Principles work hard, just like we do… It’s just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.”

Hum. A few basic errors there, both grammatical and philosophical. First, that should be a lower case p, you illiterate morons. Secondly, a principle cannot work hard. It cannot work at all. It has no independence of motion. Thirdly, it appears that Amazon’s leaders are just as limited and unimaginative in their vision of what life is all about as David Cameron, with his “hardworking people” mantra. The mid-Victorian politicians with their “ten hour day” campaign were more enlightened than these new mill owners. Fourthly, how many principles? There is a bit of mix-up there as far as number goes. Finally, the word “peculiar”. Doesn’t that sound very weird to you? What do they mean?

And the sheer pomposity of it all! From a mere mail-order catalogue company, market traders. You would think that the leadership team thinks that they’re the new incarnation of Christ, the way they talk.

Also, you would have thought the world’s brainiest geeks could design a workplace that staff actually like, but that seems beyond them.

Jeff Bezos has already responded to the piece, saying that it “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with.” Caring Amazonians? He makes them sound like altruistic Kids Company workers or early monks rather than mail order operatives trying to make a few quid. It makes me want to open their campus gates in Seattle and their warehouse in Swansea and shout “run free, run free! You are not an Amazonian! You are a free man!”

ENDS