Corporate America loves to proclaim its love and support for our veterans. The persistent problem of veteran suicide has provided big firms with an opportunity to demonstrate their concern about the health and well-being of former military personnel, including those they employ. Unfortunately, at companies like Amazon, this performative patriotism does not involve improving working conditions or changing any management practices that might actually make them better employers, even while they pledge to hire more employees with military backgrounds.

A recent report by Brown University’s Costs of War project found that “four times as many men and women who have served in the U.S. military have died by suicide than were killed in post 9/11 wars.” Cost of War researchers estimate that the total suicide toll among veterans and service members during the past two decades is more than 30,000. According to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), veterans are 1.5 times more likely to die by suicide than nonveterans, while female veterans are 2.2 times more likely to die by suicide than civilian women.

When soldiers leave active duty, their employment status and job conditions — pay, benefits, and treatment by supervisors — can have a major impact on their emotional and financial stability. With this in mind, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation joined forces with the Trump administration two years ago to promote a suicide reduction initiative called PREVENTS. Its objective was building “a public-private partnership to strengthen emotional well-being in the workplace.”

Major corporations were solicited to sign a “Hiring Our Heroes Challenge Pledge” and make a related commitment to “best practices for strengthening mental wellness and preventing suicide.” The latter pledge notes that their “employee populations,” including veterans, may have certain risk factors, such as “financial stress, emotional stress, and substance use and abuse.” To reduce these risk factors, the signatory firms agreed to “promote a safe, inclusive work environment and leverage employee resource groups” to “create communities of support.”

Among the first twenty-five “forward-looking employers” to sign up was Amazon, along with equally anti-union firms like Walmart, Starbucks, Comcast, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The company founded by Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, pledged to hire 25,000 more veterans and military spouses by 2021. Last year, that goal became 100,000 by 2024. These new hires would then be encouraged to join the company’s officially approved workplace-based “affinity group,” known as Warriors@Amazon. (Among this influx of veterans is retired general Keith Alexander, a multimillionaire former director of the National Security Agency, who has become a well-compensated “warrior” on the Amazon board of directors.)

As coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders generated a huge increase in Amazon’s online order flow, shareholder value increased by nearly $500 billion to more than $1.4 trillion. By mid-2020, Bezos’s personal net worth rose to nearly $190 billion. This enabled the Amazon founder to become an even bigger patron of a super PAC called the With Honor Fund. Its wealthy donors seek out centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans who served in the military and promise, if elected to Congress, to join “a cross-partisan veterans caucus.” During the 2018 election cycle, Bezos gave $10 million to With Honor — during the same week that super PAC critic Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate called the Stop Bezos Act.

The goal of Sanders’s legislation was to force Amazon to reimburse the federal government for the cost of public benefits, like Medicaid or food stamps, that thousands of its workers are eligible to collect because their pay is so low. Sanders’s attempt to hold the company accountable was not successful, in part because Congress already has too many members like the ones Bezos helps finance via With Honor.

At a town hall meeting hosted by Sanders, navy veteran Seth King, who quit Amazon after three months on the job, publicly questioned his former employer’s commitment to providing fair wages and “workplace wellness.” He described Amazon’s employment model as “a revolving door of just bodies that they’re throwing at the floor.”

Telling a now familiar warehouse worker story, he recalled working long hours under the pressure of demanding productivity standards, with few chances to sit down or take a bathroom break. As King drove to work every day, it “was exhausting just thinking about having to come in and start another ten-hour shift, being on my feet the whole time.”

At a company supposedly sensitive to risk factors for suicide, King felt like he “didn’t want to be alive anymore if that was the future that I had to look forward to. I was in the navy for eight years, and there wasn’t a single day that I felt as miserable or isolated as I did at Amazon.”

Other veterans hired to be warehouse managers have made similar unfavorable comparisons. One, an officer still active in the reserves, reported that his warehouse was understaffed and overheated due to insufficient air-conditioning. When mistakes occurred, he said, he’d usually get chewed out by one of his bosses.

“I didn’t get treated as bad in the [military] in basic training,” he said. “You screw up — it’s a screaming, cussing, yelling tirade on the floor.”

Like several other warehouse supervisors interviewed by CNET,  this veteran faced pressure to leave the military because, he was told, a “manager wouldn’t be able to advance at the company if he continued to serve both the military and Amazon.” When queried about these alleged violations of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, which protects service members from job discrimination or denial of promotions due to their absence from work for military commitments, Amazon proclaimed its commitment “to supporting our military and veteran employees and providing opportunities for their long-term career growth and success.”

An exposé in the New York Times documented the degree to which Amazon actually “intentionally limits upward mobility for hourly workers.” One top executive torpedoed a proposal from Human Resources to “create more leadership roles for hourly employees, similar to non-commissioned officers in the military.” Instead, “guaranteed wage increases stopped after three years and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave.”

Such policies reflected Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s belief that hourly workers who stayed too long at the company would become lazy, disgruntled, and entrenched, putting Amazon on what he called “a march to mediocrity.”