I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless.
Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them over this difficult transition period where they're still required for part of the menial manual labour tasks. The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through.
> The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through.
As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that Amazon can easily hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
> It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
That's about as useful a statement as "Thoughts and prayers."
To change the labor market you go after the parties you can affect. Amazon is one. There are many others on the demand side. Retaining the workforce would be a much lower % return for the investment.
Is it? In countries with higher minimum wages, McDonald's uses kiosks for ordering. I'm guessing, but it feels like 1/3 of fast food staff mans the registers.
Do you have a citation for this? Tokyo has a high minimum wage (and low enough unemployment that most employers have to pay more than minimum wage), but I've yet to see an automated kiosk here.
Though in support of your point, when I went to Korea last year there was a large number of automated kiosks, and I know the minimum wage there is fairly high as well. So, Japan's lack of those kiosks may have to do with a preference towards cash/human interaction in the culture.
Isn’t Japan famous for manning a lot of jobs, culturally?
Around here (Central Europe, Austria, Germany, Italy too IIRC) I don’t see non-kiosk McDonalds anymore, as they went through the kiosk upgrade in the past few years. Noticeably fewer employees.
It takes a long time to develop and plan a rollout of those kinds of automated kiosks for large companies. They've clearly been planning such a rollout for many years. The fact it's coincided with a lot of discussion of minimum wage increases is either a complete coincidence or an example of correlation not implying causation -- mass layoffs usually result in discussions about labour laws.
I would argue that the job losses to automation would've happened anyway without any discussion of wage increases -- kiosks are cheaper than even below-living-wage workers.
I haven't been to Japan in many years, but they had plenty of kiosks for ordering food from restaurants. You put in money, hit the button next to the pic of the food you want, it gives you a ticket and you take it to the cook.
Automated kiosks for ordering aren't new - they date back about to the 1890s. They actually went out of fashion in the 1950s-60s when wages grew the fastest and died out entirely in 1991.
This is reminding me of a discussion about Facebook's content enforcement, where I still don't understand the argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20222594. Pressuring people to miss bathroom breaks is wrong, I'd agree - I'm all for that being legally punishable if it isn't already. But the argument gets to a point where people are simply saying that the job inherently sucks anyway, and the people who are voluntarily doing it in exchange for the money would be better off not even being given the option and being involuntarily unemployed, and if necessary, the company employing them shouldn't even exist if that job must be done. I don't understand it.
I hate saying this, but it comes from a place of privilege. If you've never not had a job, you think just banning bad jobs will mean everyone has a good job. If you've been unemployed, you know you'd rather have a job and have it reformed through continuous work than be unemployed.
The problem, though, is that there are people who have never not had jobs who nonetheless have opinions on what the baseline job should be. Since they've never had to choose between food and a shitty job, they assume that they can solve the problem by just mandating jobs not be shitty.
People who are better at finding and keeping jobs -- are, typically, against minimum wage increase (because they better understand the consequences of such restriction).
Ironically, people who struggle with keeping a job -- are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot by supporting minimum wage increase.
Not everyone else is. People may put up with the 'above average' amazon because everything else in the area is still paying closer to minimum wage. If min wage was raised, it might make it easier to say 'no' to the amazon warehouse gig.
It sounds like conditions are more of a problem than pay. Maybe there should be less that enforce regular breaks for workers doing monotonous jobs, and maximum hours.
Good luck getting a that kind of law passed in America though. Far too socialist.
But the regulation strongly influences what the market will pay. The trend of allowing companies to have employees sign non-competes for relatively low skilled jobs, for example, depresses wages by impeding competition for labor.
It is fortunate that companies found these 1099 loopholes.
Without these loopholes, low-skilled candidates would have much harder time to find and keep their jobs.
It is amazing how many commenters on Hacker News do NOT understand basic economic model of supply and demand.
Supply side economics has been debunked over and over. To change the labour market you reduce the labour supply or increase demand. Demand is already high, so tighten up labour supply. Or, in other words, limit immigration.
> I think at this point most smart members of HN should realize that the only reason immigration has much momentum is because the democrat party relies on it to win elections.
It's the “Democratic Party” and, no, they don't.
> All I see from Democrats is all talk about helping the poor but they don't do the most sensible and easiest thing to help the poor, simply limit the pool of labor by limiting immigration of low skilled workers.
Limiting immigration doesn't limit labor supply in a globalized market; it effects it's geography, but whether or not labor mobility is restricted capital and goods are largely free to move (and, no, Trump's tariff policies, while breaking with the neoliberal consensus, haven't been well designed to promote the interest of working Americans either. There was once a Democratic Party idea of “free and fair” trade that would have been good had it actually been substantially pursued, but in practice Bill Clinton pursued neoliberal free trade with only vestigial gestures to the kind of common, upward-moving standards they would prevent a race to the bottom.
> As far as democrats are concerned, a worker from Bangladesh is just as deserving of a given job as a worker from Florida.
Nope. I'm saying that Democrats realize that with relatively free movement of capital and goods, stopping a worker from Bangladesh from entering the US doesn't remove that worker from the pool of labor competing with US labor.
I didn't say anything even remotely related to what anyone deserves, and deserving something more doesn't change the facts about what does and doesn't work to achieve it.
This is a very globalist view. What about region specific jobs? The worker in Bangladesh absolutely isn't in the local competitive pool for service jobs. When we talk about exported goods, then sure.
We have a very globalized economy, whether that's your preference or not.
> The worker in Bangladesh absolutely isn't in the local competitive pool for service jobs
Jobs are not things that inherently exist in places and which people compete for, jobs are created by the confluence of supply and demand. Yes, some demand is highly localized, such as for certain service work, but demand for service work also tends to have very high price elasticity. Reducing supply can work to drive up market clearing price of labor in those areas, but only while simultaneously reducing the number of units of labor actually traded. You aren't keeping the same jobs and reducing competition, you are reducing the number of actual jobs to essentially those that would have been filled at the higher salary whether or not the lower paid worker was also, additionally, employed. And you are reducing domestic economic activity and velocity of money, because the trades that don't happen in the service economy because of the price effect of the labor constraint either become deferred activity or go somewhere else, mostly goods, some portion of which are imported, either of which is a local loss compared to domestic service trade.
So the worker at mcdonald’s has competition from bangladesh because of price elasticity? how does the worker from bangladesh compete with local only jobs? you’ve failed to make your point.
> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
The market has no moral compass. If you decide that the market dictates what we should do, then your actions will reflect the morals of the market, i.e., none.
Supply and demand is a statement of what "is", not what "should be". To some approximation.
Or perhaps reasonable workers' rights and actual enforcement? Along the lines of mandating more breaks or preventing companies from hiring and scheduling many people at just below full-time so the employees aren't eligible for myriad benefits, both compensatory and quality of life.
That's a leap, for sure. I am not arguing for a higher minimum wage. I didn't mention minimum wage, even obliquely. I am arguing that it is correct to demonize companies for their labor practices.
Increasing minimum wage will do nothing. If you increase the cost of the workers of a good then the cost of the good increases. The idea that we can raise the minimum wage without inflating will never happen, companies are not just going to absorb the costs of increased wages, they will increase their prices to compensate. So the net effect of raising the minimum wage is nothing.
Amazon pays above minimum wage, so the only thing increasing minimum wage will do is reduce the job supply and make people even more desperate to keep the Amazon jobs.
No, no. If you pay unskilled workers more, they will spend more and the overall economy benefits. There will be more jobs and everybody will be happy. This is called Spray Up Economics.
You also price the bottom end out of the market. Sure mega-corps can afford to pay workers more, but half employees work for small businesses which are very sensitive to minimum wages. When wages go up it can be harder for employers to justify hiring teenagers, older, or disabled folk for entry level jobs like being a bus-boy.
"The market" is not intelligent, moral, or nice to people. "The market" decided that slaves are a pretty efficient way of farming. You can hate the game not the player, but the player is still responsible at some point.
Slavery was by definition the opposite of a market system, because the government enforced a system where people were not free to choose whether to provide their services in return for compensation.
People could choose. Slaves couldn't. They were literally not considered people (which then "improved" to 3/5th of a person).
Or to put it another way, "the market" may decide that the optional strategy is when you have no voice and are an obedient resource. In that case your opinion about it being the opposite of a market system doesn't matter.
Is this what they’re teaching in school these days? Market systems by definition by definition require freedom of transaction on both sides. Slavery is by definition not a market. In a very real sense, it was the industrial market economy of the north that beat the agrarian feudalist economy of the south into submission and freed the slaves.
(Also, slaves were never considered “3/5 of a person. The text of the relevant provision read:
> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
In the above equation, slaves must count as a whole “person.” Otherwise, you’re multiplying 3/5 by 3/5. That’s just math and grammar. That’s leaving aside the fact that the whole point of this clause was to limit the power of slave states, and it would’ve been better for purposes of this clause to not count slaves as people at all, to further reduce the power of the south.)
> That’s leaving aside the fact that the whole point of this clause was to limit the power of slave states, and it would’ve been better for purposes of this clause to not count slaves as people at all, to further reduce the power of the south.
Always found the irony of this fascinating. Similarly, women and non-landowners were each counted as a "full person" for the purposes of the census, despite the fact that they couldn't vote, which means that states with higher amounts of income/landowning inequality or a statistically significant female gender disparities would put more voting power in the hand of rich white dudes.
One could imagine some horrific historical dystopia where corrupt rich polygamists are bringing in more women and poor people into their state to gain more power in the House.
As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
I do not agree that market efficiency should have priority over all other considerations. It seems to me this idea simply reflects the views of those who derive a net benefit from markets, and are oblivious (by accident or choice) to the costs of market failure or impossibility of clearance.
Look, supply and demand only work under conditions of perfect competition, which include total knowledge of the market by all participants and no costs for entry or exit. Such conditions obviously do not obtain in many, perhaps most real world contexts. A slavish obedience to these laws is therefore a losing strategy, and indeed in the real world most people take a strategic approach.
People who take a strategic approach for themselves while insisting on the supremacy of supply and demand to others (who may or may not be aware of the dichotomy and subsequently credulous of the assertion) are engaged in an act of deception.
The fact that Amazon can easily hire people at $15/hr at its current abysmal working conditions does not mean that they morally should. The market conditions let Amazon get away with it, and collective action changes market conditions.
Costco provides health insurance and pays its employees well, and employee satisfaction is high. Chick-fil-A pays its workers $17 an hour minimum and provides health insurance and benefits. There are plenty of other examples of successful businesses that pay above "market conditions". These places are also high on satisfaction and people are treated like human beings.
The problem is working for a business owner who's a prick. That's not the fault of capitalism, it's the fault of Amazon's leadership.
That's not really the same job you would have to compare other Amazon with other warehouse workers (not that amazon works should not have good working conditions.
The Q is how does Amazon compare to similar Jobs and in the UK JB Sports seems to have similar problems with hundreds of workers taken to hospital over 4 years.
They too pay at market conditions - everybody does. They just value some things (employee churn, loyalty, valuing the job and being nicer to customers etc.) more than they value money.
In Europe, Lidl is known to pay cashiers significantly more than others too. It’s damn hard to get a job there, people don’t leave Lidl jobs; consequently Lidl can afford to be picky and hire the best people in the segment. That’s business strategy, and spending money to accomplish their goal, not paying “above” market to be some sort of socialist Samaritans.
Amazon doesn’t give a damn about churn, because they don’t need to, and as long as people are freely willing to work for them, as more than enough clearly are, they don’t need to pay more.
Given Amazon is such a large part of that market, they do in fact play a large role in the perpetuation of that market. This strike action is in fact those people pushing back both against Amazon and that larger set of conditions they are in.
Would it not be even more in Amazon's interest to cultivate labor practices which make their warehouses places people might want, instead of merely being willing, to work?
"Oh, the market..." Bullshit. Amazon can afford to let people go to the bathroom without fearing for their jobs. They choose not to.
Tangentially one thing that I've pondered is the the Amazon Fulfillment Centers are typically on the periphery exurban areas such that they will have the benefits of the minimum wage legislation of the urban area but that wage will go a lot farther and they will have a lot shorter commute then if they were located in the urban area itself as a normal retail job would. That seems smart. For instance, $15 an hour goes a lot farther in Tracy and Stockton toward rent or a downpayment than it does in the Mission. Obviously Amazon were to pay more and that would be even better.
Poor people generally don't live in suburban or exurban areas. And if they can't afford decent transportation then they will either face very long commutes or move and be stranded with whatever jobs are in the periphery exurban area.
Three fun facts. One, most poor people live in the suburbs. In Atlanta, for example, the figure is 88%. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/suburbs.... Two, 80% of people living in poverty have access to a vehicle: https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu.... Three, in post WWII cities, almost all jobs are in suburban and exurban areas. In Atlanta, more than 75% of jobs are outside the city itself (many parts of which are pretty suburban to begin with). 80% of all job growth is outside the city.
So yes, $15/hour employment in exurban areas is actually good for poor people.
Previously yes, since a high number of retail jobs (i.e. stacking shelves, sorting inventory, etc.) were all done in the core part of the urban area (i.e. think Target or BestBuy directly in the downtown area). With Amazon Fulfillment, the "retail-like" jobs (sorting inventory) can be done where the employee actually can relocate to the periphery and have a traffic free commute. And delivery drivers will be returning the fufillment center so will naturally be returning to the periphery at the end of their shifts.
This results in several net negatives for workers though:
- Housing in exurban areas is not necessarily cheap. And moving has a nonzero cost. People may not be able to move to the exurbs in the first place.
- Downtown is where services are. Generally speaking, suburban support for low-income people is often lacking. And kids have to switch schools, people lose their existing community support networks, etc.
- Because downtown has so much employment, it's relatively easy to switch between jobs. Don't like your retail job? You can switch to another retailer, or a restaurant, or any other type of low income job. In these exurban areas, how much employer diversity is there? Is it easy to get to other employers?
This mostly seems like it would just create company slums.
On the first, you're looking at $1500 in rent or $350K to purchase for a one bedroom in Tracy versus $3500 in rent or $1M to purchase for a one bedroom in SF. Fair point on the second one, some sacrifices will need to be made. At some point though - downtown won't be able to support everyone living in a 1800 square foot home and trying to get to work no matter what zoning.
I think the last one is the strongest - they are stuck if there are no alternative employment options.
> It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
There's no reason we can't do both. Unfortunately, once you start criticising capitalism (which inevitably leads to these types of employee-employer abuses without unions or other legislation) you get called a communist (incorrectly) and the discussion is over.
Because it is no person’s place to compel, using violence, two consenting adults to alter an agreement between them to which they both voluntarily consent and that harms no third party.
So in your system, if I pay an employee to climb an unsafe ladder, OSHA has no right to slap me for that because the employee consented? That sounds awful. There would be many preventable deaths and injuries under a system that neuters OSHA; what you're proposing is deeply immoral.
The boss shows you a rickety ladder and says “Climb up there or you’re clocking out for the day!” You, drawing on the extensive mechanical engineering and actuarial experience that got you this $15/hr warehouse job, evaluate the likelihood of it collapsing and the expected bills, pain, and suffering if it does. “Looks shakey—give me another $2.73 first”, you say. The boss rummages around his bag, hands you some change, and away you go.
Even if in a world where individual freedom/responsibility trumps everything else, it seems like safety standards would save hassle. In the actual world, where everyone can’t assess all of these risks—-and many of them are hard even for experts to accurately measure—they seem even more worthwhile.
I'd say the libertarian's response would be that organizations like UL (which already does work for OSHA) would get hired by the company to certify their workplace, which would then serve as enticement for job candidates.
This would essentially make job safety another "perk", like flex time and friday pizza - available to some, based on the scarcity of their skills.
As someone who would call myself left-libertarian, I have some sympathy for your position. The thing is that the whole society - including the very existence of Amazon - is currently predicated on state violence, and therefore focusing specifically on the small part that provides worker protections looks unseemly.
Not to mention that an opposition to state enforcement of minimum wages does not justify the claim that Amazon should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
This is true but in the absence of a method to internalize externalities it is worse to subsidize those who can maximally externalize their costs. I don't think that the inadequate legal system that allows people to externalize their costs to me is a sufficient deterrent to violations of the no harm principle.
Any system that does not internalize costs explicitly subsidizes those actions that greatest externalize. I'm not good with that. It's not a free market. You don't get to sell my property rights just because the law isn't good enough to recognize that which is inherently mine.
OSHA doesn't overrule what someone can do with their bodies at all. It forbids businesses and their employees acting in an official capacity from demanding that other employees do something that puts them in unnecessary danger. If a business entity wants limited liability for shareholders, that's the contract they sign with the state.
OSHA couldn't care less if a CEO or Chairman climbed up on that dangerous ladder and got hurt.
I must admit, this is the first time I've seen a libertarian bold enough to dress up something as inane as dismantling OSHA with rhetoric deliberately evocative of modern progressive social movements. As though, by dismantling an agency dedicated to assuring safe working conditions, you're doing something akin to legalizing same-sex marriages. I have mad respect to anybody that bold, but give me a break!
Why do someone’s own choices about their own body remain valid when you agree with them, but not when you disagree with them?
I have given you a break: I have given you a logical, rational, sincere position, without snark or subterfuge.
I did not argue for dismantling OSHA; these are moral statements independent of any national law.
If anything, I argued against using violence to force people to do things (which is what OSHA, among thousands of other governmental organizations of every flavor around the world, do as a matter of course).
Using violent coercion to alter a consensual agreement between two adults interacting voluntarily is immoral, and denies the agency of the people agreeing to trade on those terms.
That's why hundreds of millions of smokers, smoked, after all. They carefully weighed up the evidence, using their medical training, avoided the lies from tobacco company advertising, used their "it's just common sense" know-everything superpower, and - in an almost unprecedented moment of human rational decision making - concluded that smoking was better than non-smoking.
No, it didn't happen that way. People smoked because it was cool, and it was cool because marketing people explicitly made it look cool. "Torches of freedom"[1] was how Edward Bernays set out to get women smoking cigarettes, for one famous example, generic "cool guy with a cigarette" in Hollywood films wasn't put there by accident, for another. And one of the main reasons smoking was pushed out was that second hand smoking gives other people cancer. People bought arsenic wallpaper and arsenic cloth. They did not decide, rationally and in full knowledge of the best available information, that green wallpaper was a better choice than their infant child staying alive. Or do you think they did choose that?
OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body.
OSHA's basis comes from the fact that there are many human biases, many con tricks, and many unintuitive risks, collectively learned over decades, which one human cannot rationally learn and consider in a short time. Even if that were all it was - a single human choosing whether they gamble with their health - it might be OK, but this is in the situation where a large and well resourced company has a profit-motive to exploit the humans, to coerce them and mislead them and pressure them, to take such risks without due consideration.
And worse, like the case of second hand smoke - you might be willing to climb a high structure without a safety harness, but your willingness means other people will be compelled to do so - by their employers and by peer pressure. You'll be faster, and your equipment costs will be lower. But you'll be putting other people at risk too - if you fall on a coworker, if you drop something on a bystander, if you slip on the floor in your gripless boots and knock someone else - your choices affect other people.
And society is willing to say "we don't want that. You must wear a harness, so that everyone can wear a harness. You must wear grippy boots, so other people can work safely around you.", without "fearing for your life" being a thing which excludes you from the workforce.
You're not free to drive a vehicle on public roads without a license or in a state of disrepair - because you risk harming other drivers and pedestrians. You're not free to adulterate food with sawdust, because it will harm people who eat it. You're not free to put poisons in jars marked for food, because it will harm people who don't know you've done that. You're not free to booby-trap your house because it puts emergency services at risk as well as burglars. You're not free to enslave others or sexually assault them, or take their property or money, because most of society wouldn't like that done to them. You're not free to make industrial noise in a suburban area when most people are trying to sleep, or to make toxic fumes or pollute rivers or groundwater supplies or use carcinogenic insecticide, because more people's need for potable water and sleep and edible food outweighs your need for easy money.
OSHA is a continuation of this concept of "other people" who matter and are affected by what you do.
Exactly where the limits lie, is collectively determined and up for argument. But to disavow the idea of restricted freedoms at all is somewhere along the lines of self-interest to the point of sociopathy, cluelessness, or inviting someone to shoot you and take your stuff just because they can.
Market conditions are set by regulation and market participants (there is no such thing as a pure free market except in an economist's textbook). Congress (the Senate specifically, conservatives/republicans) have failed to raise the federal minimum wage ($7.25, unchanged since 2009) to reflect the required wage to survive with increased costs of living (housing, broken healthcare, etc). This caused Senator Sanders to have to shame Amazon into paying a higher wage to Amazon's warehouse workers (which Amazon not only agreed to do, but also stated they would lobby for raising the federal minimum wage as well).
Why shouldn't one of the wealthiest companies in the world (a labor market participant) be demonizied for worker abuse, even if it is "legal"?
If you don't understand what Amazon fulfillment workers experience, I encourage you to take a vacation day or two and apply for a job at a warehouse as a runner. You'll only need a day or two to appreciate the experience. There is no college course or bootcamp for compassion and empathy.
I will admit that R's don't deserve the full blame here, many Democrats also oppose raising the minimum wage, and Nancy Pelosi, promising she would put a $15 minimum wage on the floor has not brought it up since taking the house. Both parties for the most part have their contingents that oppose raising the federal minimum wage.
1) Because it's not an Amazon problem, it's a fulfillment center/warehouse employee problem that applies to just about every company in the industry I'm aware of.
2) Because Amazon is a for-profit company, not a charity, and its responsibility is not to pay employees more than it has to or give them more benefits/easier working conditions than are necessary. Are you also demonizing your own employer for not paying everyone as much as it possibly can without going bankrupt?
3) Because in many areas where Amazon warehouses operate, they are a significantly better job prospect than other options, working conditions be damned.
4) Because competitive markets don't let companies pay their workers whatever they want to. If you pay your workers too much, a competitor will pay theirs less, pass the savings on to customers, and take market share from you. Amazon is one of the wealthiest companies in the world because it doesn't pay all 600,000+ of its warehouse workers an amazing salary and let them work in better conditions.
A lot of people who are angry at Amazon are really angry at the outcome of unchecked capitalism. These are the frustrations that should be applied to voting, not to perfectly legal corporate policies.
This is a fine plan if you're not the one suffering. Democracy takes time, and you can (and should) use leverage against corporations at the same time when necessary.
This is the point at which the thread swerves into unsubstantiveness and therefore flamewar. I realize it's not always predictable, but please take threads in the opposite direction.
Democracy takes time but I don't see any other way, as someone who are not the one suffering, I'm not going to boycott amazon. I like fast shipping and cheap item.
'matzl has a history of coming into these threads to tell everyone how much he just doesn't care. I like the cut of your jib but I've learned that it's probably better to down the troll and move on.
At this point your comments have the effect of trolling others, whether you meant to or not. Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We've had to ask you this before.
Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how provocative another comment is. Please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you'd take their spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.
Not responding is always an option, and in a case like this it's the right option, as expressed by the ancient internet adage "please don't feed the trolls". The site guidelines ask the same, albeit less colorfully.
How is telling me a terrible person going to be useful ? You have to face reality that like many other people, I like fast shipping and cheap stuff more than amazon worker welfare
> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
This isn't currently the case by a long shot, compensation is more driven by a monopolist control of the market than anything else. For retail, manufacturing and similar positions (like the amazon warehouse) compensation isn't being allowed to freely vary - businesses have become unreasonably entrenched and therefore retain a strong control of the capital for production, leading to an unbelievably strong wealth inequality. If you asked America who would be willing to take Jeff Bezos's job for a tenth of the compensation (including some stock options to make up for the fact that Bezos actually is paid quite modestly) everyone's hand would shoot up, among those there would be plenty of qualified individuals (including plenty with the aptitude but lacking the prior experience expected) - but for some reason the board of directors hasn't taken this action...
This is a sort of "free market" but not the sort of "free market" that I appreciate.
Is there an actual response to the market argument in there? Are you saying Amazon has a monopsony in retail and therefore can drive wages below market levels?
So I believe it does that at best only imperfectly and further it's neither obvious that compensation should be derived in that fashion nor in my, and many others, opinions is it correct.
> . It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for
Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you...think about that.
While I voted you up for the general point, I also think that perhaps cutting off the parent quote where you did is a little unfair:
> rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
It's appropriate to "demonize" Amazon, but isn't that observation also correct? Amazon's taking advantage of desperate people, and no matter the job market conditions, it's unethical for them to do so. But doesn't the fact that they can treat workers this way and still have workers suggest they're taking advantage of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed?
Not if people only have so much time+energy+motivation to protest things. Attempting to get people angry at one thing is implicitly an attempt to "spend" the limited currency of their motivation-to-make-the-world-a-better-place.
Righteous indignation works similarly to the "warm fuzzies" that cause people to donate to charity. Each person craves some set amount of these resources; once they have enough, they're satisfied, and they stop bothering to do things whose only reward is more of that resource.
I think you might be missing out on two important points here. As an amazon worker making ~$15 an hour, what avenue would you suggest to go about "demonizing" market conditions? What does that mean from their perspective? What does that mean at all, to demonize a condition? On the other hand, the people making those decisions have names, faces, addresses, and we can apply pressure on them where they personally feel it.
Secondly, a strike that's limited in scope or duration can help build solidarity among workers which can be drawn on again and again for more elaborate and risky actions. Think about it -- would the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you at work put his livelihood on the line for you? What if he didn't have to because every single worker on your floor would do so at the same time? This is all a process of transferring power from the C-suite to the workers where it belongs, and I think we need to evaluate the results of such actions based on those broader goals.
One of the easiest and best forms of protest is to stop spending money with Amazon, Walmart or <<insert some company here>>
Sometimes it is difficult - if Comcast is the only game in our area, then we don't have a choice. Otherwise, this hits these companies where it matters most - their profits.
I think it's correct that doing that is the most effective direct action, but the problem is that one person doing this is totally ineffective, it's the "drop of water" problem.
Raising a ruckus, strikes, etc are useful because they trigger people to become aware and concerned that this is a problem, causing more people to stop giving the company money. The ruckus is essential.
The problem is that workers in this position are getting squeezed by opposing forces.
On the top you have automation. They have jobs because they cost less than robots. But every wage increase or company benefit or break that reduces worker productivity is a step closer to cost parity with automation, and therefore the unemployment line.
On the other side, they can move away from that line by accepting lower pay or worse working conditions. And there is a trade off between the two as well -- if the job sucks more in a way that allows the business to hire fewer people then they can each get paid more without crossing the line where the jobs get automated.
Blaming Amazon for this is like blaming the local power company for world energy prices. They're just providing one corner of the triangle -- you can work there and have a hard job but better pay than most other unskilled work. If you want an easier unskilled job, those exist too, and they don't pay as much.
But the option to do easy unskilled work for high compensation isn't there. That's the corner of the triangle where the humans cost more than the robots. And maybe that's for the best, but the workers don't need Amazon to actually do that to get the same outcome from their perspective -- they can just quit.
It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers.
And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduced profits.
When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”
> When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”
You put your finger on the thing that bothers me most about the free-market critique of labor conditions. They all hand-wave away the responsibility that corporations have as entities run by (presumably) empathetic humans. Amazon does not have to automate away jobs instead of giving workers fairer conditions and wages. In fact, they may find that the boost in productivity that comes from happier, more rested, more focused workers more than makes up for the marginal decrease that comes from less pressure in the workplace.
The point is that we don't have to accept that corporations are, and should be, perfectly "rational" economic actors. They don't have to pursue profits at every conceivable avenue unless the market tells them otherwise.
True, but I bet there would be at least a small percentage of people who would still not buy from you because you don't treat your workers well. Most people would still shop with you, as their own wages are crap and they are looking for cheapest places to shop. But if they were paid well, they will at least consider shopping with ethically sound companies.
It is like a circle - lower wages lead to lower purchasing power, so companies pay their workers low to lower prices to sell to low earning customers, and so on...
Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the USA, behind the military.
It's fairly obvious how the above "draconian" conditions benefit customers. Employees that take long breaks or pick items slowly leads to delayed deliveries, having to employee more staff per delivery, having to raise prices or reduce range to cover this cost.
This is really the flip side of "customer obsessed", when you are focused on customers you don't particularly care about any individual employee (all the way up the chain).
For a counterexample, google and facebook mostly treat their employees well (with the exception of some contractors). However customers don't trust them as much, because they know they are profit/employee focused.
Why don’t you do that now? Amazon takes in billions in profit, meaning that their prices are substantially higher than they could be. Why aren’t you (or some other competitor) taking advantage of this?
It’s funny how this sort of argument never comes up in the context of taking profits.
Amazon profit from non AWS biz is in small billions and less, while it may be large in absolute, it is not high as percentage of revenue or by employee. Only way to beat Amazon in profit is have ridiculously high efficiency which is very difficult, or have a different business model which is normally a niche and will not be amazon scale.
Competitors do take advantage of this! There is vicious price competition for most of the kinds of goods that amazon ships from its warehouses. This competition has pushed profit margins into the single digits (probably low single digits). There's really not any room for prices to fall further with given technology.
Again, profit margins for this sort of work are tiny. Adding significant wage costs would almost certainly consume a huge percentage of profits at which point the suppliers of capital will invest their money elsewhere.
If you are going to make such a strong claim, you probably need to back it up with data.
Google Amazon profit ($11 billion and change last year), workforce size (650,000ish) and divide. That gives you a lower bound for the worst case where all Amazon employees are warehouse workers.
Amazon earns a lot of money from quite a few things that have nothing to do with warehouse workers. In particular I have read that half their profits come from AWS. I don't think that is enough data to support your claim.
A better set of numbers to look at might be Walmarts (more of a pure retail company). They make maybe 10B in profit per year (it varies a little) with 2M workers. That's $5,000 per worker which isn't much wiggle room.
Money is fungible. Amazon can afford to pay better. The only data you need to know that is what I gave.
You’re giving a reason why they might not want to. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that they want to. If they wanted to, they would be doing it already.
They only make $5000 per worker per year or so, given that the stock market has consistent returns of about 7% lately it's getting to the point that it would be better to put that money there was opposed to paying workers with it for such small returns.
$11 billion divided by 650,000 workers isn’t $5,000.
In any case, the point is that they can pay more. You can quibble over the amount. You can argue about whether or not they should. But they can, in the same way that I can buy an entire truck full of peaches if I decided that would be a good idea.
We are back at run the warehouses at a loss. The profits from AWS have nothing to do with the guys packing boxes and moving the profits from there to them is running it at a loss.
That analysis is wrong because it ignores two facts (1) Retail is a highly competitive, low margin business; and (2) Economic systems are dynamic, not static. Amazon’s profit margins are in low single digit percent. If Amazon pays above market wages and keeps prices the same, that creates an opportunity for Wal-Mart to come in and lower prices by using lower cost labor. Customers will go to Wal-Mart instead, because the Internet and things like Google Shopping make it trivial for consumers to chase marginal savings. As a result, Amazon’s workers are out of a job.
Note, by the way, that the minimum wage in our competitor countries (France, Germany, UK) is about $11.50 per hour adjusted for cost of living. That’s much lower than what Amazon is laying.
They could indeed use their other businesses to fund running their retail/fulfillment business at a loss. But at that point it would be just as rational to jettison those businesses (by spinning them off into another company), and now we're a step behind square one: they lose whatever economies they get from being a single company, their cost basis gets worse, and they're in an even poorer position to pay more.
These are descriptive, not normative, observations.
It's also a descriptive observation that they can afford to pay more without destroying the company. Whether they should is a separate question I haven't even attempted to address.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, only that it doesn't follow from the economics of their retail/fulfillment business (to which those employees belong) that they rationally can.
Paying someone materially above market value creates a precarious situation for the employee in which they are operating with an income they can’t hope to replace if the employer leaves. It happened where I live with an auto assembly plant. There are deleterious effects on the local job market as well, in which lical companies can’t pay enough to compete.
All told it’s probably better to put the money in the hands of an employee, but there are certainly negative consequences that can arise.
If we want unskilled laborers to have more money, it's much more economically efficient for governments do this through taxation and transfer payments then for individual companies that happen to employ people in this category to pay above market wages.
If society does it through taxation, it's everyone's responsibility.
If only certain companies are responsible, then only a portion of the population is responsible.
I completely agree. If Amazon pays their workers better, that won’t fix the millions of other workers stuck with bad pay and abusive jobs.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the individual companies. Certainly, our energies should be focused on bigger societal changes. But it’s not misplaced ore to also mention the fact that some companies could already do better, and choose not to.
I completely agree. If Amazon pays their workers better, that won’t fix the millions of other workers stuck with bad pay and abusive jobs.
That's not what I meant by "more efficient." If every company employing low skilled labor suddenly raised pay above market wages it might help all those workers. But it would mean that prices for things produced by unskilled laborers were artificially high and prices produced by higher skilled laborers would be artificially low. This would cause the market to produce the wrong mix of goods and services and we would all be worse off for the difference.
I don’t understand, how is that different from taxing and giving workers money that way? They should have the same effect in terms of economic efficiency. The only reason we use taxes for this sort of thing is because it’s harder to cheat.
You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees.
Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be.
To pay significantly more they would have to raise prices, which they can't do because they're in competition with Walmart and everyone else.
For context: if Amazon were to use all of its profits from FY18 (~$11B) to pay its ~650K workers more, it would come out to just under $17,000 per worker.
Did you actually try doing the math? $11 billion divided over 650k employees is roughly $17k which amounts to $75 per day assuming the employee works around 225 days a year which in turn amounts to less than $10 an hour assuming the employee works for 8 hours a day.
So you’re saying they could afford to give their workers a $5/hour raise and still retain a healthy profit? Why the snide question at the beginning, then?
I try to tip well. If you think I should tip better, make your case. If I disagree, I’ll make my case. I can guarantee you that if that happens, my argument won’t be that I’m tipping the market rate.
Waitresses make less than minimum wage, don't they deserve healthcare, to raise a family, to live in the center of some of the most expensive real estate in the world and have at least two weeks paid vacation per year? If you were to tip say $50 to $100 each time you ate out this could be a reality. How much would $50 be compared to your net worth, less than 1%? Greedy capitalist.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It leads to degraded discussion, we're trying for a bit better than that, and I'm sure you can make your substantive points without it.
Doesn't matter, like Amazon it doesn't matter that everyone else pays much less than you (market rate) instead you are personally responsible for the lives of anyone you pay for a service. If the amount you are willing to pay doesn't result in a great standard of living then you are at fault.
>Doesn’t matter if your claim is actually correct or not? That’s a hell of an argument.
If you eat out once in a lifetime or every day an effective wage can still be calculated. In NY or CA you are talking something like 30 - 50 dollars a meal[0], even more if you want to provide healthcare and all the rest. Its likely you aren't leaving $20 - $50 bills on the table for your morning coffee so why don't you think baristas deserve a living wage? It would be such a small percentage of your net worth.
I dont think the point was missed at all. In fact, I think it was effectively rebutted. I think he's pointing out that not being able to urinate without the risk of being fired is incredibly dehumanizing no matter how much you pay.
Pissing in a bottle between stock aisles is a "market condition". The market rewards those participants who do not have interrupted labor due to bladder events.
India went through a socialist phase where for decades people “emphasize[d] with the poor” and implemented public policy. And where did that lead? Decades of economic malaise. In 1991, the World Bank and IMF required economic liberalization as part of a bail out, and starting in 2000 growth accelerated dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As someone from that part of the world, yes, your mode of thinking “bothers” me. When my family left Bangladesh in 1989, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Since that time, real GDP per capita has grown by a factor of 6. To put that in relative terms, it’s like going from Guatemala to Germany in one generation. Capitalism is a fricking miracle. There are of course such things as market failures which require regulation. But those can be articulated without emotional appeals to “empathy.” Making policies based on “empathy” and notions of power relationships between workers and companies is destructive and perpetuates poverty.
I didn't advocate socialism, and I could not care less about what an Asian country did or didn't try for decades. Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries on earth so I think that's irrelevant to a debate about the ethical ramifications of actions perpetrated by the most profitable corporation in the wealthiest country.
Oh dear no. Capitalism is a miracle for people who are on the winning side, of the equation, it's awful for people who are not and are mostly trapped on the wrong side of that divide. As environmental degradation encroaches, that latter group will gradually swallow more and more people.
It's not a matter of empathy vs rationality as you suggest, but of under what conditions empathic strategies are efficient and self-sustaining. You assume the world (including society) as objective and rewarding unempathic rationality, but many social relations are wholly arbitrary and are optimized to reward particular strategies.
Evidence from statistical mechanics points to the evolutionary stability of self-organizing decentralized peer-sensitive strategies.
You know, I was reading the other day about Jeff Bezos being worth $118 billion. What is so great about maximizing such a quantity? Jeff Bezos doesn't know what to do with his spare money besides spending it on rockets. Would be really be functionally 'poorer' if he woke up tomorrow to find himself worth 'only' $18 billion, and the other $100 billion evenly distributed across the population (everyone in the world better off by $14), the US population (everyone in the US better off by $300), or the population of Amazon employees (everyone better off by approximately $180,000).
Supposedly it's more 'efficient' for Jeff Bezos to be in charge of all this money, but Jeff Bezos' wealth depends to a large degree on his ability to keep labor prices just above those of other employers hiring from the same pool in any given market. You're maximizing the extraction of value from the combination of capital and labor, but in a parasitical fashion that leaves Jeff Bezos with an (almost) unimaginably vast surplus and many of his employees with no surplus at all. You might argue that such workers should increase their economic value so as to command a higher wage, but in reality most of them are already working near the envelope of their physical capacity while being too tired and time-poor to undertake independent or institutional study to significantly improve their earning potential.
Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few. It’s true that inequality has increased over the last 30 years: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/bangladesh/income-distribut.... The income share of the top 10% has grown from 22% to 28%. And the share of the bottom 20% has dropped from 10% to 8%. But 8% of a number that’s 6x bigger is way better than 10% of a number that’s 1/6 the size.
Focusing at the bottom end, a 20% wealth hit is a really big problem for poor people. And just because they're well-off compared to other countries or previous periods in history is meaningless if they have solvency issues in the present. Being flat broke in our advanced technological society is a serious hardship and can not be measured in simplistic absolutes.
It’s not a 20% reduction in wealth. It’s an 8% share of an income pool that’s six times bigger versus a 10% share of an income pool that’s much smaller.
As if the effects of that fall in income won't compound, and as if you were factoring in purchasing power parity and negative as well as positive externalities. Stop with the baby arguments Rayiner.
There's also a Rawls-esque thought experiment, which is "What rough archetype of a person/family would be better served by being teleported back to pre-capitalism if they got their ~current status in the old order, and everything that comes with it?"
This is a really brutally difficult game to play in a developing nation because one of capitalism's achievements is "Half your children don't die." (In the last 30 years in Bangladesh early childhood mortality is down ~14% to 3%.)
> Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few.
Capitalism has had demonstrably terrible effects for many people all over the world without the luck of being born in a country or even a social class with enough economic clout to dictate favourable terms in trade agreements.
The conflict and genocide in East Timor was driven by capitalist Indonesia (a US ally) and colonial greed. Of course this conflict was ignored at the time because it was more important to focus on the Khmer Rouge, so the US and its brand of capitalism could save face:
These are just three examples. There are countless other examples of the destruction and death caused by capitalist policies all over the world. This kind of greed, corruption and harm is not limited to totalitarian states, they're just less reported on by western media. Deliberately so.
Calling it a 'miracle for everyone' is an obscenely narrow-minded claim.
Your examples are terrible. East Timor is a classic case of conflict based on language and religion (Indonesia is Muslim, East Timor is Portuguese-speaking and Catholic.) Your water example involves a private company being forced to raise rates to pay for a dam that it was forced to build as part of a government I funded mandate.
The "language and religion" bit bugs me: How do you know if any collection of individuals' prejudices has ever caused war when it could be the invisible hand of capitalist economics? It's invisible.
If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in parallel to justify and perpetuate the profit. Where do we draw the line for which conflicts we can say definitely starts with the moral flaw of a person/group, and which starts with the forces of economic incentive?
Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalism by definition requires voluntary exchanges, which don’t happen in master-slave relationships. Again, slavery and serfdom predate capitalism by thousands of years. This is a definitional aspect of capitalism. Indeed, Adam Smith’s wealth of nations was expressly a critique of the then-prevalent system of mercantilism.)
My point was that lot of leftists/anarchists will say that economic forces, including before the capitalist market economies, can create situations where ideological extremist groups will gain power. They will appear out of nowhere and anyone can say "this looks like social animus just happened to win here", but the underlying cause was some group's will to extract resources from a place or population.
I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"
I wonder if a Amazon warehouse workers have tried using diapers & tried expensing them. Whether the claim for approved or rejected, it'd be +1 piece of evidence to highlight you-no-pee-pee shenanigans.
What would be wrong in lowering immigration numbers of low skilled immigrants to help people stuck in unfortunate Amazon employment like situation above?
And yet I never hear any such solution being spoken about in public?
Why should it reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market? What's the axiom upon which you stand to say that is the correct way of things?
If wages are not set by a market, ie not supply and demand, they will be mispriced. Mice-pricing represents a loss of efficiency in the economy, and makes everyone worse off over time.
If wages were set lower than equilibrium, obviously the workers would be lose out on this.
If wages were set above equilibrium, the consumers would lose out due to the higher costs being transferred over to them.
The market price represents the balance between the two interests that is the most efficient.
Inb4 some smartass posts "but perfect markets are only in textbooks and this is the real world". That isn't an argument that justifies as to why we should try to move away from the efficient equilibrium.
The market equilibrium price may be the most efficient, but efficiency doesn't care about morals and ethics and "shoulds".
Human beings should be treated humanely, ascribed intrinsic value, and moral considerations should be applied to interactions with them. Neither economics nor physics cares about human rights, but systems can be built to accommodate other value systems than the defaults that stem from raw theory.
Maybe wages set above equilibrium will result in consumers losing out. That's inefficient, but not necessarily immoral. I strongly believe that utility functions are not evenly distributed. Giving Jeff Bezos $1B and 100k workers $10,000 each is not as good as an outcome where Jeff gets $500M and workers get $15,000 each; it's not even as good as Jeff getting $400M and workers still getting $15,000 each.
The problem here is capitalism though. It has already distorted the market by extracting as much rent as possible from what ever inefficiency and externality it can find to make whatever equilibrium found far below anything a
truly efficient market would determine.
Couple this with the misguided proposition that cost (market determined price) reflects value, and thus that fellow citizens right to food, shelter and safety should reflect their market determined labor price and you get this result.
Capitalism is a failed idea in it’s current incarnation, and does not deliver on the promise even of efficient markets.
Attacking Amazon to fix this, or enforcing minimum wages, isn’t more rational than taking pain killers to improve on the situation of hitting your head against a wall repeatedly. If we have nothing better to offer, by all means, but we should feel really ashamed that this is the best we have to offer.
We need something new, not that I know what, but it should be pretty obvious that what we have now fails to deliver.
I find the ideas of geo-liberalism somewhat inspiring, and I do think some synthesis is in order where market economies are leveraged for the beautiful resource allocators they are.
Sounds like this axiom then, is some kind of utilitarian functions; the idea is to do whatever makes the most people better off, in aggregate? That it's ok to screw over someone if a greater amount of benefit then goes to someone else.
I'm not convinced, however, that an efficient market is the same as this utilitarianism. Do you have any evidence that efficient markets produce the best outcome for the most people overall?
Seems to me that an efficient market could easily consist of a large underclass barely staying alive; why would the most efficient market not have everyone in that situation? Surely that would be perfect efficiency; the entire population being paid just enough to keep going? No surplus, no excess; surely that's far more efficient - but that's in direct conflict with the idea of making everyone better off and giving everyone a nicer life.
Is that an axiom that leads to the principle that their wages should reflect supply and demand? A moral judgement is being made here when someone says this is how things should be, this is what's right.
With market pricing, the people involved are responsible for their own irrational behavior.
Brilliant. It's all their own choice. They should have chosen to be born into a rich family. They should have chosen an expensive education. They should have chosen good health. They should have chosen a job that pays millions.
All this, of course, is commonly believed in the US. I sometimes suspect that actually it's not so much believed as just something that rich people want very much to believe; it means they can feel like they deserve and earned every last penny, and that they don't have to feel bad at all about all the people being screwed over.
Just because you have market leverage to do what you want to desperate people, doesn’t mean you should. If this were a wage dispute, I might agree, but it’s much more than that.
>the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
Yeah. There's no way way it's more complicated than this. If there are other effects not reflected on a simple X/Y axis then I don't wanna know about it!
> It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
The thing is that Amazon largely contributed to create those market conditions, by getting the consumer used to free next day delivery (same delivery in some places). And by squeezing their workers like this, forcing other online retailers to follow if they want to stay competitive.
> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
The odiousness of the use of the word "should" has been pointed out elsewhere, and I reiterate it, but there is another point to be made about this analysis: It neglects that Amazon is a monopsony or near-monopsony. As Amazon replaces other supply chains, the demand for supply-chain labor is increasingly concentrated in one buyer of labor, Amazon. We should reasonably expect a distortion in the market to occur wherein Amazon leverages their power to either reduce wages or demand more labor for the equivalent wage.
In effect, the market conditions to which the OP appeals are eroded away by Amazon's cornering of this sector of the labor market. $15/hr may be good PR, but it's not a "fair" or "market" wage if Amazon can just burn through employees with adverse working conditions (ostensibly valued at a higher rate in a real market) because of their position as the sole buyer of labor.
If we're going to apply market theory to this, we have to go all the way, and not just stop when it suits our purposes.
Amazon is absolutely not a monopsony for unskilled labor, or even for warehouse labor. UPS and FedEx each have roughly the same number of employees as Amazon. Walmart has more than double.
That's not the right way of phrasing it. They're producing a substantial amount of value, in the real sense that the world is a better place because of the work they've done.
I was at a graduate careers fair in a city where Amazon had just opened offices. Naturally, Amazon had a stall at this careers fair. The person running their stall was telling an audience of maybe six or seven other people that Amazon was the kind of company where if you could find a path around their warehouse that would shave even a single second off a warehouse worker's journey, they'd make them walk it. The audience were quite impressed by this.
I suddenly found myself the other side of having said "what an awful place to work," and receiving a mix of bewildered and hostile looks from every other person around that stall.
I'm pretty sure the claim was hyperbole – the practical side of getting people to walk a particular path would have been my follow-up question, if I'd thought of it in time. Even so, the claim revealed a mentality of workers as robots that I think helped explain some of the news stories of extraordinary conditions of their warehouse workers.
Yes, and the criticisms of Taylorism are fairly well-developed. In fact, a lot of the criticisms of Amazon's practices are much the same. With Amazon's level of data collection on individual warehouse and logistic workers, it puts them in a place that Taylorists of the 80s could only dream of.
At least in the UK, they've found a way to make sure that they are in no way directly financially responsible for any of the externalities of what their approach does to workers, chiefly by pulling tricks like having their workers hired on an agency basis through subcontractors.
I'm not saying this is wrong, it's just what they've done. They have spent the money and found a way to operate that is more efficient. It's what they do, and it's how they sold themselves to a group that included me.
I also found the whole thing to be a bit contradictory: software engineers at a multiple of the pay of warehouse engineers working on optimizing the warehouse that is probably almost near optimal.
Perhaps if I had been quicker-witted, I'd have asked if we found a way to make the software engineers working on shaving a second off the path around the warehouse more efficient, would they make them do it.
> I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless.
If it’s a task that can’t easily be automated and needs to be done, the doing it is creating value.
If they didn't "create anything of value" why are they there doing it? Why does Amazon have them doing what they do in the first place? The point is they do in fact play an important role in the generation of the value by Amazon and they are asking for their fair share.
As automation keeps on improving and productivity gets more centralized will there be a shortage of jobs?
The above poster makes a fair point that this is work well suited to automation. In the broader sense with retail closing and Amazon taking market share, centralizing productivity (i.e. reducing retail jobs to fewer picker jobs), and then automating those fewer jobs away entirely, are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?
I genuinely have no idea how society would work if you simply eliminated 20% of jobs tomorrow. Mass poverty? Artificially created jobs? A larger rich/poor divide?
It's highly unlikely that 20% will disappear overnight. Every other case where we've seen automation/innovation eliminating jobs has been a gradual process, so I see no reason for this not to continue.
Amazon has been testing cashierless grocery stores, yet they haven't completely eliminated their competition where they're available. I'm sure they'll become popular, but they'll likely roll out relatively slowly. We already have self checkout, yet some people prefer to checkout with a human, and I doubt that will change.
Manufacturing jobs have been using more and more automation, yet manufacturing jobs are still available, just different. Many jobs that used to be minimum wage jobs have been replaced by higher paying jobs with specialists; there are fewer of them, sure, but they pay better.
As labor jobs get replaced by automation, we'll invent new jobs to take advantage of the increased labor pool. That's just the way innovation goes.
No, because job demand is not a zero-sum game but a function of supply.
For every job that gets "destroyed" by technology, several new ones are created. The problem is we, as humans, are terrible at predicting the future - for example, try explaining a mobile app developer job to someone thirty years ago in 1989. Now try imagine what jobs we will have 30 years from now, keeping in mind how off a person in 1989 would have been.
Perfect world solution here is that Amazon retrains their workers, but as we're not in a perfect world, that typically falls to the state. As human labor becomes more valuable to fill niche and volatile job markets, due to automation taking large scalable jobs, retraining is going to become even more important.
I don't think a mobile app developer would be too difficult to explain to someone from the 80s: they already understood the concept of computer programmers and software, and "everyone has a pocket computer" existed for decades in science fiction by that time.
A better analogy would be explaining something like social media consultants (or for that matter, social media influencers). Hell, _I_ still don't understand the user behavior underpinning the social media economy, and I've lived in it for a decade.
True, but even a keyboardless PC in your pocket would have been hard to comprehend, as you would have to explain everything from touch LCD screens to the internet. Also talk about online-only businesses or even drop shipping. In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online. There are catalog analogies, but the concepts are so foreign it makes it difficult to visualize 30 years from now without projecting our own biases onto it.
even a keyboardless PC in your pocket would have been hard to comprehend
Given there were two pocket sized PCs released in 1989 - the Poqet PC and Atari Portfolio, that seems unlikely, except in a "the future is here but not evenly distributed" sense. "How would you use one without a keyboard?" "You'd touch the screen directly" "oh, ok".
But even then, LCD pocket calculators were common by 1989. Wearable computing had been around since 1981 (Steve Mann) for anyone following tech developments. Seiko had released a wearable computer watch in 1984.
In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online
But you had telephone ordering. And you could have had fax ordering. Back to the Future 2 came out in 1989 and they were predicting a future world of 2015, which included a kind of tablet computer, head mounted displays, flat-screens, implicit voice recognition[3]. OK it's not PCs, smartphones or the internet but it's enough that a blockbuster Hollywood movie expected people to understand "pay by putting your thumb on this portable device", and not find it "hard to comprehend".
(Terminator was from 1984 and that was a mobile, keyboardless computer, in a sense).
Yea I dunno, all of these seem like pretty simple extensions of existing concepts, to the point that they existed in pretty-much fully-realized form in sci-fi (incl Internet and touchscreen analogues).
I should note that I wasn't trying to be pedantic, and the specific example used in the parent comment doesn't detract from its point. I just think that the social media economy is utterly novel and fascinating.
> are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?
This wouldn't be the first time. Happened with farming 100-150 years ago. It's going to be a painful adjustment, but until all human needs are met, I'm sure humans that still have jobs can come up with work they want performed in exchange for money so long as politicians don't legislate against the existence of those jobs.
Perhaps the state should be responsible for the roughness of economic transition, especially for work-affecting phenomena which is global? Such as through polishing the unemployment program.
Civil rights, Apollo, total cultural leadership, leading decolonisation the world over, Bretton Woods still on, net exporter still, pre local peak-oil...
That would be okay so long as any solution is temporary with clear criteria for sunsetting the government's involvement. Last thing we need is yet another agency that succumbs to the Shirky Principle and citizens become dependent on the government instead of taking up one of the new jobs that appear in the next few decades.
Maybe the human work will shift to robot technicians, and how many blown servomotor assemblies or control boards you can swap out in an hour, but there will always be human standards that need help enforcing in some industries.
Since Amazon easily hires and retains people at these wages, there very likely isn't anything wrong with these jobs. At least not compared to similar jobs for the same segment of the work force.
What I think is really going on here is that Amazon has a PR vulnerability that can be exploited. With enough videos and testimony produced contrasting the plight of the poor oppressed workers with their boss, The World's Richest Man, Amazon will need to do something to make this go away.
> Since Amazon easily hires and retains people at these wages, there very likely isn't anything wrong with these jobs. At least not compared to similar jobs for the same segment of the work force.
I agree that there are almost certainly many other examples of inhumane treatment of low-wage workers. We should fix those too. If low-wage workers had unions then you would be able to have those kinds of cross-industry group actions.
But no, the work conditions at Amazon are not acceptable. And to pretend that this a free market transaction -- and not a case of people who are desperate (and probably being forced to work several jobs and depend on government programs due to inhumanely low wages) being exploited.
They only just started paying $15/hour recently, after the whole STOP-BEZOS Act back-and-forth with Bernie Sanders[1]. You appear to be implying they paid a $15/hour minimum wage before October of last year (you can't be a leader in something if you only started doing it 9 months ago because of overwhelming public pressure by politicians) -- they didn't.
My point is that low-wage workers are usually not in a position to quit one of their multiple jobs because they might become homeless or lose their health insurance. In fact, Amazon having higher wages means that low-wage workers are more likely to continue working there despite the conditions, because they have nowhere else they could go. But instead of discussing the point I was making, you are cherry-picking one particular phrase I used -- which applies to almost all other low-wage jobs but no longer (as of Oct 2018) applies to Amazon.
But also, the working conditions are the thing that most people have issue with (now that Amazon finally pays its workers a minimum wage that is reasonable). Not being able to take bathroom breaks without risking the loss of your job is not a humane way to treat people, even if you're paid $15/hour.
The official US employment figures (U3) have very well known flaws when discussing the status of ordinary workers (they don't count people working part-time or casually that wish to work full-time, nor do they count people who have stopped looking for a job). U6 (which includes those factors and thus is a much better indicator of actual unemployment) is sitting around 8%.
More than 70% of Americans live pay-check to pay-check, and 40% cannot afford a $400 out-of-pocket emergency. The rate of people delinquent on their car loans (which is an economic indicator of how ordinary people finances are doing, since car loans are usually the most important credit people have to pay off) is increasing at an alarming rate. Economic problems for US workers didn't end in the 90s.
When you employ hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not hard to find hundreds who are incredibly unhappy. Sure, this only represents 0.1% of their workforce, but news agencies don’t care about that. People just want something to be angry about.
They’ll continue to ignore that $15/hour is within “living wage” for the low CoL areas that Amazon fulfillment warehouses are located in.
They aren't asking for a wage increase, they're asking for better working conditions -- this is explicitly talked about at length in TFA. Also, Amazon only started paying a minimum wage of $15/hour in Oct 2018 (9 months ago) -- in large part thanks to Bernie Sanders[1].
This reminds me of the Foxconn suicides. Lots of press made it sound like a major problem, but the actual rate was lower than both China and US averages.
The averages include non-functioning alcoholics, drug addicts, retirees with no money to live on, who don't want to be a burden on their children, chronic gamblers, people in serious debt, people who are terminally ill, people who are too depressed to hold down a job, veterans with PTSD...
In short, not the same demographics as people holding down 'decent' jobs for the area.
When you employ hundreds of thousands of people, it's not hard to use divide-and-conquer against them, to get them to act against their common interests.
Most of them are not in any position to push back on your demands, even if they'd all be better off from having the freedom to be able to step away from their 'highly important job' to have a piss in peace, without threat of termination.
I think it should also be noted that the best way to show an employer that they need to do better is supply and demand, quitting entirely and working for someone else is not only more effective than simply demonstrating or slacking off, it’s also many magnitudes more professional and better for your career.
> I think it should also be noted that the best way to show an employer that they need to do better is supply and demand, quitting entirely and working for someone else is not only more effective than simply demonstrating or slacking off, it’s also many magnitudes more professional and better for your career.
If the goal is to get the employer to notice the issue, leaving and hope they get the idea, when the pool of applicants is essentially unlimited seems like a poor way of articulating a position.
Amazon is a captive audience in this protest and by not just outright leaving, the employees are forcing Amazon to consider their situation, rather than write it off and bring in a new batch.
Some people have mouths to feed and bills to pay. You can't just tell people to quit if they don't like it. There aren't many other $15/hour jobs available for most of those workers.
Between this and the Mechanical Turk article I read earlier today, I am left thinking about these type of jobs. There is this "chasm" of things that machines still cannot but that are repetitive and boring for humans, for which the value to human-effort ratio is small.
I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of these types of works. Now, the interesting thing about some of these jobs is that they cannot be moved to places where the payment to cost of living ratio can be improved. Some Mechanical Turk tasks could (if the language allowed it) but the Amazon warehouse jobs would be impossible to move.
Unless, Amazon opens a chain of warehouses in Mexico's cities that border the US (Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, Sonoyta, Nogales, Cd Juarez, among all the others) and then dispatches the goods from there. That however would need to include a very good import/export deal.
> I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of these types of works.
On the other hand, people are hard at work trying to automate these jobs. Amazon would love nothing more than to have a completely robotic warehouse and a fleet of delivery robots that run 24/7.
Well, in theory a company like these can create robots that are operated from anywhere in the world. In that case, the operator job may be outsourced as it may be cheaper and less of a hassle than to have a person in X country getting paid more, complaining and going on strike.
> He says he has to pick an item about every eight seconds, or 332 per hour, for a 10 hour day.
Ignoring the math, it’s hard to imagine that pace. Are they forced to continually be moving? Or is the person counting picking up, say 15 usb chargers as 15 separate things?
It is humanly possible. As a teenager, I worked at UPS, where I was expected to stack boxes real-life-Tetris-style into a van at a rate of 45 per minute. They could get as heavy as 30 lbs. I actually got to enjoy it after a while (biceps!), but I could never get the hang of memorizing the zip codes (every truck has a list of 1-30 that we were expected to memorize instantly).
I did a similar job for UPS, but at an airport before school in the mornings (~2am-6am). Unloading the containers from the big plane, then sorting all those boxes, and finally loading the smaller planes or trucks. Everything was timed, and it was tough cold work (middle of winter, in a cold part of the US, at an airport where there is nothing to stop the wind), but its totally possible.
Comically enough, the part that stuck with me the most was how bad I was at memorizing the codes for the various trucks/locations as well.
I also did this and have younger friends who still do. I much preferred that job to a customer service one where I had to deal with angry people all day. I was also sorting via zip codes and enjoyed the physical work... I don't understand what people accepting a factory job expect. It is repetitive, non-creative, work. That is the idea.
I'm sure they expect it to be miserable, but expecting a miserable job and being happy about it needn't align. They might not have the necessary skills to be employable in not-miserable work, and might not have the necessary means or time to acquire those skills.
What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is: we have enough wealth as a society that if we wanted to, we could allocate resources and labor in such a way that nobody (even unskilled workers) would have to do work that miserable, at that pace, for that low compensation. But it's not an emergent property of the market, and we'd have to sacrifice some economic growth, and some payout for people higher up the ladder, to do it. We have to collectively decide whether that tradeoff is worth it, and these folks (understandably) are arguing that it is, and asking the rest of us to have some empathy.
This would be true if all consumers were rational actors and thought through the labor market ramifications of each purchase they made before they made it, but they're not and they don't.
OK but I'm saying I wasn't miserable and it was a better job than working retail to me.
I agree it would be great to divide resources and labor in a more intelligent way I'm very open to ideas, but for now the reality is that some jobs are shitty and some are far better. And all the perks and benefits tend to come through hard to attain and coveted jobs. In my opinion you can't just create a system of equality, true equality will never exist. So why not just let it play out naturally? Drawing a line and effectively taking from people higher up is an astonishingly difficult line to draw and the overhead from a change like that could be devastating in itself, especially considering how Govt's are run in general.
I did a similar role when I was young and working at a warehouse. Basically pick, pack and ship orders. You basically worked until the orders are filled, 10, 11 hour shifts were not unusual.
An item every 8 seconds is a rapid pace, but at least when I did it, the orders are sequential based on the layout of the warehouse. You grab one item, look at the next item, walk an aisle or two down, grab that item. I would estimate something between 10 seconds between picks?
It is physically demanding work and boring as hell, but you end up in great shape! A couple decades ago when I did it the work paid really well for an unskilled job. Made putting up with it bearable.
Pick workers at robotized FCs stand in one place at the nexus point of conveyors and robots. Robots bring them shelving units of products. Conveyor belts bring them empty containers. The human selects products from the robot and puts it in the container.
Similar story to the other people here, having worked in a ups warehouse with unload rates of >1100 per hr I find it's not the physical nature of the job that's hard (in fact if you like moving around it's good) but mental stress of doing 1 dimensional things all day that is the real challenge!
...also saw some random github-y thing while googleing the model number which hints at some level of hackable/api-able interfacing which made me click the buy button. That's sketchy info though
If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence to enter our market and outcompete us.
Reading through these comments I find myself rather dazed at all of the complaints regarding $15 an hour salaries, I'm a software engineer with 6 years of experience in a first world country and I make less than that before taxes.
Which first world country is this? I made $30AUD as a waiter in 2015. An Australian software engineer with that much experience getting paid almost half that ($15 is USD yeah?) in 2019 would be absurd.
I earn around that in Western Europe but it's still a pretty good job for Spain and I have no doubt I live in better conditions than the Americans working for $15 an hour, which is really what matters.
The amount of smug proclamations about how all these workers are going to be replaced by robots in these threads is really gross.
Nearly everyone that posts on HN is in a situation where their employer holds vastly more power than themselves in their employer/employee relationship, statistically are you likely being screwed, and you aren't going to be Jeff Bezos one day either.
So either we continue to deny it isn't or we actually start those conversations now and figure out how we live in that world.
And there is a correlation between actions like this and the desire to have a more automated workforce. Not saying that as blame because there are many other reasons and you can look at the reasons their jobs are so bad right now anyways.
Sure. However, I think the poster is commenting on the insensitivity of the post by OP.
No one has denied that this is not happening because it is. We can however, comment on them in a way that is empathetic to the workers who are protesting. Never know, might come for any one of us one day.
What do you mean? From an approach perspective? Shouldn't the first thing you do to understand the problem is to see it from the other persons perspective? Empathy is not the end all be all. It's a start.
I'm criticizing the approach. Government is the only entity more powerful than amazon. You want change ? Imo more effective to do it through government compared with advocating boycott.
Thank you for clarifying your point. Understood and fair. I think that of course government is one mechanism to create positive change.
However, the problem with our government currently is that there are other outside factors that would get in the way (Like corporate lobbying.) of any kind of labor initiative.
I will say that boycotting used to be a viable means of getting your point across (Civil right boycotts of the 60s as an example.). The problem I think nowadays is that it has lost it's teeth due to lack of a collective follow through (See the most recent Gucci boycott/"protest" from a few months ago.).
Job demand isn't zero sum, but a function of supply. Idle worker time ends up unlocking new types of jobs that weren't previously possible (usually service related) and people fill them.
I mean, I would broadly agree, but you don't need to have a million dollars to buy shares in a robotics venture.
However, I still contend that, even with millions of dollars, most people would not have the foresight to invest. As evidenced by the fact that those who suffer from windfalls of money typically lose it very quickly.
You’re right. We could also make the choice to smash cars, because they take jobs away from the horse and buggy industry. We won’t, because the problem is not humanity’s total productive output growing larger, but how this output is managed and distributed.
There are things much more important than humanity's 'total productive output', which is anyway not guaranteed to ever be managed and distributed in a better way. Human beings are not economic production units. The economy is a means and not an end.
Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if there isn't one within the next two centuries.
Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death would be eradicated.
Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)
Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now. We could have stopped it and we still can.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Blithely assuming that it is is dangerous.
The fact that, in the past, the economy created new jobs and new sectors that the majority of people were capable of working in does not guarantee that it always will. Nor when it does is that any consolation to the people un(der)employed for years on end or sometimes for the rest of their life.
In the long run, we are all dead.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a hiccup in human history. Human history is a blip in the world's history. There are no laws when it comes to this. Unless you can provide some other very good reason for believing that more jobs, and good jobs, will be created than those are destroyed, I will have to doubt it given the evidence before me.
Indeed, even many 'good' jobs are actually economically unproductive and totally unfulfilling make-work. Today's situation is much worse than it appears at first glance.
The biggest difference in the past (i.e. industrial revolution) was that a human was still required when technology improved and the increased output only occurred from that tech when workers were skilled up to use it appropriately. Also training more workers in these new skills meant even more output and a potential edge against your competitors as that multiplier would carry to workers trained. Each worker gives you more productivity but you still need more workers to scale output. This obviously results an "arms-race" mentality from employers to train staff to fill the gap to take the lead against competitors. It also adds bargaining power to the skilled worker - if they strike instead of not producing that multiplier/leverage works against the employer as they miss out on more output than if an untrained worker strikes. They may even have to shut down their factory or whatever. Leverage and worker productivity work both ways for the employer; it's one of the big reasons cited for the rise of worker unions and arguably the rise of the middle class since then.
The first wave was all about making people more efficient (higher output multipliers for effort); the next wave may very well make people redundant in the economic production equation. If one person is all that's required to scale infinitely (O(1)) OR people aren't required once the capital is built the share of gains to workers IMO erode substantially and mainly accrue to capital holders. Particularly if those gains result in a concentration of market power to one company.
It's happening but that doesn't mean a) we should just bend over and accept being fucked over due to some vague robot threat in the future or b) make jokes about workers having to bend over.
That wasn't a joke it was a statement of the reality of the situation which is that the labor performed by the people striking will likely be moved to automation, eliminating the job entirely.
Ambivalently, this is the reality of things, unless you restrict globalization and implement domestic laws against automation, economic pressure is going to provoke automation in many areas, first in the most automatable and later on in higher value added areas...
Scabs are workers who cross the picket line, not customers. If you think boycotts are a good idea, ask the auto unions how well customers not buying cars worked out for their members.
Only because it's a way to use and coöpt language for your cause, not because it's the way the public understands it. It's like AOC insunuating Pelosi racist. It's used for effect.
Or, imagine a nurses' strike, but I as a patient don't honor their strike, am I a scab?
If you're a patient for something elective that could be delayed until after the conclusion of the labor action then yes, you're a scab. For emergency care? Probably not.
A strikebreaker (sometimes derogatorily called a scab, blackleg, or knobstick) is a person who works despite an ongoing strike. [Scabs] are usually individuals who were not employed by the company prior to the trade union dispute, but rather hired after or during the strike to keep the organization running.[0]
The parent comment was absolutely correct in saying that you are trying to co-opt the actual definition to serve your goals, as the word has nothing to do with being a customer.
While you're correct about the meaning of the word scab, there doesn't yet exist a word with appropriately caustic undertones to describe the customer who continues to patronize a service whose workers are striking -- and so we typically use that word for both situations. Welcome to the party.
Not the first time New Englanders have boycotted a supermarket chain either. When Market Basket ousted their president and voted to give the shareholders dividends rather than reinvesting in the company[1]. Though these workers wern't on strike they were protesting what they felt like was the first step of the company getting gutted and sold.
Are you implying that the unions asked Americans to boycott cars that weren't foreign-assembled crossovers?
Your comment seems to not really make much sense since UAW and other unions are currently involved in calling for boycotts of Mexico-assembled GM vehicles.
It's not simply about hurting Amazon, it's about sending a signal. "This specific part of our business is threatened by the way that we're running it." Let it make business sense for Amazon to treat people like human beings. Otherwise it won't.
And then what? Amazon will continue to do the bare minimum to appease these signals periodically.
It is not the duty of consumers to provide a social safety net for workers. This is precisely where government should step in. If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
> And then what? Amazon will continue to do the bare minimum to appease these signals periodically.
Which is the point of a strike.
> It is not the duty of consumers to provide a social safety net for workers. This is precisely where government should step in. If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
The reason people are striking is because again and again, the american government has not done this, and many people (on this site, even) believe that the government should not do it. That's kind of the whole point of the 'small government' schtick.
I'm not against striking - I'm just undecided on the efficiency of it in this particular case.
It seems to me it would be easier to get people to vote than to boycott Amazon in an impactful way. But as brundolf pointed out, it doesn't have to be either/or.
Strikes can serve multiple purposes. Generally, the first purpose is showing the employer that the workers have leverage and are willing to use it, but if the strike becomes publicly known and discussed by people who aren’t Amazon or its employees, it can provoke discussion in the wider society about workers’ rights.
That may not happen as the result of one strike, but if there are lots of strikes over a period of time they can incrementally make the public more aware and tilt the odds of electing people who will pass such legislation.
> If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
It's not either/or. In today's political climate, unfortunately, pushing the market is the only thing that seems to ever accomplish anything.
I do question how much something like this could realistically push the market though. Boycotting a public transportation system with only one revenue stream is very different from boycotting a multinational corp with diversified revenue streams.
Which is in an of itself an entire set of problems to sort through, but I don't see what actual point you're making other than spewing do-gooder derogation.
Oh, it's so nice to see all these rich tech guys are concerned about the plight of Amazon workers. Suppose if one of these Amazon workers applied to be a programmer at your company even though they didn't go to a top twenty school or have 5-7 years experience with the trendiest stack, but merely did a bootcamp, and published some apps on their own, would you hire them and spend your money (as opposed to Jeff Bezo's money) to better their lot in life? Or would you hit delete the second their pathetic resume touched your inbox? At least Jeff Bezos is making it possible for people to pay their rent and not end up yet another homeless guy on the San Francisco sidewalk.
"At least" is right; he is doing the very least he can. If they are working for the wealthiest man on the planet he could afford to pay them a decent wage.
Slightly unrelated but there is something weirdly consistent about how Amazon treats their workers and people who have to work with them. I remember just exhibiting an AWS conference was the most time-intensive grueling event I've ever worked in the tech industry.
Obviously not as hard as a factory-working job, but they hold the only event in the industry that has you working from 7 am to 7 pm w/ no break if you want to exhibit.
I mean they practically can become that if you include the networking events and dinners but the listed hours in the exhibition hall usually are closer to 8 hours.
Ew, no. That's horrible. The company I work for does a lot of shows. I generally do about 22/year. A common range is 9am to 5pm, but 10am to 4pm is not unheard of. 8am to 6pm happens from time to time and feels really bad. I think out of 60ish shows that I've done only one was 7am to 7pm.
Yeah the best ones are 11 to 7. No one wants to network at 8 am before a bunch of keynotes and presentations. Lunch and after event mixers are the best.
7 am to 7 pm was terrible. everyone was sleepy in the morning (pre caffeine) and completely worn out by the happy hour/closing time.
Some back of the napkin math:
650,000 Amazon workers.
Let's say 600,000 are min(ish) wage and get an increase from $11/hr to $22/hr.
That's a 13.2B increase per year.
Jeff Bezo's net worth is 165B.
Jeff Bezo's Net Worth drops 8% after one year.
Jeff's net worth isn't in cash. It's going to be affected much more strangely than your analysis suggests. If Amazon has to raise its labor costs that much, Wall Street will react in a way that is difficult to predict the magnitude, but easy to predict the direction.
Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected out for the year means you'd be proposing a pay raise larger than the profit margin for the company, which is definitely going to affect the stock price. But Amazon is a weird case where most people think that they can just turn on the spigots anytime they really want to just make money, so it's maybe not the easiest analysis.
But for most companies, they make less profit than people think, especially if they're looking at revenue numbers, and a lot of people tend to suggest things that would make a 6% profitable company (not a terribly uncommon number) become a -25% profitable company or something. Even if you tip all executive compensation back into profit, that doesn't usually do much for these large companies.
Totally fair analysis and I don't disagree at all. I will add, however, that there are a few points that detract from this take.
First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders
in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.
When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.
However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.
If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.
I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.
A lot of this is why I didn't say it wouldn't affect Jeff at all, or try to predict the particular impact, but just that it would be... strange. Even if you could objectively analyze the full business picture, nobody could fully analyze exactly how Wall Street would react; the ability to do that would imply the ability to get very rich on Wall Street very quickly.
I forget where it was, but I also recently read an article musing on the idea that in the modern era we seem to have a new threat emerging where companies establish very, very firm footholds in some particular industry, and then use that to leverage their way into other industries because they can literally out-resource the entire competitor base of that industry. In some sense, in theory this has been possible for a long time, and we've had things like Samsung which are massive conglomerates, so it's not a new problem in quality, but the quantity of money that can be brought to bear this way in the 21st century may still make this a new sort of problem for trust busters to keep their eyes on.
While you're right about Jeff's net worth, profit is also misleading as many times it's manipulated for tax gains/shield. Amazon is notorious for doubling down on reinvesting into capex and maintaining a thin profit margin.
Either way, Amazon profits would not be hit by the full $13B increase - more likely profits would remain unchanged, while capex and other investments would go down by that amount.
This so much. All of this analysis is predicated on the idea that Amazon has made this value for its owners through legitimate means and not by underpaying, overworking, and dehumanizing vast swathes of their workforce. It's so bizarre to me that people think it's a reasonable argument to make that "X company couldn't do Y if they payed better" and the response is just a giant shrug and "I guess their workers will have to pee in bottles and get second jobs" and not "X company therefor can't reasonable do Y"
You're getting downvoted but your point is bang on. I don't think people realise how horrible the conditions in Amazon's warehouses are. A year or so ago they hired ambulances to wait outside rather than turning the AC on in the warehouse. They would rather their workers risk death as opposed to paying money to cool them.
> They would rather their workers risk death as opposed to paying money to cool them.
Or rather, it’s cheaper to hire EMTs than it is to climate-control fulfillment centers. Frankly, that seems like the strongest indictment of profit-as-sole-motive I’ve heard, but of course the HN thread can’t handle much in the way of criticizing capitalism or FAANG.
Comments spreading FUD that some sort of deep tech attach of google is responsible for all the negative press get upvoted to the top when the simplest explanation is maybe tech isn’t the perfect good thing everybody wants to believe it is?
You're totally right. Just wanted a quick easy way to estimate the minimum hit he'd take in an admittedly fictitious world where net wealth isn't tied to the company's stock price.
Yep. The situation is similar to what Ford had. Salary increase might happen if they have a shortage of candidates. But will there be a shortage? Or are they just the best employer for a lot of people?
What would it effect bezos's net worth to halve the required number of items picked per hour but keep the pay the same? Pay should be determined by the market, decent working conditions are what we should be fighting for. Amazon workers aren't poorly compensated, they're just working shitty jobs regardless of the compensation. Paying people more doesn't make abusing them okay.
If each employee was paid the same to pick half the items, then they’re effectively being paid twice as much to do the same amount of work. Amazon would have to hire twice the workers (if not more) to fulfill their order volume, which means shipping items becomes more expensive.
So the real question is: Who is going to pay the bill?
And the problem I see here is, whoever you ask this, the answer is always “not me!” Everyone wants to reap the benefits of cheap labor (e.g. cheap, fast shipping), while proclaiming they want to treat the labor force well, but without a willingness to actually “put their money where their mouth is” and pay for it when it actually comes down to it.
For example: If you could willingly add 50% to the cost of every Amazon purchase if it gave workers better conditions, would you? If your first reaction to that is “Hey, that’s not my problem! The [government/market/unions/etc.] should have to solve that!” ... then yeah, we’ll the thing is that’s what everybody says when asked these sorts of problems.
Exactly. The implicit argument is that there is always some magical high-paying job with awesome benefits just round the corner if they just simply make the simple decision of switching jobs and/or pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Right...
Rising tides lift all boats. The largest employers changing their hiring practices forces other employers to change as well, to remain somewhat competitive.
A free market would allow the employees to unionise to negotiate more effectively the employee side, like Amazon the company uses many people collectively to negotiate the employer side. But Amazon is anti-union and spends money to that effect.
If the free market is a fair market, unionising wouldn't make any difference as the negotiated rates would already be fair and couldn't be any more fair. Amazon wouldn't be spending money to block union efforts, because that would be wasted money. Therefore either this isn't free market, and your comment is wrong (not free market), or this is free market but it isn't fair so your comment is wrong (free market, yet still relevant).
Marx predicted this with his theory on Entfremdung (alienation), in a system of highly optimized division of labor those laborers are going to be for a lack of a better word: bored.
I've been boycotting amazon for a long time. Waiting for "democracy" to solve the problems of unabated exploitative capitalism is a cop out. I put my money where my mouth is. I pay more, wait longer, but shop at places where I know people are treated at least decently.
Other jobs are just as vulnerable to protests, strikes, and boycotts, so I don't see why they couldn't all be pressured to treat workers better.
By your logic, workers should never fight abuse, as they'll "just get another job that's just as hard". But the history of labor shows this to be false, and that collective action can achieve improvements.
Please don't respond to a bad comment with a worse one. Maybe you don't owe the other commenter better, but you do owe the community better if you're posting here.
I'll get downvoted to hell for saying this, but $15/hr is upper middle class pay here. I made less than that for much of my software development career...
You’ll be getting downvoted because what you make “here” and it being upper-middle class pay is not relevant at all to these workers, unless you want to make a disingenuous suggestion that they move countries to “here”.
Of course I understand that. I just find it very hard to sympathize with the plight of someone making $15/hour. It seems high, even taking differences in cost of living into account.
It's not a paradox as stated, since "or" has ambiguous meaning, but it does look suspicious, since 3600sec/8sec is 450, and 3600sec/332 is about 10.8sec.
Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them over this difficult transition period where they're still required for part of the menial manual labour tasks. The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through.