Keep in mind though that this resilience is at the expense of thousands of workers who have to forego their own social distancing and risk their own healths so that we can get our next prime delivery in 3-4 days.
Amazon isn't run by robots. There are real humans who are going through hell to support this increase in demand.
It's also worth pointing out under (the old) normal conditions Amazon warehouse workers already had to put their health and wellbeing at risk every shift. I'm not familiar with health benefits for the average Amazon distribution center worker but I hope they get something more than BezosBux to spend at whatever urgent care operator happens to be a sister company.
Amazon has always exploited its labor force; that's why they are in the position to dial things up as needed to meet demand surges.
I'd like to balance all of this concern for the worker with a broader perspective.
Consider that business isn't charity.
If Amazon made a promise to deliver in 2 days, and I'm paying for that benefit, doesn't that mean I have the right to demand that benefit or be compensated? Does a pandemic mean that Amazon has the right to profit at my expense?
Isn't it a bit self-centered to say "Well, I can afford to toss money away on Prime membership without reaping the benefits, therefore anyone can"? What about those who rely on Prime membership and use it heavily but aren't rich enough to waste money on a service that isn't provided?
Now if normal delivery endangers the health and lives of deliverymen, then would it not make sense to ask for compensation from Amazon?
Why would I pay Amazon's workers for not delivering on managements promise? The entrepreneur should pay. Management should pay the workers to work, and only take money from customers for services delivered as promised. If Prime prices go up after current contracts expire, that's fine. Jeff Bezos doesn't need my charity.
Amazon's treatment of its physical laborers resembles a high tech version of early 20th century factory labor. It is frankly surprising they have not had some kind of modern equivalent of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
It's the height of demagoguery to support your argument with evidence that you freely admit doesn't exist. Do you have any evidence that Amazon is anywhere near as dangerous as a crowded locked room with no fire safety machinery?
Yeah, I do. But you seem to be more interested in preemptive accusations and frankly I don't have time for that kind of a "discussion". I don't expect to convince you, and I don't care to. Cheers!
Racing around a hot warehouse for miles a day while a handheld device counts down the seconds before you risk losing your job while you try to hold it in because you can't afford a bathroom break does not sound like a good blue collar job to me.
If the worst thing you can say about a job is that you might lose it, maybe it's a good job -- probably the best job. They aren't trapped in a farm in a company town getting ripped off by the company store where they can't leave for 3months. They aren't visa hostages. It seems your criticism of Amazon should be leveled at every single other employer offering worse.
Amazon's health benefits are actually quite good for entry level positions. Those benefits are a big reason Amazon's warehouse workers put up with the low wages and exploitation, at least in the US.
We can’t switch jobs or start a business because our health and well being is tied up with an employer. It’s possible that switching jobs means switching doctors or foregoing care.
And I’d say that the worst part about employers subsidizing healthcare is that they gladly do it because it’s essentially untaxed salary.
If my employer wasn’t allowed to subsidize healthcare, they’d have to pay me more and that extra pay would be subject to payroll tax.
So the whole system incentivizes employers to lobby for this terrible system of employer-based private for-profit health insurance. Big companies love it because it’s a way in which they can trap employees and snuff out competition from smaller businesses.
I'm not sure how glad. Health insurance is a cost center, your employer probably has no competitive advantage in getting it, and employees seem to undervalue it (everyone who starts COBRA is shocked how expensive the coverage always was).
Theoretically a company like Amazon should be able to provide masks, goggles and health monitoring to its workers to minimize the possibility of a COVID19 outbreak among them. It’s in Amazon’s business interests to do so (or risk business disruption due to outbreak among their workforce).
It’s also better for society that the congregations of people shift from many geographically scattered and difficult-to-monitor locations to a few single operations like Amazon warehouses that can be very closely monitored and screened for COVID19. Amazon’s warehouses can be more cheaply monitored and supplied with PPE than all of society can.
This should probably be part of SOP for responding to outbreaks like this.
Amazon jobs require a strong bladder and God bladder management. They retain people with strong bladders and good bladder management. If they couldn't fill the roles with strong bladder employees, they'd have to relax that requirement.
Now they're going to have strong bladder management + strong touch your face management. :)
On a more serious note, I wonder if there are scenarios where asymptomatic carriers can contaminate packages sent to many geographically diverse locations?
> Theoretically a company like Amazon should be able to provide masks, goggles and health monitoring to its workers
Theoretically yeah, but practically Amazon is driven by people with short-term profits in mind, so you don't see this happening. In the ideal world, capitalists realizes that if their customers / workforce goes out of jobs because of sickness, they won't earn as much. But seems that's too much future thinking, so business are trying to extract as much value they can before they'll be forced to shut down.
Amazon is actually defined by long-term thinking, which was heavily criticized for over a decade while their stock remained flat. It's hard to imagine now, but people didn't really believe in the company until about 2009.
Jeff Bezos' letter to shareholders, 1997:
It's All About the Long Term
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies... We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
This seems pretty standard when you ask executives at any company. Of course no executive is gonna go straight out and say they don't care about the long-term, only about short-term profitability.
> Hey Joe, does your company emphasis on the long term or short-term profitability?
> Joe: What a good question! We at ACME AB of course favor long-term sustainability rather than short-term profitability
> How about letting your warehouse workers go to the bathroom whenever they want?
> Joe: well, our long-term plan depends on short-term profitability so of course people can't go to the bathroom whenever they want, they should have a allocated slot for that.
Point being: look at the actions of a company rather than the words of the owners/workers, and you'll get a much more real picture.
You mean like eschewing short term pandering to the market and massively reinvesting in the company? Like they've done for years. So, yes, Amazon thinks long term.
While Amazon clearly does not have their workers best interest in mind, this is not a short-term profit driven company. On the contrary, Amazon is focused on growing and solidifying its long-term position at the expense of short-term profits.
The company doesn't do anything by itself. It's all driven by people, and people who work in a company changes. Effectively any company participating in the for-profit culture of capitalism favors short-term shareholder benefits over long-term societal ones, because that's simply how the system works and prefers.
The Good Place made a point of this! They (kind of arbitrarily ) placed the last date it was possible to exist without exploiting other people’s misfortune in some way back in the 1600s.
I caught the episode where they detail how every act you perform in modern life has so many negative consequences and repercussions that everyone on Earth has, for centuries, wound up going to Hell.
It haunts me because it's true.
(Not the going-to-hell bit, the part about how things are so interconnected and so fucked up that you can't wipe your ass without damaging the environment, and that's even before you get to the luxury phones made by de facto slave labor.)
It's the way of the world. Instead of trying to change the world, you could try adjusting your moral framework to be more in line with the world. Also, trying to change the world without first changing yourself is futile. And if you changed your way to put the benefits of others over yourself it would just amount to suicide, leaving the world as it is.
Well, you'd then be reducing the demand on market conditions reducing jobs, if that's worse than someone working making less than you... You'd also be living in a relative state of luxury using far more land than the average person can reasonably acquire and live on.
The problem is that nothing is fair or perfect, and any system that tried becomes far more unfair and restrictive in practice.
Notice how fairness is only something people try to accomplish if it benefits them. As soon as they themselves have an unfair advantage, they won't give up their benefits to achieve fairness.
It's a sacrifice, yes, but I can buy chocolate without being anguished that it got the blood of children from third-world countries on it. Doesn't everyone silently accept these things by living in modern society?
I mean, sure, some people love to pretend that they really care, but none of them sacrifice their own benefits, instead choosing, like me, to sacrifice the benefits of other people.
There's no dilemma once I've chosen a position. The dilemma is having to choose if you want to sacrifice your benefits, by for example not buying a smartphone, or the benefits of other people, by supporting the exploitation of other people through your purchasing power.
Yes, generally we do just silently accept these things. You're typing this on a PC or phone built using slave labor using minerals extracted by warlords to fund campaigns of oppression (despite some companies paying lip service to these issues it really still affects all electronic devices). When you are finished with them, they will be sent to Africa and burned in open landfills by hand to extract valuable minerals. Our oil market is based on dictators extracting their nation's wealth and using it to fund terror, in some cases literally on us.
Nobody in the modern world walks away from Omelas.
> Yes, generally we do just silently accept these things. You're typing this on a PC or phone built using slave labor using minerals extracted by warlords to fund campaigns of oppression (despite some companies paying lip service to these issues it really still affects all electronic devices). When you are finished with them, they will be sent to Africa and burned in open landfills by hand to extract valuable minerals. Our oil market is based on dictators extracting their nation's wealth and using it to fund terror, in some cases literally on us.
Let's grant this point. It's arguable, but I generally support it.
Another route is to use the very tools that are produced by these processes to subvert and upend those processes. For example, your comment is one such method of getting started by raising awareness and possibly redirecting behavior.
The same thing could be writ large: a tool like Twitter, for example, enables mass demonstration and a certain sort of transparency that was harder to establish prior to its creation.
We sometimes hear and say that X is not inherently moral or immoral, just how it's used. While I think that's probably not true, in many cases, the seeds of redemption can bloom from the soils of corruption. If we are inextricably enmeshed in a corrupt society and world, it seems then that the moral choice is how to subvert that corruption with its own fruit.
Most people aren't even aware of the hardships people in underdeveloped/developing countries have to go through in order to sustain our "modern society". It's out of sight out of mind. If everyone was more acutely aware of the suffering, then there may be more of a backlash. In short, people are too busy living their lives to know and consequently empathize with what's happening on the other side of the planet. But that's not the same thing as blind acceptance.
I grew up in America, and decided to go to Southwest Asia for a while. Seeing small children work is gut wrenching and something I had never seen or thought about till I saw it on my own personally. And it has certainly made me wary and selective about hiring any sort of service, even at the expense of my own convenience.
To sibling bobthechef, whom the site will not let me reply to directly:
Your question assumes a frame of atomized individual decision making, and forgoes the possibility of changing our political economy so that children don’t have to work.
This is easily doable from a production standpoint (i.e., we could all still have enough if children did not have to work, perhaps Bezos would have to give up a little).
That we don’t do this is an entirely political decision.
How about this: what would the lives of these children be like without that work? From your Western perspective, you judge this to be awful and evil, but what if the work they're doing is actually allowing them to make their families more than they could otherwise? What if it's the best option that currently exists? What if it contributes to increasing living standards in their country over time?[0] You can't look at a third world country through the lens of Western standards of living. A dollar a day is worth a great deal in some parts of the world.
The question isn't "why are some people poor", it's "why are some people rich". Human beings are born poor. We receive or make (or steal) whatever we have.
[0] Obviously, I am discounting political corruption that might keep wages artificially low.
You're being downvoted, but you're right. We've all had blood on our hands for a long time. It's funny how it means more to people when it's right in front of their eyes.
You say "none of them sacrifice their own benefits", but I do know people who make sacrifices to choose others' well-being, such as researching the products they buy, forgoing certain foods, products, and services.
So I'd say not everyone is "pretending to really care".
As long as they own a smartphone, I'd categorize it as pretending. It's like a slave owner who goes vegan. It's clear that they do not give up their own benefits, but merely pretend to, by making choices that do not really infringe on their core benefits.
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is no excuse for moral cowardice. Sure, I live in a society, too. But I refuse to make these sorts of excuses for it. That's quite literally the least I can do. But it's not quite the same as doing nothing.
Capitalism isn't the root of this problem and I'm not being a coward, I just made my choice. Fundamentally, I do not have a problem with sacrificing other people for my benefits and I do not pretend otherwise.
If the pretense is important for you, that's fine. You can keep pretending that you haven't made the same choice as me, if it makes you happy. But your actions speak louder than your words.
With limited resources there's always going to be a struggle to gain more benefits than other people. Few people willing kill themselves to benefit others, but lots of people willingly kill other people to benefit themselves. That's just human nature and the root of the problem. If you'd forfeit your own life in a kill or be killed situation your position would at least be consistent, albeit really stupid. But no one really is like that, everyone just loves to pretend that they are good people, which I don't even take issue with. I'm just openly admitting to my human nature.
If you ask me in person, I will tell you the same. I won't give up what illusion I have left of online anonymity, however. Anything else you wanted to add to the conversation?
Empathy is exactly the wrong emotion to have here. Empathy doesn't work at scale, just makes you pity people that are like you more than people unlike you. Regardless of objective relative hardship.
Do soldiers have to be psychopaths to kill their enemy in a war? It's only a moral dilemma until you've made your choice. Fundamentally, the world is still kill or be killed. It's just hidden behind many layers of abstractions.
Amazon isn't run by robots. There are real humans who are going through hell to support this increase in demand.