Amazon Hires Homeless Workers, and Everyone Ends Up Disappointed
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"You must be a profiteer."
'Sure, I guess I count as one. How'd you know?'
"Well, you learned about the immense, tragic problem of homelessness, and apparently your first thought was, wow, awesome, a cheap labor force I can use to cut costs!"
'Hm, okay, fair enough. You must be a philosopher then.'
"Yes! You're right! How'd you know?"
'Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable, and you've been unable to make any real progress on it, and yet when I offer homeless people an alternative to their current state, and some of them take it, somehow, the whole problem is all my fault."
It's not at all intractable. Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.
The homeless and jobless serve a function, though - to keep wages and agitation down for the precariously employed and the precariously housed. They're like this mainly for the benefit of corporations like Amazon which farm cheap labor.
Effectively the homeless serve as a form of 'public good' for the owners of capital.
That's why proposals to house or give homeless jobs with government money are met with sheer disgust by the same media that happily endorses spending billions of dollars dropping bombs on brown children.
The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them. The state may need to step in with a minimum wage (or basic income), but otherwise the system should work fine.
Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
>The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them.
More unemployed + homeless
=> More afraid workers
=> Workers who are willing to take a lower wage
=> Higher profits
The notion that higher production automatically leads to higher profits is pretty comical.
>Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
Achievement unlocked: Trivialized mental illness.
Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person. Some people just cannot function as independent adults. One person I know managed to score Section 8 housing, and she trashed the apartment and threatened the landlord and ended up on the street. Until her condition deteriorated enough for the police to call a 5150 on her.
But she doesn't consider herself crazy. Just stressed out. Modern liberation theory means the institutions consider her to be an adult, so if she says she doesn't want to stay in an asylum, then there's no way for us non-super-rich people to stop her from leaving psychiatric care and ruining her life.
There is no firm boundary between crazy and sane, and even being delusional doesn't prevent one from being a productive member of society. We just don't have enough appropriate services for all the crazy people in this country.
Most of them started out not being able to hold down a job, however.
Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.
We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.
Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.
No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.
Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.
I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.
Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.
Some but not all. This one certainly doesn't fall apart.
>Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society
Cohesive power blocs often come together to act as as a unified political agent when they have shared interests.
Two good institutional examples of corporate power blocs in the US are Cato and the AEI. Many of their members compete for market share, but they joined forces to gain political representation together to have their interests as a whole represented.
Can I live in your simple universe?
Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?
Perhaps there are other reasons?
Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?"
Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.
Not to mention wage theft, not paying overtime, pretending your workers are not employees, etc.
Despite their earning statements, Amazon is only a 'non-profit' on paper.
I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)
There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew.
A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.
The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".
Did you read my second paragraph?
"Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?
I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them.
What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.
There is none. The ends don't justify the means (Kantian ethics).
There are network effects of a giant for-profit organization exploiting the jobless, vs a non-profit that is regulated to be aligned with the jobless.
If you're using rational beings as a means to your ends, they need to be part of the ends, which is why Amazon is being criticized.
You're committing the fallacy described by the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics". http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before.
Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do.
(Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)
Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.)
All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.
Which fallacy is Kant committing exactly?
Yes it is true that if a company helps but does not entirely solve a problem, they are not obligated to stick it out. But in this case it may be that they are not helping by offering homeless people seasonal jobs. The fallacy here is that homeless people have a choice: if I were in a desperate situation, then I would take any job on offer. I.e. by being given the option the decision has essentially been made for for me, and whilst I may be better off in the immediate future, that doesn't mean it will last (and it could even be worse in the long term), and whilst I could decline the offer, and wait for something more stable, my circumstances are sufficient motivation for me not to do that.
A cynical person might even posit that by explicitly not doing enough to bring people out of homelessness, Amazon succeeds in maintaining a pool of willing and cheap seasonal labour.
BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage.
The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.
There is a reason there are more homeless people in San Francisco than all of England.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_san-francisco-homeless...
Not an expert but it makes perfect sense that seasonal jobs are not well suited for homeless people, for the reasons the article mentions - they don't have schedule flexibility (when they can get a bed!) others have, not to mention that they really need permanent jobs. Even more so than another type of seasonal worker - the high school or college student living at home.
Good for Amazon if they're doing it for the right reasons, but you still need to do it right. There's more at stake than the typical corporate pet project. These people are (sadly) incredibly vulnerable. Taking swipes at it and failing can have serious consequences.
Everyone seems to have a laptop that "won't boot" or something...I've had to stop cleaning them for this very reason.
doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, electricians, mechanics have figured this out, i have faith that we can too. it's really not difficult.
please stop doing free tech work for people. there is something in the human condition which will cause them to be
1. ungrateful and upset with the results of your help
2. ironically, ask for more free work
3. blame you for their own fuckups
4. have set expectations that you'll do more of it on demand.
worst of all, you cheapen the entire concept of technology work. be the change you want to see in the world.
This applies to pretty much everything - friends help friends with stuff. But there's a pretty clear tit-for-tat exchange going on. If I have a problem, I expect you to give me advice, too. So, in this way, I treat tech knowledge as being exactly the same as electrician knowledge, mechanical knowledge, and medical knowledge. If you want access to my knowledge, you have to give me access to your knowledge (and to your own network if you don't have any).
I have had wealthy individuals act like they are doing me a favor because I need to find the virus/malware one of their clones dowloaded from some porn site. I always give them a quote. They send me home, and then the wife calls after hubby gets to the permently blue screen, or the wheel never stops spinning.
Feature creep is even more of an issue when the value of your time is not quantified in some way for the client.
Maybe it reminds me of myself and the help I've received after people gave up on me.
But like I said, the fallout of it often reminds me of the parent post.
The issue of mutually beneficial exploitation is a big problem in ethics[1]. People who say it's OK, subscribe to what's known as the "non-worseness claim", but many don't. That post you linked to is a shallow, uneducated piece that completely ignores the vast discussion on the topic in ethics literature[2].
Another thing is that even with the most generous interpretation, and even if you do subscribe to the non-worseness claim and find it ethically positive, in most such mutually-beneficial exploitation cases, no one is really trying to solve the problem, just to make the best of a bad situation. That is not bad per se, but let's not pretend Amazon is "trying to solve" the problem of homelessness.
[1]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#4
[2]: And that is a charitable description. It reads like an article about the motion of celestial bodies written today by someone who is completely unaware that physics has been an active discipline for centuries, and may have a thing or two to say about the subject. I don't expect everyone to be an expert on everything, and it's great that non-experts write about matters they've only recently been introduced to (as this can help others), but I find it hair-pullingly frustrating when people write about something by trying to deduce from first-principles without so much as googling to see if perhaps there has been some serious treatment of the subject before. It is doubly frustrating when it is those ignorant (though perhaps well-intentioned) articles are the ones that get referenced and discussed. It's like those texts actively erase knowledge.
All you do is say that the poster is uneducated, but have made zero attempt in educating him, other readers or advancing any argument against what was posted.
so tell me, if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
You mean like people who believe they can solve any problem by just deducing the solution from first-principles without even trying to find some prior art (I know the author of that post didn't, because it took me all of five minutes of googling to find plenty of it)? Or people who believe there are easy answers because they are just unaware of the the complexities of the world and so maintain a simple, solvable, model of it in their minds? Or worse, people who justify their views with the naturalistic fallacy and say, "well, this is how the world works; we can't change it so we might as well make the best of a shitty situation"? (as long as they don't get the short end of the stick, of course)
And you need to understand that people who write articles like that are being dismissive towards real people who have actually dedicated their lives to studying social problems (or debating questions of ethics).
> but have made zero attempt in educating him
Because the issue is very, very complex. I have provided a link that points to where to get started when approaching this difficult topic.
> if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
The reason you're bringing this up is because you think that the analogy is apt, but I'm not so sure. There are some ways to approach this (which are far from comprehensive).
First, you need to explain the situation. How much water do you have? Let's suppose you have a supply for a million people. I would say that in that situation it may be ethical for you to sell that man some water, but if you do (rather than just give him the water), you now have a certain obligation towards him. For example, to make sure that he has enough water. Another question is why is that man in the desert in the first place? Could you have possibly contributed to his being there, or did not do enough to stop him? Suppose that the reason he is there is because he got lost, and he got lost because the map of the area is wrong. And it's not just him, but many people get lost because of that map, and that is precisely why you've decided to get a water tanker and set up shop in the desert. Now, it may not have been in your power to change the map, but if you had made the same effort into getting the map fixed as into setting up your water stand, there may have been a good chance that it would have been fixed. So now this puts you in a different role: you're not trying to help solve the desert problem, but you're benefiting from it not being fixed, and while you may not have been able to fix it yourself, you could have helped but you didn't. If that is the case, I think that you have quite a strong moral responsibility towards those poor souls. You are not to blame for their problem, you certainly didn't make the desert or the wrong map, but you're not really trying to fix the cause and you are benefiting from it. In that case, I would say that at the very least you have the moral responsibility to sell the water at a very decent price, and to make sure all your lost customers make it out alive.
My point is that mutually-beneficial exploitation has been known to be a very hard problem for a long time, and so we try to approach it on a case-by-case basis, and make sure we try to understand the full ethical picture. Simplified analogies don't help -- they remove nuance from a very nuanced question.
At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
It's other people's job to make sure their map is good. If they had failed in doing so, i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
No, by "nuanced" I mean that in a system with such strong interaction between the components (anything can affect anything) there are always what you may consider "external" factors. People cloud the problem by artificially simplifying it when they don't consider the whole picture (usually just to make their decision easier).
> At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
Wonderful question. Good thing that philosophers have debated it for many years, now. Read the link I provided for an intro to the discussion.
> It's other people's job to make sure their map is good.
That is one possible ethical position, but if you explore how it was constructed, you would see it is far from trivial. To help you along, consider the axioms that have led you to the conclusion and how you came up with them.
But consider a simple example: suppose that you notice some oil-spill on the sidewalk that you manage avoid stepping into. Do you have zero responsibility to warn others? If so why? If not, why not?
> i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
Sure, but that alone is not sufficient to absolve the dude from any moral obligation. Consider the case where the dude shoots your leg off and then offers to sell you a tourniquet. You would rather buy it than die, but that doesn't make him ethically right. This is a completely different question from that of mutually-beneficial exploitation, but it just shows why offering you a better choice is not enough. It also hints to why many consider mutually beneficial exploitation to be wrong (or at least to impose added moral responsibility on the exploiter): sometimes to consider ethics, it's not enough to consider two choices: sell you the tourniquet or not, but also other choices, such as not shooting you in the first place.
In my example of the man in the desert, the two choices are not just selling you water or not, but quite a few: helping ensure that the map is right (say, by writing a letter to the mapmaker), giving you the water for free, selling you the water for a low price, selling you the water for a fair price (for some definition of fair), selling you the water for a high price. Each of these many choices has their own ethical value (things don't have to be binary). But understand this: the claim isn't that because you can always choose an even more ethical choice then a less-ethical one is "wrong", but that if you benefit by making a particular choice rather than a "better" one, that benefit may impose added moral responsibility on you.
But as I said, it's a very complicated topic.
1. Amazon may (or may not) have promised that the jobs were temporary-to-permanent rather than just seasonal.
2. Amazon did not have a clear feedback mechanism so that they could improve the program.
3. It sounds like Amazon only gave a week's notice to put this job fair together (something usually takes a month).
From the article:
> He said it’s normal for companies to face these questions when they first hire homeless workers. But he said what counts is that they keep trying and learning.
I would hardly expect to find that tidbit in an article that was attempting to lay the entire blame for the worldwide problem of homelessness at the feet of Amazon... for hiring a few homeless people from Seattle.
The problem with companies getting involved in social issues is that social issues take a degree of tact, planning and prior-research. You can't just wade in and play with peoples lives.
Good on them for trying - and I hope they don't feel burned by it - but there's a reason public entities and charities are better placed to addressed these kinds of problems, even if they're not well resourced for it. Hopefully they'll continue to refine how they approach it.
Then why is it that (FTA) "Amazon told Schwartz it would offer temporary-to-permanent positions at its distribution warehouses"?
I saw zero criticism of Amazon for offering the jobs in the first place. It's the failure to follow through and provide the promised stability.
What evidence is there of failure to follow through? Temporary-to-permanent does not mean someone is guaranteed a permanent position, it means they have a chance at it. The permanent positions might be relatively small in number, and highly competitive, so some workers will not get it. Who is most likely to be interviewed by a newspaper and have an axe to grind?
The article would be more informative if it shared data about what percentage of workers were hired as temps, and how many full time positions were expected to be hired afterward, and how many of the homeless hired as temps made it into full time, and so on. Without that information, the article is just an anecdote from a person or two.
The nature of temp work is that it's not permanent, and no one hired into a temp job should have the disillusion that they will definitely get a permanent one. Temporary-to-permanent work means that there's a chance to stay on if you're good - you're not definitely going to get fired, nor do you definitely get to stay.
No one negotiated to keep homeless shelters open so that the workers could actually DO nigh-shift work. No one counseled the workers on the financial implications of "seasonal work" and how small of a grain of salt to take when a company says the temp work "might" become permanent.
I don't blame Amazon, but I do think they were at least naive about the scope of the project and the chance for success given the circumstances of homeless people.
They shouldn't have implied there was a change of permanency.
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[1] This article has a pretty decent write-up of what it's like to work for Amazon: https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/welcome-t...
Then what?
To me it would indicate that the motivation behind proposing jobs for homeless, which is usually a barrier to other employers, would be a benevolent one.
They basically said they will not bias against employment based on your housing situation. All things being equal, this is a good thing.
The reason Amazon hires any worker, homeless or not, is to extract a profit from their work. It's entirely possible that it offers the exact same conditions as other workers, but to describe it as benevolence is naive at best.
Amazon has a huge surge in orders during the christmas period, and it struggles to find enough workers to keep up with demand. This article makes it clear that this was a scheme aimed at coping with the seasonal surge. It has nothing to do with Amazon wanting to see homeless people better off.
The article is only arguing that Amazon's part time job though wasn't as life-changing as intentioned. It was only seasonal (which they knew) and the hours didn't end up helping the staff. Now you can argue that Amazon doesn't care because it didn't accommodate the homeless workers with day jobs instead of night jobs.
If the primary motivation was to help the seasonal employees, the program might have looked significantly different.
Amazon is being shown in a very bad light in this article, but it seems fair to say that both Amazon and the seasonal employees went into this arrangement with unrealistic expectations.
HOWEVER, One side clearly has much more power than the other, and when you wield enormous power and fail to provide help that is clearly needed and you are clearly capable of providing, I think it is easy to predict that you will not come out looking good.
You have to wonder whether Amazon knew things could turn out this way when they approached the YWCA.
This arguments are getting ridiculous. Why is it always the employers exploiting the employees? Why not the other way round? The way I see it, if the people could generate more value self-employed, they would do it! The only reason they take jobs is because they can, gasp, exploit the employer by producing more value than they would otherwise, and getting paid more!
In a free society, exploitation goes both ways!
Nah. The "Losers" in MacLeod's hierarchy are explicitly choosing to leave extractable value on the table (this being the thing they're "losing") in exchange for being allowed to slack. Most people do not have the willpower to be entrepreneurs; in fact, much the opposite—most people want a job that requires as little willpower of them as possible.
Of course, he also said:
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
That's a very hostile way to describe working a warehouse job.
Offering someone a job is not asking them to break their back. Working for an employer has nothing to do with the extravagantly wealthy. All companies need employees, and companies are valuable because they serve their customers. You could equally say "break their back so random Internet consumers get their products", or "Burger King / WalMart employees break their backs so you get a cheap cheeseburger / grocery product".
Working a job tends to make people better off, and offering someone a job they didn't have before is giving them a new option. We can wish for a world where even better jobs were available, but wishing doesn't make it so. It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
You can wish there were even better opportunities, but are you prepared to provide them yourself? Or is this your position: "I'm not going to do anything about it myself, but I'm going to criticize those who do something positive, even if it's just providing a low value opportunity. Someone should provide a better opportunity than that, but I won't be the one to do it."
By demonizing companies that offer jobs to poor people or the homeless, you're committing the fallacy called the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics. http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
You're very right about this, it was wrong of me to describe the purpose of the operation as being that of making someone rich. The purpose is to maximise profits for the employer – which can lead to extreme wealth or poverty, depending on your success. Besides, in order to appreciate how shit a situation is for someone it is irrelevant to know whether someone else is profiting from it. So thanks for pointing that out.
> Working a job tends to make people better off [...] It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
I think this is wishful thinking. The article actually points out that this is not true: getting this job actually made the situation worse for a lot of them.
> but are you prepared to provide them yourself?
As a pauper myself, I am not. I don't have the resources to do so.
> to criticize those who do something positive
As I tried to show before, good intentions was not what motivated Amazon to offer jobs to these people. Also, leaving someone worse off than before is not what I would call a positive outcome. So this cannot be my position.
> By demonizing companies that offer jobs to poor people or the homeless,
I definitely did not mean to demonise Amazon. I pointed out in my last comment that this was a feature of our world, not a feature of a particular company. That's the saddest thing of this whole story: Amazon acted completely rationally, and it's easy to see how it almost had no choice but to use up these homeless people and then throw them away. Not because it's evil, but because that's what's required of it as a company. If Amazon stops churning out profits, it won't be a company for much longer.
> you're committing the fallacy called the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics.
Nitpick: what you call the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics is not a fallacy, there's no logic involved here since it relates to people's moral values. It's a phenomenon at best. But once again, the point was not to say that Amazon is evil; the point is to say this world is broken.
I would say they're in such need as they would take any job offered them, misery notwithstanding, but you're 80% with me yes.
> I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
I kind of agree with you here. I don't think Bezos is up in his office masturbating vigorously to camera footage of homeless people walking into Amazon warehouses to work. He's not hiring them because he wants to make money, in all likelihood most of them will need a fair bit more training than regular blue collar workers who are between jobs or people looking to earn some extra money, and I'm also willing to bet that a homeless person would be fairly less reliable in terms of showing up for their shifts on time if only for the fact that they literally have nothing including a car. Amazon probably does want to help, and they want to enough that they're willing to overlook the problems that come with hiring homeless people.
Now we can argue all day about how Amazon could afford to put those people in 5 star hotels for the entire Christmas season and it probably wouldn't hurt them, but that's not the point. They're a company, not a charity. They don't need to hire these people at all if they don't want to (and if they didn't, no one would even be arguing about this in the first place) so forgive me if I'm not willing to throw them under the bus for at least trying to help.
It's not Amazon I want to throw under the bus. They did what any rational player would do in their situation. What I want to throw under the bus is the situation itself, aka, how we organise our world.
IDK why.
So a socialist who wants to help the homeless will spend their time fighting the government to fund to social services.
Does political action count as "getting your hands dirty"? Well I'm not one to decide.
Edit: This is actually a really interesting topic and I didn't mean offense by my original post. So it's sad to see people downvoting/unwilling to talk about these things.
[1] Edit: Let's be fair -- there are probably a lot of intelligent socialists who have a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of these programs and the dynamics at play.
Conservatives are known for their "fuck you, got mine" mentality, powered by the belief that if you're poor, it's your own damn fault.
> IDK why.
I could venture a guess that many very religious people are on the conservative side of the spectrum, and their religion compels them to help others. Though in most cases, "helping others" means "attempting to convert them to your religion." And many times you can just replace "religion" with "cult" and it comes out about the same (e.g. Scientology has outreach programs, though I think that's more for converting survivors of disasters than helping the homeless).
This is an incredibly dubious statement. 99% of americans are literally afraid to touch a homeless person, it's pretty pathetic.
These folks are so dependent on both the income from their jobs, and the precarious balance they maintain of income to expenses, that anything that threatens either can quickly lead to cascading and compounding problem that become insurmountable.
It's very much possible to get ahead in America[2], that's why I love this country. It's also very important to recognize that it's very much possible to create a house of cards that can come crashing down, and that to also recognize that if that has happened to someone, it's not because their unwillingness to work hard, or some other perceived flaw of their character.
As an aside, this is one of my favorite moments in US politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iGmY...
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/09/398576196/...
[2] I'm aware of the international readership of HN. However as an American, I can only speak to the opportunities I've experienced.
On a really good day everyone gets fed, clothed, bathed and has a climate-controlled place to spend the night...most of the time its a stiff challenge to provide those basics..the wherewithal required to offer extras like counseling, job coaching, or to accommodate individual patron's schedules (coming and going--a security issue) is just not there the majority of the time...
What do you do about the 15 that you left on the street in the middle of winter, and it's -40 out? Will they get by until you're ready for them?
What other prioritization will you be doing? Maybe you'll also prioritize the most hireable candidates to the top of the list to be re-groomed for the workforce. What about those that find themselves in a less hireable state? How far down the list are they, and how long do they have to wait to be helped?
What about the people that are homeless due to untreated mental health conditions? Do you just ignore them for now? Are they the "class" of homeless that gets helped last?
Head off to G+ and look up Andreas Schou. He used to run a homeless shelter in Boise, Idaho. Kind of fell into the job, previous boss was incompetent. Or skimming. Or something else. But he was out and Andreas, just another volunteer, was in.
Some days he could help out. Some he couldn't. Sometimes he kept his cool. Sometimes he didn't. I'll try to find the article.
Here: https://plus.google.com/+AndreasSchou/posts/B9iRsq2kVeL
Andreas works for Google now. Writes some amazingly fucking good shit on G+ as well.
If not, then help a number you can actually help. Apply a selection process: triage, sortition, intuition. Whatever.
Someone's going to get helped, someone's not.
If you've got additional bandwidth, make loudly known that there are more people who need help, and that others should step forward.
It's rather like emergency first-responder practices. First ensure you're safe yourself. Then save who you can. Avoid wasting time on helpless cases, or those who can survive without help. Recruit others.
yet the services are abysmal!
One of the things I've long thought would be three areas to address homelessness;
1. create "hygiene trucks" - they are semi trailers that are mobile that would provide showers, bathrooms, 'scrubs' style basic clothing.
2. container based micro housing, divide the containers into ~3 rooms.
3. "standard pantry" -- give them a basic standard pantry which has the ingredients or basic meals (a step up from MREs)
4. basic min-wage jobs with initiatives like this with Amazon where the co gets a tax break - but must provide basic skills like cleaning, organizing etc.
Then -- FOCUS ON MENTAL HEALTH
Mental health degenerates REALLY fast for those that dont have the above basics.
NO PETS.
There is a startup in SF doing exactly this. I've seen their trucks around the Tenderloin. http://lavamae.org/
[replying to dpark's child comment here] How is this better than a permanent facility? It's got to be way more expensive to build this into a truck.
One reason is that the public bathrooms around the Tenderloin/Civic Center are just constantly fucked up with needles stuck in the drains and other issues, requiring constant maintenance. Most of the time I walk by one it's closed or actively being worked on. With the truck they can probably manage and control it a lot better.
How is this better than a permanent facility? It's got to be way more expensive to build this into a truck.
> 2. container based micro housing, divide the containers into ~3 rooms.
Containers are not an affordable way to build housing. Shipping containers converted into housing is a fetish for rich people with architects.
> FOCUS ON MENTAL HEALTH
Yep. Mental health problems are highly correlated with homelessness. Everything from depression to schizophrenia to substance abuse. Often multiple issues combined.
> NO PETS.
This eliminates a huge number of homeless. Many homeless desperately cling to their pets because they have no one else.
A fair amount of people wouldn't want a homeless shelter or washroom next to their house, but a mobile truck could have the same benefit while placating the NIMBYs.
People like respect and affection much more than they like food and heat.
I'd go further, especially in the case of a company scaling in the billions:...provide basic housing near order processing centers, or any other place where unskilled labor is needed, or semi-skilled labor can be offered training...with whatever amenities are necessary for employees to be productive--transportation and a reliable phone are huge deals for a homeless person...
It's not enough to say "I'll hire the homeless, give them a chance" just to make the news...it's much better to say "I'm committed to doing whatever it really takes to put someone back on their feet, provided they are willing to work "
If that's the price of admission, Amazon will probably decide it's not worth the trouble and abandon the project, and the homeless people you're concerned about will have even fewer opportunities.
If you are in a position to help others and you do not that says something very profound about you...effective benevolence is hard work...always has been...
Yes, amazon obviously benefits from having a larger labor pool to chose from when hiring the poor, but why is this a bad thing?
If you had the opportunity to go make Warren Buffett an extra $1 Billion, but you'd only get a 1% cut of it, would you say that's a bad deal? I would hope not, because 1% of $1,000,000,000 is still $10 Million. You'd have to be either crazy or filthy rich already to turn that down just because it'd make a wealthy person wealthier.
A seasonal amazon warehouse job might not be the most luxurious, but it still has an unusually low barrier to entry, and is likely to be sustainable for amazon to provide it regularly. Even most of the wealthiest billionaires had to start out by doing annoying grunt-work at some point in their careers.
My guess is that it cost Amazon more money (opportunity cost had they hired a more fit individual) and that they were actually looking for cheap PR not cheap labor.
However Amazon doesn't give a fuck about their minimum-wage employees anywhere, especially in their warehouses.
Consider what the jealous groupies sing about Captain Hammer's girlfriend in Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog:
So they say he saved her life
They say she works with the homeless, and doesn't eat meat
We have a problem with her!
Alternatively, how hard would it be for an employer to provide barracks, or other housing options for seasonal employees?
Are they not best positioned, and inclined to help?
> most homeless shelters close during the day and have strict curfews that don’t allow people to arrive in the night
I thought homeless shelters had some sort of semi-permanent living arrangement. Does this mean that they essentially drive everyone out during the day? Otherwise, how does it affect work on a night shift?
But this is a tiny fraction of the total quantity of shelter beds - most are mattresses that are laid out on a gymnasium floor at 8pm (first come first served, so yes the lines form much earlier), then collected and stacked at 7am the next morning when everyone is given a quick breakfast and turfed out onto the street.
Yes. Many (most?) homeless shelters are like this. Semi-permanent housing is less common, and it's very difficult to get into due to the limited number of beds. Most semi-permanent housing also has curfew, and might still interfere with night shift work.
How is the risk of going into these kinds of jobs any different for a non-homeless person? Possibly even greater, given they are paying rent/mortgage, car lease whatever.
Would it be better if these kinds of job completely abolished? Anyone who puts their hand up for these jobs, knows or should know what they are getting into.
Having said that, efforts should be made to work out the issues rather than just bash anyone who is trying to lend a hand (even for selfish reasons). For instance the shelters could adjust their policies and accommodate the people who work during the night (and have proof of it).
In many cases they know they're getting into the only job available to them, and that their kids need to eat.
We shouldn't be creating a world where people are expected to do strenous physical labour under stressful conditions for barely enough money to live. Amazon is taking billions a year, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the people who make that possible should see some of that.
Amazon has never made a significant profit and never paid dividends. AFAICT, the people who made Amazon's billions possible (including non-labor costs like suppliers and real estate) have seen pretty much all of it.
I think we must applaud Amazon for this brave move in first place and homeless people should be thankful to Amazon. Clearly these people have not seen 15 Indian students staying in 2 Bedroom apartment earning below minimum wage for part time work.
Perhaps they shouldn't have to choose between shelter and employment.
>I think we must applaud Amazon for this brave move
We can applaud Amazon for trying while also acknowledging problems with the attempt.
>Clearly these people have not seen 15 Indian students staying in 2 Bedroom apartment earning below minimum wage for part time work.
Maybe not. Instead they've seen 50 hungry people crowd into a shelter trying to get a night's sleep while earning no wage at all. They've also seen 50 more get turned away because the shelter is at capacity. And they've probably been in the second 50 many times themselves.
This is ridiculous. Do you suppose students working part time and living in cramped quarters actually have it worse than people who are literally unemployed and homeless?
10 people working at night can pool in money and rent a space just to sleep during day time. I have done that in past and it worked well. There are several ways to solve these problems without complaining.
The constraints on a company participating in a program are quite disproportionate, they're looking to fill a seasonal gap and while looking towards a social problem to fill this gap is honourable (and mutually beneficial), they also need to be aware of the duress that mutually beneficial labour can create.
This article only attempts to highlight the constraints. Amazon should have better social policy to be deal with the vulnerabilities of the assets they hire in this situation. I'm sure it's a learning experience for the YWCA, but the onus is still on Amazon to be able to better negotiate stable living conditions for the people it employed through such a program. These are people who have the potential to get out of bad situation but are still vulnerable (financially / socially / mentally), and this vulnerability should be realistically accounted for as the real liability that it is to the company employing.
No company needs to embark on such a program, they could fill labour shortages through traditional means, but when they do, it should be with some mutual agreement to work with the organisation and employees to ensure a quality outcome. Anything less is socially negligent.
It's heartening that Amazon wanted to participate, but I hope they can take on the criticism and help build a better program.
What if some shelters around just reverse its schedule, and start closing by night and opening by day for this people?.
Amazon will have what they want
Homeless will have a job and a safe place to stay when is colder out and most conflicts between homeless and drunked people arose. I suppose that Amazon pays for heating its buildings.
Shelters could save some precious money in electricity and heating and maybe an easier life for shelter's volunteers.
It seems that all parts will benefit.
Because these are separate bodies there may be different rules, regulations, standards regarding what it takes to be a nurse.
Law obviously makes sense when so much is state specific, I'd be less convinced by nursing.
They don't even seem to try to have common laws/licensing/practices for a really huge number of quite boring matters where it would seem quite efficient and advantageous to operate the same way.
That should tell something.
Warehouse work isn't fun. My employer has a large number scattered across the country and picking and stocking requires some hustle to meet customer demands; ours is more sensitive as we pull for both overnight and on demand. Still there are many people who keep these jobs for years, if not using them as a springboard into better positions within the company (most of our older executives came from pullers). Amazon may or not have a path out of their warehouses, I don't know
Or, you know, just leave when you can't pay the rent?
Is that not an option? Or do they not expect homeless to be able to do that?
If it makes it easier for both sides to get what they want, it's not even that big of an expense.
That's a fascinating web site and interesting article. They use the term "people" a lot (great!), but refer specifically to only women being impacted (bad but very PC), "She said she and the other women in her shelter felt burned". That might be that the shelter is a female only shelter, but it's very common.. However, I read about 10 articles on that site. They were only about women or a black man... Very interesting. On the surface, it looks like a prejudiced website (PC on steroids).
On a side note, Australian Bureau of Statistics says that ~70% of homeless people are men, but most articles in Australia talk about the plight of homeless women. I wonder if that becomes self-fulfilling: extreme sexism in the media means that homeless men are neglected for Political Correctness' sake.
Personally, I think most media have a lot to answer for in driving prejudice as hard as they can, especially in the last few years. While some call for a men's movement, I see how much feminism drives sexism - and we don't need more sexism driven by gender based movements. We need society to universally condemn prejudice.