Hacker News Reader

Comment by biomene | Hacker News Reader

> What it were proved that Amazon was offering jobs to the homeless at the exact same rate and conditions that it offered to all its seasonal workers, thereby not treating the homeless any worse than others

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.

View on HN

Why are they mutually exclusive? If I can help get employees for my seasonal surge and HELP homeless people then that's a double win for me.

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.

They don't have to be mutually exclusive, but it is important to understand what the primary motivation for an arrangement is, because it helps you predict how the arrangement is likely to change with changing conditions.

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.

> The reason Amazon hires any worker, homeless or not, is to extract a profit from their work.

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!

> The way I see it, if the people could generate more value self-employed, they would do it!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com