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Comment by pxlpshr | Hacker News Reader

A lot of finger pointing at Amazon but most of the employment demands from the 'union' have been characteristics of Whole Foods since looonnngg before the aquisition. For example, unpaid paternity/maternity leave, no recognition of any holiday including federal - just 3 weeks of PTO used at your discretion, below market compensation, crappy benefits, calcified management, and the list goes on.

Most people work there because of the perceived culture of being free-spirit & hippy, but from my observation it's not that great of a place to build a career & wealth. Or perhaps it's par for the course and I'm just accustom to tech companies treating their people pretty well given how competitive the market is for top talent.

Source: I live in Austin with friends who work at the HQ.

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> 3 weeks of PTO

Having been in the UFCW Local 367, it takes 3 years to get 3 weeks PTO - it's 1 week the first year.

And you get "sick days", but you had to call in sick for 2 days (and lose that pay) and have a doctor's note, to start getting sick pay.

If you do call in sick, you have to explain to the manager that they'll be short a person all day, and customers will find the store that much busier and harder to shop in. Stores don't have a "b-roster" to call in when someone is sick.

Journeyman checker wages have been frozen at 18.50/hour for a decade. And it takes 4 years to work the hours to become journeyman, which increases in every subsequent union contract.

Thank you for the realism without any snark.

We're in the middle of the best economy in years. Why would a worker put up with that? Go someplace else. Whole Foods doesn't put stores in small towns. Anyone who works there has plenty of other options.

We’re in the middle of the best economy and wages still aren’t rising. Monopoly, monopsony, and free market extremism have crushed them for all but the very few.

https://www.epi.org/publication/its-not-just-monopoly-and-mo...

So no, there aren’t really “plenty of options” to get paid or treated better. Just better returns for those already at the top.

Yeah for sure, people living hand to mouth in a hyper competitive low-skill wage job definitely have the luxury of shopping around for better conditions where employers have their pick of any number of people desperate for a job. Totally.

This sarcasm does not move the discussion forward. There’s a number of things a person can do in the U.S to pick up a skill from a trade to medicine. With grants, loans, or any number of free/paid courses.

Also, it is truly impressive to see people work and succeed going from “not very much” to “boy he’s a force”. Just takes effort, go figure.

Yes, it is impressive to see people improving their lives, and we should work towards a society that helps people do that. However, to just write it all off as if "hard work" is the only thing preventing a lot of people from improving their lives is very much blind to the reality that a lot of people are _already_ working very hard, just to stay afloat as is, and there are other factors beyond "hard work" preventing change.

Acquiring a skill takes money (if there's any kind of accreditation) and time. If you're living paycheque-to-paycheque and looking to change employers, chances are you don't have much of either. Not everyone has a safety net.

Which is why having a safety net is so important in society, and therefore, society should subsidize it.

But no such thing exists in America, so that's how do many people get stuck with no options.

There have been umpteen articles how wages have not kept up with inflation. It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.

???

Inflation and Trump not having a morality record is kind of given if you can believe CNN and the NY Times...

The rest of your statement requires explanation for my head to wrap around... The phrase frumentarious frippery springs to mind.

>It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.

I don't really understand what you're saying, but Obama had a despicable morality record as well. Kill list, 7 wars, drone bombed American citizens with no due process, dropped 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone, tortured people including Chelsea Manning.

> swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record

This is a weird juxtaposition. You appear to be implying that "first black president" and "less than stellar morality" are moral opposites.

Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.

And if that's just "fake news" given it has been reported in multiple sources, then I suppose I can just call any retort you make as "fake news" as well.

Were you trying to reply to a different comment? Because your response makes absolutely no sense.

> Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.

Congrats on inventing this never-before-seen grammatical construct, though.

> We're in the middle of the best economy in years.

Best economy for whom? The U.S. economy as a whole has expanded greatly since the 1980s, but it's the individuals' economies that matter, and they haven't expanded much.

Yeah, why work a dead end low paying job? Just go get more money!

'best economy in years' i s a meaningless statement.

You should be looking at who the gains from that economy are going to.

And? If Amazon bought a company with poor working conditions, ripe for unionization, it’s their problem. They’re the bosses now.

Maybe the workers hoped things would get better absent labor organization, but now that they’re being managed by a company rife with labor abuses, their circumstances have become more clear to them.

I don't disagree, I think it's a great opportunity for Amazon to make this a big win for their optics - externally for consumers who are starting to view them as the new Walmart and internally for WF employees.

I just felt I needed to clarify that attacking Amazon and painting them red in the press for poor employment practices that WF has upheld for a long time was not really a diplomatic strategy for approaching your new boss, especially when a lot of WF employees likely wanted Amazon to be a "hands-off" acquirer.

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