Employees at Amazon's New NYC Warehouse Launch Unionization Push
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I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year.
Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.
It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.
That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth.
So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction.
I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!
A self-fulfilling prophecy would be if the belief that unions fail to help workers made them fail to help workers (which also happens).
Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition.
Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.
Now if you bring up the "service" provided argument, That is literally their job. If they are getting paid a decent minimum wage or little bit more than that, i think it's fair. Do you tip McDonald's employee? Do you tip your garbage men? Do you tip the people who helped you at the clothing store?
Because you can afford a $400 bottle of wine. It’s a wealth-based sliding scale.
If you don't want to participate in the culture, don't go to places you would be upset doing so.
A lot of good waiters make more with tips. A "fair wage" from the restaurant owner's perspective would be a bit less than how much they pay a line cooks (~$14/hr). A waiter at a semi-popular restaurant can make much more than this because the customer doesn't know fair value of their work and usually overcompensates. Waiters can also cheat on taxes a bit when people tip in cash.
my perspective as an employee: I definitely would remember which customers tipped well. anyone who walked into the restaurant would at least get the minimum treatment my boss expected, but I would often go above and beyond for people I knew tipped well. I usually averaged around $12-15/hr after tips, in a state where the minimum wage was $8.50 or so. this is just speculation of course, but I really doubt I would have made that much money if it had to come direct from the business (ie no tipping culture).
my perspective as a customer: tipping allows me to decide whether I want to pay extra for good service. if I just go to some restaurant occasionally, I'll just tip 18% or whatever and they at least won't spit in my food. on the other hand, if I go to some place all the time, I can tip 25% or more and get great service every time I go.
tipping allows people who care about good service to pay for it, and it allows servers to allocate more of their time/attention to their best customers. having experienced both sides of it, I'm really not sure what the problem is, unless you're just visiting and don't understand the system.
And i like how you conveniently ignored the last paragraph. Do you tip any of the people i mentioned? Because, frankly a garbage men's services are way more useful and needed than a servers. Why do servers deserve a tip and not people working at clothing store? Or people working at Walmart?
first of all, mandatory tipping at a coffee shop or takeout place is dumb. afaik, these are not legally considered tipped positions and the employer is not usually allowed to count tips toward minimum wage. that said, I certainly recommend you throw a little extra in their tip jar if they actually provide outstanding service.
> Do you tip any of the people i mentioned? Because, frankly a garbage men's services are way more useful and needed than a servers. Why do servers deserve a tip and not people working at clothing store? Or people working at Walmart?
I don't claim that the tipping system is inherently moral or immoral. my claim is that it is a practical way to align incentives in a particular set of situations. in a restaurant, the difference between acceptable and great service is quite large. if I'm handling several tables, I'm usually going to get to the tables that tip well first. I'm going to make sure they're not in the middle of a deep conversation when I go over to check if the food is okay. there are tons of subtle things that a skilled server can do to improve your dining experience if they are incentivized.
garbage men, on the other hand, either pick up your trash or they don't. idk what the difference between a good and a great garbage collector is, maybe the great one takes the time to leave my can sitting upright? a cashier can ring you up fast or take their time, but can't really affect your experience other than that.
I do actually agree that maybe some retail positions should be tipped. I find that usually Walmart employees don't give a shit whether I find everything I'm looking for. occasionally one of them is super helpful and saves me 30min or more of hunting around the store. in these situations I try to slip them a couple bills. if they refuse, I make sure to find their supervisor on the way out and explain that they made the store a lot more money by helping me find my things.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tipping-doesnt-reward-good...
https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
I suspect the causality is reversed. rather than good service being rewarded by good tips, people generally tip the same amount wherever they go, and after a while they start to get recognized and receive better service.
Compare the quality of service of people that do "their job" to those that are rewarded for doing their job exceptionally well on an individual basis. Serving food table-side is participating in one of the most intimate rituals of human existence. It's in a whole different tier of customer service than fast food, clothing, etc.
Do you have any idea how much restaurants would have to raise their prices to pay a "fair wage"? Enough to where the number of servers they could employ would fall dramatically, not only disincentivizing great service, but also the pure availability of it. There are razor thin profit margins on food.
- The system we have is internally consistent, which your comment very ably pointed out.
- Restaurants are incentivized to employ workers whose pay falls under the "tipped workers" regulations.
- Americans are used to tipping, and we understand the trade-offs, and those of us who don't work for tips (like you and me) generally like a tipping-based system. What's not to like about a system that gives us the power to control or punish service workers according to our whims? ;)
Finally, citing profit margins as the reason to artificially depress payroll obligations of employers to employees might be accurate, but it's also a great example of how the system is broken: Why do restaurants exist that can't afford to pay their workers a fair wage?
It is essentially a trick to get people to not think about how much money they are spending.
In places like Miami where English comprehension is very low, mandatory gratuity is added with a further line item for tipping
Disparate hospitality minimum wage excecptions across the country exacerbates the level of research and discretion needed to adequately consider tipping. With some places paying a seperate lower minimum wage to restuarant workers and some places like California (where over 10% of the country lives) having normalized minimum wages but the same compulsory guilt driven tipping expectations.
This is very true, the "best" (or should I say most succesful?) unions are those that have a monopsony (they control all the supply and there is only one buyer). The only recent victory I can recall is that airport workers are guaranteeda $19/hr minimum wage [1].
The other dimension that is brought on is that unions tend to be "corrupt" with the leaders taking advantage of their positions to "extort" money if they don't get favorable deals; some of these leaders also just pocket their earnings and don't spread the wealth. The mafia also infiltrated many of the unions in shipping and distribution to control the flow of drugs which has sullied the reputations of many unions in New York. [2]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/nyregion/airport-workers-...
[2]https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio...
Nowadays it’s even more ridiculous with payment terminals all set to 15%, 20%, 25% options and to tip $0 you have to go to “custom amount” and type 0. The most idiotic part about it is that most of the places that use this practice provide no service at all! You pick your food! You clean after yourself! What are you tipping them for???
But I somewhat prefer this way, actually, since you can leave quicker.
I haven't heard of any cases where the money doesn't go to staff, have you? That seems rather illegal.
The institution of beggary is surviving in India for the same problems.
The government even has beggars cess, taxes to train beggars into a decent profession.
Nothing works because some one always pays, and therefore there is an incentive for it to continue.
Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered, regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'
It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down. Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone any favors by reducing their employment options.
Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated.
An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or contract.
> [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot."
Freudian slips.
> She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets.
Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.
> “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement.
Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’ at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”
Software developers don't have any trade union at all, and we're paid well.
The reason you can't buy legal services from Walmart is the same reason you can't buy software development from Walmart. It's just not their business.
Well, actually...
"The Law Store offers fast, face-to-face legal services in convenient Walmart locations."
You're not paying for legal representation. You're paying for all the time and effort the lawyer spend establishing their professional reputation.
You or I would get laughed out of court. A professional lawyer could show up, say the same things and get taken seriously.
Relatively mundane work doesn't get any more interesting the faster you do it.
It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.
Or they can close down the shop if they can't find the money to do the right /required thing.
They would have said margins are too thin, that it's impossible to pay more, that menial labor doesn't deserve more, that paying more would result in immediate widespread layoffs, that warehouse employees have little recourse but to accept their lot or quit because that's just how the market works.
But that argument assumes Amazon, or any business, pays some objective measure of what a job is "worth", or as much as the market will allow. They don't, they often pay as little as they can get away with.
So yes, Amazon could close down the shop, but Amazon could always close down the shop. They could also afford to pay their warehouse employees more. They don't, not because they can't, but because they prefer not to.
It's not Amazon that creates this situation. It's the market system itself and it will always exist, because if Amazon doesn't do it some other employer will -- in some jurisdiction or scenario in which they can get away with it -- and gain a competitive advantage. Unless there's a labour shortage, or government action, it's a race to the lowest common denominator or worse. And that's why the formation of a union across the whole sector is imperative.
Clearly, if you accept a job, you believe the compensation to be fair. If it wasn’t fair, you wouldn’t take the job. It’s as simple as that.
Or it's your only choice. We're not talking about skilled labour with lots of options.
Picking between running madly around an amazon warehouse for 15 dollars an hour or taking some other low skill job for less seems fine, until Amazon realizes that the workers are all interchangeable and the company benefits more by burning through them quickly and replacing them with fresh bodies than it does by continued support for its staff with long term plans of employment. The second they decide to exploit their labor for their sole benefit, rather than something that can be seen as mutually beneficial for both in the long term, that's when people start to feel you should be doing better.
Also, just to address a theme that gets thrown around a lot. >>Working at Amazon is literally no one's "only choice" in the US.
What does this mean? The US is a massive country with huge differences from one region to the next, never mind the difference between the urban and rural areas within a region. To try and pretend its a unified country with unified value systems and a unified equally distributed economic system is asinine. On top of that, who the fuck knows what's going on in "Joe Random-US-Citizen"'s life. Maybe it is his only option because he also has to take care of his dying father and is racked with student debt from a failed attempt at getting his BA. IDK what anyone's value choices represent, but this whole "you can always just do better if you really wanted" is a lie I'm sick of being peddled. The US is economically more advanced than many countries. There's still people living in relative poverty. There's still massive social problems.
Any time someone says any broad group (Americans, Gays, Engineers) all face the same situations, I have to roll my eyes because it's never true.
Sorry if this came across as a personal attack on your views (it isn't, I don't really know them from your 2 sentences), it's just something I see get brought up and this was me finally responding.
These are not exclusive options. Workers can make a decent wage and be incentivized by bonus programs.
I’m not sure how this is undignified or how to have enough dignity in such a program.
It’s a challenge to try to maximize productivity and having elective programs where individuals can choose to put in extra effort than they normally would could certainly be structured in a way that isn’t compulsory and reduces the risk of someone harming themself.
It certainly would award workers who work harder and produce more than others. And there could be valid reasons for lower productivity (ie, poor health) that are outside of worker control. But I think the aim is not to evenly distribute wages across all workers, but to allocate wages to the most productive workers.
Manual labor is a challenge to manage.
They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.
If they did it by saying "everyone that meets this specific standard gets a bonus of X" then i don't think anyone would really complain. But because they are overworking themselves to have a chance to maybe get a prize, it seems unnecessarily exploitative.
That's not how a raffle works. You earn tickets which increase your chances of winning. The highest performer isn't necessarily the winner. That also limits how much effort people are going to put into it.
I agree that getting rewarded for actual work performed is strictly better, but in the end the workers get to decide if they want to play that game or not.
> They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.
I guess the possibility that warehouse workers are going to sabotage each other and risk getting fired over raffle tickets wasn't considered in the planning. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it sounds far-fetched.
This is a rather short sighted view. In many cases, they either play or they lose out big (either financially or even up to losing their job). For many of those outside tech (and some in tech), losing your job isn’t a risk they are able to take.
Imagine the olympics where there is no gold, silver, bronze. Is it undignified to award the highest performers?
A method that awarded everyone would not lead to productivity gains desired since it skips the competition and motivation. This only applies to manual labor and not to many other careers.
Competition is not undignified or wrong if it is fair and structured properly.
Overworking is optional. It’s something I used to be into when I was young, but not now.
It’s tyrannical if all weee forced to work harder, even if age prevented it.
The Olympics is a competition, not a group of people working towards the same goal. It would be MORE like giving one member or a relay team a gold medal instead of giving it to an entire team when they win.
They're being treated like dogs, pressured to perform tricks in exchange of a treat.
I mean, move fast to receive raffle tickets? Seriously?
The context of this practice matters quite a bit, but it’s hard to say that work incentive programs are undignified because dogs get treats for tasks.
And a raffle is literally a form of income since it has value and is taxed as income. Perhaps you mean getting a raffle ticket and losing isn’t income.
You've just described my whole life...
I'm not saying that Bezos and the people packing goods in a warehouse should be paid equally but the absolutely obvious unfairness of the modern capitalist economy is simply unbearable for more and more people. The fact that many people still don't seem to have any issue with having somebody earn effectively a thousand times more money than their employees is absolutely baffling. And then they go around shopping for tax rebates for their new headquarters. Everything is fine people, the system is working.
IMO this (and global warming) are going to be the downfall of capitalism. There's too much greed. Too many rich people complaining about taxes while people sleep in the streets. As a result people will turn more and more towards populists as they feel betrayed by the elites. That's how you end up with Trump, Bolsonaro, the populist government in Italy and the current protests in France. People know that they are getting shafted.
The proven solution is to rename "power hours" to "hackathons".
The key word here is "pressured". There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon. You can work on your own pace, or choose to dropout. Almost all of the people who participate do so because of their interest and not to win a trophy or some cash.
I guess you haven't had the pleasure of participating in monthly workplace "hackathons". Of course participation is optional, but it can look good on your promotion case wink-wink nudge-nudge.
I think hackathons could be fun but they should either be done independently from a company or do something that's not of any direct value to the company but something fun.
My brother worked in one of these warehouses (not for Amazon, but more or less the same crap) and frankly I think it's a bit obscene to compare this situation to software engineering. It's exhausting, it's boring, it's unfulfilling, the turnover rate is huge, you can't really socialize with your coworkers (partly because they change so fast, but also because you have no time and you're often competing with each other).
I'm sure in the near future the vast majority of these jobs will be replaced by machines though. It's a bad thing for employment but I don't think I'll be sad to see them go. Let the machines to the boring work then take the wealth generated and redistribute it to the population to do actually interesting things! Technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines.
There doesn't appear to be an easy answer. My comment was only meant to convey that soldiering on to worry another day comes at an opportunity cost.
i assume you mean the shareholder population?
I'll go in and say it should be redistributed to the population at large -- anything that gets us, as a species, closer to that Star Trek utopia is a good thing. World's got the resources for it already.
i just think that's what would happen. trickle-down economics and the idea that any savings will be passed down to the consumer is a marketing crock of shit.
I've got a very cush job, and I can totally identify with what you're saying here.
One feature of that comparison you're critiquing, however, is very important.
A lot of us working in IT who have cushy jobs imagine that our interests are more aligned with the owning classes instead of with the working folks who are doing really painful jobs.
I don't agree with that view, and I feel that a lot of the callous and dismissive "no one is forcing them to work" comes from the fact that many people don't understand that at their core, the ideas that lead working people to have power of how they work affect everyone who is employed by the people who own businesses.
So while I agree that my working conditions are much, much better than any warehouse workers, fundamentally if I am going to stand in solidarity with them I need to understand that my interests are served by the same things that serve their interests, because we both labor for a business instead of owning a business.
To return the comment your criticizing, you have a reasonable point that working conditions for people who "engineer" are much better than those that move boxes.
At the same time, I feel like understanding that those folks moving boxes have the same underlying interests as those of use moving bits is completely necessary to understanding how we can move towards a world where your laudable premise that "technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines" can be treated descriptively instead of just normatively.
Income inequality is so obscene that it's far worse than the Gilded Age. Watch this infographic chart video showing the current distribution: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.
Of course, a union has to recognize that it's not blindly serving its members, if it drives companies out of business. Like hindering technological advancement by refusing automation.
This. Capitalism is all about freedom of association. Unions only start to become incompatible with capitalism if they start to force themselves as a monopoly to control who may or may not work for a company.
Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.
The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.
It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.
Actually, it's not. It's a page taken out of the old soviet playbook, where factory workers were pushed to increase production through means other than pay increases or productivity rewards, and played with psychological tricks such as appealing to nationalism or even conformance with the regime's ideal.
The exploitation trick is as old as time, but it's not specific to an economic system.
Hence the saying: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
Actually, it's not. State capitalism has absolutely no relation to how workers were used and abused by communist regimes.
For example, the following is from "The Failure of the Working Class" by Anton Pannekoek in 1946:
The workers of the world nowadays have two mighty foes, two hostile and suppressing powers over against them: the monopolistic capitalism of America and England, and Russian state capitalism. The former is drifting toward social dictatorship camouflaged in democratic forms; the latter proclaims dictatorship openly, formerly with the addition "of the proletariat," although nobody believes that any more.
Occasionally, companies try to organize with market principles internally, with divisions charging each other for services performed. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it turns into Sears.
What's weird to me is that these people aren't forced to work there. They're working there because it's their BEST option.
There are professions when skill transfer is problematic, like a railroad engineer, but warehouse worker is not one of them.
It is indeed not frictionless and requires some effort, but it's certainly doable.
You've just explained why this power isn't realistic to invoke. If you're a warehouse worker, can you afford the unemployment time long enough to find another job? Can your family?
In real life most people first secure a new job and then resign from their current position.
To answer your question: no, my family cannot afford me not working for half a year as well. I believe this is the case for most of people not living with parents.
There is no such thing as a race to the bottom.. This is a common trope from people who don't understand economics. Union benefits are zero sum rent extraction, and in the long run, inhibit economic growth and with it broad-based wage growth.
At least a feudal lord had obligations to their subjects.
Since many (most?) people in the US cannot afford the land and other resources necessary to provide for themselves (e.g. via farming or craftsmanship), I'm not sure that it's unfair to draw a parallel between them and serfs.
It's really not that uncommon for people outside of major cities to own their home?
It’s a job. If you add more value, you ought to be paid for it in dollars, not raffle tickets.
Secondly, it is not a reward for working efficiently, it is a reward for working the most efficiently. There is only one winner and the other participants get nothing. The company gets the added value either way of course. This is a great if you want to break up employee solidarity too.
Thirdly, the term 'efficiency' implies there is some sort of process optimization going on; the same energy goes in, more value comes out. I doubt workers are suddenly provided with better tooling during 'power hour', so 'efficiency' probably just means 'run faster, exhaust yourself'.
Finally, you can bet 'power hour' metrics are used to adjust regular productivity targets related to other 'incentives', overall making the jobs more demanding and less rewarding over time.
The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor, treating workers as mere goods that can be bought and systematically manipulated, and thinking about living, feeling humans in this way is disgusting to me.
I suppose we cant expect Amazon workers to go into excel and calculate their yearly earnings from prizes?
If they did this, its a non issue.
But I suppose we can't expect Amazon workers to do this... correct?
>The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor
You say this like its a bad thing. If you can turn labor into something an unskilled/uneducated worker can do, humanity is more productive. This is the goal of creating processes.
It's dehumanizing, and petty to try and squeeze people out this way.
I wasnt going to make a career out of a job that gave me a free shirt for working extra hard.
But then again, I'm an engineer, so maybe I make better decisions.
Seems unlikely. Engineers are as prone to bad decision making as anyone else. Some of them - the supercilious dickheads who believe their own hype - even more so.
I remember reading that are a gazillion rules and regulations on attempted unionization, so "you're fired" might not be it.
But I understand that it’s possible to put a passage in the employee handbook that “if you belong to a union, the following does not apply to you; check your union agreement for details,” and to offer some benefits, such as profit-sharing, only to nonunion employees. Since labor law is complex, I don’t know what limits exist on that approach.
Edit:
Guess the number is closer to 75 now. It originally started in NYC several years ago, but has rapidly expanded now.
See the cities list by clicking on the “see all cities” link below where you can enter your zip code here:
I'm thinking in particular of Amazon Flex.
If you are not happy, with Amazon policy, they will just not give you any package to deliver.
keep everything private
do not collaborate
> let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.
I highly recommend the latest Reply All - https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/132-negative-mount-ple.... It's about that town in Wisconsin that "won" the new Foxconn factory.
https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-sta...
Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
Is this the conclusion you reached after reading Amazon's balance sheets? If so, would you mind sharing your research?
To be fair though, they aren't making money on fulfillment really, they're cross-subsidizing it with their more profitable segments which also do not require that many workers. In that sense it isn't comparable with Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended?
$19 is certainly enough to live (~$38k/year). This is way above poverty and one of the highest wages for unskilled labor.
At least it's way more than a postdoc immigrant can count on.
This is unhelpful, but that's the way things work at the moment, and it's very well understood by aggregate investment capital.
So then you get a second sense: good enough to sustain huge amounts of investment capital from people who correctly perceive that it will destroy other companies that choose to pay their employees enough to live.
Still pretty unhelpful, if you're a human…
If they work 40h a week, rent a single bedroom apartment at ~$1600 and the cost of living for one is ~$800 this leaves 2976 - 2400 = ~576 a month without special circumstances. In this case they don't have a car, drinks or meals outside the home, going out (movies/etc.), alcohol, dog, sport membership or travel and certainly no family. If they have one family member at ~600 a month they are down 24 dollars a month so they'd better not. [1]
Simply seeing that Amazon is doing so mindbogglingly well for itself that the value of their assets has grown by 52.65% in 2017[2] and while still holding ~22 billion dollars in reserve[3], workers are not adding some value (as is required in a Keynesian capitalist system) but an insane amount of value. And it is all trickling up while workers cannot afford to have a family.
[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Long-Island-NY-Unit...
[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/...
[3]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/256-billion-apple-cash-amazon-...
That's not up for a company to decide, they don't control all the prices and sentiments that determine what is and isn't "decent to live". They can decide what they can pay to hire an extra worker and make more money as a result. If they don't believe they'll make more money as a result, then there's no hire.
It seems odd that capitalism would have such a duty to humanity because it’s like saying “art has failed humanity.” Or “this screwdriver has failed breakfast.”
As we're seeing now, wealth and income inequality are at terrible levels. Wage stagnation has been hurting the middle class. Housing is becoming increasingly expensive as jobs centralize on cities. Gentrification pushes out the working class.
We have climate change bearing down on us, the effects of which are already being seen through mass migration, fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry would have us believe there are "two sides" to this argument so that they can continue to profit instead of adapting and doing the right thing. The first to feel it certainly won't be those of us making several hundred thousand dollars per year and looking down on those living paycheck to paycheck. It'll be those living paycheck to paycheck who feel it first.
Neither artists nor bartenders have the power over humanity that capitalists do.
With great power comes great responsibility. This is precisely why we must hold capitalists accountable.
The solution is to not work long-term in an entry-level, unskilled job.
The typical HN reply may be trying to help figure out a problem like “if I only have X dollars how can I maximize.”
Reality is that unskilled labor doesn’t get everything they want. Fortunately, they get everything they need. A better example would be healthcare, but I think Amazon’s fulfillment center workers have pretty good insurance.
It’s not a Rolex, but I was pretty happy when I was finally able to live alone.
I was thinking in terms of Maslow [0] as it’s somewhere, I think, around esteem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Sure, you need a lot of money to enjoy life in NYC and $18/hr isn't exactly a lot of money. Even then, for folks without any other marketable skills, this isn't the slave wage as you falsely depict here.
You also should be properly reading that balance sheet. Those $22 billion in cash stand against $36 billion in short term liabilities, for example. Long term debt is over $37 billion.
And yet, they are critical to the operation of the company (until their jobs have been automated). If all of them decided to go on strike then Amazon would have fullfillment issues -- at least until the people on strike have been replaced.
Since the value of the entire workforce is higher than the sum of the value of the individual workers, thus convincing the business that raising the wages/improving conditions is in their own interest, compared to something like a strike.
The workers want less crappy working conditions. I understand that. The problem is that their pay is what it is in order to make up for the crappy working conditions.
I don't think unionization will help here. Warehouses can already be automated to a much greater extent than Amazon does. I suspect that at ~$19/hr Amazon is very close to the break-even point for replacing pickers with automation.
Edit:
Picking inventory is fully automated in some warehouses in places with lower wages than NYC (Summit Racing for example). It stands to reason that combined with the higher than typical wages, whatever the break even point is an Amazon warehouse in NYC is far closer to it than anyone else.
Why do you suspect this? The labor market is far from an efficient market.
"[Amazon] is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable"
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that.
At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many people around.
Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes.
Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete.
The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch.
The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?)
If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.
And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars.
I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income).
I'm sure they've thought this through more than some random poster on Hacker News.
It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.
There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.
Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as to make robot deployment feasible.
But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.
I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity and that’s directly in worker control.
Assuming that's true for the sake of argument, I don't think the wage of the average Amazon warehouse worker is anywhere near that tipping point. 50 to 100 Kivas cost between $2 to $4 million and I guarantee they are not hassle or maintenance free, and all they do is move shelves around. Automating the rest of the warehouse process adds orders of magnitude more cost.
Ideally, we'd have fulfilling, well-paid jobs for everyone. If we can't have that, at least robots don't suffer when you make them do mindless, repetitive tasks at high speed for no money.
The status quo is humans suffering in miserable jobs. A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.
One way or another, we're going to have to figure out what humans do in an automated world, because the robots are coming for everyone's job, not just warehouse workers. (Unless climate change stress collapses society before then, which might happen)
By prohibiting monotonous work, you're preventing those low-skilled workers from contributing to the total production, which reduces the rate at which the economy automates. Automation is a product of investment capital (surplus productivity). Anything that reduces total production results in less productivity being invested into upgrading the economy.
Or Tesla.
Years ago I declined Amazon mid way into the interview process after reaching out to ex-amazon workers from that same office.
On the other hand, I know Amazon workers in a different country who love their jobs.
Unions are needed if you don't have options.
Amazon could start by stopping the free banana handouts (in a city so gentrified nobody who lives there needs a free banana) and instead paying their workers in that area more.
But your president is doing great work there from what I gathered :^)
This livable wage argument is insane. If you think the livable wage argument is $19/hr, vote to change the minimum wage (and please don't do it nationally, San Francisco hardly has the same cost of living as anywhere in West Virginia for example). Stop trying to shame companies into it, that's not how capitalism works. Capitalism ensures people get paid market rate. If you don't like that rate, change the minimum wage.
You're also not helping anyone by killing off companies that pay low wages. There is no automatic substitution where a new company emerges that pays good wages when you kill off an old company that paid low wages.
All you do by killing companies off with mandatory minimum labor standards is reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages.
They are already the target of many union's campaigns (some aren't straightforward, one can say) but for reasons that aren't related to working conditions and are far more threatening to unions's future: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-electromobility-j...
The amount of lobbying involved in keeping the german automotive industry going despite them mostly missing out on recent developments is staggering.
I don't think anyone wants suffering, but solutions are never as simple as they appear to be when poverty is involved.
[1] https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
Unions have a few positives, but, especially in the US, unions have a reputation for historically becoming corrupted by organized crime, strangling businesses into oblivion, and/or making it impossible for companies to fire incompetent/lazy workers. I know it's not like that in some places in Europe, but the US has been burned by truly egregious unions that have set back progress for decades.
In fact, both wages and life expectancy were improving faster before labor laws came into effect.
Honestly, I don't really see how people cannot see it as anything other than exploitation of human life. Maybe homeless people exist so it's less obvious and is why the government has never done anything to make that go away.
I don't know what you consider humble, but my family does not have a spare 300 grand to gamble on risky investments.
Not exactly humble beginnings.
There can be much more diversity within each party organization than there is in the parliamentary sense of "party."
I thought party majorities in the house and senate were crucial?
If a majority of one of the house's seats belong to people who identify with party A, then they're more likely to vote with party A, but they don't have any special privileges like choosing the head of state (e.g. Prime Minister).
More practically, to vote in a specific PM in a country with a normal parliamentary system, you need to vote for local representives that belong to their party, then hope that the party keeps them as the PM. Meanwhile, you end up with local representatives you may not want in the course of supporting the party. A president, in contrast, is just voted on more directly (yes, electoral college inefficiencies aside).
As far as I can tell, a parliamentary system lends itself to having more parties because they can form coalitions to maintain a majority and elect a new "government" or administration. While that isn't possible in the US, it also isn't directly needed because the President is elected.
MPs don't in fact choose the PM in the UK system either. It's much more indirectly the case that someone who appears that they would have the confidence of the house to pass legislation may be invited by the Queen to form a government.
But talking practically in both systems, and especially in the current political climate, a party majority in the house and senate means everything, as we saw with Obama's inability to pass almost anything from his agenda.
Also there is one curious place where the US party system is enshrined in law unlike elsewhere - for some reason your party leadership elections (primaries etc) are run by the government! And in some cases they legally allow non-party members to vote in them (open primaries.) I think that's absolutely bonkers from the UK perspective. Who the party wants to lead them as a candidate is their business alone.
Yes. My point stands that the PM is inherently different from a President. The President's party can have no representatives in either body and still be elected by the people. Local elections have no bearing on their election, as you're aware.
> for some reason your party leadership elections (primaries etc) are run by the government
The US doesn't have party leadership elections, which is kind of my point. The primaries are for an elected position, not a party leader. My ideal is a California or France-style runoff. Why shouldn't the people vote on who their final choices should be?
If you elect a set of representatives who want one thing, a higher house of representatives who want another, and a premier who wants something else, nothing gets done.
> Why shouldn't the people vote on who their final choices should be?
People's final choices are whoever applies to be on the ballot and meets the requirements such as signatures in support.
If a group of people (a political party) choose to get behind one candidate, and other candidates in the party agree not to run after that choice, then that's the parties' business - the government shouldn't be involved in running that vote and shouldn't force the party to accept non-members in that decision.
Who is supposed to pay for that? If it's the employer, they'll just take vacation/leave out of your/everyones paycheck. If it's paid for by taxes, then the most efficient thing would be to just hand the cash to the people and let them decide whether they want to work or not.
> And decoupling health “insurance” from employers, dump everyone on healthcare.gov or taxpayer funded healthcare.
I agree with the first part, but dumping "everyone" on taxpayer funded healthcare will only create crappy healthcare for everyone (UK) or two-class private/socialized healthcare (Germany) - except it will be worse because of the inherently higher healthcare costs in the US.
Healthcare and education can wait while we're dealing with what really matters.
What?
The US political system just provided a massive tax break to corporations. That's how our time and resources are being spent.
You don't get into finance/medicine/tech startups to have an easy work life balance.
In many other industries American workers are considered lazy by Latinos and Asians.
Realistically think of Mexico, Canada, and China.
I was obviously replying to that.
Bol.com/Conrad come to mind for instance.
Comparing apples to apples, the working conditions/ living conditions in the US are significantly worse than those in most other industrial countries, including working hours, paid vacation, employment protections, maternity/paternity leave, pensions, health care, life expectancy, child care, ...
Comparing living quality in relation to GDP per capita, living in the US is a pretty bad deal.
And workers in those countries have been conditioned to these conditions ask any Indian colleagues how workers are treated back home.
Personal swipes are not allowed here. Please edit them out of your posts to HN.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662752 and marked it off-topic.
Only if the company is mandatory to work for.