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Comment by stfwn | Hacker News Reader

Good!

> [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.”

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>power hours

The proven solution is to rename "power hours" to "hackathons".

> 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.

>There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon

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.

They tried to do a hackathon at my company but after initial interest a lot of people dropped out so in the end it was cancelled.

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.

The trick is to not care about internal promotion. You can also get promoted as you change jobs.

Indeed as an engineer this is the best course of action in our industry.

There's definitely a parallel but I don't think you can put on the same level the sort of pressure unskilled and low-wage workers get in Amazon warehouses to the stress we get as skilled workers in the software industry. We are (on average) much better paid, we can (usually) find an other job easily and overall we (generally) have a much better quality of life.

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.

Any job that pays you enough to live, but not enough to get to a better place in the long run, is a dead end. When technology takes these jobs, lives will be ruined. Many people would be better off finding something new now rather than later.

I suppose that you're right but to me your comment reads like a modern version of "let them eat cake". This vicious circle of having a shit job that pays enough to live but not enough to get a better place is specifically the problem. There used to be a time when factory workers could get a decent wage, buy a good house, buy a good car etc... And maybe eventually progress through the social layers. It's getting harder and harder. Unskilled worker's wages stagnate while rich people's incomes soar.

I definitely have sympathy and empathy for people in this condition. No employee is immune. Think about whether your job will exist and afford you a comfortable lifestyle in 20 or 30 years.

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.

> then take the wealth generated and redistribute it to the population

i assume you mean the shareholder population?

I don't think he meant, but it's unclear whether you think that's what should happen.

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.

> but it's unclear whether you think that's what should happen.

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 think it's a bit obscene to compare this situation to software engineering."

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.

I wouldn’t have an issue with these power hours if not engaging in this little game meant you simply got to miss out on the “prizes”. However if not participating in them have employment reprecussions (affect raises, promotions, lead to concerted teasing, peer presdure, etc.), then that would be troubling.

Or subbotniks in Soviet parlance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik

I admit I haven't read the article but what's disgusting about incentivizing employee efficiency with prizes?

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.

Unions form to prevent a race to the bottom. Individual employees have no power at all, so employers can keep pushing them. Changing jobs is not frictionless, even in a good job market. Most people who work in low-paying positions can't afford to miss a few months of pay because they quit their job to look for something better. Since people have to work to survive, especially in the US with its poor social safety net, you get situations where people are forced to take a job no matter how exploitative it is.

Individual employees have a power of moving to another employer.

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.

> 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?

I think yelling "I quit!" and slamming the door happens only in movies.

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.

>>Unions form to prevent a race to the bottom.

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.

what if it's the best option because it's the only option?

Are they slaves forced to work for their local lord? Probably not in this time in the US - "the only option" is not a credible hypothesis.

You're underestimating their lack of bargaining power and the power differential with the employers in the region.

At least a feudal lord had obligations to their subjects.

My understanding is that one of the primary differentiators between serfs and lords was that lords were able to own land.

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.

Many of the people I grew up with in the southwest own their homes (for the sake of this discussion, finance == own). Almost none of my friends in NYC own their homes. I recently moved out of NYC to a new england state and most of the people in my office own their homes.

It's really not that uncommon for people outside of major cities to own their home?

you say that as if the cost of getting a different job was zero, where in fact if there's only one employer around and you have a family or something similar, it's more likely to be in tens of thousands of dollars if you include future medical bills for stress-related illnesses. it's very expensive to be poor and/or out of options.

What’s wrong is that it’s easy to exploit human psychology with a variable ratio reward schedule using raffle tickets and prizes.

It’s a job. If you add more value, you ought to be paid for it in dollars, not raffle tickets.

Firstly, they are not prizes, they are microscopic chances at prizes. The company is cutting down on cost by playing prospect theory-based games with their employees' salary.

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.

>The company is cutting down on cost by playing prospect theory-based games with their employees' salary.

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.

I guess you've never worked those jobs. Try it for 6 months or a year and then tell us if you still feel that way.

It's dehumanizing, and petty to try and squeeze people out this way.

Wrong guess, I've done my time on minimum wage work.

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.

The condescending tone is likely why you’re being downvoted.

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.

The goal of creating processes is to improve. Ideally workers would be skilled, educated, and empowered at improving their own processes

> directly to their management team

keep everything private

do not collaborate

If you want to hear a really sad, frustrating story about this -

> 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.

Why is it disgusting? In a lot of job people are expected to rush to get things done. I know a lawyer who was fired because she didn't get a payment executed by 5pm (it ended up costing someone a lot of money)

Lawyers are compensated better for their time than Amazon warehouse workers. The raffle tickets aren't for, you know, a performance bonus or anything of value, it's just a cheap gimmick.

Also the reason lawyers make so much is that they have the best trade unions ever. There’s a reason you can’t buy legal services from Walmart.

No, the reason lawyers make so much is that they have knowledge and skills that are in high demand and that most people don't have.

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.

In Poland, lawyers got deunionized to a large degree around 10 years ago, and the result is that most lawyers with private practices are no longer making great money, or are plain struggling. The only ones who make a very good living are those in niche specialisations, handling corporate interests.

In the UK at least, a lot of lawyers (particularly partners of small firms) make a lot less money than people might think.

Can you imagine how much more software developers would earn if we were unionized as lawyers are? If you couldn't practice without a license? If you needed to go school for $$$ before being licensed?

> There’s a reason you can’t buy legal services from Walmart.

Well, actually...

"The Law Store offers fast, face-to-face legal services in convenient Walmart locations."

I looked briefly and, correct me if you know better, but I believe The Law Store is a business partner of Walmart rather than being owned by it. So when you pay them you are not paying Walmart shareholders but its owners (who are lawyers)

Yeah, fair enough :) I wasn't making a serious rebuttal, sorry for not being clear.

Lawyers typically don't make all that much money until they a bunch of years and experience under their belt.

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.

I agree with your sentiment, but I can see how this would be different. A lawyer has a career of very unique hard work that requires much self discipline, but success brings great rewards. I imagine a fulfillment center probably feels somewhat like a a cage, where "working harder" just means running the hamster wheel faster.

Relatively mundane work doesn't get any more interesting the faster you do it.

It's disgusting because it's undignified. Workers should receive a decent wage for work performed, not pressured to perform as fast as possible for gimmicks in an ever quicker race to the bottom to see who can wreck their health the fastest.

It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.

Amazon UK had bathrooms outside of airport-style security where workers had to regularly pee in soda bottles because their minimum performance goals didn't allow time for the distant odyssey and security theater required for a bathroom break.

So power hours are actually the hour before lunch, and everyone is running around because they are desperately trying to hold it in?

They literally can’t afford it, they have razor thin margins. Their business model depends on inhumane working conditions, which is why I would be glad to see them go (not that this will happen, but at least in Germany they have received some pushback against their practices)

They raised base pay across the entire network just to avoid bad PR. I suspect Amazon could find the money if they wanted to.

>>I suspect Amazon could find the money if they wanted to.

Or they can close down the shop if they can't find the money to do the right /required thing.

Which, ironically, is exactly what a lot of people would have predicted had someone said Amazon should raise base pay to $15/hr.

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.

Amazon the company made a profit of billions this year. Amazon the store is nowhere near as profitable as AWS etc. but they can still afford it. The lack of profits in retail is from choices of going for aggressive expansion and going for those thin profit margins. They don't need these sort of demeaning gimmicks.

They made no or almost no profit with their retail business for years, that was the only way they could expand so quickly.

Taking no profits in retail was a very intentional decision they made. Bezos has talked publicly at length about it.

You've been downvoted a bunch and I can see why but I also somewhat agree with your point.

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.

Who are you to call it undignified? How about you let employees make their own choices.

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.

You are literally commenting on an article about the workers doing just that (making their own choices). You know you can try to actually improve your situation in other ways than quitting right? Even in a collective fashion that will benifit other people.

> you believe the compensation to be fair

Or it's your only choice. We're not talking about skilled labour with lots of options.

Working at Amazon is literally no one's "only choice" in the US. In fact, I would bet on it being a better option than most of what is available to low or unskilled workers.

Just to take this down a certain path: having your foot amputated is better than having your whole foot cut off, but nobody is going to describe either as good choices.

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.

“decent wage for work performed, not pressured to perform as fast as possible for gimmicks in an ever quicker race to the bottom to see who can wreck their health the fastest.”

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.

It's undignified because it's prizes to the highest performer, instead of bonuses to everyone meeting a certain goal.

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.

> It's undignified because it's prizes to the highest performer, instead of bonuses to everyone meeting a certain goal.

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.

> but in the end the workers get to decide if they want to play that game or not

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.

That presumes this raffle is really a secret ploy to get rid of unproductive workers. I'm not presuming that.

If you think it’s a “secret” ploy, then you’ve not worked in these types of positions before. It might not say it on the promotional posters hung around the work place, but it’s definitely well understood that performing in the bottom 10% is not a career continuing path.

I’m confused as to how a prize to the highest performer is undignified. This is precisely the model they want to encourage. It’s not literally a single prize, but there are multiple prizes.

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.

> Imagine the olympics where there is no gold, silver, bronze. Is it undignified to award the highest performers?

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.

> Why is it disgusting?

They're being treated like dogs, pressured to perform tricks in exchange of a treat.

I mean, move fast to receive raffle tickets? Seriously?

This seems pretty reductive of all labor since we perform tricks (show up to work) in exchange for treats (wages).

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.

Working is not a trick and earning your livelihood is not a treat. A lousy raffle isn't even a form of income.

Working is a series of tricks that I would never do unless I got a bunch of treats.

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.

> pressured to perform tricks in exchange of a treat.

You've just described my whole life...

The gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening. You can rationalize it any way you want but more and more people are shocked by the obscenity to have people like Jeff Bezos sleep on mattresses filled with dollar bills while the people working for his company are paid crap wages for an exhausting and unfulfilling job.

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.

pretty sure lawyers don't work for raffle tickets.

I can guarantee you amazon would not only fire these workers, but would close down the entire warehouse if needed

>>so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”

I remember reading that are a gazillion rules and regulations on attempted unionization, so "you're fired" might not be it.

Oh, Amazon won’t explicitly say they’re being fired for trying to unionize. There’ll be some cover story that the workers violated some rule no one ever heard of and everyone else ignored, too.

Sounds like an employment attorney's dream.

New York City is an expensive place for a warehouse. I believe it only exists so Amazon can offer same day delivery to millions of people. I have no idea how valuable that is to Amazon, but it’s apparently valuable enough that they already accept incredibly high costs. They may just accept the union as one of those costs.

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.

Amazon has two warehouses that I know of in NYC. One is next to the Empire State Building, the other is in Brooklyn along the East River. They are both “Prime Now” facilities with the option to have stuff delivered in under an hour. Prime Now isn’t only in NYC, they have it in about 25 cities in the US currently. It’s not the best known of Amazon services oddly, probably partly due to the separate app.

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:

https://primenow.amazon.com/storefront

Except that a large portion of of Amazon workforce is not contractually linked to Amazon.

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.

It's capitalism: cannibalize and sell-out the commonwealth, extract monies to the detriment of externalities borne by citizens on the vague, unfulfilled promises of jobs and tax paying workers because corporations own the political class. Welfare for the rich, crushing austerity and paycheck-to-paycheck 3 jobs/sleepless "trickledown" lies for everyone else.

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

Capitalism doesn't have to cannibalize. Often it works to everyone's benefit.

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.

> 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.

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.

I like to make the distinction between guilds (limiting access to professions and employers and controlling seniority and positions) and unions (collective bargaining). In most western countries the line between the two is heavily blurred, to the detriment of the union movement which has suffered heavily over the last 40 years.

Income inequality is not the issue here or in the Gilded Age. It's monopoly power.

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.

> It's capitalism:

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.

> means other than pay increases

Hence the saying: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

I always tell people that working in a big Corp feels like walking around in Eastern Germany while the wall was still up. Same kind of posters, 5 year plans, top down propaganda that has little resemblance with reality, "rewards" like T-shirts with motivational messages.

This is the reason why some people called it state capitalism, since the only difference for the workers is who's the boss.

> This is the reason why some people called it state capitalism

Actually, it's not. State capitalism has absolutely no relation to how workers were used and abused by communist regimes.

Care to explain?

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.

Ronald Coase’s paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” compares companies with the alternative of everybody being an independent contractor cooperating with other independent contractors on individual projects. I think it’s an interesting thought experiment, and it focuses on why companies operate in a authoritarian way internally.

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.

The tension between capitalism and communism is a dispute about the optimal size of the firm.

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