Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them over this difficult transition period where they're still required for part of the menial manual labour tasks. The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through.
The above poster makes a fair point that this is work well suited to automation. In the broader sense with retail closing and Amazon taking market share, centralizing productivity (i.e. reducing retail jobs to fewer picker jobs), and then automating those fewer jobs away entirely, are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?
I genuinely have no idea how society would work if you simply eliminated 20% of jobs tomorrow. Mass poverty? Artificially created jobs? A larger rich/poor divide?
Amazon has been testing cashierless grocery stores, yet they haven't completely eliminated their competition where they're available. I'm sure they'll become popular, but they'll likely roll out relatively slowly. We already have self checkout, yet some people prefer to checkout with a human, and I doubt that will change.
Manufacturing jobs have been using more and more automation, yet manufacturing jobs are still available, just different. Many jobs that used to be minimum wage jobs have been replaced by higher paying jobs with specialists; there are fewer of them, sure, but they pay better.
As labor jobs get replaced by automation, we'll invent new jobs to take advantage of the increased labor pool. That's just the way innovation goes.
For every job that gets "destroyed" by technology, several new ones are created. The problem is we, as humans, are terrible at predicting the future - for example, try explaining a mobile app developer job to someone thirty years ago in 1989. Now try imagine what jobs we will have 30 years from now, keeping in mind how off a person in 1989 would have been.
Perfect world solution here is that Amazon retrains their workers, but as we're not in a perfect world, that typically falls to the state. As human labor becomes more valuable to fill niche and volatile job markets, due to automation taking large scalable jobs, retraining is going to become even more important.
A better analogy would be explaining something like social media consultants (or for that matter, social media influencers). Hell, _I_ still don't understand the user behavior underpinning the social media economy, and I've lived in it for a decade.
Given there were two pocket sized PCs released in 1989 - the Poqet PC and Atari Portfolio, that seems unlikely, except in a "the future is here but not evenly distributed" sense. "How would you use one without a keyboard?" "You'd touch the screen directly" "oh, ok".
But even then, LCD pocket calculators were common by 1989. Wearable computing had been around since 1981 (Steve Mann) for anyone following tech developments. Seiko had released a wearable computer watch in 1984.
In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online
But you had telephone ordering. And you could have had fax ordering. Back to the Future 2 came out in 1989 and they were predicting a future world of 2015, which included a kind of tablet computer, head mounted displays, flat-screens, implicit voice recognition[3]. OK it's not PCs, smartphones or the internet but it's enough that a blockbuster Hollywood movie expected people to understand "pay by putting your thumb on this portable device", and not find it "hard to comprehend".
(Terminator was from 1984 and that was a mobile, keyboardless computer, in a sense).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poqet_PC [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II#Dep...
I should note that I wasn't trying to be pedantic, and the specific example used in the parent comment doesn't detract from its point. I just think that the social media economy is utterly novel and fascinating.
This wouldn't be the first time. Happened with farming 100-150 years ago. It's going to be a painful adjustment, but until all human needs are met, I'm sure humans that still have jobs can come up with work they want performed in exchange for money so long as politicians don't legislate against the existence of those jobs.
Why do you say that?
That's not the right way of phrasing it. They're producing a substantial amount of value, in the real sense that the world is a better place because of the work they've done.
As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that Amazon can easily hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
Why shouldn't one of the wealthiest companies in the world (a labor market participant) be demonizied for worker abuse, even if it is "legal"?
If you don't understand what Amazon fulfillment workers experience, I encourage you to take a vacation day or two and apply for a job at a warehouse as a runner. You'll only need a day or two to appreciate the experience. There is no college course or bootcamp for compassion and empathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9m7d07k22A (Warehouses: HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)
2) Because Amazon is a for-profit company, not a charity, and its responsibility is not to pay employees more than it has to or give them more benefits/easier working conditions than are necessary. Are you also demonizing your own employer for not paying everyone as much as it possibly can without going bankrupt?
3) Because in many areas where Amazon warehouses operate, they are a significantly better job prospect than other options, working conditions be damned.
4) Because competitive markets don't let companies pay their workers whatever they want to. If you pay your workers too much, a competitor will pay theirs less, pass the savings on to customers, and take market share from you. Amazon is one of the wealthiest companies in the world because it doesn't pay all 600,000+ of its warehouse workers an amazing salary and let them work in better conditions.
A lot of people who are angry at Amazon are really angry at the outcome of unchecked capitalism. These are the frustrations that should be applied to voting, not to perfectly legal corporate policies.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Be kind."
Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you...think about that.
> rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
It's appropriate to "demonize" Amazon, but isn't that observation also correct? Amazon's taking advantage of desperate people, and no matter the job market conditions, it's unethical for them to do so. But doesn't the fact that they can treat workers this way and still have workers suggest they're taking advantage of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed?
Righteous indignation works similarly to the "warm fuzzies" that cause people to donate to charity. Each person craves some set amount of these resources; once they have enough, they're satisfied, and they stop bothering to do things whose only reward is more of that resource.
Secondly, a strike that's limited in scope or duration can help build solidarity among workers which can be drawn on again and again for more elaborate and risky actions. Think about it -- would the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you at work put his livelihood on the line for you? What if he didn't have to because every single worker on your floor would do so at the same time? This is all a process of transferring power from the C-suite to the workers where it belongs, and I think we need to evaluate the results of such actions based on those broader goals.
Sometimes it is difficult - if Comcast is the only game in our area, then we don't have a choice. Otherwise, this hits these companies where it matters most - their profits.
Raising a ruckus, strikes, etc are useful because they trigger people to become aware and concerned that this is a problem, causing more people to stop giving the company money. The ruckus is essential.
On the top you have automation. They have jobs because they cost less than robots. But every wage increase or company benefit or break that reduces worker productivity is a step closer to cost parity with automation, and therefore the unemployment line.
On the other side, they can move away from that line by accepting lower pay or worse working conditions. And there is a trade off between the two as well -- if the job sucks more in a way that allows the business to hire fewer people then they can each get paid more without crossing the line where the jobs get automated.
Blaming Amazon for this is like blaming the local power company for world energy prices. They're just providing one corner of the triangle -- you can work there and have a hard job but better pay than most other unskilled work. If you want an easier unskilled job, those exist too, and they don't pay as much.
But the option to do easy unskilled work for high compensation isn't there. That's the corner of the triangle where the humans cost more than the robots. And maybe that's for the best, but the workers don't need Amazon to actually do that to get the same outcome from their perspective -- they can just quit.
And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduced profits.
When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”
You put your finger on the thing that bothers me most about the free-market critique of labor conditions. They all hand-wave away the responsibility that corporations have as entities run by (presumably) empathetic humans. Amazon does not have to automate away jobs instead of giving workers fairer conditions and wages. In fact, they may find that the boost in productivity that comes from happier, more rested, more focused workers more than makes up for the marginal decrease that comes from less pressure in the workplace.
The point is that we don't have to accept that corporations are, and should be, perfectly "rational" economic actors. They don't have to pursue profits at every conceivable avenue unless the market tells them otherwise.
I'm Amazons competitor, I automate away the jobs and pay the lowest wages possible. Now my goods are cheaper than Amazons and you buy from me instead.
It is like a circle - lower wages lead to lower purchasing power, so companies pay their workers low to lower prices to sell to low earning customers, and so on...
It's fairly obvious how the above "draconian" conditions benefit customers. Employees that take long breaks or pick items slowly leads to delayed deliveries, having to employee more staff per delivery, having to raise prices or reduce range to cover this cost.
This is really the flip side of "customer obsessed", when you are focused on customers you don't particularly care about any individual employee (all the way up the chain).
For a counterexample, google and facebook mostly treat their employees well (with the exception of some contractors). However customers don't trust them as much, because they know they are profit/employee focused.
It’s funny how this sort of argument never comes up in the context of taking profits.
Retail is BRUTALLY competitive.
This is not tons of profit. Your assertion is incorrect.
Again, profit margins for this sort of work are tiny. Adding significant wage costs would almost certainly consume a huge percentage of profits at which point the suppliers of capital will invest their money elsewhere.
If you are going to make such a strong claim, you probably need to back it up with data.
A better set of numbers to look at might be Walmarts (more of a pure retail company). They make maybe 10B in profit per year (it varies a little) with 2M workers. That's $5,000 per worker which isn't much wiggle room.
You’re giving a reason why they might not want to. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that they want to. If they wanted to, they would be doing it already.
In any case, the point is that they can pay more. You can quibble over the amount. You can argue about whether or not they should. But they can, in the same way that I can buy an entire truck full of peaches if I decided that would be a good idea.
Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be.
To pay significantly more they would have to raise prices, which they can't do because they're in competition with Walmart and everyone else.
Exactly how often do you think I eat out?
I’m responsible for the tips waiters receive from me. Amazon is responsible for the wages their workers receive from them. Makes sense to me.
If you eat out once in a lifetime or every day an effective wage can still be calculated. In NY or CA you are talking something like 30 - 50 dollars a meal[0], even more if you want to provide healthcare and all the rest. Its likely you aren't leaving $20 - $50 bills on the table for your morning coffee so why don't you think baristas deserve a living wage? It would be such a small percentage of your net worth.
[0]https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/rent-is-affordable-to...
Last year was neither a typical year nor is that the profit from retail.
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-fro...
AWS makes good money, but you can't really expect them to use it all to subsidize retail (even more than they already do) forever.
If society does it through taxation, it's everyone's responsibility.
If only certain companies are responsible, then only a portion of the population is responsible.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the individual companies. Certainly, our energies should be focused on bigger societal changes. But it’s not misplaced ore to also mention the fact that some companies could already do better, and choose not to.
That's not what I meant by "more efficient." If every company employing low skilled labor suddenly raised pay above market wages it might help all those workers. But it would mean that prices for things produced by unskilled laborers were artificially high and prices produced by higher skilled laborers would be artificially low. This would cause the market to produce the wrong mix of goods and services and we would all be worse off for the difference.
If you do it via taxes and transfer payments then you don't distort the prices of goods.
All told it’s probably better to put the money in the hands of an employee, but there are certainly negative consequences that can arise.
Note, by the way, that the minimum wage in our competitor countries (France, Germany, UK) is about $11.50 per hour adjusted for cost of living. That’s much lower than what Amazon is laying.
How would that cause them to lose money?
These are descriptive, not normative, observations.
India went through a socialist phase where for decades people “emphasize[d] with the poor” and implemented public policy. And where did that lead? Decades of economic malaise. In 1991, the World Bank and IMF required economic liberalization as part of a bail out, and starting in 2000 growth accelerated dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As someone from that part of the world, yes, your mode of thinking “bothers” me. When my family left Bangladesh in 1989, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Since that time, real GDP per capita has grown by a factor of 6. To put that in relative terms, it’s like going from Guatemala to Germany in one generation. Capitalism is a fricking miracle. There are of course such things as market failures which require regulation. But those can be articulated without emotional appeals to “empathy.” Making policies based on “empathy” and notions of power relationships between workers and companies is destructive and perpetuates poverty.
It's not a matter of empathy vs rationality as you suggest, but of under what conditions empathic strategies are efficient and self-sustaining. You assume the world (including society) as objective and rewarding unempathic rationality, but many social relations are wholly arbitrary and are optimized to reward particular strategies.
Evidence from statistical mechanics points to the evolutionary stability of self-organizing decentralized peer-sensitive strategies.
You know, I was reading the other day about Jeff Bezos being worth $118 billion. What is so great about maximizing such a quantity? Jeff Bezos doesn't know what to do with his spare money besides spending it on rockets. Would be really be functionally 'poorer' if he woke up tomorrow to find himself worth 'only' $18 billion, and the other $100 billion evenly distributed across the population (everyone in the world better off by $14), the US population (everyone in the US better off by $300), or the population of Amazon employees (everyone better off by approximately $180,000).
Supposedly it's more 'efficient' for Jeff Bezos to be in charge of all this money, but Jeff Bezos' wealth depends to a large degree on his ability to keep labor prices just above those of other employers hiring from the same pool in any given market. You're maximizing the extraction of value from the combination of capital and labor, but in a parasitical fashion that leaves Jeff Bezos with an (almost) unimaginably vast surplus and many of his employees with no surplus at all. You might argue that such workers should increase their economic value so as to command a higher wage, but in reality most of them are already working near the envelope of their physical capacity while being too tired and time-poor to undertake independent or institutional study to significantly improve their earning potential.
22% of $1000 is $220.
8% of $6000 is $480.
28% of $6000 is $1680.
$480 > $100.
This is a really brutally difficult game to play in a developing nation because one of capitalism's achievements is "Half your children don't die." (In the last 30 years in Bangladesh early childhood mortality is down ~14% to 3%.)
Capitalism has had demonstrably terrible effects for many people all over the world without the luck of being born in a country or even a social class with enough economic clout to dictate favourable terms in trade agreements.
The conflict and genocide in East Timor was driven by capitalist Indonesia (a US ally) and colonial greed. Of course this conflict was ignored at the time because it was more important to focus on the Khmer Rouge, so the US and its brand of capitalism could save face:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_invasion_of_East_Ti...
As was the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia that led to conflict and massacres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_Water_War
Plus the US-backed militias and crackdowns in various South American nations to prop up and entrench its business interests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
These are just three examples. There are countless other examples of the destruction and death caused by capitalist policies all over the world. This kind of greed, corruption and harm is not limited to totalitarian states, they're just less reported on by western media. Deliberately so.
Calling it a 'miracle for everyone' is an obscenely narrow-minded claim.
Kudos.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in parallel to justify and perpetuate the profit. Where do we draw the line for which conflicts we can say definitely starts with the moral flaw of a person/group, and which starts with the forces of economic incentive?
I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"
If wages were set lower than equilibrium, obviously the workers would be lose out on this.
If wages were set above equilibrium, the consumers would lose out due to the higher costs being transferred over to them.
The market price represents the balance between the two interests that is the most efficient.
Inb4 some smartass posts "but perfect markets are only in textbooks and this is the real world". That isn't an argument that justifies as to why we should try to move away from the efficient equilibrium.
Sounds like this axiom then, is some kind of utilitarian functions; the idea is to do whatever makes the most people better off, in aggregate? That it's ok to screw over someone if a greater amount of benefit then goes to someone else.
I'm not convinced, however, that an efficient market is the same as this utilitarianism. Do you have any evidence that efficient markets produce the best outcome for the most people overall?
Seems to me that an efficient market could easily consist of a large underclass barely staying alive; why would the most efficient market not have everyone in that situation? Surely that would be perfect efficiency; the entire population being paid just enough to keep going? No surplus, no excess; surely that's far more efficient - but that's in direct conflict with the idea of making everyone better off and giving everyone a nicer life.
Human beings should be treated humanely, ascribed intrinsic value, and moral considerations should be applied to interactions with them. Neither economics nor physics cares about human rights, but systems can be built to accommodate other value systems than the defaults that stem from raw theory.
Maybe wages set above equilibrium will result in consumers losing out. That's inefficient, but not necessarily immoral. I strongly believe that utility functions are not evenly distributed. Giving Jeff Bezos $1B and 100k workers $10,000 each is not as good as an outcome where Jeff gets $500M and workers get $15,000 each; it's not even as good as Jeff getting $400M and workers still getting $15,000 each.
Couple this with the misguided proposition that cost (market determined price) reflects value, and thus that fellow citizens right to food, shelter and safety should reflect their market determined labor price and you get this result.
Capitalism is a failed idea in it’s current incarnation, and does not deliver on the promise even of efficient markets.
Attacking Amazon to fix this, or enforcing minimum wages, isn’t more rational than taking pain killers to improve on the situation of hitting your head against a wall repeatedly. If we have nothing better to offer, by all means, but we should feel really ashamed that this is the best we have to offer.
We need something new, not that I know what, but it should be pretty obvious that what we have now fails to deliver.
I find the ideas of geo-liberalism somewhat inspiring, and I do think some synthesis is in order where market economies are leveraged for the beautiful resource allocators they are.
Humans act irrationally all the time.
Brilliant. It's all their own choice. They should have chosen to be born into a rich family. They should have chosen an expensive education. They should have chosen good health. They should have chosen a job that pays millions.
All this, of course, is commonly believed in the US. I sometimes suspect that actually it's not so much believed as just something that rich people want very much to believe; it means they can feel like they deserve and earned every last penny, and that they don't have to feel bad at all about all the people being screwed over.
0. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-amazon-raising-mi...
- Housing in exurban areas is not necessarily cheap. And moving has a nonzero cost. People may not be able to move to the exurbs in the first place.
- Downtown is where services are. Generally speaking, suburban support for low-income people is often lacking. And kids have to switch schools, people lose their existing community support networks, etc.
- Because downtown has so much employment, it's relatively easy to switch between jobs. Don't like your retail job? You can switch to another retailer, or a restaurant, or any other type of low income job. In these exurban areas, how much employer diversity is there? Is it easy to get to other employers?
This mostly seems like it would just create company slums.
I think the last one is the strongest - they are stuck if there are no alternative employment options.
So yes, $15/hour employment in exurban areas is actually good for poor people.
The odiousness of the use of the word "should" has been pointed out elsewhere, and I reiterate it, but there is another point to be made about this analysis: It neglects that Amazon is a monopsony or near-monopsony. As Amazon replaces other supply chains, the demand for supply-chain labor is increasingly concentrated in one buyer of labor, Amazon. We should reasonably expect a distortion in the market to occur wherein Amazon leverages their power to either reduce wages or demand more labor for the equivalent wage.
In effect, the market conditions to which the OP appeals are eroded away by Amazon's cornering of this sector of the labor market. $15/hr may be good PR, but it's not a "fair" or "market" wage if Amazon can just burn through employees with adverse working conditions (ostensibly valued at a higher rate in a real market) because of their position as the sole buyer of labor.
If we're going to apply market theory to this, we have to go all the way, and not just stop when it suits our purposes.
Why?
The fact is, OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body.
What is deeply immoral is third parties using sticks and firearms to overrule that person’s choices. Their body, their choice.
I have given you a break: I have given you a logical, rational, sincere position, without snark or subterfuge.
I did not argue for dismantling OSHA; these are moral statements independent of any national law.
If anything, I argued against using violence to force people to do things (which is what OSHA, among thousands of other governmental organizations of every flavor around the world, do as a matter of course).
Using violent coercion to alter a consensual agreement between two adults interacting voluntarily is immoral, and denies the agency of the people agreeing to trade on those terms.
The boss shows you a rickety ladder and says “Climb up there or you’re clocking out for the day!” You, drawing on the extensive mechanical engineering and actuarial experience that got you this $15/hr warehouse job, evaluate the likelihood of it collapsing and the expected bills, pain, and suffering if it does. “Looks shakey—give me another $2.73 first”, you say. The boss rummages around his bag, hands you some change, and away you go.
Even if in a world where individual freedom/responsibility trumps everything else, it seems like safety standards would save hassle. In the actual world, where everyone can’t assess all of these risks—-and many of them are hard even for experts to accurately measure—they seem even more worthwhile.
This would essentially make job safety another "perk", like flex time and friday pizza - available to some, based on the scarcity of their skills.
Spreading of information so that people can make choices: good
Using sticks and guns and shackles to force people to do as you demand: bad
Safety can be engineered. Do not bake something unsafe (state enforcement via violence) into the system.
Not to mention that an opposition to state enforcement of minimum wages does not justify the claim that Amazon should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
No, it didn't happen that way. People smoked because it was cool, and it was cool because marketing people explicitly made it look cool. "Torches of freedom"[1] was how Edward Bernays set out to get women smoking cigarettes, for one famous example, generic "cool guy with a cigarette" in Hollywood films wasn't put there by accident, for another. And one of the main reasons smoking was pushed out was that second hand smoking gives other people cancer. People bought arsenic wallpaper and arsenic cloth. They did not decide, rationally and in full knowledge of the best available information, that green wallpaper was a better choice than their infant child staying alive. Or do you think they did choose that?
OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body.
OSHA's basis comes from the fact that there are many human biases, many con tricks, and many unintuitive risks, collectively learned over decades, which one human cannot rationally learn and consider in a short time. Even if that were all it was - a single human choosing whether they gamble with their health - it might be OK, but this is in the situation where a large and well resourced company has a profit-motive to exploit the humans, to coerce them and mislead them and pressure them, to take such risks without due consideration.
And worse, like the case of second hand smoke - you might be willing to climb a high structure without a safety harness, but your willingness means other people will be compelled to do so - by their employers and by peer pressure. You'll be faster, and your equipment costs will be lower. But you'll be putting other people at risk too - if you fall on a coworker, if you drop something on a bystander, if you slip on the floor in your gripless boots and knock someone else - your choices affect other people.
And society is willing to say "we don't want that. You must wear a harness, so that everyone can wear a harness. You must wear grippy boots, so other people can work safely around you.", without "fearing for your life" being a thing which excludes you from the workforce.
Freedom includes freedom to opt in to risk according to your personal risk tolerance.
You're not free to drive a vehicle on public roads without a license or in a state of disrepair - because you risk harming other drivers and pedestrians. You're not free to adulterate food with sawdust, because it will harm people who eat it. You're not free to put poisons in jars marked for food, because it will harm people who don't know you've done that. You're not free to booby-trap your house because it puts emergency services at risk as well as burglars. You're not free to enslave others or sexually assault them, or take their property or money, because most of society wouldn't like that done to them. You're not free to make industrial noise in a suburban area when most people are trying to sleep, or to make toxic fumes or pollute rivers or groundwater supplies or use carcinogenic insecticide, because more people's need for potable water and sleep and edible food outweighs your need for easy money.
OSHA is a continuation of this concept of "other people" who matter and are affected by what you do.
Exactly where the limits lie, is collectively determined and up for argument. But to disavow the idea of restricted freedoms at all is somewhere along the lines of self-interest to the point of sociopathy, cluelessness, or inviting someone to shoot you and take your stuff just because they can.
OSHA couldn't care less if a CEO or Chairman climbed up on that dangerous ladder and got hurt.
Any system that does not internalize costs explicitly subsidizes those actions that greatest externalize. I'm not good with that. It's not a free market. You don't get to sell my property rights just because the law isn't good enough to recognize that which is inherently mine.
The problem is working for a business owner who's a prick. That's not the fault of capitalism, it's the fault of Amazon's leadership.
In Europe, Lidl is known to pay cashiers significantly more than others too. It’s damn hard to get a job there, people don’t leave Lidl jobs; consequently Lidl can afford to be picky and hire the best people in the segment. That’s business strategy, and spending money to accomplish their goal, not paying “above” market to be some sort of socialist Samaritans.
Amazon doesn’t give a damn about churn, because they don’t need to, and as long as people are freely willing to work for them, as more than enough clearly are, they don’t need to pay more.
The Q is how does Amazon compare to similar Jobs and in the UK JB Sports seems to have similar problems with hundreds of workers taken to hospital over 4 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/29/140-jd-spor...
The market has no moral compass. If you decide that the market dictates what we should do, then your actions will reflect the morals of the market, i.e., none.
Supply and demand is a statement of what "is", not what "should be". To some approximation.
Or to put it another way, "the market" may decide that the optional strategy is when you have no voice and are an obedient resource. In that case your opinion about it being the opposite of a market system doesn't matter.
(Also, slaves were never considered “3/5 of a person. The text of the relevant provision read:
> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
In the above equation, slaves must count as a whole “person.” Otherwise, you’re multiplying 3/5 by 3/5. That’s just math and grammar. That’s leaving aside the fact that the whole point of this clause was to limit the power of slave states, and it would’ve been better for purposes of this clause to not count slaves as people at all, to further reduce the power of the south.)
Always found the irony of this fascinating. Similarly, women and non-landowners were each counted as a "full person" for the purposes of the census, despite the fact that they couldn't vote, which means that states with higher amounts of income/landowning inequality or a statistically significant female gender disparities would put more voting power in the hand of rich white dudes.
One could imagine some horrific historical dystopia where corrupt rich polygamists are bringing in more women and poor people into their state to gain more power in the House.
That's about as useful a statement as "Thoughts and prayers."
To change the labor market you go after the parties you can affect. Amazon is one. There are many others on the demand side. Retaining the workforce would be a much lower % return for the investment.
Good luck getting a that kind of law passed in America though. Far too socialist.
The problem, though, is that there are people who have never not had jobs who nonetheless have opinions on what the baseline job should be. Since they've never had to choose between food and a shitty job, they assume that they can solve the problem by just mandating jobs not be shitty.
Ironically, people who struggle with keeping a job -- are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot by supporting minimum wage increase.
The esoteric reading of minimum wage is it is a accelerationist policy aimed at subsidizing automation.
Though in support of your point, when I went to Korea last year there was a large number of automated kiosks, and I know the minimum wage there is fairly high as well. So, Japan's lack of those kiosks may have to do with a preference towards cash/human interaction in the culture.
Around here (Central Europe, Austria, Germany, Italy too IIRC) I don’t see non-kiosk McDonalds anymore, as they went through the kiosk upgrade in the past few years. Noticeably fewer employees.
I would argue that the job losses to automation would've happened anyway without any discussion of wage increases -- kiosks are cheaper than even below-living-wage workers.
Though I was specifically thinking Sweden.
So you will find companies that claim they already pay way above minimum wage but it's just PR.
It is amazing how many commenters on Hacker News do NOT understand basic economic model of supply and demand.
nope, that's just using the fact that right now capital has more leverage than labour to pay your workers as little as you can get away with.
This isn't currently the case by a long shot, compensation is more driven by a monopolist control of the market than anything else. For retail, manufacturing and similar positions (like the amazon warehouse) compensation isn't being allowed to freely vary - businesses have become unreasonably entrenched and therefore retain a strong control of the capital for production, leading to an unbelievably strong wealth inequality. If you asked America who would be willing to take Jeff Bezos's job for a tenth of the compensation (including some stock options to make up for the fact that Bezos actually is paid quite modestly) everyone's hand would shoot up, among those there would be plenty of qualified individuals (including plenty with the aptitude but lacking the prior experience expected) - but for some reason the board of directors hasn't taken this action...
This is a sort of "free market" but not the sort of "free market" that I appreciate.
Yeah. There's no way way it's more complicated than this. If there are other effects not reflected on a simple X/Y axis then I don't wanna know about it!
And yet I never hear any such solution being spoken about in public?
"Oh, the market..." Bullshit. Amazon can afford to let people go to the bathroom without fearing for their jobs. They choose not to.
I do not agree that market efficiency should have priority over all other considerations. It seems to me this idea simply reflects the views of those who derive a net benefit from markets, and are oblivious (by accident or choice) to the costs of market failure or impossibility of clearance.
Look, supply and demand only work under conditions of perfect competition, which include total knowledge of the market by all participants and no costs for entry or exit. Such conditions obviously do not obtain in many, perhaps most real world contexts. A slavish obedience to these laws is therefore a losing strategy, and indeed in the real world most people take a strategic approach.
People who take a strategic approach for themselves while insisting on the supremacy of supply and demand to others (who may or may not be aware of the dichotomy and subsequently credulous of the assertion) are engaged in an act of deception.
The thing is that Amazon largely contributed to create those market conditions, by getting the consumer used to free next day delivery (same delivery in some places). And by squeezing their workers like this, forcing other online retailers to follow if they want to stay competitive.
There's no reason we can't do both. Unfortunately, once you start criticising capitalism (which inevitably leads to these types of employee-employer abuses without unions or other legislation) you get called a communist (incorrectly) and the discussion is over.
If it’s a task that can’t easily be automated and needs to be done, the doing it is creating value.
Delivery creates significant value. What are you talking about?
I suddenly found myself the other side of having said "what an awful place to work," and receiving a mix of bewildered and hostile looks from every other person around that stall.
I'm pretty sure the claim was hyperbole – the practical side of getting people to walk a particular path would have been my follow-up question, if I'd thought of it in time. Even so, the claim revealed a mentality of workers as robots that I think helped explain some of the news stories of extraordinary conditions of their warehouse workers.
At least in the UK, they've found a way to make sure that they are in no way directly financially responsible for any of the externalities of what their approach does to workers, chiefly by pulling tricks like having their workers hired on an agency basis through subcontractors.
I'm not saying this is wrong, it's just what they've done. They have spent the money and found a way to operate that is more efficient. It's what they do, and it's how they sold themselves to a group that included me.
I also found the whole thing to be a bit contradictory: software engineers at a multiple of the pay of warehouse engineers working on optimizing the warehouse that is probably almost near optimal.
Perhaps if I had been quicker-witted, I'd have asked if we found a way to make the software engineers working on shaving a second off the path around the warehouse more efficient, would they make them do it.
What I think is really going on here is that Amazon has a PR vulnerability that can be exploited. With enough videos and testimony produced contrasting the plight of the poor oppressed workers with their boss, The World's Richest Man, Amazon will need to do something to make this go away.
Or at least that's what this campaign hopes.
I agree that there are almost certainly many other examples of inhumane treatment of low-wage workers. We should fix those too. If low-wage workers had unions then you would be able to have those kinds of cross-industry group actions.
But no, the work conditions at Amazon are not acceptable. And to pretend that this a free market transaction -- and not a case of people who are desperate (and probably being forced to work several jobs and depend on government programs due to inhumanely low wages) being exploited.
Amazon has been a leader in paying unskilled workers a good salary at huge scale.
My point is that low-wage workers are usually not in a position to quit one of their multiple jobs because they might become homeless or lose their health insurance. In fact, Amazon having higher wages means that low-wage workers are more likely to continue working there despite the conditions, because they have nowhere else they could go. But instead of discussing the point I was making, you are cherry-picking one particular phrase I used -- which applies to almost all other low-wage jobs but no longer (as of Oct 2018) applies to Amazon.
But also, the working conditions are the thing that most people have issue with (now that Amazon finally pays its workers a minimum wage that is reasonable). Not being able to take bathroom breaks without risking the loss of your job is not a humane way to treat people, even if you're paid $15/hour.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.nl/bernie-sanders-amazon-fight-m...
The number of people working multiple jobs to make ends meet peaked in the 90s, but the legend lives on...
That you find blue collar job conditions unacceptable says something about you, not too much about the jobs.
More than 70% of Americans live pay-check to pay-check, and 40% cannot afford a $400 out-of-pocket emergency. The rate of people delinquent on their car loans (which is an economic indicator of how ordinary people finances are doing, since car loans are usually the most important credit people have to pay off) is increasing at an alarming rate. Economic problems for US workers didn't end in the 90s.
They’ll continue to ignore that $15/hour is within “living wage” for the low CoL areas that Amazon fulfillment warehouses are located in.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.nl/bernie-sanders-amazon-fight-m...
When you employ hundreds of thousands of people, it's not hard to use divide-and-conquer against them, to get them to act against their common interests.
Most of them are not in any position to push back on your demands, even if they'd all be better off from having the freedom to be able to step away from their 'highly important job' to have a piss in peace, without threat of termination.
In short, not the same demographics as people holding down 'decent' jobs for the area.
I did a quick ctrl-f and don't see anyone else talking about this in here. How does HN feel about it?
Personally it's just another reason to keep my distance from Amazon, although I will still randomly yell out Jeff Bezos' name because I find it funny.
Jeff, motherheckin Bezos!
If the goal is to get the employer to notice the issue, leaving and hope they get the idea, when the pool of applicants is essentially unlimited seems like a poor way of articulating a position.
Amazon is a captive audience in this protest and by not just outright leaving, the employees are forcing Amazon to consider their situation, rather than write it off and bring in a new batch.
Doesn't work if every other employer is also like that.
I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of these types of works. Now, the interesting thing about some of these jobs is that they cannot be moved to places where the payment to cost of living ratio can be improved. Some Mechanical Turk tasks could (if the language allowed it) but the Amazon warehouse jobs would be impossible to move.
Unless, Amazon opens a chain of warehouses in Mexico's cities that border the US (Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, Sonoyta, Nogales, Cd Juarez, among all the others) and then dispatches the goods from there. That however would need to include a very good import/export deal.
On the other hand, people are hard at work trying to automate these jobs. Amazon would love nothing more than to have a completely robotic warehouse and a fleet of delivery robots that run 24/7.
I mean Mexico is quite wealthy compared to the rest of Latin America and the North of Mexico includes many of the wealthier areas.
It's not the same building a warehouse in Nuevo Leon as in Chiapas.
Ignoring the math, it’s hard to imagine that pace. Are they forced to continually be moving? Or is the person counting picking up, say 15 usb chargers as 15 separate things?
Which they do. Amazon has both human and robot pickers.
Here's a story about a patent on a wristband that enables this kind of tracking: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-wa...
It is humanly possible. As a teenager, I worked at UPS, where I was expected to stack boxes real-life-Tetris-style into a van at a rate of 45 per minute. They could get as heavy as 30 lbs. I actually got to enjoy it after a while (biceps!), but I could never get the hang of memorizing the zip codes (every truck has a list of 1-30 that we were expected to memorize instantly).
What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is: we have enough wealth as a society that if we wanted to, we could allocate resources and labor in such a way that nobody (even unskilled workers) would have to do work that miserable, at that pace, for that low compensation. But it's not an emergent property of the market, and we'd have to sacrifice some economic growth, and some payout for people higher up the ladder, to do it. We have to collectively decide whether that tradeoff is worth it, and these folks (understandably) are arguing that it is, and asking the rest of us to have some empathy.
I agree it would be great to divide resources and labor in a more intelligent way I'm very open to ideas, but for now the reality is that some jobs are shitty and some are far better. And all the perks and benefits tend to come through hard to attain and coveted jobs. In my opinion you can't just create a system of equality, true equality will never exist. So why not just let it play out naturally? Drawing a line and effectively taking from people higher up is an astonishingly difficult line to draw and the overhead from a change like that could be devastating in itself, especially considering how Govt's are run in general.
We do exactly that every day. Price discovery in the market is the result of collective actions that determine if a tradeoff is worth it.
Comically enough, the part that stuck with me the most was how bad I was at memorizing the codes for the various trucks/locations as well.
An item every 8 seconds is a rapid pace, but at least when I did it, the orders are sequential based on the layout of the warehouse. You grab one item, look at the next item, walk an aisle or two down, grab that item. I would estimate something between 10 seconds between picks?
It is physically demanding work and boring as hell, but you end up in great shape! A couple decades ago when I did it the work paid really well for an unskilled job. Made putting up with it bearable.
The vast majority of the deals are re-runs of ones in past 6 months...just all at same time.
I buy a lot of amazon stuff, but this barely shifted my day to day pattern.
I did find out that you get wifi power plugs that are controllable and measure electricity usage. That's pretty cool...just not sale related.
...also saw some random github-y thing while googleing the model number which hints at some level of hackable/api-able interfacing which made me click the buy button. That's sketchy info though
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GWWRK1C
[Please bookmark & make use of smile.amazon.com/co.uk thing...it's amazon's corporate charity thing - free 0.5% donation]
Jussayin'
I earn around that in Western Europe but it's still a pretty good job for Spain and I have no doubt I live in better conditions than the Americans working for $15 an hour, which is really what matters.
[1] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/country/ranking
Nearly everyone that posts on HN is in a situation where their employer holds vastly more power than themselves in their employer/employee relationship, statistically are you likely being screwed, and you aren't going to be Jeff Bezos one day either.
So either we continue to deny it isn't or we actually start those conversations now and figure out how we live in that world.
And there is a correlation between actions like this and the desire to have a more automated workforce. Not saying that as blame because there are many other reasons and you can look at the reasons their jobs are so bad right now anyways.
But we can't ignore it.
However, I still contend that, even with millions of dollars, most people would not have the foresight to invest. As evidenced by the fact that those who suffer from windfalls of money typically lose it very quickly.
No one has denied that this is not happening because it is. We can however, comment on them in a way that is empathetic to the workers who are protesting. Never know, might come for any one of us one day.
However, the problem with our government currently is that there are other outside factors that would get in the way (Like corporate lobbying.) of any kind of labor initiative.
I will say that boycotting used to be a viable means of getting your point across (Civil right boycotts of the 60s as an example.). The problem I think nowadays is that it has lost it's teeth due to lack of a collective follow through (See the most recent Gucci boycott/"protest" from a few months ago.).
Robots replacing humans is not new, we have been doing this for at least 40 years.
Resources continue to be spent on this technology (and related technology, even if not originally for this purpose).
Unless we stop any robotic research, its happening wether we like it or not.
Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if there isn't one within the next two centuries.
Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death would be eradicated.
Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)
Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now. We could have stopped it and we still can.
Or we can bury our heads in the sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Birth_of_the_movement
With progress comes new opportunities. It may not happen fr everyone, immediately, but it will happen.
The fact that, in the past, the economy created new jobs and new sectors that the majority of people were capable of working in does not guarantee that it always will. Nor when it does is that any consolation to the people un(der)employed for years on end or sometimes for the rest of their life.
In the long run, we are all dead.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a hiccup in human history. Human history is a blip in the world's history. There are no laws when it comes to this. Unless you can provide some other very good reason for believing that more jobs, and good jobs, will be created than those are destroyed, I will have to doubt it given the evidence before me.
Indeed, even many 'good' jobs are actually economically unproductive and totally unfulfilling make-work. Today's situation is much worse than it appears at first glance.
The first wave was all about making people more efficient (higher output multipliers for effort); the next wave may very well make people redundant in the economic production equation. If one person is all that's required to scale infinitely (O(1)) OR people aren't required once the capital is built the share of gains to workers IMO erode substantially and mainly accrue to capital holders. Particularly if those gains result in a concentration of market power to one company.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/stop-shop-strike.html
That's not the way unions themselves use the word.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24904995/boston-union-ca...
"Boston union calls Yankees 'scabs' for crossing hotel picket line"
Or, imagine a nurses' strike, but I as a patient don't honor their strike, am I a scab?
The parent comment was absolutely correct in saying that you are trying to co-opt the actual definition to serve your goals, as the word has nothing to do with being a customer.
Your comment seems to not really make much sense since UAW and other unions are currently involved in calling for boycotts of Mexico-assembled GM vehicles.
It is not the duty of consumers to provide a social safety net for workers. This is precisely where government should step in. If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
Which is the point of a strike.
> It is not the duty of consumers to provide a social safety net for workers. This is precisely where government should step in. If you really give a shit about the people working at Amazon, write to your congressman/congresswoman and voice your support for social programs that would positively impact them.
The reason people are striking is because again and again, the american government has not done this, and many people (on this site, even) believe that the government should not do it. That's kind of the whole point of the 'small government' schtick.
It seems to me it would be easier to get people to vote than to boycott Amazon in an impactful way. But as brundolf pointed out, it doesn't have to be either/or.
That may not happen as the result of one strike, but if there are lots of strikes over a period of time they can incrementally make the public more aware and tilt the odds of electing people who will pass such legislation.
It's not either/or. In today's political climate, unfortunately, pushing the market is the only thing that seems to ever accomplish anything.
Valid point.
I do question how much something like this could realistically push the market though. Boycotting a public transportation system with only one revenue stream is very different from boycotting a multinational corp with diversified revenue streams.
Don't be a scab and cross the picket line. Don't use anything hosted on AWS today.
(Which basically means "turn off your computer because nothing will work" today)
Obviously not as hard as a factory-working job, but they hold the only event in the industry that has you working from 7 am to 7 pm w/ no break if you want to exhibit.
7 am to 7 pm was terrible. everyone was sleepy in the morning (pre caffeine) and completely worn out by the happy hour/closing time.
Yea they can decide to move to the next low-pay job, zero-hour contract, no benefits, wages barely pays the rent, on food stamps ..
If the free market is a fair market, unionising wouldn't make any difference as the negotiated rates would already be fair and couldn't be any more fair. Amazon wouldn't be spending money to block union efforts, because that would be wasted money. Therefore either this isn't free market, and your comment is wrong (not free market), or this is free market but it isn't fair so your comment is wrong (free market, yet still relevant).
Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected out for the year means you'd be proposing a pay raise larger than the profit margin for the company, which is definitely going to affect the stock price. But Amazon is a weird case where most people think that they can just turn on the spigots anytime they really want to just make money, so it's maybe not the easiest analysis.
But for most companies, they make less profit than people think, especially if they're looking at revenue numbers, and a lot of people tend to suggest things that would make a 6% profitable company (not a terribly uncommon number) become a -25% profitable company or something. Even if you tip all executive compensation back into profit, that doesn't usually do much for these large companies.
People keep turning up to work on third world garbage dumps for cents/day earnings, so...
Or rather, it’s cheaper to hire EMTs than it is to climate-control fulfillment centers. Frankly, that seems like the strongest indictment of profit-as-sole-motive I’ve heard, but of course the HN thread can’t handle much in the way of criticizing capitalism or FAANG.
Comments spreading FUD that some sort of deep tech attach of google is responsible for all the negative press get upvoted to the top when the simplest explanation is maybe tech isn’t the perfect good thing everybody wants to believe it is?
Either way, Amazon profits would not be hit by the full $13B increase - more likely profits would remain unchanged, while capex and other investments would go down by that amount.
First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.
When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.
However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.
If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.
I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.
I forget where it was, but I also recently read an article musing on the idea that in the modern era we seem to have a new threat emerging where companies establish very, very firm footholds in some particular industry, and then use that to leverage their way into other industries because they can literally out-resource the entire competitor base of that industry. In some sense, in theory this has been possible for a long time, and we've had things like Samsung which are massive conglomerates, so it's not a new problem in quality, but the quantity of money that can be brought to bear this way in the 21st century may still make this a new sort of problem for trust busters to keep their eyes on.
So the real question is: Who is going to pay the bill?
And the problem I see here is, whoever you ask this, the answer is always “not me!” Everyone wants to reap the benefits of cheap labor (e.g. cheap, fast shipping), while proclaiming they want to treat the labor force well, but without a willingness to actually “put their money where their mouth is” and pay for it when it actually comes down to it.
For example: If you could willingly add 50% to the cost of every Amazon purchase if it gave workers better conditions, would you? If your first reaction to that is “Hey, that’s not my problem! The [government/market/unions/etc.] should have to solve that!” ... then yeah, we’ll the thing is that’s what everybody says when asked these sorts of problems.
as consumers, we can help by boycotting amazon.
By your logic, workers should never fight abuse, as they'll "just get another job that's just as hard". But the history of labor shows this to be false, and that collective action can achieve improvements.
The US is, all things considered, expensive.
Senior FAANG engineers make ~$200/hr. How does $15 seem at all high?
No, no you dont