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"