Amazon warehouse workers are walking out and Whole Foods workers are striking
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As others have mentioned these workers have so little leverage right now because of the massive unemployment. So even if Amazon was to charge customers more, they could totally just pocket the money and the warehouse/delivery/grocery people would have no position.
It's so completely unfair. Everyone risking their lives to feed us right now should probably be making 2-3x normal pay (and we should be paying a lot more for their services).
The vast majority of people in modern militaries will never see combat. They are all somewhere relatively safe and merely supporting that small minority of troops who will see combat. Consequently, it is no surprise that pay is fairly low.
But in the private security world – people guarding Western and Chinese interests in unstable developing countries – those people are likely to get involved in some shooting, and so their salaries and benefits for loved ones are very high.
Still, agreed, private military is nearer 1:1.
Amazon should do what's good for the most amount of people which is keeping prices down. There are plenty of people willing to take these jobs, we have record unemployment. Raising wage 2-3x the normal pay is unfair given how many people would take these jobs today.
I think it's way to easy for us with nice paying jobs, and secure employment to say that we'd pay more for goods and services. There are so many unemployed people that aren't going to be doing good in a month. These people will want any job and will need cheap goods.
If we're going to do some sort of hero compensation for all of our essential works, which I'm in favor of, it should be through the government. Private sector should continue to be fair and act rationally.
Amazon could do this by reducing the amount of profit it pockets and giving that share to its employees.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth. He can afford it.
In fact, I'd like to see Bezos risk his life commuting to work on unsafe public transit, working in some of Amazon's warehouses where he'd be exposed to other workers who might be sick, handling hundreds of potentially infected packages, and doing deliveries... all this with crappy if any health insurance and virtually no safety net.
There's been a long-standing argument that founders deservedly reap great rewards because they are the ones in a company who shoulder the great majority of the risk.
Now that's been shown to be an utter and complete lie by this epidemic, hasn't it?
Bezos is sitting nice and safe in his mansion, pocketing billions while it's the desperate people who work for him who risk their life for peanuts.
All essential workers during this crisis deserve some kind of additional compensation. Wealth redistribution should happen through the government. One company can't do it all themselves. They have a responsibility to both their shareholders and their employees. It they abandon one of those responsibilities they won't be able to do the other one effectively.
Amazon can be just as competitive without being as profitable to its shareholders.
The hundreds of billions that Bezos has pocketed as profit are not essential for Amazon's success. That profit could easily be redirected in to the pockets of Amazon's employees and towards making a safer work environment instead, arguably with a corresponding increase in Amazon's competitive effectiveness.
Amazon operates within an existing system, defined by government regulation, and competes within that system exceedingly well. If you're upset with the outcomes, blame the real culprit: utterly ineffective government policies. Corporations are by definition not altruistic entities. They're not supposed to be, and it's the job of government policy to tame the negative possibilities of their profit-driven pursuits.
Why can't corporations seek profit and altruism at the same time? Because you can model your business as a function that optimizes for profit, which is easily quantifiable. I've never seen any way to optimize for altruism.
Say you wanted to optimize for altruism and profit: how would that work? Is 3x wages really enough if employees still have shitty health insurance? Should Amazon provide its own medical services in warehouses so they don't depend on bad private insurance? How many doctors should they hire? Should they treat non-workplace health issues? What if they find someone has cancer? You get into fuzzy, grey territory very quickly with this line of thinking. Profit is always a number and it's better when it's higher. How do you measure altruistic behavior?
If you're upset with the outcomes, change the system that's incentivizing that behavior. Don't penalize the players for succeeding. This is the role that government is supposed to play.
Great idea, except that the government has been effectively coopted by the very corporate and wealthy interests they are tasked with regulating.
Government officials regularly come from high executive posts in industry, and when they retire from government work are hired in to cushy, well-paid jobs at the very corporations they had regulated and assigned government contracts to while they were in office.
The "pro-business" faction has been busy deregulating as much as they can and selling off government assets to private corporations. Anti-trust enforcement has been a joke for decades. As we speak environmental regulations are being rolled back with the excuse of making life easier for polluting corporations in the wake of the cornavirus crisis. With the successful capture of the Supreme and lower courts by conservatives we can expect to see even more corporate and wealth dominance.
At this point in history I don't have much hope in the government reigning in corporations or the wealthy. The trend towards ever more wealth concentration and ever greater inequality in the US is crystal clear.
I would agree with that. But I still think it's probably easier to fight that fight than to try to shame corporations into achieving unquantifiable, often mutually exclusive goals to everyone's satisfaction. I'm not hopeful government will change any time soon, I just want to make sure we're directing the resentment to the right place.
Pick one.
No, there was a record high in the number of people filing for unemployment insurance in a week, which is not the same as a record high unemployment rate.
We certainly might be heading for 10% unemployment rate or more, but we aren't there yet.
I think we're seeing the market work exactly as intended. It goes both ways. If workers strike (with solidarity), the market will respond accordingly to find a price at which people are willing to do the work. But no, it won't happen instantly. The capitalists won't just give in and say "You're right guys, we're sorry.". Their hand must be forced, and that is the history of all organized labor.
This makes less sense if you're one of the tens of millions of people making much less right now.
I'll tell you why that doesn't work- corruption.
Government needs a revolution to change.
Again, this is wrong. Governments can change in all sorts of ways. In the current hyper-polarized political reality in the US, it may seem like a revolution is required, but just look at the number of changes that have actually occurred under Trump and Obama.
If we could muster the political will to actually address corruption, then it would change, and it wouldn't require a revolution.
The problem is people just don't care.
Otherwise, the onus is on the rest of us to remember how these companies value human life.
It's just that things break down in hyperefficient settings (factories, warehouses etc) when unpredictable events hit them. These environments aren't great at adapting quickly to things they haven't faced before.
Before anyone with decision making power or imagination, can be pulled in to deal with some issue, (that no one has training or experience to handle on the front lines), it's already all over social media and the news. That's just how things work currently.
Give it a few days before reacting to whatevers on the net or on the news.
They really don't. If people cared, Nike wouldn't use child slave labor.
Most people just can't afford to demonstrate they care. If you're part of an exploited underclass, feeding your family has to be more important.
It always comes down to the fact that people will not give up their own benefits for someone else. If you want people to do something you have to appeal to their self-interest, not their morality.
Workers are easily replaceable at the moment, but companies should tread carefully in treating workers as expendable.
In a time of crisis legislation, investigations, and executive orders have a way of happening a little faster than normal.
Indeed, if you reinvest almost all your profits in the business instead of taking them as earnings you pay very little in taxes. Taxing investment would be a very stupid thing to do since it would discourage what makes society richer in the long run.
Anecdotally, I absolutely and conscientiously used Amazon as a way to avoid paying sales tax when I was younger and less financially stable.
Gaming the system is what I'd call their sales tax treatment. They didn't collect it everywhere until they got so large that they're warehouses and datacenters were everywhere. And depending on jurisdiction I think its the 3rd party sellers' responsibility where possible.
Hopefully there is going to be wake up call in society. Surely a large scale demonstration like this would convince people that your "free market capitalistic assigned worth, i.e. your salary" is not a sufficient measure of your value in society and external adjustment (eg: government regulation or welfare or ...) is actually quite reasonable.
That is not an option for those living paycheck to paycheck, or not in the prime of their life.
Human beings are not a resource, and managers need to understand that there is a social cost they pay and thus need to comply with a social contract.
The switching cost is near infinite and not reflected in the pay.
We read Atlas Shrugged and see ourselves. Let us run the world and everybody will do great. We don't read The Jungle or Nickel and Dimed, and if we do we don't see ourselves. We enjoy the benefits of the labor movement as natural rights -- or even dismiss things like weekends and sick leave as unnecessary.
That's not everybody on HN; in fact HN seems to be better than many. Slashdotters, last I saw, seemed quite convinced Rand had written scripture.
Is our world now more like 1984 or Brave New World?
https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/brave-new-world-v...
Edited: I've just re-watched that Intelligence Squared debate and, my God, it is bang on and more relevant now than ever!
Rand gave us a picture of a just world where everybody earned what they got, and where misfortune was your own fault. The Invisible Hand self-corrects. It's easy to support that when you come in the top 1% of the world and therefore must have earned it, and conversely everybody else didn't.
At the very least, if one is sending a gig shopper to Whole Foods... tip like crazy. (Or don't break the strike at all.)
Edit: No strike threat, but there's a petition here https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/amazon-must-protect-work...
Better than nothing!
These strikes just seems opportunist. For those saying “workers should get PPEs” - how? There’s a shortage and medical workers are a higher priority since they’re more likely to be infected. And clearly, online shopping is popular these days and important to keep operating while there are shelter in place orders. Grocery stores are also important to keep operating.
These workers are free to forego their jobs and go home. Amazon should just replace them and move on. There will be many others who are willing to work.