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Comment by outlace | Hacker News Reader

Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation? I haven't delved into the details of this specific case but this reaction is typical regardless of the facts it seems. The big company is always the evil one and the employees are always little enslaved saints.

Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish everyone well.

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When one side has all the power and the other side has none, to pretend that the benefit of the doubt accrues equally to both is an act of moral cowardice.

How about considering the facts of the situation and not generalizing and applying a pre-conceived narrative?

I don't really know how to address the kind of confusion that mistakes a statement of principle for an imposition of narrative.

There's no way to respond seriously to someone who is suggesting we ought not learn from history.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but how can you know if your principle ("one side has all the power and the other side has none") is relevant without understanding the specifics of the issue at hand?

You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are irrelevant.

I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the earlier comment.

I mean, for as much as I've said so far, I'm pretty comfortable working from the knowledge that one side is a corporation worth enough billions that the specific number is both indeterminate and irrelevant, and the other is some people making minimum wage who'd like their working lives to be a little less shitty. Also, the corporation can fire those minimum-wage workers at any time, for any reason or none at all, and leave them zero effective recourse under the law - because most of what the law says is what the lawyers convince the judge trying the case it says, and one of those sides can afford hot and cold running lawyers out of petty cash while the other is living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford them at all.

That an engineer whose work I greatly respect, whose VP role gave him vastly more knowledge of the corporation's inner workings, walked away from seven figures of RSUs and whatever no doubt sizable other compensation, because he agrees with the folks making minimum wage that their situation is bullshit, I'd think should add considerable point to the argument.

But Bray's action, while commendable, is severable here. If you need convincing that corporate power vastly outweighs labor power in the United States of 2020, I'm not the person to do it, for the same reason I'm not the person to convince anyone that water is wet or fire is hot. You might try struggling along paycheck to paycheck for a while, working some place like an Amazon warehouse, if you don't know what it's like. Or you might try listening to people who do when they tell you what it's like. Beyond that, I really don't know how to help you.

You have made the false assumption that I'm talking about this particular situation (Amazon/Tim Bray) when I was simply responding to the more general comment about making judgements based on generalities and not on particulars.

Yeah, totally. People are so annoying with how they want to learn from history! Like you, I too wish people would just be total morons and not ever learn from the past.

So your asserting that without understanding the specifics of the situation that a "lesson from history" should be applied and should guide your opinion about a particular situtation? It isn't important to you what the nature of the particular situation is? How are you deciding which "lesson from history" is applicable or is there just a single universal lesson about "big corporations" that should be applied irregardless of the facts?

That's not an argument, just an assertion. All you've done is restate the position the GP was questioning the reasoning behind:

> Q: Why does it seem like big corps never get the benefit of the doubt?

> A: Big corps don't get the benefit of the doubt because they are big. Anyone who disagrees is a moral coward.

Perhaps you have overlooked that the distinction I drew was one not of size, but of power.

I guess I just don't see how that's a meaningful distinction in this situation. Size and power are pretty obviously correlated. GP's question wasn't "Are large corporations powerful?" it was "Why aren't large (powerful) corporations given the benefit of the doubt?"

Phrasing the question in terms of size makes it easy to ignore the power differential, and ignoring the power differential is the only way that question seems to make sense.

The first rule of firearms safety is that the gun is always loaded, because any other assumption will far too easily betray you into deadly error. The first rule of electrical safety is that you always keep one hand behind your back, because it only takes a few milliseconds for a cross-body current to stop your heart. Economic power, similarly concentrated, is differently risky, but not less so. Some things - no matter how useful they may be when properly handled - are simply too dangerous to ever be trusted.

You seem to be asserting that all that is needed to determine who is right or wrong in any particular situation is to assign some sort of "power" metric to both sides and then conclude that the powerful entity must be wrong and the weaker entity must be right without actually considering the particular issue at hand.

This seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.

What it seems like to you is your business. But, to extend a metaphor from my prior comment, you're going to need to go a lot further than you have to convince anyone that the guy with the shotgun needs to be worrying about the guy he's pointing the shotgun at, and who is also obviously unarmed.

It's not impossible to convince people of that, but you're going to need to work at it, because you're asking them to believe something that's the direct opposite of the situation they're actually seeing with their own two eyes.

If you want to call something lazy, why not start with the kind of thinking that takes such a mealy-mouthed, "we can't know for sure until all the facts are in" approach to that?

All I said was that the particular facts of a situation are relevant. Hard to believe that is a controversial point.

I don't think you have to assume little is morally superior to say big becomes evil. When those in power become powerful, by nature they do everything they can to maintain that power. When they were small that might be by making the employees happy, or the like but when they are big they have shareholders to answer to and percentage points to keep up.

In this specific case Amazon immediately fired every single person who whistleblew or attempted to communicate their non-action on Covid-19 in the early days and the early outbreaks in warehouses. This isn't some kind of worker pay disagreement or such, the company literally got people killed.

Every single person they fired was female or a person of color.

The problem with big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees is the general fact that eventually lobbying and shareholder meetings lead to treating people like sheep and robots.

I think there are plenty of great examples of responsible mid-size companies, but nearly every massive company has these stories somewhere and there are plenty small companies guilty of massive missteps but generally not on these kinds of scales, I suspect it's because the ceo of a small joint has to look these people in the eyes on Monday and nobody is squeezing them over the last 2%.

Bezos doesn't have to look anyone in the eye and its much easier to put your underlings at risk and fire people when your boss tells you to do it.

>Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation

Simple. Morality is a human trait and corporations are not human beings.

The actions of big corporations are the actions of humans.

Yes. Humans with a fiduciary duty (legal obligation) to put shareholder value above all else.

Because the little guy in these situations has nothing to hide. His motives and goals are clear to everyone, as are the constraints he may face in pursuing them. That's never true of something on the scale of Amazon.

How about cases when the little guy is just as big of an asshole as the big guy? There are stories of small business owners in poorer countries employing literal slaves (in XXI century)...

Employees are subject to intense competition for employment, while big companies face much less competition [1]. This means that, all other things being equal, big companies are less unaccountable than their employees. While this dynamic certainly doesn't guarantee abuses of power on behalf of big companies I think it makes sense to be inherently suspicious of their actions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

Well, for one thing, the "big corporation" isn't a human being, and the 'little guy' is.

"everyone"

"always"

"I haven't read the article but..."

"always the evil ones"

"always little enslaved saints"

Thanks, I just filled out my bingo card

edit: Sorry gang but some comments just don't warrant being taken seriously. Especially when using inflammatory, offensive language designed specifically to be maximally confrontational. So you'll excuse me if I take a little pleasure on Monday morning taking the piss out of this bootlicking comment.

I actually did read the article.

Oh ok thanks, that makes a huge difference.

Sincerely,

A little enslaved saint

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