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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

Why would the workers organize and risk their careers without just cause?

He mentions petitions with thousands of signatures. Are all of those people just…I mean, what?

If they were lying, then Amazon could easily come out and say, "They're asking for regular breaks every four hours and we literally give them that. They ask for PPE and every employee is given X, Y, Z. They want us to reduce our carbon footprint by 10%, here is an independent audit showing 12% reduction." (etc.)

In situations of extreme power imbalance, it's not unreasonable to default trust the person not in power who is taking far greater risk.

Sometimes you'll be wrong! But the burden of proof is on people in power.

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>why would the workers organize and risk their careers without just cause

Warehouse stocking is not a career. Most of these people are hourly workers with little to lose. You can't apply the same standards to white, blue, and no collar workers because the nature of both the work, the people, and the culture are totally different.

If that statement shocks or offends you, I encourage you to take a temporary job at a place like Walmart or visit an oil rig and experience the differences yourself.

How on Earth can you think that low-skill hourly workers in America have "little to lose" by jeopardizing their livelihoods? That's precisely what ensures that they have so much to lose. Maybe you or I can lose our jobs, survive on savings for a good while, and easily find another role; they can't.

? Under the CARES act, low-wage workers "earn" more on unemployment than from working.

That depends on whether or not their individual state is effectively processing both regular unemployment and the federal side effectively and whether or not the state side is being contested. Also, that ends in July currently whereas there have been complaints about Amazon warehouses (and other jobs) well before the pandemic.

As I understand it, the 8000 people that signed the petition of support to organize were not hourly workers but corporate white collar workers with high pay that have issues with climate response and worker protections for blue collar workers. Like Tim, the guy who wrote this essay.

Very interesting. Hard data on all this would be much more valuable than anecdotes and presumption that those with power are always the evil ones.

Corporations are at least some kind of good. Otherwise, we would need to all form our own little businesses, and have everyone redo a whole lot of common tasks. Corporations are the economy's approach to DRY.

> Very interesting. Hard data on all this would be much more valuable than anecdotes and presumption that those with power are always the evil ones.

The signatory names and titles are available publicly: https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/public-let...

Thanks! It does substantiate the point these are mostly white collar workers complaining about their environment agenda. I saw a single bullet about work conditions, and this was couched in a context about not docking pay if there are big storms that wipe out operations.

Definitely not a corporation mistreating its employees. I don't know why this is portrayed as such. If employees want to force their employer to follow some agenda the employer does not agree with, I don't see a problem with the corporation firing the employees.

What hard data do you need? The petition is public, and the number of people who signed it is as hard as you're going to get!

Hard data on all the evil that Amazon is presumably doing. What are all these evil things that makes Amazon so horrible?

Everyone deserves a safe (as possible) job with a living wage, that is not something only white collar workers who went to university are entitled to.

Meat packing and agriculture jobs in the US are presently incredibly dangerous, under-regulated (wink-wink regulated large corporations who have immense political power through lobbyists and trade PACs), and often done by undocumented persons who cannot get compensation if they are maimed or killed. Interestingly, these industries often advertise wages in Central and South American countries' newspaper to encourage migration, legal and otherwise.

Nobody just deserve it, everyone has to find one and keep it. You never get anything in life because "you deserve it and the Universe has to give it to you", not in this Universe.

It's true that nobody gets something from the universe just because they deserve it. Which is why for several thousand years humans have grouped up into civilized societies where we can construct environments that better match how we think things should work. So that people can get what they deserve.

Since we're not talking about somebody adrift in interstellar space, your argument makes less sense. Instead you have to argue some variant on a) not everybody deserves a reasonably safe job, or b) people do deserve that but we as a society can't afford it.

(I don't think either of those is true, but at least they'd make sense.)

You just served a false dilemma. There are also options c and d and more.

Even having a society does not make wonders: we don't have a cure for cancer, we don't have a vaccine for Covid, having a functional society does not mean you can obtain everything, including safe jobs and decent lives, especially when the definitions of safe and decent are moving targets: versus 200 years ago we are living an utopia of safe jobs and decent lives. Just think logical, not only emotional.

If there are options c, d, and following, I'd like to hear them. But your second paragraph is pure option b, the notion that we can't afford it.

I think that's wrong. We of course can't afford everything, and I never said otherwise. But what we're talking about is "a safe (as possible) job". There's no particular reason to think that if Amazon takes proper worker safety precautions, suddenly they'll be out of business. Might Bezos be marginally less rich? Sure. Might Amazon customers pay a smidgen more? Sure. Will society collapse? No. Will some other workers suddenly not have a safe workplace? Also no.

We can afford it.

If "we can afford it" then please explain why 90% of the manufactured goods purchased in USA are made in China; is it because competition and lower wages in China? We can afford to pay more the USA workers to produce it locally, but we don't. Why?

I don't care about how rich is Bezos, it is not my problem (or, more exactly, not a problem for me), but the blanket statements like "everyone deserves X" and "we can afford Y" are a problem: we don't simply deserve and we cannot afford most things.

We're not talking about "most things". We're talking about safe working conditions. We can afford them. And people deserve them.

The universe no. The universe is a cold, hard mf.

But would it not be nice if it were society, us humans, who would provide the right to a safe job and dignified life?

"The society" is a generic term to hide behind; the society does not provide jobs, businesses do (or self-employment). Nobody provides a "dignified life", that is another vague and non-measurable term to hide behind.

problem with your utopia is that in order to provide the vagaries of a "dignified life" you are compelling people to labor for others. We have not yet achieved post scarcity and there is never a guarantee that enough people in your society will participate in good faith to sustain those who are, for whatever reason, less productive.

That's not an argument against a safety net, just the opposing force that makes the correct (and possible) solution somewhere in between [UBI, euthanization), and different for each grouping of people.

we seem to have enough people participating to sustain large scale warfare operations around the globe, bail out entire industries, and pay politicians above average salaries. imagine what we could do for society if not for spending so much money on these pursuits which large swaths of our population find immoral.

Seems to work alright here in Europe tho, even with scarcity.

By the way, I find the notion comical that in a capitalist system, you are not compelled to labor for others. In practice, that is.

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