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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to defend Amazon, but the picture many of us have is inaccurate (I own a recruitment marketing company and have recruited for and against Amazon over the past five years in many markets). Prior to COVID, Amazon was one of the best-paying warehouse jobs and was putting immense upward pressure on restaurant, retail and low-end construction job pay. In many markets, Amazon was paying warehouse workers $16-$17/hour where the prevailing wage was $12-$13. The working conditions story wasn't as good for Amazon, and most companies were competing with Amazon by on benefits, policy (i.e. no seasonal layoffs, late, sick, vacation, etc) or culture (we're family friendly, free cookout every day, etc...).

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Fake news has really taken this Amazon thing and run with it, fanning the flames of false outrage. Disappointing to see.

Historically ALL corporations that have reached a certain size are likely to get media attention for good and for bad.

This goes for Standard Oil (and probably every oil company since), AT&T, IBM, microsoft, walmart, google and tesla.

I remember the story about some guy saying he had to piss in a bottle at the amazon warehouse...I believe that story, but I also believe if you take any random sample of half a million people, at least 1 person in that group will be peeing in a bottle that year. And then there’s the whistleblower who was trying to gather support when he was getting paid to be at home for 2 weeks...

Firing whistle-blowers is pretty egregious. If we can't try to fight for a better world after all this is over, what are we even doing besides just idly watching hundreds of thousands die?

It's because Bezos is political active, and pretty conservative (though he hates Trump). ...so the political forces are fanning the flames of discontent online.

I don't believe any of these anti-Amazon posts are organically appearing on the front pages of Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc...

It's all just bots.

People care because some folks put their ethics above their wallets.

Never underestimate the strength of anti-capitalist sentiment - it's a common thread in issues like this.

Even people who should know better, like Tim Bray, keep trotting out lines like this:

> So they're gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism.

If you think about it from the perspective of an ideological war against capitalism, certain facts (like people ignoring Amazon driving wages up) start to make more sense.

I'd like you to demonstrate how capitalism will solve warehouse workers' problems in this scenario.

I'd like you to demonstrate how that's relevant to my assertion of anti-capitalist bias.

(Though for what it's worth, the same way it's solved problems of poverty throughout the world: https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1528)

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