Amazon's Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power
theregister.com
theregister.com
I'm surprised that the article doesn't also mention the absolute joke of a Supreme Court decision, ruling that Amazon's mandatory security screening does not need to be compensated. Legalized wage theft is what that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...
1) This is stating that Amazon requires its warehouse workers to go through a security screening before they can leave at the end of every shift.
2) This daily process takes 25 minutes to 1 hour
3) Employees are NOT paid for this time
4) Employees are hourly and not salary
5) The supreme court UNANIMOUSLY agreed they do not have to be paid for this work.
6) Their reasoning for this is that the security check is not a critical part of the job and could be eliminated.
Those 6 facts either cant be right or I must be missing some critical 7th fact that ties this all together. Can anyone help out?
Amazon could eliminate the security check entirely with no adverse effects on the employee's work. From Amazon's point of view, it is easily dispensable. The employee's cannot opt out of the security check without being fired. From the employee's point of view, it is entirely indispensable.
Though not stated, I'd guess that there is also an unhealthy amount of efficient market hypothesis thrown in. If I assume that all markets are at equilibrium, then no company would have workers perform unnecessary work, because those workers would then choose to work somewhere that doesn't.
Edit: It may also be that the Court wanted to avoid extending existing law, and instead wanted to point out limitations in it for Congress to then amend. I'd have to read the transcripts in detail there, which I haven't done.
lol, scores of work assignments and whole jobs shouldn't be compensated with this line of reasoning.
And if we take your comment to its sliperry slope conclusion, then employers could ask for employees to do anything, for any amount of time, unpaid, if they considered it "critical".
Some people began to get upset and act against it--ie, shut down their machines early to cover the spread. They received some very hard pushback from supervisors, then management. It blew up into a full-blown unionization campaign, with the Canadian Auto Workers union representatives stationed outside exit streets from the plant meeting with employees as they left for the day to promote their position, and the company electing to hand out anti-union pamphlets, put up anti-union flyers all over the grounds (halls, break rooms, change rooms, plant floor), and host meetings where they would slyly threaten to close the plant and move it away.
It got ugly. And that was over a combined ~30 minutes a day maybe. I'd be pretty upset over being held after work for an hour for a search. (I've had that experience in college working for a major chocolate/candy manufacturer but it never took more than 20 seconds. I still thought that was ridiculous to search our bags for little plastic noisemaker boxes of candy breath mints that couldn't cost more than a few cents).
People need to not judge court decisions solely on whether they think the headline outcome is good or bad. Besides the fact that the actual outcome is frequently more complicated than the headline, the reasoning is just as, if not more, important the outcome. That's the part that constrains future court decisions.
[1]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf
even reading the first few paragraphs, there seemed to be numerous lines of argument the court ignored in this regard. what other complications should we be considering with respect to this otherwise worker-unfriendly decision?
frankly, i'd support the (radical) idea that we should pay non-exempt workers at the start of their departure for work all the way to their arrival at their after-work destination. this has the nice side effect of pulling corporations into the fight against excessive, wasted commute times, sprawl and the housing crisis, and spewing excess toxins into our lungs and the environment.
Reading through the ruling was interesting, and definitely helped me to decide that the problem wasn't with the Supreme Court's decision, but with the poor protections in place on the Portal-to-Portal Act. I hold with the moral statement that actions performed by the employee, and required by the employer, must be compensated. Since the security screenings were mandatory, it is immoral for the employees not to be compensated.
If it's buying retail products, I look at Etsy or Walmart, or smaller sources if possible.
If it's digital infrastructure, I opt for Digital Ocean most often.
I'm increasingly uncomfortable with everything about Amazon and its subsidiaries.
Choosing not to do business with the Carnegie Steel of online shopping just isn't going to change Amazon's market position. There will never be enough people boycotting Amazon due to its inhuman treatment of its workers to offset the value Amazon receives from doing so.
The only solution that I think has a chance of working is public policy, which seems increasingly less likely as political parties are ever further beholden to the interests of their corporate benefactors. It's a bleak outlook, but as the allusion to Carnegie Steel suggests, it isn't the first time the US has found itself in this position. In fact, the parallels between the political economy of the early 20th century and today seem increasingly more aligned.
But at the same time, I find it really weird to go, "I morally can't stand for a single thing you're doing and I think you're a generally ill hearted company. Here, take more of my money to help you fund your ill-doings."
I can get behind boycotting companies we know do bad things, however I wouldn't delude myself into thinking that this is a means to ending the abuse of their workers, or a means of making the world a better place. This is a political problem, not a consumer problem.
Being an ethical consumer seems to be Sisyphean task, as to do so responsibly we'd need to ensure the alternatives we purchase from aren't treating their workers even worse to hold some market share. When we factor in the complexity of supply chains, environmental considerations, and labor practices across the globe (and the relations between core and peripheral nations,) a consumer simply cannot reasonably fit their purchasing decisions within a consistent ethical framework. This is probably the reason behind the phrase "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism."
That and boycotting is political mob mentality. Needing a random person, you'll never meet or have a coffee with, telling you what to do so you can be a "a good person" in their eyes is bullshit. Do it strictly because you believe in your own ethics.
I can think of at least some ways in which consumption might be more ethically neutral.
After a natural disaster, you often see communities band together to meet each others needs however they can. In a way, this mirrors how many native cultures approach production and resource distribution. Accepting the resources I need or providing for other's needs according to my ability certainly isn't unethical.
There is something fundamentally different about the nature of consumption in economies based on maximizing exchange value vs meeting greatest needs. Otherwise, you likely need to defend the increasingly controversial position that markets maximize utility greater than any alternative.
I'd certainly like to hit Amazon with trust busting regulations, but I have to settle with being "personally responsible" in the meantime.
Public culture and it’s impact via media are greater than they were back in the day I think.
And I think the social value of these gestures - making boycotting companies behaving like amazon normal, and eventually even cool / expected, is a major factor in social change and in precipitating legislation.
But it does take decades.
Isn't etsy for handmade/artisan goods? I don't think I ever bought anything handmade/artisan off amazon, but that might just be me. As for walmart, is it any better than amazon? Aren't they also infamous for underpaying their workers?
Voting with your wallet is one half of the solution, voting with your actual vote is the other.
"Welcome to the shitty end of the employment pool. If you don't want to get stuck here, stay in school kids!"
Is not a solution, it's a personal escape hatch for the few that can follow the advice. Even if everybody "stayed at school" there would still be a need for these jobs, so it would just be that degrees would devaluate so that people are still working those. At worse, they would be done by immigrants who don't have the means or support to "stay at school" anyway.
In other words, as long as there are people working those jobs, the answer is not "stay in school to avoid them", but in fixing the horrible conditions.
"Stay in school" is a quinteseential individualistic "each to their own" answer.
A civilized answer would be legal changes...
This is why it's so hard at the bottom of the labour market: we spent all our money on corn subsidiaries and free shit for people over 65. There's nothing left for working people. And that includes me. I had to struggle through a shitty under funded school, take poorly paid jobs, pay off a huge student loan and now I'm facing higher income taxes and bloated artificial house prices and a national debt built to record levels giving other people tax cuts for nothing.
We can't solve issues like this in isolation because the real issue is that there are no resources left. You have to solve resource distribution. And that's gonna be very very hard. Until then, all any of us can do is try to avoid being in a group that isn't politically important.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24340272
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...
Then we should work to change that. As a society, we should find this kind of stuff unacceptable. There should be some baseline level of transparency and dignity employees are treated with.
For any particular scrap of ground the "labor movement" (in italics because there is no such coordinated movement on the timeline and scale by which these things happen) wants to fight for the fight for that scrap ends at low margin BigCos like amazon who will not give it up until legislated (or until it looks like they might be and they can get brownie points by biting the bullet ahead of time). In unionized industries the BigCos are also the unionized workplaces where change happens at the glacial pace of contract negotiations. Changes come about in higher margin and smaller scale parts of the economy first. If you want Amazon and Walmart workers to have an hour break for lunch (or some other particular policy goal) then you are not going to get that until so long after the workers in the Coors warehouse and the McMaster warehouse have had it that the legislators can feel secure in legislating it.
Here's an example. Say the UAW manages to negotiate with GM that every third Friday should be pajama Friday. Farcical, right? Of course because it's not within the bounds of what we consider reasonable right now. It has to become reasonable first. If you want pajama Friday or any other specific policy goal it has to be within the bounds of what is reasonable. Before the UAW can even broach the subject there needs to be acceptance elsewhere. The UAW isn't gonna ask for pajama Friday at GM unless they think the policy is not crap and they're not gonna think that unless they've done that at the smaller Ford plant and they're not gonna do that until they've piloted it at the tiny Peterbilt factory where they have a better position in negotiations and can afford big reaches. And they're not gonna try it there unless they've seen the policy play out successfully somewhere else first, say the non-union Cat mining shovel plant down the road where they have the fat margins per worker to do that kind of thing. And the Cat plant isn't even gonna entertain the possibility (and the workers won't push for it) unless it's been proven to work in the even higher margin and smaller scale RV industry plant in the next state over.
I'm not going to repeat myself but if you wan workers to have a generous (by our current frame of reference) paid hour lunch break at Amazon's warehouses then the process by which the idea is normalized is basically the same. You can't change policy at BigCo or at the legislative level until you've made that policy = normal and reasonable by doing it other places first. The strength of the "labor movement" is completely and totally tangential to that process and a good argument (though I don't necessarily agree with it) could be made that strong labor institutions (unions) actually hinder the process because they reduce the agility with which decisions can be made by the bigger players.
So if you want pajama Friday at GM or you want a paid hour long lunch break legislated upon Amazon and Walmart, or any other change that looks to be big and unprecedented from our vantage point here today, then you're gonna need to plant the seeds of those changes in workplaces of a completely and totally different setting so that when the change does finally come to the GMs and Amazons of the world it comes at the end of a long bunch of incremental steps because that's the only way change comes to those big places that are deeply invested in and optimized for the status quo.
Costco, Ocean State Job Lot, and other small scraps of the consumer goods retail economy known for treating their workers well and proving you can make money doing so are doing far, far more for the future of workers in Amazon's warehouse than and "labor movement" can do because what those "generous" employers are doing today is what Amazon will be doing in time.
It's not as farcical as you think. I worked at a place in the 90s as an intern where the union negotiated "casual Fridays" where jeans and open toed shoes (how scandalous) as a work rule.
I'd love to see some of the negative commenters made staff manager of just one busy warehouse for a few months and made responsible for a 500 low skilled workers with no prior systems in place such as these and see what kind of solutions they can come up with on their own that are any better.
I would come up with a system that actually informs workers of what their productivity targets are and allows them to monitor their progress with accurate data in real time.
I would also not have an automated process for termination, if for no other reason than attrition and retraining are more costly in the long run than underperformance by a fraction of a percent. Particularly given the variables that can affect performance which are out of the employee's control.
Now of course i'm sure most warehouse workers aren't like that but I can't even imagine what managing 125,000 low-skilled employees like that would be like, and i'm sure the turnover is absolutely massive as well.
It's all unicorns and rainbows and posturing until you're the guy who has to actually manage them.
I have to say, you stereotyping all warehouse workers as drug addicts and thieves is not a good look. It says more about you than them.