On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it.
I suppose it is relevant to whether something makes good content, but hopefully most of us aren’t here primarily to comment on our judgment of content marketability
I think the most common place I see it is with surveillance conversations
Though I should note that I’m not seeing those comments towards the top anymore, so that’s good
> What did you expect?
Well, geez, I don't know basic human decency probably? Are we all so numb to asshattery that we're not surprised or upset when we learn about someone using power to hurt or control the little guy?
> On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it.
Yeah, it's pretty much just a lazy dismissal of the issue, and maybe even an attempt to jam up the discussion.
Though my employer users AWS. I don't have any swing over that sadly.
But for my own money, no more Amazon.
This was another motivation for going with DO: there's just less of it. Less to learn, less to get lost in. We've got a couple of juniors on the team who are brand new to actually having to get the software they write to run in production, and I don't think the AWS control panel is a very good place to send someone like that.
Most people are too lazy to look at another store.
I get that. But... 2020 isn't 1920 or even 1980. Fresh eyes might see more clearly.
To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today. Surveillance is easier too. IDK. Yes, Bezos does not want an amazon union and won't just let it happen without a fight. Same as always. That said, if people want to hear what an amazon union organiser has to say... it's almost impossible to stop it.
I don't think the central factor here is Pinkertons. Union organising is the actual determinant. If they can get enough amazon employees interested, they'll probably succeed regardless.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
Which is, if I recalled correctly, illegal.
Even if they do do it illegally, the justice department has to be motivated to go after them. Which, with a Biden administration that is close to Bezos is unlikely:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-tech/amazon-...
These workers can't really rely on the justice Department.
So that it's pretty costly for the ruling class to push ordinary people around. Not that they can't, I mean they still control the army and police so technically they can still do whatever they want, but in reality it's going to be very expensive, financially and politically to push people around if ordinary people possess both qualities.
In reality, bezos and any future amazon union are opposed to one another. That's a pretty firmly embedded truism in union thinking too. No point getting outraged over the trite.
Also, this is not even amazon getting serious yet. Imagine what happens when/if amazon union organisers ever make a credible effort.
Retaliation against employees is illegal. Shutting down a unionised facility is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Entirely legal in a "Right to work" state.
I can't believe people here people here manage to justify this abject behavior as "business as usual". This is not normal, not legal and shouldn't be accepted.
"If you didn't want to be spied-on, you wouldn't try to unionize"? Really?
But that's a double-edged sword. It's also an advantage to employers and businesses. And recent history has shown they have the advantage: they been successful at thwarting union formation (see Wal-Mart, the movie American Factory, etc.) and even labor laws (e.g. Prop 22).
That's neither here nor there. The point I was disputing was the idea that changes in mass communication technology gives an advantage to unions.
However, to your point: your phrasing "using communication to persuade people...to vote for your side, that's called democracy," obscures some important distinctions. If your success at persuasion stems mainly from the greater power you have to project your message (e.g. via wealth), then that's arguably not actually very democratic. That's pretty easy to see when greater political power is used (e.g. the CCP suppressing dissenting voices and successfully persuading the people with a thick blanket of weakly-opposed propaganda), but there's a similar dynamic when one side can greatly outspend its opponent, since wealth is a kind of power [1].
For a union vote, the employer typically has both greater wealth and greater political power: it can blanket the workplace with anti-union messages and require employees to repeatedly attend anti-union "education" sessions during work hours (which is typical before a union vote), while the union organizers have much more limited access, and must try to reach employees outside of work.
[1] this is an area of tension in liberal democracy, where trade-offs need to be made.
For those of us who are working from home due to the pandemic (or other reasons), we don't have any way to communicate with our co-workers except via electronic channels that can be logged.
Pre-covid, one could reasonably expect that if one were to mention unionization in conversation over lunch, there wouldn't be a permanent electronic record of it. Now, it's just not something you can discreetly discuss with someone unless you have their outside-of-work contact information.
That said "communicating via electronic channels" is not an insurmountable problem. It could be turned into and advantage. If union organizers post a letter, video or whatnot... amazon employees can see it. If people want to sign up to an unsurveiled "stream," they can.
The reality of secrecy and anonymity are what they are. Amazon are feisty, but they aren't the KGB. Secrecy is hard, probably unattainable. Anonymity is doable, but not default. Circulation is easy, assuming recipients are into it. etc.
Its equally easy to be disappointed and show some virtual outrage via social media. To me if office workers are not putting their money where their mouth then it is not of much consequence whether they are disappointed or world weary.
Who is being forced?
If Amazon went away, would their situation be better or worse?
I believe that as a society we must ensure that people have enough money to live, but why should the employers on the bottom of the skills spectrum be forced to bear the brunt of it?
Every employer should be required by law to provide a safe workplace free of discrimination and harassment. But hiring unskilled workers at a market wage doesn’t make you a bad actor.
> Every employer should be required by law to provide a safe workplace free of discrimination and harassment.
And who is going to sue when they are underpaid and have no other job options available? Litigation is time consuming and expensive and rent won't wait.
> But hiring unskilled workers at a market wage doesn’t make you a bad actor.
No, but artificially preventing the market conditions (wage + others) from raising by blocking people's basic right of association will make you a bad actor.
registered an account just to inform you what an utter crap of a statement you've made there. since i've bothered thus far, i made it a point to review more of your presence here. the conclusion i've come to is you are quite the twat. in a most general sense - a cunt of the dunning-kruger variety.
If not, what is your answer to the quesiton "why are they doing this job at all"?
Because they have to do something, and this is the best they can do? Then "have to do something" is the force, and they are the forced.
You say "who is forcing them? Why don't they quit?" and yet ... they don't quit, and you (apparently?) think there is no reason why.
I don't think the force is a single person or company. I think it's the economic and social system we live in has become (intentionally or not) tuned to keep as many people as desperate as it can, because those are the kind of people who will work longer and harder for less money.
What if I run the most worker-centric paradise, with employee empowerment, great wages, benefits and conditions?
And what if the national organization of an umbrella labor organization considers my non-union workforce as a threat to both their budget and their political power? And what if they provide materials and advisors promoting unionization, despite the fact that they are acting in the interest of the union organization itself, and not the workers they hope to represent?
Now your strawman benevolent dictatorship could never exist since you would still be denying workers control over their workplace. Thus they may form a union to fight for that control.
So yes, companies have to accept it.
What I was taught was that generally most older countries already had established police forces that wouldn't allow groups like the Pinkertons to exist by the time the union movement came along where America didn't and instead their police actually came _from_ groups like the Pinkertons.
But I'd take that with a grain of salt given that it was second hand summarized information even when I first got it.
England and the rest of the Anglosphere adopted what are often called "Peelian principles," focused on policing by community consent, 50+ years earlier than that.
From Time's "How the U.S. Got Its Police Force"[1]:
> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.
With regard to police originating from strike breakers, that's also true.
> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.
> police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants"
This is a common misconception that the north was "free" even as the south kept enslaving people. It's true that the north also had other economic forces influencing its policing, but the Fugitive Slave Acts gave plenty of legal cover for anyone wanting to make a buck by finding "escaped slaves" (often just whatever black people they found) in the north.
Unions are a way to negotiate a better deal than the legal minimum for unskilled labour.
Are they though? There are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.
Obviously working condition protections are much better than they were before 1950s-ish, and the existence of a minimum wage is greater than zero (where applicable). But neither of those inherently meet a bar as fuzzy as "decent".
That's right and most of their work in Western Europe is helping workers enforce the law.
None. This is a legally protected right.
This isn't a true statement.
Companies are allowed to argue against unionisation. In the US isn't it even a constitutionally protected right to do so?
Here (Italy) unionization is a constitutionally protected right. My employer can try to persuade me not to join one, but is absolutely not allowed to retaliate against me if I do, discriminate basing on union membership, etc.
Yes, and isn't this therefore an example of 'tactics that are ok for a company to combat unions'?
They don't have a right to combat them at all. Union organizing is literally a human right. Of course ownership doesn't want them -- the feelings of ownership are (supposed to be) irrelevant.
The specific human right is usually referred to as "freedom of association". You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
You need something more than freedom of association to justify unions, rooted in the recognition of bargaining disparities between employers and employees.
That's something the libertarian left and libertarian right surely agree on - minimising the application of the monopoly of force and all that.
So you assume both employers and employees can freely organize and associate. That's your starting point.
Now - we've decided that the right to join a union should be protected (it evens out an existing power imbalance) and that collusion to force down wages should be illegal (because it amplifies an existing power imbalance to the detriment of society at large)
We're moving away from areas where I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, but I think as a society we've decided that while anti-competitive laws do infringe on the rights of business leaders, we're trying to balance their rights with those of everyone else, and the laws are necessary to prevent a permanent class divide between business leaders who cannot be challenged, and workers under them. In the long run, allowing complete free association among CEOs would limit the freedoms of the rest of society.
Society is a constant project of balancing various conflicting rights, and this is one of many cases where we limit the rights of a few to defend the rights of many.
Obviously not. Real-world cases in point:
* Firing people for being queer
* Firing people for objecting to sexual harassment
* Firing people for going to the bathroom
FWIW, You can pick out any other number of declarations of human rights and the right to form and join trade unions is in them. It's very widely considered to be a human right, not some fringe thing.
"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
This is, legally speaking, a meaningless document.
By looking into the declaration of human rights: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Fast forward many decades later. This is a right you and I both enjoy. (This is also why we both have time to shitpost on HN.) If there was a serious proposal to take it away, you and I would probably be standing side by side on the street demanding our rights back.
It’s easy to talk a big game about human rights when your rights aren’t on the line.
This is simply not true. Amazon have a right to argue against unionisation in order to combat it.
Won't somebody please think of the companies? :'(
In the US they could improve working conditions to the point that employees are happy with the status quo. Unionisation efforts are typically driven by employees who are stressed by unhealthy/unsafe working environments, employee mistreatment, or poor pay. We see the opposite of this in the tech sector, where decent pay, safe environments and plenty of benefits leads to a rather union hostile attitude.
> Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?
If we accept that unions act to address the power imbalance between employees and employers and unionisation is mainly driven by employers exploiting that power imbalance then I think it's both good for society and in line with the spirit of the laws that exist in many places that make various forms of union busting illegal.
They could do the same for their warehouse employees, but that would mean paying them very well and giving good benefits.
I suspect if amazon paid 2x average box packer wages and gave good breaks/benefits, unions wouldn't have much traction there, either.
The parallel isn't crazy (the economics might be, I haven't analyzed)
It's also not that feasible to pay developers $120k/yr as the rest of the world has found out, America manages it for a number of reasons and because of this you likely won't see developers unionise any time soon even if you guys do have some very questionable contracts.
Yes, because why the fuck would you side with the party that has power (the employer) over the side that usually doesn't (the employee)?
https://revealnews.org/?s=amazon
A search for "Amazon working conditions injuries" on DDG or Google will return many of those, but also follow-ups by many media houses considered to be reasoned/reliable, rather than rabid and ranting.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but these anecdotes are there in significant numbers.
It really sucks that we decided to bring back indentured servitude. Good thing those unions are there to help the worker and not just some parasitic middleman who sees an opportunity.
Who is forced to work in Amazon's warehouses? Is Amazon rounding up people with guns everyday to make them work there?
This exact transformation already happened with Wal-Mart in the 80s and 90s. Obviously no one is literally forcing workers to go to Amazon's warehouses but you can see how in essence this leaves them with no choice (i.e. forced).
Your theory could obviously be valid as well.
The quality, variety, convenience and price of goods available to me all improved. The Mom and Pop who had been financing their lifestyle on the backs of the rural poor were forced out of business. I feel a little bad for them, but it seems wrong to elevate them over the rest of the population.
Newegg is a better place for parts, why use the Amazon stores for B&H and Adorama when you can .. just go to the websites for B&H and Adorama?!
I wrote this a while back. Amazon's has turned into a platform that's basically killed all the other parts sites and competition we use to have:
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...
Millions of people went from self-sufficiency to being desperately poor and without homes because their land was privatized by governments that were in cahoots with industrialists.
You want to know terrible working conditions dancing with a sign for 5 hours a day in the sun when it's 90+. I did that for 3 years and was happy to do the job, mind you this was only 10 years ago so it isn't forever. I made 7.50 an hour. I would've killed to get a job at amazon back then.
People are getting payed $16 that is incredible for an unskilled labor position.
This discussion isn't explicitly about the working conditions of Amazon, it is about the highly unethical methods they use to crush dissent and workers organizing, namely the leaked documents that detail actions including the spying on workers suspected of organizing even outside of work by the Pinkertons.
This isn't the 19th century, this deeply upsetting and unconscionable behavior should not be tolerated in the 21st century.
We should of course be mindful of whataboutism when discussing these things but I think it’s a good idea to consider the economic and social context when talking about these issues, they don’t exist in a vacuum.
Deflecting criticism with "some workers have even more upsetting conditions than these" doesn't help either party, moreover it actually shuts down an important discussion relevant to both. We shouldn't tolerate any business crushing dissent the way Amazon does; that's what is being discussed here.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
10 years ago, warehouse conditions were the same or worse as they are now except you would be lucky to get $16/hr without a forklift operator certification or some other credential that made it more than just 'unskilled labor'
That's one view, but it's only informed by "the way things are". Another view is based on the way things should be, that no one should have to work for less than the wage it takes to live a reasonable life. https://livingwage.mit.edu/ offers values for this.
I don't see why someone should work full time and still end up poor.
Then focus on the right problem which is cost of living.
Focusing on salary doesn't fix the problem when you have markets that are heavily housing constrained and massive government meddling in education and healthcare that drive up the cost of both well in excess of inflation.
Increasing wages without addressing housing shortages, just puts more money in the pockets of landlords as those higher wages drive up rents.
Whether someone gets $1 or $2 matters not if you can buy the same amount of stuff with it.
In the overwhelming majority places in the country $16/hour is decent amount that goes a long way. That's over $40k at 50 hours a week. That's enough to live on your own in most places. If you have roommates, it goes even further.
The problem isn't the $16. It's the circumstances in very very few geographic markets where $16/hour isn't enough because cost of living is out of control in those few markets.
no offense, but this assumes too much about a person. you could make minimum wage $100 an hour, and there will still be poor people because some people make bad decisions. (not even taking into account that that would cause massive inflation etc). just giving a person $100 an hour doesn't guarantee they won't end up poor, as evidence by all the professional athletes that made millions and ended up bankrupt
another note, your link above gives massively different outcomes based on life situations (1 adult, 2 adult, 0-3+ kids etc). Do we need to make minimum wage such that it works for 1 adult with 5 kids who somehow got there with no skills whatsoever such that they are still working for minimum wage? Some people make poor choices in life, and we can't just raise minimum wage to a point that makes up for that. It's simply not possible.
Now, we can talk about other safety nets, such as a universal basic income, and universal healthcare, etc which I'm 100% for. The gov't should help these people, they shouldn't force small businesses to pay people more than the value they bring to the business. This is just picking winners, amazon will get bigger, and small businesses will get killed. Let the free market decide how much people are worth in the market to a business, and let gov't help keep people out of poverty.
Why should the government have to bail out business that can’t afford to operate?
That “agreement” to work for the current price is compelled by the threat of hunger and homelessness. It is not a fair and free agreement when one party has all of the power.
The very very very very least a company could do is pay all of their workers a living wage.
World average is 18K, that's adjusted for purchasing power parity. 32K is at least 2nd quintile, maybe top. Poland is a little less than 32K average, Japan is around 38K, OECD data from 2019. Somewhere between Japan and Poland is where the average worker starts to be poor. Interesting.
And that is at the present time, every generation going back to the invention of agriculture had it worse. Someone making 32K a year - PPP adjusted - is in what, the top few percent of all humans that have ever lived? Poor bastard. Learn to code.
In the same way that if everything is about politics, nothing is about politics, if everyone is poor, no one is poor. And if these people aren't making a living wage while making what the top few percent of humans have ever made, how did our ancestors manage to live and have children on a sub-living wage? Shouldn't they have died out?
I think in this case, "living wage" is just a propaganda term. "Poor" is too I guess. I guess maybe that propaganda term works on people, "living wage". It seems to be effective propaganda, seems to be working. I just cringe every time I read it. Adjusted for inflation, I made $7 an hour working in a factory. Decades later you're going to tell me that isn't a living wage, more than twice what I made back then wasn't a living wage? Was I lucky to survive?
That's bullshit by the technical definition of bullshit, and its propaganda.
Anyway, these arguments usually split people into two camps, people who worked warehouse or factory jobs before, and people who haven't.
And I still call Amazon "horrible working conditions".
The fact that it is better than being poor isn't saying much.
(And to forestall the inevitable adjustment of one's pince-nez to well-actually: that it'd be median or even above-median wages somewhere else does not mean that it is not poor in America, nor that the two situations can be reasonably compared.)
I’m working on a book, or books, on the subject. It seems surprising to people that something happens called poverty with less than a certain level of income, that makes things get extremely hard and require great care to recover from. I was on track to get off the street and nearly did last year but faced a setback, and the pandemic threw a big wrench in my system this year (which is adapting, harder mode). My working budget has been $55/day or $375/wk or $18k/yr.
It felt like you see yourself as a victim. I've been out of work before, but I never saw myself as a victim or powerless. I knew what I was worth and yes, it does take a lot of work, but I found work based on my own skills and merits.
America is increasingly growing into a nation where we cloth ourselves in victimhood as virtue. We are literally in a space where no-body is in the office today. You could pick up a $130 ~ $160k job anywhere and move out to a suburb in Texas. All you need is half-decent Internet, and you'd basically be living as if you were making the $200k you had in The Valley.
Stand up for yourself. If you only see yourself as a victim, that is all you will ever be.
You're talking to someone who is homeless, who probably hasn't been able to bathe in a while given the pandemic, and who is probably wearing clothes that they've slept in for several years now.
Yes, there are employers that will hire people literally off the street, but they aren't hiring for $130-$160k IT jobs, they're hiring for manual labor jobs without benefits that are probably off the books and can't offer steady hours.
What tracks are available for Amazon warehouse workers who want to move up?
It’s purpose is to establish a level at which poverty is 100% ensured.
Being below the poverty line means you are certainly poor. Being slightly above the poverty line means you are very probably poor.
> On June 10, the Oregon Health Authority announced a COVID-19 outbreak at Amazon's Troutdale warehouse that has now lasted 25 weeks and infected 97 people with the virus, making it one of the largest workplace outbreaks in Oregon.
While dancing with a sign in the sun does lead to heat exhaustion risks, it's unlikely to lead to permanent disability, which seems like the inevitable outcome of working at an Amazon warehouse for too long.