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Comment by bhupy | Hacker News Reader

Well, COVID showed us that it's not just that stuff gets to your house in 2 days (rather than 3!), stuff gets to your house in 2 days even during worldwide pandemic with widespread supply chain disruption.

Also, starting an online business is easier than ever due to democratized access to infrastructure that was once only available to large blue chip companies with access to 1000s of high skilled engineers, and has seeded an industry of small/medium sized tech companies that has resulted in further consumer surplus and wealth creation.

Not saying that there's an obvious "correct" point of view, but once you add a little more nuance, it actually does make everything worth it for a lot of people.

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> stuff gets to your house in 2 days even during worldwide pandemic with widespread supply chain disruption.

On the backs of warehouse and distribution workers who put themselves at serious risk for Covid (or just backbreaking work environments).

Warehouse and distribution workers that are paid $15/hr at a minimum, enjoy the same group health insurance benefits as their software engineering and product management coworkers, and enjoy the same 401k matching as their desk-bound co-workers — benefits that are unavailable to almost any other entry-level job that requires no college education.

And while it's definitely difficult that they have to put themselves at serious risk for Covid, that's true for any essential worker too. Ultimately most people agree that this is a worthwhile tradeoff to ensure that people continue to get access to food, supplies, COVID tests (in the case of frontline nurses), etc.

I'll re-iterate, there's no obvious correct answer, and it's difficult to agree on the best way to litigate these issues. One thing I can say for sure is that blithe one-line HN comments is the worst possible way to litigate them, much less understand them.

You're eulogising a system that doesn't deserve eulogies.

Workers pass out in warehouses and aren't allowed toilet breaks. And many are gig-economy contract hires who have zero chance of ever seeing a 401k or any other permanent employee benefits.

> You're eulogising a system that doesn't deserve eulogies.

Nobody is eulogizing anything. The system isn't dead, it's alive and well. What I, personally, am doing is simply appealing to nuance.

> Workers pass out in warehouses and aren't allowed toilet breaks

Yes, this is bad. Nobody is arguing that it's all sunshines and daisies for Amazon Warehouse workers. The argument is that the reality is more complicated because they are well compensated relative to their similarly-skilled counterparts elsewhere. And it's not like they're not allowed toilet breaks as a rule, the reality is that Amazon's warehouse policies are decentralized and in one documented situation, there was malpractice. This is undeniably bad and should be fixed, and one would be a fool to argue otherwise. Notwithstanding (objectively bad) isolated incidents like this, in the aggregate, it is arguably a good thing that 1.3 million unskilled people are gainfully employed with competitive benefits, and all in service of providing convenient supply chains to the world especially in times of widespread pandemic and distress.

> And many are gig-economy contract hires who have zero chance of ever seeing a 401k or any other permanent employee benefits.

At least as it relates to the warehouse workers in the United States, this is factually untrue.

Honest question that will sound snarky: What's the point of (relatively) generous pay and benefits if workers burn out / get injured and fired in a short amount of time?

First of all, I'm not sure it's obvious that burn out / injury is the norm instead of the exception — though happy to shown otherwise if you have any links. We hear about the worst cases because that's what's reported on, but we never hear about the boring average Joe warehouse worker that just clocks in, does their work, clocks out, and then goes about their life.

The hours are predictable, and there's no oncall rotation so you can reasonably plan your life around the difficult working hours, and you never have to worry about not affording health care because Amazon health insurance is quite generous.

Saying warehouse workers enjoy the same benefit from 401K matching as a software engineer making $300k a year is like saying the warehouse workers also get to enjoy the same discounts at the local Rolex dealer. They simply can't take advantage of it the same way as someone making 6x their salary.

Sure, I was just listing one of the many benefits they enjoy. You can view the exhaustive list here -> https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. It includes paid leave for up to 20 weeks, with up to 6 weeks transferrable to spouses, which I hope you agree would be useful to warehouse workers.

That a warehouse worker might benefit less from 401K matching doesn't refute the central argument: Amazon provides high pay and generous benefits atypical of entry level unskilled work that doesn't require a college degree. Not only that, they offer this to 1.3 million people. As a fun exercise, I recommend just trying to do the back-of-the-napkim math and try to work out the total cost to providing $15/hr (at a minimum), generous group health insurance (usually working out to about $1000/month in premiums), 401(k) matching, paid parental leave, and then multiplying that by 1 million (my rounding error there is more people than employed at most large tech companies).

Some things missing from the official PR:

* This is specifically parental leave, not just general purpose leave. And it's only 6 weeks for adoptive parents.

* There are reports of people losing healthcare coverage while on leave - right after having a baby? Really?

* Reports of people being put on PIP after their leave was over, which as we all know is a threat that you might lose your job

* Reports that people are not pushed to use their leave and there is sometimes pressure to not use it (risk of PIP, “Boy, will you be sorry if you use it.”)

* Parental leave doesn't extend to hundreds of thousands of temporary, contract, and part time workers

https://www.fastcompany.com/3053093/whats-missing-from-amazo...

I would also say it's not a great argument to say how much Amazon spends in aggregate going "above and beyond" on its employees. I doubt it really affects their bottom line in any material way.

$15/hour is also looking to soon become the minimum wage. I guess a pat on the back they did it before they were legally forced to. $32k a year is not what I'd call "high paying" though, even for unskilled entry level pay. Many waiters and bar tenders in big cities get paid a lot more than that.

I promise you I do not work for Amazon, nor have I ever worked for Amazon, nor am I in any way affiliated with Amazon — though it does say a lot about our discourse that one might think that the only way to have a charitable view of Amazon is to literally be a paid shill. I work in healthcare. At most, I work at a startup that relies quite heavily on AWS and am a happy customer. I'm just tired of the lack of nuance that I see in these threads.

> * This is specifically parental leave, not just general purpose leave. And it's only 6 weeks for adoptive parents.

I'm not sure that I insinuated otherwise.

> * There are reports of people losing healthcare coverage while on leave - right after having a baby? Really?

> * Reports of people being put on PIP after their leave was over, which as we all know is a threat that you might lose your job

> * Reports that people are not pushed to use their leave and there is sometimes pressure to not use it (risk of PIP, “Boy, will you be sorry if you use it.”)

Do you have an actual link with context? Otherwise this is just unfalsifiable conjecture. The links in your article are 410'ing. Keep in mind that you can't draw conclusions from one off incidents. Even non-Amazon workers have work horror stories — they happen. Whether this is emblematic of the experience of all 1 million-odd workers is another question entirely.

> * Parental leave doesn't extend to hundreds of thousands of temporary, contract, and part time workers, contrary to you saying it covers 1.3 million employees.

Sure, but that's true anywhere. What we do know is that Amazon does not rely predominately on temporary contract workers. It also heavily narrows down the scope of your argument to "Amazon probably doesn't treat its contract workers well", and I might agree with that. I also, personally, think that Amazon is still a net-good to society in spite of that because I'm not an absolutist.

> $15/hour is also looking to soon become the minimum wage. I guess a pat on the back they did it before they were legally forced to. $32k a year is not what I'd call "high paying" though.

First of all, it's not even obvious that $15/hr is soon to become the minimum wage, Joe Manchin has signaled opposition to it (https://twitter.com/bpolitics/status/1356676773971456003). It'll most likely be left out.

Secondly, $32k a year isn't the total compensation, because you have to take into account the monetary value of Amazon's group health insurance policy (it's around $1000/month).

Thirdly, $32k (+ ~$12k) is around the median wage in the US, and that happens to be in the top 5 in the developed world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalen...).

And fourthly, this is for an entry-level job that doesn't require a college degree or any sort of training, it's obviously not going to be 6 figures, nor is it going to be on par with (say) teacher's salaries or police officers.

That is the case with all essential jobs, isn't it? Logistics, retail, medical, emergency services, infrastructure. All remained open, all had to show up in person. Amazon is, in the big picture, still far from the biggest one in that field.

> that was once only available to large blue chip companies with access to 1000s of high skilled engineers

Back in the old days, THE CLOUD came from IBM or CompuServe. Now it comes from Amazon and Microsoft. Big deal. It's still way more expensive than buying hardware, and now every programmer also has to work as an incompetent sysadmin and DBA.

I guess that if you see a spike in traffic, AWS will let you bankrupt yourself from the bills rather than take your site offline for an hour.

I think it's you that is lacking nuance, no offence. For instance: the climate crisis is one of the most serious issues we will have to face in the following decades. Yet, millions of delivery vans every day will depart half-empty rather than wait to be full in order to deliver funko pops in 2 days instead of 3 (yes, I realise the hyperbole). Emissions may be 40% greater because of this, according to one analysis. And because externalities like these aren't properly accounted for, some people can get fabulously rich off the price that will be paid for us all, in illnesses, deaths, and price (with heavy "interest") that we'll all have to pay later to clean up their mess. Also, I'm pessimist that they will never be properly accounted for, since the people acquiring huge sums of money with this state of affairs also acquire with it huge power to kill any meaningful reform or progress that would endanger their cash cow.

> I think it's you that is lacking nuance, no offence.

I think you might be misreading my comment to suggest that Amazon is unambiguously good. Read it again, I'm trying to argue that it's not unambiguously bad, and that we need more nuance when discussing these issues. I'm not sure if it's possible for an argument to be any more nuanced than that.

Regarding the climate issue, we agree! It's a big problem. But again, we need to put our nuance hats on:

1. While Amazon is a substantial contributor to CO2 emissions, it's nothing compared to that of the coal industry, airlines, and everyday drivers of automobiles. That being said, it's worth noting that US renewable energy consumption surpassed that of coal for the first time last year -> https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895

2. Amazon is simply meeting the needs of its consumers. Ultimately there's a cost to convenience (there's no denying that), and it comes at the cost of the climate. We agree that we'd be better off if externalities were priced in. The fact that externalities are not priced in isn't really Amazon's fault, because they're in no position to enact such policies as a whole. They only have control over their own policies, which brings me to...

3. Amazon is on track to power their operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 (https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge), and invested $2 billion (with a B), in green energy companies (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-annou...). So it's not like they're doing absolutely nothing in their power to at least check their own emissions.

Now, all this said, is it still not worth it? Maybe, I don't doubt that there exists some people that believe that the warts are big enough that none of this is worth it. But it isn't obvious or straightforward, and there are just as many people (if not more) that do think this is all worth it, warts and all.

How's that for nuance?

But neither am I arguing that it is "unambiguously bad", so perhaps we are misunderstanding each other :)

What I'm saying is that I find it difficult to praise a company for its success when that success is at least in part predicated upon costs that they do not bear. In other words "profits for them, costs for us all". All that could be solved, or at least improved, by adequately pricing in those externalities, or even restricting them all together (e.g. for emissions: carbon tax + hard cap).

And I don't buy the "they're not in control of whether or not externalities are priced in", they have immense lobbying power to de facto subvert democracy and overpower the will of the people. They can kill or stall legislation that harms their bottom line, and of course they will! It makes them more money so why ever wouldn't they?

> And I don't buy the "they're not in control of whether or not externalities are priced in", they have immense lobbying power to de facto subvert democracy and overpower the will of the people. They can kill or stall legislation that harms their bottom line, and of course they will! It makes them more money so why ever wouldn't they?

What evidence do you have that Amazon, specifically, has done this? And why would Amazon work towards becoming 100% renewable by 2025 (surely at a high cost to them) or investing $2B in climate action (that's roughly how much they'd have to pay in carbon pricing anyway), if they actually wish to lobby against carbon pricing legislation? That is internally inconsistent.

Is it clear that Amazon delivery is worse for emissions? Isn't it better to have one truck deliver everyone's goods, versus each person individually driving to the store (which also has a much larger geographical footprint than a warehouse, per item)?

I'm willing to concede that Amazon may well have driven overall consumption up. Also, anything being shipped by air is causing way more emissions by weight than any amount of people driving to the stars. But I still wonder how this balances out against the efficiency of a delivery van; I don't think the answer is that obvious.

The point is there are no incenctives for them to optimise for this. They optimise for profit, so if doubling their emissions nets them +0.05% profit on each delivery, they'll jump right on it. That's a failure of the system, more than of any individual company itself.

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