Amazon Keeps Getting Sued for Paying Drivers Less Than Minimum Wage
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At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. The general population are becoming aware of these practices. Amazon may not have directly committed the violation but they've created and shaped an environment ripe for rampantly abusive labor practices.
If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. Don't just leverage cheaper labor from labor abuse until it gets public attention and then terminate a contract set in place to pass blame and responsibility.
Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands?
Amazon is just playing in the same broken system.
On one side of the equation we have people being paid poverty wages, on the other side we have the richest man in the world with the power to change that. This isn’t a coincidence or just a strange, second-order, unintended byproduct of the system. It’s cause and effect. It’s what the system was designed explicitly to do. The system is in fact working to spec.
A rival might not be able to afford that so they let everyone go, or Amazon gobbles them up for dinner.
There's always an ulterior motive when lobbying is involved.
This is the thing that regularly gets lost in the minimum wage debates. Some jobs suck more than others. Amazon warehouse jobs suck kind of a lot. You spend all day standing up and doing manual labor. Because that's what it takes to make unskilled work produce $15/hour in value.
You pass a law requiring competitors to do the same and the ones who were paying $10/hour but workers had more down time, will have to make them more like Amazon jobs. In other words, will have to make them suck more.
There are a lot of people for whom that is not a good trade off. For a 20 year old who can physically do the Amazon job, it might be a good choice in order to make more money. For a 60 year old who can't physically do the Amazon job, taking away the less demanding job they can do is really screwing them over.
I truly don’t understand why so many think that someone doing less than what it takes to live (alone, independently) should be paid a living wage. Food, housing, energy, care, ... all take productivity; if someone can’t produce enough to cover their own needs, they need be recognized as a dependent and treated as such. It’s not your obligation to pay me a living wage just because you need floors swept or burgers flipped.
There are tasks I’d hire people to do, but it’s not worth enough to pay housing/food/care/heat/etc for.
Besides that, just paying people to do nothing works fine because they can do non-economic work (childcare/caretaking) or speculative things (write a book, go back to school) and US policy is heading back in this direction. We stopped with Reagan because voters tend to turn against welfare policies when you point out that black people are getting them.
You’re assuming paying people to do nothing will result in “unpaid” productivity greater than their UBI. This is not dominant human nature; all basic needs met, most turn to fighting/copulation/gluttony/drugs/sloth.
Oh, just noticed your racist BS at the end. Bye.
I am confident demand is infinite and people will not want to stop working if more basic needs are met[1]. It's the opposite - people don't produce efficiently if they're starving and they can't be matched to better jobs because they don't have the free time to find them.
> Oh, just noticed your racist BS at the end. Bye.
You seem confused since you're the one arguing poor people are naturally idle and will just get in fights with each other if made less poor! Luckily, I have the normal opinions of a person in 2020 and we can all see through through Reagan's "welfare queens" propaganda at this point. As for the evidence about American voters, you should see the people they elect, but also David Shor[2].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre... - note the part about poor people being idle became steadily less true until March 2020 and seems to be caused by poor Fed policy, not video games.
[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-cu...
You don't really need US-made goods, just buy the ones made in China. You don't really need an appliance repair service, just throw it out and buy another one. Fixed income people don't really need low priced goods and services, they can just pay more (somehow).
You're making the assumption that the alternative isn't worse.
> Makes traffic better too since they're not commuting.
Or makes traffic worse in the alternative because the higher-paying job involves a longer commute (and higher transportation costs that eat the extra money), which is what had made the lower-paying job viable to begin with.
> Offering crappy jobs is bad because people might actually take them; now they don't have the free time needed to find better ones.
This is patronizing. If something is really worse for people then why are they doing it? Are you certain that you're smarter than them and know more about their circumstances than they do?
> It reduces economic productivity and it might be cheaper to just pay them unemployment.
You've identified a serious flaw in the unemployment system. Taking a bad job causes you to lose it, remaining unemployed doesn't. Replace unemployment with a UBI. Now you don't need a minimum wage.
That's right, that's what we're doing. There are better systems than a flat minimum wage like wage boards since they're more flexible, but Australia uses that system a lot and yet also has a $20/hr min wage underlying it. (The Nordics don't have one at all because they use sectoral bargaining contracts. Should probably get one though.)
> This is patronizing. If something is really worse for people then why are they doing it?
Personal responsibility doesn't exist at the level of societies. Sometimes you just get scammed, and it takes a while to get out of the situation if you do. Banning bad jobs is useful the same way banning any other scam is.
> Replace unemployment with a UBI. Now you don't need a minimum wage.
UBI substitutes for unemployment here but it's not the same because the funding source is different. In particular the one for UBI doesn't exist. The US did just pass basic income for childcare though.
UBI does not substitute for minimum wage though, because it doesn't have the effect of eliminating bad jobs. In practice min wage seems to have other positive effects from this like forcing employee productivity to increase faster; in the limiting case with a monopsony employer it even increases employment because they have no other pressure to offer a market clearing wage.
Your position is that this is better for the people in the US who used to make that stuff?
> There are better systems than a flat minimum wage like wage boards since they're more flexible
If you want flexibility, just let the employee decide if the wage is too low. They're the person with the best knowledge of their own situation and also the one with the strongest stake in it.
> Personal responsibility doesn't exist at the level of societies. Sometimes you just get scammed, and it takes a while to get out of the situation if you do. Banning bad jobs is useful the same way banning any other scam is.
The patronizing thing you're doing is assuming that all low paying jobs are bad.
They almost universally have countervailing benefits. They're closer to where you live, have more flexible hours, are less physically demanding etc.
Because otherwise nobody would take them.
> UBI substitutes for unemployment here but it's not the same because the funding source is different. In particular the one for UBI doesn't exist.
Taxes don't exist? Unemployment isn't funded by a tax?
> UBI does not substitute for minimum wage though, because it doesn't have the effect of eliminating bad jobs.
That's exactly what it does. People have the UBI, so not taking a bad job doesn't cause them to starve, so nobody takes a bad job.
Except that now it's the actual bad jobs they don't take, based on their own understanding of their own circumstances, instead of a bureaucracy's flailing incompetent efforts to implement central planning from an ivory tower.
> In practice min wage seems to have other positive effects from this like forcing employee productivity to increase faster
This doesn't come for free. It most often comes by eliminating redundancy and slack, which increases efficiency but harms resiliency. It e.g. makes it more likely that productive companies go out of business, because when you have slack and something bad happens, you cut the slack and survive. If something else already consumed the slack and something bad happens, you go bust.
And there are already plenty of incentives to eliminate slack in favor of efficiency, so smashing the balance on purpose is counterproductive.
> in the limiting case with a monopsony employer it even increases employment because they have no other pressure to offer a market clearing wage.
A monopsony employer is a catastrophic tyrannical threat to everyone. Any solution other than "destroy the monopsony with righteous fire" is nothing but a suicide pact.
I want to start a coffee roastery. Margins won’t be “livable” for a while, but do need added labor to start; you (a complete stranger) would punish me for not starting better than where the starting point is.
It is effectively illegal to be poor. The punishment is slavery or deaths of exposure and despair.
Billionaires are a failure of policy and should be treated as pirates, raiding the homes of their customers and employees.
It is illegal to be poor because progressives impose laws making zoning, housing, food, jobs, etc too costly and punishing any who attempt to make lower wages livable.
Billionaires are because they make accessible goods/services to greater percentages of limited populations.
World abject poverty has plummeted from majority to near zero in my lifetime. That was capitalism improving productivity of all.
Pretty sure you mean Nimbys, unless you're suggesting that building high density houses next to coal burning plants is perfectly fine and should never have been banned. There's a difference between zoning that increases prosperity, and zoning for selfish incentives that you would be wise to consider before casting zoning laws as progressive, when that's patently false[0].
>Billionaires are because they make accessible goods/services to greater percentages of limited populations.
>World abject poverty has plummeted from majority to near zero in my lifetime. That was capitalism improving productivity of all.
You imply causation without evidence. Billionaires use extractive and ethically bankrupt methods to undercut their competitors while skimming their plunder off margin between a fair price and their true cost. This is neither necessary, nor sustainable to ensure prosperity for all. This randian perspective is emotionally comfortable for the winners but tragically harmful to literally everyone else.
0. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/zoning-reform-i...
The best answer to this is that we shouldn't have a federal minimum wage.
Minimum wage is one of the depression era policies like price controls that were instituted before we knew better. It is a price control.
The reason we still have it is politics. Notice that the advocates of raising the federal minimum wage are overwhelmingly from states that already have a state minimum wage above the federal one, and could set their state's minimum wage to anything higher as they like, since it's a floor, not a ceiling. So why do they care?
They care because the cost of living is different in different regions. $7.25 might be a living wage in El Paso while $15 might not be in San Francisco. But California doesn't want their tax base moving to Texas, so politicians from California want federal laws that make it more expensive to do business in Texas. They want to deprive lower cost of living areas of their competitive advantage.
You can tell something is fishy when most of the supporters of raising the federal minimum wage represent zero people who actually make federal minimum wage, and the representatives of the people who do make federal minimum wage are the opponents.
And actually instituting the policy screws over the people it's supposed to be helping, because then the jobs stay in higher cost of living areas and the higher cost of living causes more harm than the lower wage would have in the lower cost of living area.
And politicians from Texas want to institute tariffs on China and other countries with lower labor costs than Texas. Everyone is playing the same game to maintain their outsized share of the pie.
But that’s not going to happen, so it depends what benefits me and my closet tribe members. Currently I’m in a high cost of living area with very high minimum wages, so I’m for high minimum wages.
If I could make a suggestion, don't do that.
What benefits the tribe's leaders is not the same thing as what benefits the members of the tribe. Elected officials want a larger tax base because once they have enough to provide a basic level of services necessary to prevent the population from revolting, the excess can be diverted to cronies. What that means to you is that you and yours pay more for housing and have a more wasteful government; it's not a benefit to you. Not fighting against it would tend to raise your cost of living by increasing competition for local resources.
But also, that mindset is poison. Once you admit to a willingness to be inconsistent for the benefit of tribal conflict, you're no longer engaged in good faith negotiations. You're making a declaration of war against your own countrymen. Then it's might makes right and the strong taking from the weak. And they don't stop at the other tribe. Put kleptocrats in power and they don't just steal for you, they steal from you. If that's not what you want, you have to refuse what causes it.
> Federal UBI and no minimum wage or any other subsidy to anyone.
> But that’s not going to happen
That's what people say about everything, until it does.
But it doesn't happen on its own. If you want something you have to work for it.
[0] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...
The fact that automation is both reducing the number and quality of jobs probably merits discussion as well. We simply don't have anything in place to ensure automation doesn't ruin people's standard of living.
He was arguing that society "has to pay people welfare" because Amazon doesn't pay enough. In other words he's arguing that paying welfare is bad, which is not true and goes against the rest of his platform. Actually it's good, and the reason it's good is that it raises your wages because it gives you more freedom!
In other words, without welfare the employees would be getting paid even less.
(This can change depending on work requirement rules, which are mostly bad, but not enough of a problem to change the dynamic here.)
This is not quite the argument. What you're leaving out here is that Amazon can afford to pay enough, their CEO is the richest man in the world worth over a hundred billion dollars, and Amazon pays $0 in income tax. Bernie is not saying welfare is bad, he's saying that corporations using the welfare system to subsidize their profit margins while their CEO enriches himself is bad.
I'm sure if they thought they could get away with "subcontracting (wink wink)" all of their labor positions so that they are not liable for the wage theft that must occur to meet the contracts, they would do so.
Which if you were to believe it, Amazon wants to "help" you start a delivery business, with as little as $10k to invest.
Think about that for a second.
Instead of paying delivery drivers and providing capital (trucks, gasoline, insurance, etc). Amazon wants YOU to pay them for the privilege. They've turned what should be a job into a contracting business with one, predatory customer. Amazon.
What you fell for the Con...
Amazon wants $15 in order to put the final nail in the coffin of small business hiring that teen for their first job stocking the small local store...
No they want those positions gone, they want those business shuttered.
This idea that Amazon is "fighting for the worker" in their drive for $15/hr minimum wage is moronic.
$15/hr min wage is also not based on any economic reality and as a basis for a "living wage" it would be far to low in some reasons, and far too high in many others.
Minimum Wage should be a LOCAL, or state level policy not a national one.
This is correct but it's a good thing because small businesses are unironically bad. Small business owners are the most reactionary demographic in the US, less productive than large businesses, the most abusive towards employees, and exempt from discrimination laws.
They also don't have negotiation power and can't improve anything with their suppliers (e.g. Chinese restaurants may all be family-owned, but they're all buying ingredients from the same place).
I did not think I would see the day that HN was pro corporation and Big business.
Aside from the fact your completely wrong, most people are employed by small or medium businessed, and SMB's are often more agile and able to respond faster to market demands than larger companies
This is why you do not see large companies innovating, instead they buy out small companies that have innovated in an effort to grab and/or hold the market share they lose to upstarts.
Also it is ironic that in a post dedicated to talking about how terrible Amazon treats its retail employee's and with provable evidence of employment abuse by other large companies on the world stage you stake a claim that small businesses are more abusive, that is laughably absurd
Small and medium business are the backbone of the economy, and in large part treat their employee's better than large companies. Sure some very small micro business with less than 25 employee's might but SMB is generally companies 25 - 1000 employees and under 1 billion in revenue. Companies this bracket often have some of the highest employee satisfaction scores, and lowest turn over it is absurd to to think that SMB's are worse than the Large Global Corporations.
That said however, you have made a common mistake the people advocating for artificial increased in minimum wage make. It is not about what the person is "worth", it is about how much revenue a business can make off that labor
if a business has to pay $15 for labor, but can only resell that labor for $10, there is no job. hell even if a business can resell the labor for $15 there is no job.
This is economic reality, I know using emotion to talk about a persons "worth" may seem like a valid argument but it is not.
If the economic reality was just as simple as declearing labor is worth $15 by fiat, then why stop at $15, why not $20 or $50, hell let just demand everyone make $1,000,000 a year we will all be millionaries.
You likely easily see why this reducto absurdum I am sure you will reject it as a fallacy but the economic reality does not change
If you want to see wages increase you have to increase the value of labor, and government regulation can not simply demand the value of labor increase. Attempts to do so often have very bad unintended consequences
You can absolutely set a floor for labor. Go back and study some history, then maybe you'll be able to understand.
I know history rather well, this is why i am opposed to centrally planned economies, They always fail and always cause more suffering then they resolve
You do not get to formulate sketchy ways of doing business because you must make shareholders money. They invested, and took a risk. They don't always get to win. Losses are not something that should be unfathomable. The fact that people haven't done that great a job at rooting this stuff out sooner is a bit on the mystifying side only up until you realize the folks we'd count on to do it are having their checks paid by the people getting investigated.
Strange how these companies keep getting hoodwinked into profiting immensely from slave labor. I mean, how could a billion or trillion dollar company know whether or not its supply chain uses slaves to produce the goods they sell? It seems like the only way to know if slaves produced their goods is to get caught red-handed by someone else. How do these underfunded NGOs and regulators catch the companies innocently profiting from slave labor?
The same thing companies do when they go to a different state within the US with weaker labor and environmental laws. And the same thing individuals do when choosing to purchase products at cheaper prices from places with weaker labor/environmental laws.
Blaming individual companies for regulatory arbitrage is a fruitless endeavor.
At what hypothetical point is this? I'm pretty sure you can do this indefinitely, which is why they do it.
"Watch me, I'll show you how easy it is!"
But instead of young couples on dates being taken for $20 a pop on promises of large stuffed animals, they're luring in new business owners with promises of riches. The problem is, it's a rigged game. Amazon know it, otherwise they'd do this work themselves.
The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive.
If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
Thank you for making my day!
Not to mention the sheer gall of repeated corporate responses when caught like these that are ridiculous even at face value.
Most people don't seem to notice these "mistakes" are always to the benefit of the corporation. NEVER to the benefit of the customer, employee, etc.
We can see from Amazon's actions, and lack of actions, that they're as committed to not breaking labor laws as they are committed to not committing fraud and IP & trademark infringement by selling counterfeit items on their marketplace.
That is to say, it's all rhetoric and PR. After all of this time, and reading countless words from Amazon promising to fix it, I still cannot report to Amazon that I received a counterfeit item from them via their return process, and Amazon drivers are still making less than minimum wage.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
If it doesn't come out with results you like, then the inputs are wrong. Specifically, settlement amounts are probably too low.
People who claim all safety related issues should get a recall are just wrong. If there is a 1 in a billion chance my car explodes and kills me, then a recall should not be done, because my chances of dying on the way to the dealer to have the repair done are higher.
Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.
2. while it's easy to calculate what's the nutritional content in a food, estimating future failure rates isn't trivial and there's a lot of subjectivity involved. Companies will definitely be fudging the reliability numbers to get an edge. See for instance, the failure rates for hard drives. The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%. Therefore I'd expect these nutritional fact labels to be totally useless at best, and a waste of time/resources at worst.
Case in point, my first internship in California was in a building with a sign that said "This building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." What's in the building? Who knows. Could be really bad chemicals, or just someone who has a beer on their desk [0].
It would be much better to have some information about the chemicals contained, how bad are the chemicals, and what is the expected effect of the chemicals at the concentration at which they're encountered.
It was some green slime you put in your bike tires to prevent puncture leaks. I had never seen that before. I bought it and took it home with me, skillfully avoiding California so it didn't become carcinogenic.
> The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%.
I'd suggest dealing with that as fraud, not giving up.
Either that, or we treat them like any other animal incapable of civility - we cage/muzzle them and don't provide them with any opportunity for responsibility.
COVID has really highlighted this rather well. People do believe there should be zero risk, they will only accept risk when it has already been assimilated into their lives, but as a society we seem incapable of assimilating of new risk.
I use to think we would get fully autonomous cars, but now I am pretty sure we will never see this technology on the public roadways, not because it is infeasible, but because it can never ELIMINATE all risk to human life, as such it will be rejected by society.
Just like the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" transformed to "everyone self isolate until covid is no more" Automated driving is no longer about being "safer" in an objective way, it has to preventing all death, and if an automated car even causes one death then we must continue with human drivers, at least that is the view of many in society. We can not allow an algorithm to resolve a trolley problem, it is better a human do that.
As a society, we have become very very very risk adverse.
As soon as autonomous vehicles are approved you're going to have driverless Amazon delivery trucks ejecting packages in your driveway and emailing you that they've arrived.
All the truck drivers and their unions know that, so they do everything they can to inject fear mongering stories into the media every time there is a driverless car accident, because politics.
And the media eats it up because it's clickbait. If they provided a reasoned risk assessment then the conclusion wouldn't be "fear for your lives" which wouldn't drive as much traffic.
That is unlikely, the population has a huge problem right now with package theft, even if it does not "cost" the customer anything when i order something I need the product it if stolen from me even if I get another one a few days later it makes me less likely to buy online for things. Amazon's market dominance is directly tied to 1-2 days delivery times.
Having a bunch of robots just toss packages 5 feet from the road might seem like a good idea to an MBA, but in reality it will make package delivery less reliable if I have to have 30% of my amazon packages redelivered because of theft, damange etc, amazon will lose its market share.
Already they are losing in many way in price, i am often times finding things for lower prices than on amazon, largely because of their INSANE platform charges (i.e the 30% "fulfilled by amazon" surcharge)
Amazon Retail business is still either break even or losing money, AWS supports the company. I am not sure they can withstand the hit that would come from fully autonomous package delivery.
>All the truck drivers and their unions know that,
I can assure you it is not Truck Drivers or the Truck Driver unions (which really have almost no power these days) that are at the heart of anti-automation reporting.
Insurance and Local governments have alot more at stake, hell most local governments have huge amounts of revenue that come from parking and other road related fines that would disappear entirely with fully automated cars.
You're making the case that it won't matter because the problem is already present.
The human drivers already do this. How strong a case can you make that they won't be able to get away with something they already get away with?
> Already they are losing in many way in price, i am often times finding things for lower prices than on amazon, largely because of their INSANE platform charges (i.e the 30% "fulfilled by amazon" surcharge)
Complaint unrelated to driverless trucks.
> Insurance and Local governments have alot more at stake, hell most local governments have huge amounts of revenue that come from parking and other road related fines that would disappear entirely with fully automated cars.
By most accounts self-driving cars are going to reduce insurance liability because they don't drive drunk or text and drive or get tired or angry or distracted. But also, insurance companies don't really care about claims when they're predictable except to the extent that the corresponding premiums are so high they discourage people from buying insurance, which is a high bar when car insurance is required by law.
And listing additional groups who have the incentive to throw shade on self-driving cars for underhanded political reasons rather than legitimate risks is just more to the point.
All that being said, you're absolutely right, we could have just accepted that life comes with risk and allowed millions within the US to die within a couple months.
yes it did, then the goal posts were moved, it was no longer about hospital resources it became about death rates, then when death rates did not support the lock down narrative it become about infection rates
In reality (for many regions) it was always about political and economic control not public health
>>we could have just accepted that life comes with risk and allowed millions within the US to die within a couple months.
There are hundreds of different ways the pandemic could have been handled to believe the only 2 options where complete economic shutdown or death is moronic is in no way supported by the evidence, it sounds like you want have a fact based discussion but are leading off with emotional rhetoric, I am happy to debate facts, but I have no time or need for emotional responses or red herring fallacies
It's one thing when companies have unforeseen flaws that end up causing injury or death. No one is perfect and, while they should pay reasonable restitution in line with the level of their mistake, it seems fine overall.
Other the other hand, knowingly producing a product that you are reasonably sure will unexpectedly[1] kill or hurt sometime should have severe penalties. Those penalties should be imposed not through individual lawsuits (which are a poor tool for assuring the rights of whole classes of people - class action lawsuits not withstanding), but through prevailing regulatory action. To be honest I don't think it would be going too far to, as a standard action, nationalize a company in that situation.
We really, really do not want a situation where companies are choosing to kill their customers because they think they will come out ahead in the end. Think about it - are we happy that the leadership teams of the tobacco industry, or the oil industry, or the fiberglass industry were kept in place? How much better of a world would we be in if tobacco companies were at existential threat from their behavior? Where they needed to sell cigarettes like the USA sells guns (with the understanding they may kill)? I think we should seriously consider that standard of product safety.
[1] Products like guns, which are intended to injure or destroy, are their own thing imo.
(To be clear, I'm not saying that I find this morally correct — I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect, honestly, except icky at the surface level. I more means that it seems retrospectively to me that, well, of course that's how it would go, given the incentive structure)
This isn't really a corporate issue at all though. Given scarce resources (whether physical or human), we need to be able to allocate resources efficiently. A conversation along these lines happens in public health systems all the time: how much money should be spent on medical interventions? There, the concept of a QALY (Quality-adjusted life year) is used, and typically, a price limit is set per QALY. Then, only interventions below that threshold will be funded. The idea is that since the healthcare system has limited funds, it doesn't make sense to spend exorbitant amounts delivering marginal results for one patient.
Now, one could argue this is simply a monetary issue, and if we didn't use money to measure these things, the issue would go away. The thing is, even if money isn't an issue (somehow), scarcity is still something we need to deal with. Developing and administrating medical interventions takes human labour, and spending a disproportionate amount of person hours on small gains is still an issue.
This comment is probably a little rambling, but the TL;DR is that given scarce resources (whether that's money in a corporation, or chemists and doctors in a health system), doing calculations on human lives is necessary if we want to make sure we allocate resources effectively.
It's easy to detect "time-shaving", what with everyone having a trackable cell phone today. If time at work exceeds time on the clock for multiple employees, that shows wage theft.
The Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor should be able to demand triple damages for wage theft. 2/3 goes to the employee, and 1/3 goes to enforcement efforts.
This never happens in union shops, by the way.
While that exact problem many never happen (and I have by doubts about even that statement)
unions are not the panacea of all virtue nor are they the solution to all labor problems
Time theft is estimated at $400 billion per year, much higher than unpaid wages.
If an employer denies legal wages they are thieves and should be held accountable by law enforcement for theft, just like any mugger or burglar would.
It's not as if employers don't have the means to remediate this.
If we cut down to it, there is a fundamental tension - the average employer wants maximum productivity for the least amount they can get away paying, and the average employee want the maximum possible income with the least amount of work. As a thought experiment, if your employer were to offer to reduce the length of your work-week while maintaining your current salary, what is the minimum number would you agree to? Zero is acceptable with no consequences.
After a certain point you have to call it a duck.
Not that I doubt it, but simple metrics like GDP per capita have obvious problems.
For one, if two women instead of taking care of their own families take care of the others for pay, GDP has increased (and the government took money from both).
Those two families, however, just lost money (taxes on income) while having inferior care and losing 1-2 hours of care a day (travel time).
Maximizing GDP can be negative to well-being and it’s possible that untracked labor such as traditional wives in other countries could actually be a gain for their populace over a higher GDP nation.
I think how to measure wealth in real terms is difficult.
(This is all setting aside that Wall St is cooked book stew at this point and much of US wealth depends on that fabrication.)
I don't think it's really a mystery. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the US has the largest GDP (total, not per capita) in the world. Of course there are pros/cons to this measure. That said, while your hypothetical is true, I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.
> I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.
I would argue that a major economic viewpoint is exactly this has happened — women entered the workforce to do jobs that replaced the role they traditionally did at home, which boosted GDP but crashed a bunch of untracked value.
I’ve had several economists explain that to me as the source of growing worker discontentment: they give more labor for less value delivered to them, but it makes the number bigger on the books. You say it doesn’t make sense for the parties involved, but that’s only true of the two families: the government gets extra tax revenue if the families make that exchange. People outside those families have an incentive to force them into that position because those people benefit from the families loss.
I think if you added a couple steps to my scenario (and some information fuzziness), you could see it happening in the real world.
I overly distilled the point to highlight the absurdity.
Nevertheless the US is a very wealthy country by any measure.
In reality Mom A is a nurse, and cares for 20+ people in a day, and Mom B is a school administrator, both provide more than one-day-of-mothering value per day worked, so it's actually in everyone best interest that they leave their kids at daycare, consuming 1/6th of a less-talented person's day, enabling their professional output. Even the daycare worker multiplies their output by watching multiple children.
What I’m saying is striping out “mom” work into “preschool”, “restaurant”, and “laundromat” leads to inefficiencies that don’t come back at scale — for most families. Rich families have always had maids, etc. precisely for the reasons you state: it makes economic sense.
We’re making that up in decreased quality: your family gets worse childcare, food, and laundry plus some extra lost time to transit in exchange for mom spending her day doing those things for other families. (Eg, McDonalds or Denny’s or preschool or a maid.)
The on-the-books increase from “nurse” and “school administrator” aren’t due to increased efficiency, but rather, due to off-the-books losses, like the value of homemakers.
And in the 70s I think the poor population (esp. the black one) was much poorer and possibly not employed at all.
That is NOT a no-tolerance policy. They're literally saying they tolerate some violations so long as its not so bad. Amazon is responsible for this and I'm guessing it stems from a work culture that sees some abuse as inevitable or okay in small amounts. Its not okay. You can't violate worker rights just some of the time and think you're being responsible. This is well outside acceptable business norms in the US. The fact that the official spokesperson thought it was okay that to publicly admit they sweep violations under the rug so long as it doesn't become too bad speaks volumes to Amazon's toxic and amoral work culture.
> What is the pay rate at Amazon?: $15 an hour is the Amazon minimum wage—although you can make more based on your location and the shift you choose.
The problem is that Amazon has set up a system where labor abuses are the only way to succeed, while keeping their hands clean.
Amazon hires Delivery Service Providers (DSPs) on contracts. These contracts are for a specific number of 'routes' on a given day. They have a handful of DSPs for each delivery station, and they even help people start DSP companies by giving them loans for vans, access to better deals, etc. But the DSP is an independent company that can operate however it wants to, on paper.
The DSPs then hire delivery drivers, each an independent contractor themselves typically. The drivers get a route of 200-ish packages and follow the step-by-step navigation Amazon's provided app tells them[0] to do. The drivers are supposed to work for up to 10 hours then bring back whatever is leftover.
Problem: Amazon rewards the DSPs that have the fewest missed deliveries, pay them more per route. The DSPs that get the most pay are the ones who have learned how to get their drivers to work longer without complaint, take no breaks, keep driving, keep delivering. The ones who abuse.
Amazon does not reward the abuses, they just reward the effects of the abuses. Amazon can say "We don't tolerate that", but they absolutely do. What they actually don't tolerate is DSPs whose drivers complain. Every DSP operator out there is telling their drivers: you keep your mouths shut or you're out.
This isn't an accidental design. The people in charge of this program are sociopaths. And Amazon's senior leadership has rewarded these sociopaths for building this very low-cost delivery system. There's a Leadership Principle called "Deliver Results", but there isn't one called "Be Ethical".
[0](And let's set aside the part about 'workers following step-by-step instructions Amazon gives them are somehow not actually employees', which is bullshit.)
"And Amazon's senior leadership has rewarded these sociopaths"
I'm too small to make a dent, but rest assured, I am "rewarding" them back with my wallet. Never again shopping on Amazon. I simply can't justify saving a few £ knowing that the people delivering / manipulating what I buy are abused. I read quite frequently about the issue and unless we protest with our wallets this abuse will continue.
It is not perfect but mostly shipping is done by postal service that is ok for me and As Amazon there is no guarantee about products being genuine then E-bay is as good or more than amazon.
If I go to a market and look for the best quality for the best price, I suppose I'm encouraging sociopaths, too.
There may be some argument for the scale of Amazon needing to take a deeper look. But requiring that a buyer of a good or service must know how the sausage is made would break our system.
Instead, the vendors do need to be held accountable.
For the record, I think these tech monopolies are a bad thing as a whole for the overall market but not because they're trying find the best deals on goods and services. More because they monopolize, and set the rules for the largest marketplaces which only governments should do.
In that particular case Amazon knows what’s going on because they have engineered the system, buys services anyway.
For purchases of some illegally obtained goods U.S. Code §2315 is there since 1948, has not broken the system: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2315
"We don't tolerate any lawbreaking, but you need to fulfill these performance metrics (which can't be achieved except by lawbreaking)."
I'm of the opinion that, as a general practice, this needs to be addressed by legislation. I don't know what the specific workable solution looks like, but essentially: if a company contracts work out that any reasonable person could determine would require violating laws or regulations to accomplish, that the company is held directly legally responsible for those violations.
Whether it's delivery drivers speeding or illegally parking or not making minimum wage or whatever.
But basically, any company (like Amazon) does cost modeling of every step involved in a process long before they decide whether to hire employees to do it, or contract it out. In fact, that's precisely how they can determine how much they're willing to pay to contract something out.
So it's not really that hard for a court to demand that a company produce its modeling estimates, and then compare with the actual service provided, and show that the company either a) knew that corners would need to be cut illegally, or b) made negligent assumptions.
Remember, I'm not talking about mom and pop shops who are all sharing a single huge contractor like UPS or FedEx. I'm talking about huge companies like Amazon or Uber who use a large number of subcontractors. They have entire teams of people who model this stuff. They know exactly what they're doing.
If you're not part of the solution then what are you?
Everyone there is part of the problem and excuses their behavior with bullshit like "I'm only working on a small percentage of the exploitation". Is everyone so bad a maths now you've forgotten that 10 tenths makes a one?
I'd hold a different world view, in which individuals who have good intentions shouldn't be blamed for their work getting bastardized or leveraged in unethical ways.
In this case, it seems totally reasonable that an engineer on this project would assume that their work would reward efficiency (which it does), and not be gamed to reward exploitation (which it apparently also does).
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
put another way, is the person who built tipping into instacart a bad person? or is it the person who decided to calculate pay as (baseRate - incomingTips) = actualWage the bad person?
But, I also think folks who excuse this kind of thing are bad actors too.
Or like down thread, trying to shift the blame to "the users" who are intentionally misled by advertising and the known information-imbalance that makes exploitive-capitalism work.
I've heard that FedEx Express's system will forcibly go blank for the 30 minute mandated lunch break. Can't scan any packages, etc. Seems like something software that tells you what to do (and demands input) could also do. Might need followup effort to avoid gaming by spending some of lunch driving to the next stop, but still allowing driving to a restaurant.
At the end of the day, you've got to accept that just because you can write software to do $thing, doesn't mean you should. If you're going that far into the tails to innovate, there's probably something more fundamental you've missed.
If I buy a product extremely cheap, I also will be liable if it was a stolen product. Why is the same not true for Amazon?
The other complaint is valid.
Because otherwise ... yeah? Private toll roads can be a good solution.
The city simply made an analysis of the number of roads they'd build over the years and the cost of being a capable engineering organization versus the premium of getting existing experts to build it. They probably don't generate their own electricity either, for the same reasons.
The only reason they sell it off is to make cash now for whatever political reason at the expense of future taxpayers.
The delivery of electricity is also handled by governments, or companies that are basically government since they have to run everything by governments first like price increases. Just like water lines and sewer lines. Electricity generation does not need to be government operated since it can come from multiple sources, but the delivery is just like roads since you can’t have multiple options to each destination.
Generally, but I could plan to have that contractor back for each repair as long as they do a good job.
> The state has allowed NTTA to have a lifetime contract of earning tolls on the roads even past the cost of building those roads
Presumably they're responsible for maintaining the roads. We've simply decided to call them for repairs as long as they do a good job.
> The contractor does not keep sending you bills after the fees have been paid
If I defer up-front costs in trade for maintenance costs then they do. This is really handy some times.
A look at first world countries whose use taxes completely cover road investments and maintenance shows that we're about $4-6/gallon shy of actually covering our costs.
I'm not sure it reduces traffic as much as it initially seems.
I know truck drivers in general are pressured to meet deadlines at the expense of sleep, but this driver seemed like they were more sleep deprived and stressed than the normal truck driver. They seriously need to treat their employees better, for the sake of public safety. And America needs to get rid of this contractor loophole. They're employees, even if Amazon likes to pretend that they aren't.
I think we can agree that the negative side-effects of the sub-minimum-wage-package-delivery arrangement are subtler.
The common theme here is that the enterprise is against the law, and "there's demand for that" is no excuse to break the law. The reason for the law is more "subtle" but theft is theft.
Of course, the dude selling cigarettes will probably be lucky to make $100 a day, but he's risking jail time. The folks stealing wages from delivery drivers are stealing way more than that, but they'll pay some fines and settle some lawsuits which almost certainly won't overwhelm their profits.
Or -- let's say it's more subtle. So what?
I also think it's wrong to equate the proposal that minimum wage law should be changed because there is demand for jobs at a certain wage with the proposal that murder-for-hire should be allowed because there is demand for it. Minimum wage laws are barely 100 years old in the US, while laws against murder are as old as law itself.
I'd venture to say that you could describe punishments for murder to any civilization in history and they would at least understand why you would propose such a thing. Minimum wage law, not so much. If some newcomer to my 18th century town is willing to work on my farm for a season for nothing but room and board, and you tell me that that relationship is exploitative and should be illegal, I'd call you insane.
I think a better comparison we could make is the sale of heroin. That's another instance where two consenting adults enter into an agreement that is currently, but not historically, illegal. It's also an instance where many argue that the relationship is exploitative, despite being voluntary. The similarities with minimum wage law are, from my perspective, deeper and more resonant.
And (tongue in cheek, kinda) some might say that the age of laws against murder indicate that the industry is ripe for disruption...
Even after a law is passed, and upheld in court, it still needs to defend itself in the court of public opinion when it is questioned. If you are content with and confident in the status quo, then you don't have to participate in those discussions. But if it is important to you that minimum wage laws go away, you have every right to argue against it ("there is demand for lower-wage jobs", for example). And if it is important to you that minimum wage law continue to stand, and you believe they are under threat, then it may make sense to defend it by pointing out its merits (e.g. "competing, desperate people do not act rationally or in their collective best interests").
If somebody proposes: "There is demand for marijuana", think about how useless the comment "there is demand for murder" is. Yes, they are both illegal things. No, that does not mean it's useless to discuss whether they should remain illegal. Now, if you continue with "familiarize yourself with the case law, marijuana users go to prison because it's illegal", do you see how it continues to be useless to the discussion about the legality of marijuana use? The discussion is not about whether [marijuana use/sub-minimum-wage employment] is actually illegal.
A) practical B ) economical C) moral D) All of the above
Learning to differentiate between the lunacy of market signal theory from which reality is abstracted out of and the next big thing is a bit of a learned skill.