Amazon Just Cut Off Warehouse Workers from a Companywide Directory
thestranger.com
thestranger.com
This cannot POSSIBLY go wrong in any way, can it? I'm struggling to understand how that could ever have been approved.
By almost any account Amazon pays well and has good benefits.
Amazon would absolutely burn their entire infrastructure to the ground, salt the earth and piss on the ashes before giving an inch of power to their employees that they couldn't take a mile of back at their leisure, a power dynamic which unions would deny them. That's just who they are.
But yes, the benefits are nice.
No, I'm arguing that corporations aren't moralistic entities, but legalistic entities, and will make decisions based on profit risk versus legal risk instead of morality versus immorality. I never said I thought it was ok.
Amazon pays better than many jobs in their market, and they have a generous health and insurance package. They constantly give training and tutorials about wellness and safety, and they're fastidious about following regulations, sometimes to a Kafkaesque degree. And when no one is looking they'll push you in front of a bus to get to a dime on the sidewalk.
>It’s easy to talk about statistics when you’re not the one at the bottom of this thing you’re so eloquently dismissing
I'm closer to the bottom than you might think. Not everyone here is a SV bubble baby making six figures.
But they are, aren't they?
Don't you understand that corporations are a bunch of person organized into a hierarchy?
Why would anyone claim that people working within a hierarchy are free to make any immoral decision because they manage some people but answer to other?
At most, you're only arguing that some hierarchies refuse to respect morals or legalities because no one is held accountable and were found to have zero consequences.
Companies like Amazon and Facebook re-write the norms of individual consumer and worker dignities in their favor, and then push to make them global. Because people will dismiss objections to these changes as contrivances.
Isn't the propensity to violate basic human rights in such a casual and nonchalant way albeit not systematic... Extremely damning and concerning?
I mean, what is there to say about the sentence "I know they commit crimes that hurt people and society, but not on a regular basis"
Absolutely, and Amazon has some blood on their hands in that regard. But let's not forget that in a capitalist society, incentives start with the consumer. The market doesn't fit for employee quality of life, but consumer quality of life. If people cared as much about labor rights in the US as they do getting their stuff a day earlier and a dollar cheaper, their wallets and their votes would speak for themselves.
>I mean, what is there to say about the sentence "I know they commit crimes that hurt people and society, but not on a regular basis"
You want to know what I really think?
Agriculture and service industries depend on the maintenance of a permanent illegal labor underclass, militias wielding machetes and AK-47s conscript slaves for the mines that supply the world with gemstones and components for the electronics, and those electronics are assembled by children in factories that have no labor laws, but plenty of nets to catch suicides. Every branch of the entertainment industry is lubricated by prostitution and pedophilia. The tech industry exploits neurodivergent people and grinds temp workers and foreign labor into dust to make billionaires out of whatever sociopath can best figure out how to consume the minds, lives and freedoms of the public this week, and it will fight to the death to preserve the ego of a single pedophile apologist and serial harasser rather than be corrupted by the influence of women, people of color and any other marginalized group that would dare take offense, because its puerile morals were founded on and have never matured beyond 4chan.
And then there's the stuff governments get into, legally and with public consent. And then there's the illegal stuff they get away with. And then there's Maude.
What is there to say? For the most part, we're ok with all of it, because we have to be. We wanted these evils, we created them, nurtured them and praised the brutal elegance with which they rent the flesh, and now we're all caught inside the belly of Moloch and there's nothing to do in here but complain about the weather. Hot today, isn't it?
This comment will probably be flagged, and I'm OK with that. I understand.
Have you considered that it might be propaganda? Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the employees choose to work at Amazon, right? What are the other jobs like, if people still choose Amazon over the alternatives?
This comment you’ve made is propaganda at best and an intentional lie at worst.
>That Amazon pays so little in tax only shows, to me, that the company Amazon's only concern is to get money and that they don't care about society or humans.
Businesses are always going to spend maximum effort to reduce their tax bills. Perhaps instead of an infinite game of cat and mouse we should consider revamping the tax code to eliminate business taxes. We're not getting the money, we likely never will, and because of the corporate taxes we have special capital gains tax rates. Trying to get Amazon to "pay their fair share" is equivalent to pissing into the wind.
How do you square this with the huge proportion of their employees who rely on food stamps? [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-on-food-sta...
1) Obama (in the ACA) expands food stamp access by making it available to households with an income of <=133% of the poverty line.
2) food stamp enrollment rises significantly.
3) Progressives, clutching their pearls, cite "high" food stamp enrollment as an indication of the need for more Progressive policies!
That is more than double the US Federal minimum wage.
~$31K per year.
Amazon can't alter their wage scale based on your family situation. They aren't even allowed to ask about your family situation, it's a protected class.
1. https://gizmodo.com/inspired-by-alabama-coworkers-amazon-wor...
I think the fact that it is happening during a stressful time for Amazon could be clouding more important issues. EEs at Google used their company access to spy on co-workers calendars, another ex-Googler was using his access to harass customers of Google products. At 1M EEs, there is bound to be a bad/crazy apple in the bunch and it only takes one incident for this whole thing to become a very bad conversation.
Reddit recently added a glowing dot on profile pictures to alert people when you are online, but reddit has awful moderation and women are constantly getting attacked. I shut that light off as soon as I heard about it. This seems so much worse because there is no escaping work place harassers without quitting.
Attacks against individuals of various racial groups have been in the news alot recently and I could easily see a bad actor using this tool to make real trouble for an unsuspecting person. Hopefully, Amazon keeps it shut down and devises a new way for its EEs to communicate.
>On the company's internal message boards, employees claimed that Amazon cut off Phonetool access to all L1-L3 workers, which impacted "500,000+" people. But Parmley said the company only pulled the plug on L1 and L99 workers.
Now they can't send all 6 of Andy Jassy's assistants important emails surrounding on-going unionization efforts in the retail org. Andy's in the dark, he needs our one-pagers!
If this will prevent Amazon from becoming overly-political like Google, I am not going to feel too bad about it. They can still chat using Chime/Slack, just don't have full access to emails/phones of everyone in the company. And it doesn't look like it will impact the unionization efforts either, as employees within the same facility can still chat and communicate normally within themselves.
As for companies becoming "overly political", mega corporations will ALWAYS get involved in politics. The question is whether it's public or in the shadows. The other side is corporations trying to PR their way out of abuses so they can keep a good image and lessen progressive opposition.
(I am not anti-union per-se at all, you can silence me by downvoting but you'll also be creating your own echo chamber in the process)
Nobody's forcing Amazon to not be siloed, but now they are losing a competitive advantage, because this disrupts communication within the company. There's a reason for why its leadership made a conscious choice to not be a siloed firm - and its because silos are less efficient.
It's much like a repressive society that shuts down the internet, because people are using it to organize against the regime. Sure, it's free to do so, but this has negative consequences for its ability to conduct bureaucratic and economic activity.
The difference between a government and Amazon is that Amazon does not have any control over non-work communication channels their employees use - so this move isn't even going to help much.
I don't think they're doing anything out of ideological reasons. Their bonuses and compensation is always tied to their competitive performance. I am sure the higher-ups weighed the potential loss of competitive advantage when making the decision, and given their successful track record, I am inclined to believe it's not going to be as bad as the article is portraying it.
I'm sure they haven't - and are just reacting in the way that any C-suite American executive reacts to a union forming in their company - by making every attempt, sensible or senseless, to suppress it.
This is the first time I am seeing that many people claiming they're upset because Amazon made a decision they think is bad for its own business.