'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
bbc.com
bbc.com
> An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:
>> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I absolutely did not get paid more to train people.
>> Ambassador isn’t a ‘job’ you do every day, its just something you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1 day then unload trucks for the next 3.
>> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didn’t pay more. It’s voluntary. Your manager picks them. Generally speaking ambassadors are the “kiss asses” of the department.
> In case it isn’t obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up, Chris.
Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant contributions to the bottom line.
The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and their precious lack of objectivity.
This is a fantastic read.
The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker.
Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries.
For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow.
Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated.
I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees.
So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well.
Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.
Gamer care about opportunistic women's study majors who know nothing about gaming insulting their favorite pastime to try and justify their wasted lives.
Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?
The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.
https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173
"If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting"
As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You find willing lackeys at every paygrade.
As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Now it's gotten much weirder. There are fake accounts that, looking at them, you're not sure who they actually benefit. I think a bunch just got purged. No one took them seriously anyway, so navigating the motivations in the space is super difficult. It's fascinating in some ways but in others I just want to ignore the whole thing.
(edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically abusive system", or something of the sort.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare this to genocide camps.
Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical.
Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.)
Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another.
The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised!
The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still.
Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol
If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history.
The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than ever before.
Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names, verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with catastrophic downsides.
"Humans have always produced CO2 and cut down trees. The only things that have changed in past 1000 years are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it."
a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very vocal minorities
b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as a)
At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be trusted with it.
The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users?
So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?
The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not pay much attention to political speech on the internet.
The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely limiting what I read to:
1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT).
2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's delightful).
Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
I would think it would be better to just scroll past the content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.
Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits.
For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible).
I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.
Perhaps there is something in this about internet communications coming/going full circle with more episodes like this Amazon fiasco.
Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power.
You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.
I have bad news for you, but there's no way to control for authenticity.
Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything.
It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to.
>But if there's no way to control for authenticity,
And that's how it starts ...
The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.
People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
> People need to be trained
But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution. That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on them and keep the rest of us safe.
Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a population easiest when they accept and share it. All that takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from people though.
I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care.
The solution he found in the book basically involved signing everything with your own personal identifier and putting it into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.
But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.
IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.
#1 - stop using the internet to gauge what popular
#2 - stop using what is popular to dictate law and how everyone has to act.
I had written a much more scathing comment about the Amazon side of the business but I'm not sure what is allowed under hacker news's community guidelines.
1. Create fake accounts supporting amazon 2. tip your hand that they're fake 3. BBC reports on amazon creating fake accounts
I don't think even twitter can verify who made those accounts because it's so easy to vpn and use google voice numbers. You can choose what to believe, though
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/amazon-twitter-hack-unio...
I guess you haven't seen this tweet:
https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359
Real people work for Amazon. They can be just as stupid as the rest of us.
Their employees would likely be the ones creating cheap profiles.
In addition to Amazon itself, what if it's:
1. A huge investor in Amazon (like some hedge fund) who is doing it on amazon's behalf 2. A media outlet who wanted a scoop, so they manufactured one 3. A random 4chan troll looking for giggles 4. A foreign entity with some vested in sowing chaos into the discussion 5. A competitor of Amazon making them look bad through this easily debunked fake
I really can't believe your comment contains both of these quotes: "What's not believable about that?" and "People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already"
Perhaps check yourself
False flag is a thing.
My favorite (https://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Astroskin-Behavioral-Self-...):
"Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to know about the benefits and limitations of astroskin! Now I can purchase this system for myself and my crew with confidence that I did not have before. I highly recommend this report to anyone wanting to measure their blood pressure in space or other extremely harsh environments."
The product is being sold for $169.43 on Amazon, and is actually a PDF available for free via NASA.gov. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150021842/downloads/20...
As for the peeing in bottles thing, Amazon is not that smart. There are people that look completely normal, that experience life-threatening autonomic dysreflexia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia) from having to hold their bladder, even if it is just for seconds, like me. Perhaps I should try working in a US Amazon warehouse. It would be perfect lawsuit material and the ultimate power play against their inhumane policies around toileting breaks.
You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices. Amazon may be paying $15/hr but they will work you like dogs. Some people will accept that because they need the money and McDonald's just doesn't pay enough. It will be interesting to see what Amazon will have to pay if some of the minimum wage increases start to pass.
Which is actually worse. Doing it that way gives Amazon and its apologists deflect the blame back onto the victim (e.g. the worker made voluntary choice to work at Amazon, and a voluntary choice to take the break and accept the cost, Amazon fully supports the voluntary choices of its workers, if the worker is in a shitty situation, it's their fault for making those choices, etc.), even though Amazon is actually responsible for creating the situation and its consequences. If they made it "illegal," at least it would make their responsibility clear.
It's called disability discrimination. Getting paid less on the sole basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discrimination in the US. Having to use the toilet every hour or so for 1-3 minutes to take care of business in this case is a reasonable accommodation legally mandated in US law. Considering that it is /immediately life-threatening/ and /immediately quantifiable/ (via blood pressure readings-continuous, spontaneous, or otherwise), it is very clear that Amazon would have an extremely difficult time weaseling their way out of trouble with their strict enforcement of a zero-tolerance, all-or-nothing, policy.
> You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices.
Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. There are a ton of people who have ended up with UTIs and other health consequences from having to not only hold it at Amazon warehouse, but also being forced to purposefully dehydrate themselves, in the short term and long term. The toilet issue is so ridiculous that somebody who can should take them for a ride and fight for the people who are less fortunate. I would look to it as an adventure and a "summer job". I have legal authorization to work in both the US and the European Union on a long-term, permanent basis, so why not test the waters?
As I said, the condition I have is immediately life-threatening, so it's pretty clear cut that they would be putting my life in danger (strokes, seizures, retinal detachment, etc.) by "punishing" me for using the toilet.
I mean, I get what you're saying. I work in Disabilities quite a bit in my profession - and your view is generally correct. But there are literal, specific carve-outs for employers to pay people with disabilities less.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...
>Section 14(c) of the FLSA authorizes employers, [. . .] to pay subminimum wages - wages less than the Federal minimum wage - to workers who have disabilities for the work being performed.
Why is it better for Amazon to pay $15/hour and work you like dogs, vs. paying a much lower base rate but a bonus that makes it work out to $15/hour if you work yourself like a dog, and less if you're less effective? Is overhead so high that having more, cheaper but less effective workers doesn't work out?
- Paying $15/hour guarantees a steady supply of replacements for people quitting. Paying closer to minimum wage does not.
- At the scale and level of service demand of Amazon, it's probably better to have predictable headcount and per-employee performance than to try and play the fast food game where finding replacements might take weeks and even when you do, there's a good chance they'll be rather bad employees.
- It's probably a self-selection filter at this point. Pretty much everyone knows that working for a fulfillment center or DSP will be a shitty grind, but the pay is better than 90% of other unskilled jobs. People who can't handle the work will largely self-select out of even trying to work there in the first place, which saves Amazon a lot of time and cost.
From a technology standpoint, the actual hardware and materials for an Astroskin system cost around $175-$200 (clothing set + processing unit) to produce, so they really are making bank.
It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's credibility.
Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It could just be someone outside the potential union members who just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon, who is doing it.
What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't sway anyone?
If you want snark, have some back: where did the big bad union boss touch you?
> What other explanation is there?
Hired a shoddy offshore bot-writing and astroturfing outfit who are obviously not up to the job. It's a very simple, and one of the most likely, explanations. Occam's razor comes in handy occasionally if you just take the time to think a bit.
I'd guess it's neither Amazon or pro-union employees but rather random people trying to make Amazon look bad.
People aren't rational, we are inherently emotional. Reason and logic need to be taught, and controlling your emotions is one of the hardest things you can do as a human. These propaganda just play into our basic primal fears of safety and the unknown at its root. It's not hard to engage with these emotions, especially if what you are sharing already goes along with this established worldview that some have, cultivated by years of past propaganda.
I'm not sure how you reset this, given so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives nor seek them out.
I don't think it's that people aren't exposed to other perspectives -- it's that people have been programmed to be vitriol of other perspectives. It's the ever growing polarization of world views.
I'm not sure how to reset it either.
> It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder and more likely they all work at the same desk in a corporate office.
Send txt to: 555 ** *8 Email : na*****@g**.**
What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success.
There is no joy in his life.
On the contrary, he is probably very happy with the way things are. You may be buying into the "Just World fallacy"; there are plenty of people you may find despicable who are leading happy, fulfilling lives, by their standards.
I think the antipathy towards workers a combination of 2 things: it takes a fair amount of conceit/self-belief to dare think you can change the world (statistically speaking). The second thing is, even if you didn't start of with that mindset, success usually brings a certain post-hoc justification in the vein of "Clearly, I have been successful, therefore I'm better than most", which easily morphs into "My needs are more important; the little people are too focused on short-term goals and yet I have to compete with them for the same resources to achieve even more important goals I have planned". As someone from a low-income background, I have noticed that the more successful I have been, the less empathy I have, and I'm only middle-class. I don't know if it's because of my increasing income, increasing age, or combination of both.
Of course, I (and you) say this from the position of people who don't know the man in person. It's all baseless backbiting.
Obviously this isn't dispositive to say he's happy, but I don't think it proves he's unhappy either. Not wanting your workers to unionize hardly seems like proof of an unhappy life.
Most ultra rich buy news companies. It's part of your portfolio to ensure you have maximum say in the political decision process.
See "Manufactured Consent", there's a cool animated video explaining it on YT.
> Not wanting your workers to unionize hardly seems like proof of an unhappy life.
Indeed. It just shows you are above the law, and a authoritarian/oppressive.
I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one
Hopefully anyone with that level of wealth would look into fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it up with fake testimony. The point is, he has the money to build a working culture where people can feel like they are treated fairly, he just chooses not to
And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I would try to understand their perspective and make changes to improve working conditions. But maybe that's why I'll never be a CEO.
Bezos' employees have created nearly 200 billion dollars of wealth for Bezos
If they were working somewhere else, they wouldn't be generating 200 billion dollars of wealth at all
Not sure how "richest man in the world" version of myself would react. Certainly I wouldn't use my corporate Twitter account to attack (badly) US politicians.
I'd cry myself to sleep every night on my pile of billions of dollars. Poor Jeff.
Easy:
"I have $185 billion less than Bezos to spend on treating my employees better, but I've also spent $0 on propaganda against my employees interests."
A union will not break Amazon, many companies with unions still are plenty profitable.
In corporate America, responsibility is on senior leadership, and the CEO is at the top of that chain. If they want to have the W's of that system, they get to take the L's too.
Here is the summary of the issue.
Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery. This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention that benefits are also included, which as far as health insurance is a big plus for people.
Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3% unemployment rate.
As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions, and people will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their heart".
So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich, social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition does not depend on ones job.
Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is the outrage of the internet lefism.
There are definitely some true, fair, and pertinent points in your comment (though, to be clear, they're not strong enough to actually make a compelling point, and I still disagree with your conclusion and position), but this is just nonsense. Every single social welfare program is "messing with the free market", and while I do concede that some of them have been failures and some have been inefficient, they are overall a net positive to _human quality of life_, even while they may reduce a business' productivity.
If you modified your statement to "which never leads to good outcomes for a particular company", or even "for the economy", then it would be a truer statement - but it is possible for a company or for the overall economy to take a small hit, while actual real humans (who are, after all, the ones that we should care about) enjoy a far greater quality of life.
I mean, saying that a human life is worth something so you can't just treat people as expendable labor is "messing with the free market" technically, but thats a very low boundary. Social welfare addresses the lower tiers of income, specifically to aid people in basic needs of housing, food, healthcare and education. Those people aren't putting any significant money into the economy.
Unionization on the other hand is selective inflation of labor value in certain areas. Thats definitely messing with the free market. Didn't work for France very well, not going to work for US.
EDIT to be more clear-and-explicit and less snarky - taxes are an interference with the free market. I am making the claim that a high-functioning society that cares for its citizens and ensures a good quality of life must necessarily a) impose taxes, in order to b) provide social welfare programs. In particular, I claim that no purely-free-market motivated company will address social welfare needs as comprehensively as public programs would (though I do concede that, for some subsets of society, some companies will often do so more efficiently than public programs would, at the cost of non-universal coverage).
Right. Living in France sucks! /s
It’s really sad how many people get super invested in defending mega corporations. I hope it’s just employees trying to move up but you never know.
https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...
True
>probably because the conditions are so cruel.
Ugh, thats the crap I am talking about in the last sentence of my original post.
There is nothing wrong with high turnover at a minimum wage manual labor job. Amazon hires seasonal workers that happily work overtime for $30 and then quit. Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
The majority of people on Hacker News, yourself included (I can tell from your comments) have privilege that means we never had to consider something like making a career out of working in a warehouse. But this is absolutely a reality for alot of smart, hard working people, because they didn't have the opportunities you and me had.
If unionization didn't lead to better outcomes for workers, Bezos wouldn't care about it. If it was going to be so bad for workers, he would just let them do it and let them fail. The fact that Amazon is doing anything about it is proof that it will benefit workers.
Tell that to Sweden, with its 80% unionization rate and productivity (GDP per hour worked) at 97% of that of the United States.
And since you said "historically" - it's not a recent change of affairs. In the 1970s Sweden's productivity (GDP per hour) was 90% of that of the United States.
Feel free to compare other European nations:
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Labor/Trade-... https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
Sweeden also has more homeless people per capita than US, and higher unemployment, and lower GDP/capita, and different labor laws.
Its also not really a good excersize to compare against other countries. With full analysis, you quickly get into weeds of things like cultural values, homogeneity, hysteresis in policy, all of which affect the economy.
Saying that an economic policy works in one country has no relation to whether it works in another. For example (albeit a dumb one, but it illustrates the point) - in most of EU, there aren't really 24 hour grocery stores or food places, unlike in US. Is it better to enact a policy stop economic trade in late hours, with the assumption that people are more productive if they have time with their families, or would you rather have a free market that allows the night owls to make money if they want to?
The answer is that it solely depends on the population. General labor class with more traditional values would probably prefer the former. Younger techies that aren't concerned with families and love what they do and willingly work into later hours would prefer the latter. E.t.c and so on.
Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
Nope. Injecting money into lower end income levels, through things like raising the minimum wage to $10-11, or social welfare programs, causes every company paying minimum wage to slightly bump up their salaries - thats a market correction.
Unionization is economically equivalent to rent control, which is not a market correction.
The reason why rent control doesn't work is you basically people who cannot otherwise afford to live in an area, and artificially increase their net worth. Of course they want to stay in the area, which decreases availalbe housing supply, prevents building of new housing supply, e.t.c and so on with cascading effects.
With unions is the same thing. People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people, which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading effects.
>It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
As is the case for any non-protected unskilled labor position, of which there are plenty. Amazon perhaps does more metric collection and expects a higher throughput, but they also pay accordingly. And people don't have to work at Amazon if they don't want to.
Its interesting though that people chose to focus on Amazon when talking about this, instead of all the companies that share similar working conditions. Kinda shows you where your priorities are, which is not in discussion of things that could benefit the lower income class.
Your conception of what "free market" means is wrong, and the thing you're imagining has never existed.
Anyway, here's a few other things that mess with "the free market" as much as unionization:
- Workplace safety laws
- Environmental protection laws
- Minimum wage laws
- Accounting regulations
It's like saying "people are boycotting product x because they disagree with company policy" isn't allowed because "cancel culture is messing with the free market".
Where are all the comments about Walmart unionization?
By what definition of "free market" is unionization fairly characterized as "messing with" said market? Isn't the idea of the free market that actors within that market have the opportunity to use resources and organize resources the way they see fit? It seems your definition of "free market" only permits corporations latitude in making meaningful choices, but employees and consumers none whatsoever.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/search/case/AMAZON.COM%20SERVICES%20LLC
If you are going to post any proof, at least read the stuff that you posted. 16 cases of complaints with extremely vague information in them is hardly proof.
Don't bother looking for actual evidence though, because you won't find it.
> people can quit and go find easier job at any time
There's no basis for this, by your own observation. Offering bottles of water in the desert is not a fair trade of value. You have a hostage negotiation.
> There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem
Except for all the evidence you want to ignore or have laid before you to dismiss.
It's tiring at how poorly this rhetoric is thought out. I'll skip to my favorite part.
> Unionization is messing with the free market,
What does free market mean in this context? Oh right, whatever you think works because it makes sense in a closed system with immediate feedback. Reality does not match this. Major Airlines don't hire less people because they have unions (white collar and blue collar, typically).
Most of the post is some strange worldview using open language that has no weight or typical strawman theorycrafting.
Sounds easy but I assume it isn't so much. Applying regular market rules to the job market is misguided. First, people need a job to live. If all available offers are starvation wages, people can't just say "well I won't work for this". Second, changing job is a big risk regarding healthcare and job security. Some people might prefer lower pay but higher stability rather than slightly higher pay but with a high risk of being fired. Third, different people have different jobs available. For unskilled labor there will always be more people than jobs, and there will always be people that need a job now doing whatever so they don't lose their home. That will push wages down even in an environment of low unemployment.
> Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between.
There are quite a lot of reports in multiple countries and outlets. Taking into account that it's not easy for workers to put their story out there and that they take a risk by doing so, I wouldn't dismiss the evidence so quickly.
> When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down.
Or go up. Evidence is mixed and depends on the setting. It's not "undoubtely".
> While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions,
Walmart employees could make an union too.
> Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
Things unions have historically done (some of them haven't reached yet the US precisely because of the lack of unionization):
- Limit weekly working hours. - Weekends - Paid vacations. - Protect workers in bad situations (pregnancy, disability, injuries).
That's just in general. Go into actual unions and see what things they do.
Also, they're not messing with the free market. The job market is not a free market, there's an extreme asymmetry of power and information between a worker and a company. Most workers can't afford to lose their jobs, most companies can afford to lose a worker. By splitting workers they can apply individual pressure to gain an advantage that they couldn't get if workers actually coordinated. Unions restore the power balance and give workers the power to negotiate the conditions in an equal setting.
Wait so, should the unionize too? Or were they not fully staffed during the record low employment before?
One of these must be true, or you are making incompatible claims.
Free market efficiency + redistribution via taxes+coupons is the way to go.
Milton Friedman approves.
Just selling cheap shit with no regard for those who produce and deliver your products doesn't equate to "produce a lot of value to people"...
I think the 8 hour week, and ending child labour are good outcomes.
You can make a good argument without devolving into "us-vs-them" tribalism.
For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a recent example of this (read the comments)
https://www.pinkbike.com/u/jamessmurthwaite/blog/slack-rando...
We were actually "highly encouraged" during new hire orientation to go on glassdoor and leave a good review - that was the first hint I made a mistake in accepting the job. It was a pretty awful place to work.
Certainly seems like there should be. I would love to see Amazon slapped with a billion dollar fine for these shenanigans.
While it's obvious that the accounts were created by corporate you don't know if the tweets are those of real workers or not.
There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure, but there are plenty of other social networks where you can be anonymous.
However, I ultimately don't think requiring IDs would be effective and it would probably expose at-risk and vulnerable groups to greater retaliatory action. It's arguably a bit classist as well, since only those who are sufficiently rich and powerful enough to protect themselves would be able to participate with impunity.
Or why would I want to use a social network with onerous signup terms?
That's exactly why. It would allow ideas and speech with psychological safety to proliferate while everything else is shut down. It's bad enough already due to voluntary censorship (cancel culture).
Phase 1: "Okay, it's a Real Names social network, seems probably fine."
Phase 2: "Oh no, some sort of token economy. Well, maybe it--"
Phase 3: "Nevermind, it said the word 'blockchain,' abandon ship, this is doomed."
1. https://i.imgur.com/JlZIpAI.jpg
2. https://www.backstage.com/u/alisha-elaine-anderson/
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-pr...
The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl. He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world. Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main character decides that he can make his life meaningful by creating something durable in the world for other people before he dies.
My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of people getting things that they need. I write code for a living and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not they express it on twitter, and they should.
A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization afloat?
Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken seriously in certain circles.
Personally I would wait for more evidence to judge (which seems unlikely to happen). It's not so hard to operate a false flag on platforms like Twitter.
How does civilised society survive if 90% of our communication go online to platforms like this?
This cannot continue, there must be real consequences for puposeful mass deception.
I have recently gone through some of my old tweets where I replied (respectfully) to some climate deniers and fairly far right-wing accounts. All those posts are now deleted or the accounts have been closed. Where they all fake bot accounts? Who did I reply to? Did it even matter?
But if you want to keep your job, you don't speak out publicly ( https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/05/18/Fired-Amazon-Designer-Pun... )