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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it. if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against it.

I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one

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> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?

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

It's not like he is the only one at Amazon making decisions. Along with Bezos, there's a whole host of bad actors at Amazon who have decided not to treat workers well.

Financial worth absolutely has to do with the fairness or lack thereof. Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of wealth for himself since founding Amazon, so debating the moral value of those gains in comparison to how everyday employees are compensated is well within reason.

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.

Some people don't think that 'fair treatment' should be determined with the bosses wealth as a factor

Why not? The workers have created enormous value, more than any other time in the history of humanity. Why shouldn't we frame this in terms of where that value goes to?

Workers enter into an agreement - compensation for labor. There are plenty of people at Amazon who are now millionaires or very highly paid.

People have rent to pay. The "you agreed to it" argument only works if the person genuinely had other realistic options available to them. Nobody would work for peanuts and pee in bottles if they had another realistic option.

Why would you assume workers don’t have other options? The unemployment rate before Covid was the lowest since the 50’s.

If the Amazon job is so bad then there must be plenty of better options?

Why do you think that? Doesn't it make more sense that if people are accepting a bad job it's because all their options are bad as well?

It's not about his wealth. If Jeff had been independently wealthy before starting Amazon this wouldn't be an issue. The problem is the percentage workers receive of the value they generate. Jeff has gotten rich by pushing that number as low as possible, while also working to kill off businesses that might offer alternative employment to low skill workers.

It's relatively common wisdom that you don't become a billionaire without fucking over a lot of people. You can be CEO just fine, but billionaire CEO is probably not in the cards for you.

> Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of wealth for himself

Bezos' employees have created nearly 200 billion dollars of wealth for Bezos

Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this is just your ideological rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?

Your implication is that Bezos’ employees were inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this is just your ideological rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?

Ah-hah, you made a joke by making up something I never said. Funny, but could be improved. Next time try working in something I actually said.

> Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth

How much wealth would Bezos have created without his employees? I sort of imagine one guy with a computer running an online bookstore running fulfillment out of his garage.

I bet he could make an okay living if he's smart and hardworking and lucky but it's a pretty inconsequential fraction of 200 billion.

At some point, however, it's momentum and people in the engine room driving the ship rather than the captain. Replace bezos with another decent business person and I'm sure they would have made similar decisions along the way and ended up in a similar place today. It's not like bezos has some sacred gut, he just hires experts and listens to them like any other CEO would do.

> Replace bezos with another decent business person and I'm sure they would have made similar decisions along the way and ended up in a similar place today.

I worked at Amazon for 6 years. I don’t think that’s true at all. Nearly any other professional manager would have been too tempted to turn the mighty river of free cash flow into profit rather than reinvesting in the business.

False dichotomy - they never said he was inconsequential, just that his workers have done the majority of the work - which is objectively true.

If Bezos didn't need those workers - if he genuinely created every cent of value in his empire on his own, picked and boxed and delivered every book himself - why did he ever hire anybody?

The difference is that you could replace the workers with other bodies and the wealth would still have been created. Replacing Bezos would mean Amazon wouldn’t even exist.

But it isn't a false dichotomy. The claim I was responding to stated that the workers had created nearly all of the 200 billion in wealth, which would make Bezos's efforts hardly consequential.

And with your line of reasoning I should be mad when my doctor spends 30 seconds checking me and makes a diagnosis and then receives the lions share of the pay. He couldn't do his job with his nurses, office workers, and other employees. But I'm not mad, because he's doing something they can't.

Just like Bezos did something no one else could do at the time.

I don't they they could have done it without him there. The value of the employee's labour is insignificant without the organization and systems he set up.

If they were working somewhere else, they wouldn't be generating 200 billion dollars of wealth at all

> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?

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.

Yea, for all that money to spend on the attack, how'd they do such an obvious shit-job of it?

My theory is that it doesn't need to be high quality as the perception that Amazon is "fighting back" against corrupt politicians will still take.

> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?

I'd cry myself to sleep every night on my pile of billions of dollars. Poor Jeff.

> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?

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."

It would not be a good trait if one would reflexively push back at such accusations instead of reflecting inwardly and taking in the criticism.

If people said that about me, I'd call off union vote, and just give the union "my blessing" no vote needed, in fact I'd encourage a union from day one for any business I start.

A union will not break Amazon, many companies with unions still are plenty profitable.

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