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Comment by dwater | Hacker News Reader

Like unions or not, the contracts they have were arrived at over decades of negotiations between companies and employees. So while many will bemoan that unions make it impossible to fire bad employees, the purpose of those provisions is to make sure that companies aren't firing workers without cause, or because of the companies' own fault, as appears to be the case here. Amazon may have stopped most of its employee unionization efforts so far, but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me, and it almost certainly wouldn't have happened if these employees had the bargaining power of a group.

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What's wrong with firing employees without cause?

A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. Either party can opt out at any time.

I'm not sure this is something that needs fixing. You seem to feel differently. What am I missing?

Empathy for other human beings who will have negative outcomes if for pointless reasons their employment is turned off by a computer.

What empathy? Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to?

There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the only game in town for labor.

Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This comment is extremely tone deaf and betrays why this industry is fundamentally flawed when it comes to human factors. Engineers and product leads building these systems have simply never experienced the other end of the table, and then reduce the equation to a “business relationship” just like you’re doing here.

I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense. I don’t know, call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but putting a human in the loop to say “eh, that’s a bad call” isn’t a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If a human being double checking and delivering bad news is the only thing holding the economy back from grand designs of glorious, automated scale, I’d prefer another economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of people it serves.

I like the way Sorkin put it: “we used to wage war on poverty, not poor people,” and I think your initial question about empathy illuminates much of that sentiment.

> Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN?

This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of time while switching jobs in one of the best labor markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is simply irresponsible.

There are so many unfilled jobs right now.

> I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense

Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business transaction between human beings here, obviously. Please do try to comment in good faith.

Seriously, though, what the fuck is a “standard unskilled worker?” Did that sound like anything but a reductive take on people less privileged than you in your head? At the least it’s a further elimination of empathy and human factors from your point. I didn’t think there was much left to discard, but here we are, with the lower social strata in an Excel column.

Luckily for us, I’m not debating you and need not concern myself with whatever you’d like to call the argument. I’m simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have to consider that just maybe firing someone with a batch job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I didn’t even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily simplistic view of labor and its role in society.

If you can’t meet me even there and instead take an opportunity to call people who just might starve to death on the other end of such an experience “irresponsible,” based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance and employment for lower social classes, we are not going to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that from your views it reads like you have next to no experience with the financial circumstances you’re discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting but unnecessarily personal observation.

If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views.

Honestly, I’d be curious how your interview at Dominos would go. I’m not being snide. You should take a break from this line of work and go after the so many unfilled jobs you’re talking about for a while, because I think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking from personal experience). You know how one can interview for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn’t happen at Dominos.

Welcome to HN and your comments are not in bad faith at all.

Some views here are very ‘boolean’ and lack nuance... presented as simplifying complex matters. But it’s rather a simplistic mode of thinking, which reduces our lives to lives devoid of empathy. This mode of thinking also tends to see ‘working class’ folks who can’t manage their finances as folks who simply lack character.

In the words of Rutger Bregman... poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash (recommended read: his book ‘Utopia for Realists’)

And don’t forget, what this pandemic has showed us is that lots of working class folks really are essential workers.

Yes, there are some folks who are lazy, but you find that in all sectors.

Letting simple algorithms designed by folks with a very ‘boolean’ worldview determine who is worthy of employment (survival) and who is not leads us to world as illustrated in the movie Elysium.

I for one appreciate your view.

Please continue baptizing ;)

You do have to admit, Amazon has reduced the number of options you can have for employment. Last I checked, toys r us ain't hiring, cause Amazon ships the toys now.

Walmart delivers groceries to my door and lets me tip the driver in the app, have they similarly limited employment opportunities or do they expand them?

I’m not sure at this point, both are horrible corporations I’ve resisted as long as I can can, yet both regularly siphon money from my checking account.

It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the market seemed to collapse.

A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.

That’s a lot like saying it was the patient’s underlying cancer that ultimately killed her, not the pillow held over her face by an overly ambitious family member eyeing the lucrative estate she would leave behind.

Amazon accelerated what you describe in every quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking Amazon’s involvement (going so far as to call it not their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease itself is a tiny bit of revisionism.

Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It was obvious then to the point of being damned near Amazon’s entire thesis.

I'm curious, why did all the "old guard" absolutely refuse online? Blockbuster, KB, Toysrus - these were all before my time, but did they just think oh no, we don't ever have to bother with this, people will always come in the store?

Toy R Us went bankrupt in large part due to executives selling itself to a private capitol firm that saddled it with so much debt that even with its stores maintaining decent operating profits the company as a whole could not maintain the debt payments.

Amazon certainly didn't help their bottom line, but it wasn't the nail in the coffin either.

Are you looking for hypotheticals? Maybe a person has no financial safety net and has a sick family member at home that requires all of their time outside of work, leaving none for a job search.

lol your life is so privileged that you don't realize it

>What empathy?

Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary. Anyway.

Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more specifically, negotiating power.

A contract negotiated between two parties with similar amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides. These will often define things like advance notice for cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The paying party usually wants the most flexibility for cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with the terms of the contract.

A negotiation between a large corporation and an individual (low-level) employee is not really a negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually, they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move on to the next company, they don't have any more negotiating power over there either.

Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a company: they just hire the next person that comes along, still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with the terms dictated by the company), or starve.

So what can an individual employee do to get more leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent" contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their negotiation with others who also have low individual negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined, they should have a lot more leverage.

We could call this negotiating process "collective bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".

The market-driven counter to this is that if companies don't offer terms that employees agree to, they won't be able to get any employees and therefore over time, in the aggregate, they will move towards outcomes similar to what would be achieved in a mutual consent arrangement, without the need for unions.

Of course if that was correct we likely would not have seen the rise of unions in the first place because things would simply have adjusted over the many decades if industrial revolution leading up to wide scale establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to being able to survive, people will accept the terms they're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a "market correction" on labor rates and benefits.

Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.

Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to?

Because people arrange their lives around their work situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this post's example, a flawed algorithm.

This shows a distinct lack of understanding of how crappy it can be when you're poor.

It takes awhile for a new job to cut that first check. In America, usually around a month.

That month can be insanely scary with no money and mouths to feed.

That's why welfare, food assistance programs, and unemployment exist. Amazon (and every other employer) pays in to those programs by law when employing people.

Hah, is this naivete, or just obtuseness?

And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink wink, you know what we want."...

These programs also take awhile to get money into the account.

For the poor, losing a job arbitrarily, with no protections, even cultural, can be massively life disrupting.

Give severance? If a person is getting fired they're obviously not a net positive to their manager, so why would you want to protect them

You are assuming they are being terminated after a correct assessment if their value. Good employees still get fired. Managers can be wrong, or play office politics.

You say "obvious", but in the real world, the lines of net positive or negative have more inputs than that. Adding an algorithm to the mix that may or may not be operating correctly is not a human way to operate.

In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.

I'm not sure but was always under the impression at-will employment is essentially that. The employer and employee maintain an agreement that either party can terminate at any point in time. Is that not the right interpretation of at-will employment?

At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world.

It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing.

But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

You're only looking at it from one side.

What if I want to quit?

If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit.

There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).

Of course you can quit. The power imbalance is mitigated in other countries by making it hard to terminate without cause and on the other side you will have to give more notice when you quit. In Germany when I lived there it wasn't uncommon to have a contract that let you quit your job with 3 months notice or even 3 months from the beginning of the next quarter, things like that. Sure that's inconvenient for some but it's a good trade-off for others.

Indeed and it's worth mentioning that when every job has that sort of notice period it's less of an issue than you might think. Not to mention there's always room for negotiation with these things.

> What if I want to quit?

Is there supposed to be a catch here? If you want to quit, then you should be allowed to quit.

To make it explicit: in the vast majority of the developed world, the individual employee's autonomy is given priority. Companies still have broad discretion when it comes to firing; they're simply held to a higher standard of justification than "we don't like you anymore."

The same termination periods for both parties, e.g. 3 months to quarters end, or month end. And you are very far from anything even remotely resembling command economy. Unless of course most of the developed free world, excluding the US, is communist command economy in your eyes.

A compromise if not a great solution, but it is a decent solution.

This compromise does make sense in a slightly unchanging economy.

Also, if you have highly sought skills this is a detriment, if you have skills that are not in demand, then this is nice to have.

When everyone has the same periods, they don't matter. For e declining economy, we have various forms of state sponsored half unemployment, meaning that you work less while keeping your job and the state sponsors your salary to a degree.

You can also always negotiate an earlier release. These periods offer stability for both parties.

> At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world.

How does this work elsewhere in the world? From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor). If you rent a server from amazon you can stop the rental anytime you want, and they can kick you off anytime you want.

> From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor).

I think this gets to the heart of the difference: Americans tend to think of their employment as a continuous exchange of dollars for their labor, whereas most of the world takes the concept of an employment contract to heart.

That contract, in turn, contains both legal and contractual stipulations that prevent firing without cause: employers must give you so-and-so many weeks of notice before beginning the process of firing you, must pay you for so-and-so many months if you present an argument to a labor board, &c. There's nothing informal about it: it's the difference between continuous billing for a service and a fixed-length contract.

Here's a random PDF I found that explains some of the difference between US and French labor contracts[1].

[1]: https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/insight/publicat...

Employing someone in most of the world is not seen as simply buying a service. It's not a subscription. Are you aware of the concept of Noblesse Oblige[1]? As the worker is smaller and more fragile the business can handle the burden better. The business has lots of employees whereas the employees have only one employer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige

But do they also control your healthcare?

Your boss does.

Not in the big majority of developed countries... The US is also the big exception in that.

That is precisely my point.

This will depend on your views on politics/society/humanity. I know that there one side of the argument that workers should be basically hot-swappable and rack-mountable. I am often a bleeding-heart liberal and am pretty far to the other side of things. Underneath everything here it's more a question of feelings and values more than any sort of logic. Different countries' laws may come down on different sides of the argument here.

A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws around humans and commodities should probably be very different.

More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it cannot contact the local news media to complain about working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.

> employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

This is false. This presumes that all employees are incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.

Neither is true.

Not being able to (meaningfully) save money is a harsh reality for many people, what are you talking about?

The fact that some (tech/highly skilled) workers have actual leverage doesn't negate the fact that many, MANY others don't have any.

50% of the US population would be ruined by an unexpected $500 bill.

We can't operate on how things ought to be, we have to look at how things are actually...and they're bad.

Don't forget that 40% of the population is above or below working age. So perhaps it's only 20% of working age people.

My dad, career Air Force, was once given the job of coaching the privates on the Air Force base. It seems that about 50% of them were unable to pay their bills, which caused friction between the base commander and the local merchants.

The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.

Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a deadbeat.

My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending, and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were able to adhere to those budgets.

Again, 50%.

> This presumes that all employees are incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.

It doesn't presume anything of the sort: you don't need to make a statement about "all" employees to observe that the average American under 35 has under $10,000 in liquid savings[1]. That can disappear pretty quickly with a car or home accident, unexpected injury, or legal liability. Even outside of those, it's not very much to live on outside of LCoL areas for more than a couple of months.

The average American is also not a tech worker: they're somewhere in the lower middle class, and may or may not have the ability to transition rapidly between jobs (our current funhouse-mirror economy aside). You're making extraordinary presumptions about millions of people, presumptions with very real and material consequences.

But to go even further: we should not be punishing people with the threat of hunger or exposure for failing to keep liquid savings! The current economy doesn't encourage liquid (i.e., conservative) saving techniques, and American education does not consistently include financial planning. The vast majority of Americans are blamelessly "winging it" and should not be punished for that.

To tie a bow around it: I don't need to make a universal statement about every employee in America to correctly observe that many employees are materially threatened by at-will employment. Attempting to promote this into universal claims is bewildering at best; it's immediately obvious to everyone that plenty of people can survive an unexpected firing.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame...

Something being widely practiced doesn't make it necessarily good or bad though. At-will being the global norm is not inherent evidence that it is productive, just, or consistent policy.

The low hanging fruit analogies are slavery, limited suffrage, and laws against homosexual civil unions, all of which were global norms at one point.

Certainly. But I think this is missing the point: the argument isn't that employment protections are good because they're widespread; the argument is that employment protections are good and their wide-spreadness is a response to a perceived need (cf. "not sure this is something that needs fixing").

The positive argument is that it's already a fixture and an agreed-upon solution in most of the developed world. The normative argument, i.e. that it's good, is in the next two paragraphs.

> What's wrong with firing employees without cause?

For starters, the unequal status of corporations and their employees?

They're not employees, they're contractors. Meaning the relationship is governed by a contract. If a system that Amazon knows to be flawed is being used to terminate contracts incorrectly then it is a contractual issue.

Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract. It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad system.

Ever tried to cancel your phone contract? Cancelation at anytime is the exception not the norm. Same with most contracts, they all have notice periods. >What am I missing? People have obligations like rent, health insurance, school fees. They have families and children, so a minimum of planning is important. Everything else is inhumane.

My phone, gym, food, housing, electric, gas, water, internet, and insurance are all month-to-month.

As are my customers.

It's a person's responsibility to plan for job loss.

So the notice period is up to 30 days.

> A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent.

This is a childish fantasy.

So, for starters, what is described in the article (and maybe even the post your responded to) is not really a termination without cause, it is a termination for cause.

If you have a policy you require of your employees("You must take a picture of yourself"), and you terminate the employee for not doing it, that is not a without-cause termination. That is a termination for-cause - the cause being the violation of the policy.

Termination without cause would basically be "we are downsizing, you are no longer needed".

The rules about "without-cause" are pretty consistent state to state. However, the rules on "with cause" vary state to state. In a lot of states, you can't terminate someone for violating a policy if they didn't violate it. These policies are a form of "implied contract".

In other states, the employer can act completely and totally arbitrarily, as long as it is not acting illegally.

This is actually the minority of states.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

>but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me

On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get protections against arbitrary "firings"?

Amazon says they are contractors. The US government (some US States as well) has been pushing pretty hard on that view recently.

Contractors get protections afforded under established contract law and principals of executing a contract in good faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are violating the terms of the contract.

So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would that get me in trouble?

Not the same thing as contracting employees, especially in the eyes of the government.

Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of the license agreement.

Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't conforming to that part of the law then there is the potential for legal liability.

What if paragraph 144 (a) (iii) subsection b of the contract explicitly states that the employee ahem contractor has a 0-day notice period?

People aren’t software.

And a automatic metrics based firing system is probably much fairer than a human. Hard to sue for discrimination when you can prove with code it was based on metrics.

Actually, it will be easier to show any labor law violations with an automated system. Any kind of wrongful termination or bias will be easy to show in the logs.

Note that getting a computer to do something doesn't make it unbiased. People can, and often do, write bias into programs.

And easy to prove when you can show a correlation like the employee being black results in being downrated. Code and especially machine learning systems happily encode our own biases.

Fairer? You mean like Amazons AI recruiting system that was biased against women? You can simply put discrimination into every metric.

> Aren't they contractors?

Question is, according to whom. For example, Uber got hit with a pretty big fine in Italy because in the view of the court, the people working for Uber should be viewed as employees.

I wonder how much these causes are for worker's rights vs some politician trying to win a popularity contest by bashing these "evil tech foreign giants".

But I know nothing about pre-Uber Italian taxi regulations.

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