Empathy for other human beings who will have negative outcomes if for pointless reasons their employment is turned off by a computer.
In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the only game in town for labor.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Amazon certainly didn't help their bottom line, but it wasn't the nail in the coffin either.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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."...
For the poor, losing a job arbitrarily, with no protections, even cultural, can be massively life disrupting.