Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
Where are they getting this information? The average wage in the US is lower, like $13-14.
https://www.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Warehouse_Worker/Ho...
And even then comparing an average to a minimum would still be disingenuous.
The OOH from DOL puts it closer to $14.66/hr which I put a bit more faith in:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/m...
The hourly rate alone doesn’t tell the full story. Many more typical warehouse jobs are truly hourly jobs with minimal or no benefits. He said a lot of them tried to hire people for less than full time to avoid having to provide benefits. For all of the negative press, it sounded like the Amazon Warehouse was the place to be if you wanted a decent warehouse job with benefits in his area.
So, just to add another opinion
I've seen only positive comments (sample size around 3) about working in Amazon's warehouse in Poland
There needs to be naming and shaming of those that perpetuate this practice. I know retailers (Tractor Supply) for cashiers.
If you're doing warehouse work, you are part of the logistics backbone, you deserve not to have your chain jerked around. Arguably, no one should be getting their chain jerked around, but I'll call it a win to purge this pathological HR hacking from another business layer.
It's probably easier to name and promote the few places that don't do the "39.5hr week".
Government, by tieing things that should be universal to mandates to employers who employ a person for a certain number of hours in a week. Which, in addition to promoting this kind of behavior as a cost/utility optimization, encourages a feudal lord-servant relationship between employers and employees rather than a capitalist market-exchange relationship, and necessarily (even ignoring the effect of the optimization incentives) assures that what should be universal is instead limited to a narrower fully-employed class.
If the government provides the benefit universally and taxes to cover the costs, the perverse incentives to limit employment and further narrow access to the intended general benefit is eliminated.
Naming and shaming the people who follow the incentives government creates is pointless; name and shame the government for setting up the broken system of incentives. Any other target is just a perpetual game of whack-a-mole.
Suppose the benefits cost the company the equivalent of $3/hour. Then at the same cost they can either offer a job that pays $15/hour without benefits or a job that pays $12/hour with benefits. They're not idiots; they're going to offer the one that best allows them hire and retain workers.
That it happens to be the one with the higher pay should be telling us something -- that some workers value the money over the benefits.
Which makes a lot of sense. Many people have a family health plan from their spouse's job. They may value the flexibility of choosing when to take unpaid time off instead of working for $12/hour with paid time off, which is a monetary loss equivalent to more than 10 weeks of unpaid time off when working at $15/hour instead. They simply get less from the benefits than they get from being paid the money it costs the employer to provide them.
Stop requiring employers to provide "benefits" that many employees don't want and people wouldn't have to voluntarily work around it like this, at the cost of being unable to work 40 hours a week even if you want to.
But that's not the case today in the US. My point is that the government mandating that full-time jobs provide benefits (which is the case today in the US) doesn't fix the adverse selection problem. All it does is lead to a bunch of jobs right under the cutoff for full-time.
If as an employer you just can't get a break on the rates it costs to insure you, that's a really strong signal you have something wrong. Doing it through the government in theory gives people freedom of moving from employer to employer, but I guarantee you there is some juju that needs characterization in wresting some of the incentive shaping powers of insurers and vesting them in Government.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22465357/amazon-industrial...
> Amazon tells its warehouse employees to think of themselves not as overworked cogs in an enormous, soul-crushing machine, but as “industrial athletes,” and to prepare their bodies for that experience like someone training for a sporting event, according to a pamphlet obtained by Motherboard. The comparison is a troubling euphemism for a company whose workers have almost double the amount of serious injuries as the rest of the warehousing industry and who reportedly are often unable to take bathroom breaks.
> The pamphlet tells employees that some of them will walk up to 13 miles throughout the course of the day, burning an average of 400 calories an hour. It also suggests all sorts of ways to help workers prepare for the athlete life, including changes to their diets and sleep schedules and making sure they’re not dehydrated throughout the day by keeping an eye on the color of their urine. It also suggests that employees buy shoes “at the end of the day when [their] feet are swollen” to avoid tightness and blisters — advice that will be familiar to distance runners or multi-day hikers.
I see a lot of illegal workers in the ER who get injured at work but refuse to fill out the workman's comp forms - you can guarantee that their employers have a zero rate for serious injuries using that metric
[Edit - If you're looking to really improve conditions, maybe focus on the workers who don't show up in the official numbers? Reminds me of the old story about the drunk guy looking for his lost keys by the lamppost, not where he dropped them "because the light is better here"]
We are full on into an unopposed neoliberal world order. The pendulum has swung so far in this direction that an alternative or an opposition to this philosophy simply does not exist anymore in the public sphere.
Amazon isn’t obligated to provide my morbidly obese friend with a job, and he knows that, and he’s doing his best to keep on without destroying his body.
Example: Some routes between Harvard Yard and Long Wharf take you through residential and nightlife areas where a lot of people life, past biotechs, MIT, a few FAANG outposts, over a bridge with great views, across the Esplanade park, past at least a major hospital, financial district, through North End (Italian restaurants), tourist area, and to harbor walk, to sit on Long Wharf and watch the boats and airplanes.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Harvard+Yard,+Massachusetts+...
(Separate from walking, a lot of people bicycle here, and you'll see heavy bikes on some streets during commuter hours, but don't beware that bicyclist safety is so-so here. If you decide to bike instead of walk, watch out for car doors opening into your path, trucks making turns, negligent car drivers, other bikers ignoring road rules, mild resentment of bicyclists, etc. Personally, I just walk, and know that there's a good chance that a driver even going through the busiest Central Square intersection is looking at their phone. :)
Put it this way: Don't eat a 250 cal chocolate bar or take a 60 minute walk? Same impact.
Incidentally I have walked 103 miles in the last 24 days...
Maybe a crappy way if you are obese.
But AFAIK over years walking will strongly help maintain a good weight and keep you healthy. It certainly does help reduce weight and improve fitness compared to just potatoing. You can do more, but as a minimum starting point it is pretty bloody good.
One observation: people are generally not obese in central London and part of the reason is the few km walking per day to get to and from work via the tube.
Deuterated water studies back this up. Humans burn roughly the same amount of calories active or passive. The body only shunts the available calories around.
Now, exercise has lots of documented benefits. Weight loss just isn't one of them.
Well into obese (but less than 300) and it’s really not an issue at all — walking is a very light activity (and far easier than standing). Also notably, this habit has not lead to any weight-loss, or perhaps I eat to make up for it.
Ask me to run however and I’m dying in short order.
This really isn't that much. The average Disneyland visitor probably walks 5 miles per day. A nurse might walk 4 miles in a shift. I'd expect most people who aren't overweight would be able go adapt to 5 miles per day pretty quickly, and 10 is fairly doable.
What a bizarre comparison. Most people are pretty tired after visiting Disneyland. You also don’t do that 300 times a year.
One example was dog food stored under a low platform so people needed to Cary 50lb bags while bent over. It’s possible to do that safely, but when you’re tired and in a hurry it’s easy to hurt yourself doing that.
Lifting heavy objects, or having heavy objects fall on you is apparently common.
However, if you look at the table below that, even when you differentiate to more specific occupation, median (and certainly mean) wages are above $15. Perhaps there's a further differentiation to "hand laborers and materials movers" that brings this number down further, per the other BLS link in this thread.
I'd be curious about regional differences though, e.g. in Bessemer https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/economy/amazon-w...
Could just be a calculation error. If you just saw indeed's average total yearly salary that would show slightly over $15 an hour but wouldn't factor in overtime hours.
Not all sources support that claim: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/warehouse-w...
That’s probably the discrepancy, fwiw.
$14.33 / hour
Avg. Base Hourly Rate (USD)
Possibly this is true in don't places with Amazon, but the article doesn't make the argument. The closest they get is saying that Amazon is a large employer in Seattle, but that's not enough -- the city is large enough that there are tons of non-Amazon options.
For tax purposes, even things like free lunch are considered paymeny aswell.
Free meals are allowed under certain guidelines, which seem to be written in a way that generally lets companies like Google skate right up to the edge and not go over it (AFAIK). Things like loyalty points and rebates on business expenses are similarly ignored.
It's not. You just have to pay taxes on it.
You might want it because the company paying you "fake" money gives you more than the competitor that gives you legal tender. The company might also give you access to discounted goods/services, which makes each dollar of the "fake" money more valuable. There's another comment that goes to this in more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948860
This way I can guarantee quite a nice chunk of revenue for the whole foods store that is opened there. And I effectively subsidize it.
Concrete example: Company sells widgets for $12, of which $2 is profit. Then as long as the employee price is at least $10 there are no tax implications for the employees. If it were $9 they would owe tax on $1 per widget bought, etc.
That said, some companies will pay the relevant taxes for you, or at least try to by guessing at your marginal rate...
Which makes company towns illegal, hence Amazon is not creating company towns...
I can offer you 10 chickens to dig a trench, nothing illegal about that. You'd have to pay income tax tho, and the IRS does not accept (fractions of) chickens.
It's like "lol I read the wikipedia article about this!"
anyway, great way to save costs, extend runway and get massive tax deductions at the same time. the best tax deductions are ones that don't require you spending your fiat dollars, so this is pretty high up there.
How can you staff a warehouse for $15/hr in places were a studio starts at $1250/mo?
I wouldn't be one bit surprised of Amazon starts getting into real estate, offering employees monthly "rent vouchers".
There are cases like remote locations where an employer can provide housing tax-free but likely not near an expensive city.
So the landlords might decide if they want to not rent to Amazon employees or agree to take less from them but keep the high listing price for others.
It was used at the villain backdrop in the 007 movie.
The history of the island is that it was owned by Mitsubishi mining company during Japan’s industrial revolution thru World War II. There they mined coal from the seabed.
Apparently, some 40% of miners died. There also used forced labor from prisoners of war. Japan is filled with UNESCO heritage sites, and this site is one of them, but it’s bid was met with criticism.
In these small towns in Japan, the industrialists and barons have statues erected for them, but the story of the common worker is often lost and not presented during these tours.
I guess this is the difference between a literal v. figurative interpretation of the title. The article itself is speaking to Amazon's efforts to sustain its hiring pipeline in the face of colossal churn, describing activities such as sponsoring secondary schools while installing their own branding as a condition of sponsorship.
> > A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.
> > Students and staff members expressed pride in being associated with the company. Amazon partnered with the school as part of its five-year anniversary in the Inland Empire, donating $50,000 to start the pilot program, the giant sweepstakes-style Amazon check displayed prominently at the classroom entrance. The students had already taken field trips to tour the nearby Amazon warehouse.
> A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”
Further (and quite interesting) reading on the concept of a company town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Isn't this very banner in the outfield of little league games in America? As in, companies big and small ask for their branding to be visible when they sponsor things.
I think there's a material difference between a monopolist trying to impress its values upon the audience and a market participant trying to attract some of the audience.
In the movie 'Sorry To Bother You' by Boots Riley, they have an Amazon-like entity called 'WorryFree' that does exactly this.
I'm not sure we actually want this (Amazon or other big employers making housing for laborers they employ), especially since these workers are often not labor aristocrats, and therefore will have little bargaining power.
Even in the 19th century, workers had a significant amount of bargaining power, and company towns were in fact an attempt to improve working conditions, in light of workers' sensitivity to high prices.
Without things like company stores and company housing, what was found to happen is that an independent store owner or housing provider would take advantage of their monopoly status, and raise prices, leading to workers quitting. So just like oil rigs have their own company restaurant on-site, isolated 19th century worksites had their own company businesses on-site to ensure their workers had competitively priced goods available to them.
Companies did this at the time because workers in the 19th century were aware of the comparative wages/living-standards on offer, and had enough mobility to leave sites that didn't offer the best available in the market at that time. Compared to the late 19th century, workers today have enormous mobility, and ready internet-based knowledge of market options, so what would happen if company towns emerged today would not be exploitive.
Sure, as long as they can externalize this cost, they won't do this, but in the Bay Area Google determined it costs them less to to fight for housing projects and fund those, than pay the enormous overhead for getting their employees living there.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/04/google-backs-three-ba...
Is there anything positive about company towns? Maybe they're better than towns with no jobs, but I'm not even sure about that..
Does it? I've never heard of companies not paying the workers any money, just because they have their own town.
> being unable to change jobs without having to move
That is true for many job changes. If it is a big deal for someone they can just not join such a company.
> ( with the associated inability to refuse whatever the employer throws at you, however hard/illegal/dangerous)
Huh? Having a company town doesn't grant the company absolute authority. They still have to abide by the laws of the land.
Yes, because it's now illegal, at least in the US where this practice was pervasive.
> That is true for many job changes. If it is a big deal for someone they can just not join such a company.
There's a world of difference between there are few options for jobs without changing your field ( e.g. working as a waiter/waitress when in a financial emergency) and literally having zero jobs outside of a company where you live. One is " we probably have to move if i piss off my boss", the other is "we need to move".
> Huh? Having a company town doesn't grant the company absolute authority. They still have to abide by the laws of the land
That's extremely naive. Everyone in that town works for the company or has immediate family working for it. How many people would dare refuse or blow the whistle on illegal activities when their lives would be uprooted as a consequence? The power dynamic is very heavily tilted towards the employer.
Oh, I'm surprised that is allowed on HN.
Like one step above tabloids.
For a better analysis of Amazon's entrenched relationship with the Inland Empire in California, check out Erika Hayasaki's writing for the NY Times Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/magazine/amazon-workers-e...
Headline could read “Company turns up providing much needed high paying jobs to region left devastated by failed industries (steel, manufacturing, …”. Or you could say “Evil company moved in and sets up company town.”
Honestly agnostic to this whole thing but it’s interesting to watch efforts to spin things one way or another.
> it’s interesting to watch efforts to spin things one way or another
If you can’t spend your entire life improving yourself from the circumstances of your birth then you don’t have a class system, you have a caste system.
In America, class has always been something you can buy your way into. Take a trip to Newport some time, and visit the mansions of the robber barons: each is stuffed with mediocre classical and neoclassical mimicry. The purpose of these ostentatious displays was to prove to each's neighbors that they were sufficiently landed, wealthy, and worthy of their class designation.
Edit: But of course note: wealth is neither necessary nor sufficient for class; it only makes it much, much more accessible.
Midwit theories of Utopia always seem to single in on one thing they can turn into a boogieman, and ignore the rest of the complex system.
If you disagree, why don't you just hire people yourself and tell them to do stuff? Easy money from exploiting labour, no?
If you want to call it exploitation than call it exploitation. I'm fine with exploitation if the definition of exploitation is "jobs"
Jacobin is left Breitbart.
I'm reminded of the old Soviet joke than under capitalism, man exploits man, but under socialism it's the other way around.
In the ideal Jacobin world, all towns would be company towns ("owned by the people"). Please keep that in mind.
Henry Ford's ideal for manufacturing workers was long term employment, high commitment. The modern tech industry's ideal for logistical work is a fluid, low commitment workforces, with "gig economy" at the extreme end. I don't think amazon want to arrive at a place where the average employee has been working in the warehouse for a decade.
Is there an argument for not having Amazon support the local school system?
I understand that working conditions are rarely ideal. Many would prefer to enjoy leisure and collect a paycheck as the ideal source of income. Jobs pay because workers need an incentive to provide labor.
What exactly would JacobinMag.com's alternative to Amazon employment look like?
Why aren't they providing this alternative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
Because Bezos/Amazon spent years building barriers to entry?
Because people's preference for shopping at Amazon, like their preference for shopping at malls 30-40 years earlier, began the disintegration of other forms of retail work?
Because "fulfillment" centers (are you fulfilled yet?) benefit from being in locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live. They need only space and transportation (typically highway) access, and there's no need for there to be other excellent reasons for vibrant human communities to be in the vicinity.
Because employee-owned business (a Jacobin and personal favorite) face numerous obstacles in the US due to legal, political and cultural factors.
Because it's the entire economy, not just Amazon, that is collapsing into "low wage jobs that we don't have robots for yet" and "high wage jobs that can be done from anywhere" (plus, well paid skilled manual labor). When the alternative to one low wage job that will eventually be automated is another low wage job that will eventually be automated, there's not a lot of motivation to create that alternative.
What barriers? Is amazon lobbying local governments to prevent competitor warehouses from being built? Or is they're just so ahead of everyone in terms of service/price?
>Because people's preference for shopping at Amazon, like their preference for shopping at malls 30-40 years earlier, began the disintegration of other forms of retail work?
People's preferences change. If something better comes along, you have to adapt as well, not complain that your competitor is "disintegrat[ing]" your business model.
>Because "fulfillment" centers (are you fulfilled yet?) benefit from being in locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live.
From the rest of the argument it looks like you're trying to paint this as an advantage for amazon, but to me it seems more like a disadvantage. If amazon warehouses are located in "locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live", doesn't that mean they'll have an harder time finding workers and you having an easier time finding workers?
Also, I'm not sure how applicable your claim is across all of amazon. In a rural area your argument would make sense (ie. warehouse in the middle of nowhere rather than in a population center), but in metropolitan areas they're almost always surrounded by houses (eg. https://goo.gl/maps/bfT3ePP1dfupKnuo6)
>Because employee-owned business (a Jacobin and personal favorite) face numerous obstacles in the US due to legal, political and cultural factors.
I'm not sure why it has to be employee owned. It seems like you're repeating the nirvana fallacy that gp was talking about.
It's likely that you don't know that I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. I don't want to spend time here going into all the ways that Bezos sought to create barriers to entry for competitors, but Brad Stone's two books on the company get into this.
> People's preferences change. If something better comes along,
People in general are very bad at carrying out long term analysis of their preference-based decisions. People went to malls while professing to love Main St., most of them not realizing that the former would eventually kill the economics of the latter. Likewise, people's preference for online shopping doesn't actually amount to a desire to kill bricks-n-mortar retail, even though that is (likely) the eventual result. People's preferences generally express short-term feelings, rather than longer term rational analyses of how their lives, homes and societies may be affected by their choices.
> If amazon warehouses are located in "locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live", doesn't that mean they'll have an harder time finding workers and you having an easier time finding workers?
That's why there's an article on HN (Jacobin, really) title "Amazon is creating company towns across the United States".
> but in metropolitan areas they're almost always surrounded by houses
Most of amzn's fulfillment centers are rural or exurban. Most of amzn's current development plans are focused on rural locations.
And I described this in order to make the point that rural areas are almost always more difficult places to generate economic alternatives than cities.
> I'm not sure why it has to be employee owned
The question was about alternatives. Jacobin authors probably don't see much difference trading one multi-billionaire CEO for another, so I was mentioning the most practical genuine alternative to the sort of economic entity that amzn represents.
> Why aren't they providing this alternative?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
Why are you opposed to this critique? You can offer critique without needing to provide alternatives. From your questions it sounds like you yourself are falling victim to the 'just world fallacy'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
If you have/had kids, would you be excited to hear the following story from them about their day? Probably not, yet this is exactly what's happened in marginalized communities.
From the article:
""A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.
Students and staff members expressed pride in being associated with the company. Amazon partnered with the school as part of its five-year anniversary in the Inland Empire, donating $50,000 to start the pilot program, the giant sweepstakes-style Amazon check displayed prominently at the classroom entrance. The students had already taken field trips to tour the nearby Amazon warehouse."
A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”
The behemoth is here, producing not only profit but people, too. That entails corporate indoctrination, social estrangement, and profound alienation from one’s labor, which is particularly meaningless as one breaks one’s body to get so many goods to people’s doors."
If there's an alternative where employees could earn more for less labor, that might be a good opportunity to explore. Not just for the employees, but any potential entrepreneurs as well.
There are several areas where I feel critical of Amazon's policies. Voluntary employment isn't one of them.
Nor am I a fan of the public education system. If I found myself in that situation, it would be a teachable moment.
I won't argue against the employer aspect, because many of these jobs are in dilapidated towns and they are often better than the alternatives (unemployment/workmans comp claims or fast food versus getting scheduled work with great benefits).
How dare they do this travesty without democratic oversight. Clearly the best way forward is to regulate them so that they are on a level playing field with other democratically overseen government services.
You do know Amazon has been caught union busting right? I'm not so sure what your definition of democracy is when workers can't voice their concerns.
How surprising that employers who pay above-market wages do not wish to be extorted further. All the modern propaganda says they have to welcome this benevolent expression of democratic freedoms!
Wow, I’m not even gonna comment on this first paragraph. I only have one question: do you live in the US?
> How surprising that employers who pay above-market wages do not wish to be extorted further.
Employers in our current system always pay their employees less than what they produce for them, it’s called profit.
Are you really claiming that tech workers extort Silicon Valley companies because they get paid a lot of money? Wow I didn’t expect that argument.
This seems like an argument in bad faith but I'll bite.
You are ignoring the pre-existing power imbalance between employer and employee, where the employer holds authoritarian control of production and the lives of employees. Cartels and market manipulation are mechanisms used by those with existing autocratic power to grow and strengthen their control over production and people, while unions try to balance this power by giving workers a seat at the table. I think it's pretty obvious that they are not the same thing
You are making the moral assumption that just because someone has a better negotiating position in a situation there is a moral obligation to intervene in some centralized way to “correct the imbalance.”
I am denying your assumption and presenting a different point of view which has no less of a claim to morality or truth than yours.
in your original comment you said:
> When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”
My comment was simply explaining the reason why this is the case
I guess the town shuts down, right?
1) With the perspective that this feature of how society operates can and should be changed; 2) With the perspective that this is simply how society works and you can adapt or die.
Either can be viewed as more tractable than the other (probably quite correctly depending on one's circumstances).
To adopt the former approach may mean that you are faced with the dilemma of whether or not to override the rights of detractors and those who disagree.
Even if you adopt the second approach, you may encounter a similar dilemma, e.g. you will decide to order your shoes from a company with operations in a third world nation paying lower local wages, or buy via Amazon despite reservations about their practices.
Whatever approach is adopted, awareness of what choices exist and what consequences they bring will be required.
To develop the tools that will enable this awareness and measurement is a massive problem on its own because of the complexity of interrelated systems, events, consequences and disparate interests. It may not even be possible.
But when there is no objective or even widely accepted 'true north' for decision making, the trend to deepening inequality is likely to continue.
"Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”
The behemoth is here, producing not only profit but people, too. That entails corporate indoctrination, social estrangement, and profound alienation from one’s labor..."
You kind of need to be steeped into the literary culture to "fluent." Reading it, it feels like I'm "looking up" the words in my memory to follow the meaning. I suppose it's not too different from the "tech talk" dialect we're more used to on HN: "disruptive potential of this novel user space paradigm" or whatnot.
"Old timey" in this context might translate into "written by someone who is aware of a century or three's thinking and writing about the relationships between labor and capital and how they impact social and economic structure".
Anyway, my point wasn't a criticism of the content, or anything really. Just pointing out that its clunky and verbose sounding, to my rusty old ears.
The relationships between labor and capital are not obvious to the naked eye, and are subject to a lot of different kinds of analysis. Trying to describe them with language from outside the field can end up missing the critical points.
Re: The relationships between labor and capital are not obvious.
Parts of that relationship are pretty damn obvious: people work for the owners of companies.
The only accessible part of this article quotes another article describing (in plain, un-jargonized english) about a local high school that teaches Amazon corporate culture, with financial sponsorship by amazon. Without that part, no one would have a hope of deciphering what the hell Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization,” whether or not I had spent my teenage years as a member of a red lace youth group.
This style of writing tells you more about the author than the thing they're writing about, and its totally meaningless to the uninitiated. Once you get used to it, you see every particular as derivative of the greater, abstract truth with no space for novel or dissident interpretations. That's not my opinion, it's George Orwell's, a lifelong socialist.
This isn't a criticism of Marx. It is a criticism of Marxism. 200 years ago, "alienation from the product of labour" meant something when he used it. It described a process that was taking place att. If you're "analysing" Amazon's influence on towns where they are the biggest employer, it means nothing. It certainly means nothing to workers.
You can't think of relevant ways of describing alienation, because the thing you are trying to describe isn't happening now. It happened hundreds of years ago. All that's left is a psycho-economic abstraction and a history lesson.
Say I coin a term to describe the digitisation of workplaces, WFH, and such. Call it "workplace etherealisation." We can use that in "analysis" of labour-capital dynamics. In 200 years, "workplace etherealisation" and our analysis probably won't mean anything anymore. Or rather, it will be a trivial, clunky way of describing the world from the perspective of past people.
That was my initial point. This article isn't written to have meaning to amazon workers, or readers beyond a particular circle. It's written to have meaning "in-theory," deep inside abstract theories that the author is interested in for abstract treasons that have nothing to do with workers. It's mastabatory.
The concept is simple:
Most people today are put in the unusual position (anthropologically speaking) of creating things they do not themselves sell. From this flows a lot of consequences for social conflict, politics, mental health, etc, something we should try to understand.
Today it is still used, because it's part of abstract theory, to which other abstract theory relates, in ways that are entirely meaningless outside of this theory. What's the non-alienated version of an amazon worker, a door-to-door salesman?
>> From this flows a lot of consequences for social conflict, politics, mental health, etc.
Whether or not this was ever true, it was at least a legible statement 200 years ago. Today, it's a completely meaningless, mumbling piety.
> What's the non-alienated version of an amazon worker?
An Amazon worker that can exclusively determine who gets to be on the board of directors.
>> From this flows a lot of consequences for social conflict, politics, mental health, etc.
> Whether or not this was ever true, it was at least a legible statement 200 years ago. Today, it's a completely meaningless, mumbling piety.
Is your contention that alienation is _not_ one source (among many) of social conflict? Certainly history is not on your side here.
I contend that in the early 19th century, the term made for good rhetoric. IE, you could use it to describe the world and convey ideas. If it hadn't been coined then, but someone coined it now, it would be weak rhetoric. An uncompelling abstraction that doesn't describe anything, convince anyone or explain anything... like a joke that needs to be explained. No one would give it any attention. It's not even wrong, it's just irrelevant. Marx was wrong about lots of things, right about other things. He was rarely irrelevant though, at least until his later years.
I'd also point you to the fact that this kind of mumbo jumbo is why an amazon union vote failed a few weeks ago. The corporate culture BS that amazon (the point of this article) is teaching in schools now makes more sense and has more meaning to workers than the marxist theology that this article is written in. The present is not on your side.
I'll finally contend that a young Karl Marx himself would not be writing or talking like this, or reading Jacobin. He had new ideas, that made sense in his time. He got those ideas by observing the world, not arcane language written by some 15th century philosopher. That's what conservatives do. It ain't radical.
Workers don't want to hear about their alienation. They want a raise, dignity, childcare and a stake in the game. They don't want to be surveilled, or fired by an email generated by an NN.
>> The term remains easy to understand
The term is 100% unintelligible.
All of those things are encompassed by a single word—alienation. They are all a consequence of a loss of control over your working life.
IDK if I'd call the jargon high-specificity though. I'd say that it tends to be broad and abstract. "Suburban and exurban socialization" isn't highly specific.
As I mentioned though, it's not very different from the tech world jargon that's more common on HN. IE, when we talk about "disruptive," "democratizing," "platform" or somesuch. These are loaded terms too.
I was just noting that with concepts like "alienation," it's hard to imagine explaining it to someone without referring to past centuries, artisan candlemakers or somesuch.
Th most common jobs in these places are being intensely researched by roboticists. As soon as it's feasible and economical to replace the people with robots they will. For some of the jobs, that could come in a matter of months, or only a few years. It will continue.
I am going to tie this into something more controversial. Basic income. And I think even more controversial is that we may need to change how money fundamentally works in order to make basic income work.
https://mises.org/wire/guaranteed-basic-income-solution-robo...
>The UBI advocates are correct that some jobs are replaced when capital goods do the work that was done by labor. Robots are a capital good. If the same amount of output can be produced by a mix of more robots and fewer people, an industry will not offer as much employment as before. Does it follow that when one industry uses fewer workers there is no need for their services anywhere else? How would the advocates of this view explain the enormous growth in the labor force since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago—a period characterized by increasing capital intensity?
They don't have much work nowadays since their jobs in all industries were replaced with automation.
This made me think of the movie 'The Island' where in one scene, somewhere in the beginning of the movie, they show us the work our protagonists do in their community. There are tubes coming out of the wall on one side of the room and out the other; tubes which have a flowing liquid inside which the protagonists and their friends are trained to perform an action on, which is essential for some kind of process.
Only later do we find out the awful purpose of these tubes.
There is an increasing level of alienation that is hard to describe to anyone who has been lucky enough to be a labor aristocrat for most of their lives. I honestly think everyone around us is capable of so much more. Our current system, through Intellectual Property types such as copyrights and trade secrets, has made it hard to ascend 'intellectual ladders' because the intellectual ladders used by those in power have kicked them away (after they were used by them). In other words: there is a lack of diversity of methods and approaches and opportunities due to the commodification and privatization of knowledge (i.e. technology and science overall). [1],[2]
I believe the human needs for growth and play are foundational to a happy society, and in modern society, those needs go massively unmet, and the working class is being squeezed and squeezed like never before (not to mention the workers in the global south who I would argue are exploited to an even greater extent [3]).
It's also ironic that Amazon calls their production facilities 'Fulfillment Centers', because the most important people they do not create 'fulfillment' for are their workers... you know, the people who are actually creating all the value:
> If class is a social relation and the working class is made and remade daily, that formation is increasingly happening inside the massive structures that house Amazon’s warehouses, where workers face capital embodied in the whir of machinery and barking managers and the beeps of the scanner in their hands, prodding them to pick up the pace. It is happening in the parking lots outside, where people smoke and linger and chat and dread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753856
[2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[3] https://anti-imperialism.org/2012/09/18/understanding-and-ch...
You sure that's all that's needed? I am continually surprised when someone claims the internet is some all-mighty resource-rich network. It wasn't the internet that made world class scientists, it was access to privileged firewalled networks: capitalist universities, as well as state-funded yet privately controlled multinationals (more and more through trade secret law [1]), which 'own' and house - read: hoard and violently withhold - the sum total of all human knowledge (commons which belongs to all of earth's children, not just ones with rich mommies and daddies).
When someone like Aaron Swartz is driven to his death for campaigning for open access, it shows that he has come upon something that wants to stay hidden: the structures and dynamics of outdated knowledge hierarchies. Have you read his short and concise manifesto? It's an awesome (and better) articulation of what I am talking about here. [2]
That story about the Indian man is not empirical data, it's an example of an anecdotal story that helps to keep the working class distracted, stopping them from seeing how the system actually works. Stories like that are 'magical voluntarist' fantasies that end up alienating more people than they inspire. [3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805062
[2] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
There are still specialized fields guarded by academic gatekeepers. However even there, knowledge is more widely available than before.
Hypothetically speaking, if a researcher progressed to a high level in a traditionally academic field, the term "world class scientist" is a bit loaded. The rank of "world class" would most likely be determined by academic or other large institutions. If he acquired the knowledge without the receipts from an institution, he could easily be excluded. Therefore the gatekeeping to achieve this status is not strictly one of knowledge acquisition. It becomes a bit self-referential.
>That story about the Nepali is not empirical data. It's an anecdotal story that keeps the working class distracted, and stops them from seeing how the system...
I disagree strongly. It is that kind of can't do attitude that stops people from even starting.
"How can I ever succeed, when the deck is stacked against me? The world is unfair, therefore I shouldn't even bother to try. Better to go back to wage based employment. I blame the system!"
If that's the view you take, you'll never manifest success outside of the institutional paradigms you observe. No, the world isn't fair. The world has never been fair. Some will always have an advantage. That doesn't mean that Internet doesn't provide amazing opportunities for those who are willing. If you want different results, it stands to reason that you'll have to do something different. It is possible to escape day to day drudgery if you are willing, motivated and prepared to fail repeatedly.
I didn't claim we weren't?
> Information is more generally available. If you want to publish online or create software, nearly every resource is available. The Internet is its own paradigm of value.
I'd claim it's actually harder to be productive and to be exposed to the real problems facing the world. Today all of it is all hoarded, 'owned' and locked away by a small group of people. Just look at Shell oil company accurately predicting the devastating impacts of oil production and use back in the 1980’s, or big co’s burying of the early electric car (shown in ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’).
Instead of the magical wonderful world capitalist firms promise in their advertisements, we live in a single-use non-modular black-box nature-killing hellworld.
There is no universal invitation to follow your curiosity, no modularity and access to non-scarce resources (knowledge), despite us living with the most advanced technology we’ve ever had.
All this knowledge commodification means people are kept from understanding the physics (or just, science, overall) of everyday tools and products, leading to high levels of alienation [1] (not to mention all the mental health effects of all this coercion and domination).
I believe in a future where we can learn anything about anything. A world where we can physically take part in a myriad of different (democratic) open source production systems and processes, throughout our long lives. A world where our material accounting systems accurately reflect real-world scarcity, and not systems that upholds arbitrary laws that make life-saving tools, technology and science artificially scarce (and 'owned' by a very small group of people), and tries to shame and intimidate people for making a copy (e.g. shaming people in campaigns like: "You Wouldn’t Steal A Car. Piracy, It's a Crime") [2].
Today we live in a world where the tools humans need to work together are black boxes owned and created by billionaire property 'owners'. This is why I'm excited about the growth of the DWeb, because it's all about agent centricity. Some projects are starting to enable open apps whose public functions are hashed to create unique app DNA's that can evolve organically as the apps are implemented and used. It enables an ecology of distributed micro-service apps.
We need to take back not just the internet, but the world. This is about creating human-friendly living spaces for all. Bike-able cities. Green spaces and gardens everywhere for kids and adults to play. Not a world where certain types of work are made artificially scarce and tied down to a specific place (e.g. knowledge work in Silicon Valley) because of a violent archaic claim system (the ‘Intellectual Property' system).
> the term "world class scientist" is a bit loaded
‘World class‘ was bad word choice. I mean anyone with a STEM degree from a global north university that provided them access to the resources which are locked away for 99.999% of the working class. Someone who can command a big salary (as they're part of the labor aristocracy), as well as work on exciting research projects (much less alienating work).
[1] Gabor Maté on alienation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs39tNLQss8
[2] that’s why I am excited about Valueflo.ws by Mikorizal, and the holographic chain framework by the MetaCurrency project.
Beyond that, without structural change, it won't help you to become a programmer unless most people can't become a programmer.
This assumes you're not willing to do what others cannot or will not do. Innovation and developing your own ideas is key. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries industrial goods were only as good as the purposes they were applied to. The difference is that those industrial goods required greater investment and labor.
Today you can use a computer, develop products and services, market them online and collect revenue with only your own labor. It is a cottage industry with worldwide reach.
Can you give some examples? "Intellectual Property" isn't preventing you from learning programming and earning 6 figures.
I honestly believe you might be missing the bigger picture here.
"Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. [...] These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, in ways similar to industries that were nationalised in the past — and yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control.
This is the dark side of Silicon Valley, the uncomfortable reality that lurks beneath its glitzy exterior. Whatever its emancipatory narrative, Silicon Valley is facilitating a system where wealth concentrates, labour is disciplined, the public sphere is diminished, and global inequities are reinforced."
From earlier in the article:
"The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]
My comment isn't about me being able to 'learn programming and earn 6 figures', as you put it, it's about the overarching system, laws and culture that surround us all.
This also feels relevant:
""Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded. Experts in any field rarely want people to understand what they do, and generally enjoy putting people down." [ - Ted Nelson]
Computer Lib was published in 1974, and it’s kind of eerie that those words ring so true today. The tech industry that grew out of this knowledge still feels like a priesthood, one dominated by men who are either white or a specific kind of Asian, who define the parameters of what’s considered “real” tech talent according to what they themselves are good at. They hire people with similar academic backgrounds, programming journeys, and knack for solving brainteaser questions in interviews as themselves.
The worst of them outright resent the existence of coding bootcamps and other efforts to get underrepresented groups into tech, seeing them as a threat to their own privileged status, even if they wouldn’t admit it as such. They’re not real programmers, so the reasoning goes, if they didn’t go through the desert of learning how to code in the days before GitHub and StackOverflow and Codecademy, when you asked for help on mailing lists and IRC channels and usually expected no response. Unlike the high priests who discovered tech long before they knew how lucrative it could be, these newcomers are motivated primarily by the money, and that makes their qualifications suspect. For many of them, it’s just a job - the worst possible sin to those who believe you should do what you love, and who perhaps spent some of their most formative years in social isolation in pursuit of that love.
I definitely went through a phase, probably entwined with my Ayn Rand phase, where I wholeheartedly believed this view. It took a while before I saw it for the self-aggrandising gatekeeping it is. It’s similar to what Alex Williams has called “negative solidarity”: a requirement that other people suffer as you have, not because you believe that it will be better for them, but because it makes you feel better about yourself. The most common form of gatekeeping that occurs in tech isn’t driven by a noble desire to build better products by keeping out the less capable; it’s driven by a much more selfish desire to implicitly validate the choices and skills and perspectives of those already doing well in the industry." [2]
I believe the fundamental problem we are facing is one of over-correction with constant meddling. We simply are making more "humans" than we know what to do with or that the market can bear. Simplistically I'd say this devalues the value of our labour way more than we're comfortable occurring, but at the same time we're too uncomfortable to say that maybe we shouldn't be allowing our population to grow unchecked like this.
It's a multi-generational ponzi scheme that we are running in order to make this all work, and we're starting to see the gaps form. What we see makes us uncomfortable, but we can't describe why or form a concrete opinion against it. And goodness we definitely can't tell people that it's not their fundamental right to impose obligations on the rest of us to take care of the poor new souls they bring into this world without thinking it through.
Will they have their own money only usable there and pay their local employees with it too ? /s
This smells more of medieval style feudalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosignano_Solvay
You'll need to use the italian wikipedia for more details:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosignano_Solvay
The actual "Solvay village", i.e. the Company Town:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villaggio_Solvay
was built in the '20's and '30's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight
In what way? Are people obligated to work for amazon?
Look to Walmart- America's largest supermarket chain, and America's second largest employer (second only to the U.S. government). Rural America is a sea of "Walmart towns", where the best employment is the only employment.
>Rural America is a sea of "Walmart towns", where the best employment is the only employment.
Are you being hyperbolic by saying that amazon/walmart is the "only" or "only viable" place of employment? Are there literally no other places to work? If you're being hyperbolic, at what point does it count as "medieval style feudalism"? I searched around on wikipedia for what "feudalism" is, and despite my best efforts I can't pin down on a good definition. However, it definitely doesn't seem to be "one entity provides most of the employment in an area".
This article is a real bummer.
Now, people think that is distasteful and that businesses should be doing all kinds of things like charity work and soup kitchens and funding housing developments and schools and so on so forth. This is called "stakeholder capitalism". It produces the result you describe.
Since capitalism is now international, nation states are losing the ability to regulate it. This would lead to collapse though, eventually, and the international capitalist class is recognizing that. Recently the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed a minimum corporate tax of 15%. I foresee that most law and regulations governing the business and financial world will be decided by international NGOs and banking organizations, not nation states.
However those organizations have no real interest in the well being of the working class, so I would predict that inequality will continue to increase and capitalism will become more and more authoritarian and the capitalist class will become more and more isolated from the workers, to the point that they will become unaware of the suffering of the mass of the people. Small businesses of any kind will be gone; only large institutions will survive and diverse competition will be replaced by a series of necrotic monopolies.
At some point in the future this will either become unbearable and a global revolution will occur, leading to some unified government, maybe democratic, maybe not, or the corporate class will have good enough tools of control that a grinding dismal stability will be achieved.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
This. These companies bring a greater level of prosperity to the locals as well. In my experience, far more exploitation occurs in cities.
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