Hacker News Reader

Comment by habibur | Hacker News Reader

I wish Amazon employs 50% more workforce and then force cut working hours for workers to 8 hours / day. Aka, you can't do overtime even if you want to.

But may be they did it. Or the workers don't want it. Or something else. It's not like Amazon didn't think of it themselves.

View on HN

I worked a string of temp jobs throughout college - usually via temp agencies. I too, did some similar gigs to Amazon warehouse.

Usually, both employee and employer want the overtime - more so for the employee, if the OT pay is attractive. When I worked night shifts in a mail sorting facility (11PM to 11AM), the OT pay was almost 100%

Employees want it because they can make more money without having to balance multiple gigs/jobs, employers because less employees = less paperwork and less people to manage.

And this is why regulation is needed. As long as employees want OT pay because otherwise they can't make a living, they will work (sometimes ridiculous) amounts of OT and companies will exploit that need of the workers. People having to work two full-time jobs or balancing "gig economy" modern slavery just to make rent? That only shows how broken the system is, especially when it comes to rents.

Fair wages and OT bans by law are the only way out - like in Germany, where you are not allowed to work more than 10 hours a day across all your jobs combined.

I don't agree with equating paid employment in a free society with slavery. I think that's distasteful rhetoric, however, the idea of a government imposing restriction on individual citizens' time to eradicate overtime, the only way for a substantial amount of people to get ahead in life, is closer to an inescapable situation than a busy minimum-wage job with overtime available.

> I don't agree with equating paid employment in a free society with slavery.

If people only have the choice between being exploited by Amazon in conditions that are beyond reasonable (e.g. having to piss in bottles, not getting lunch breaks), by "gig employers" shifting entrepreneurial risk towards employees (Uber, but also hospitality that doesn't pay minimum wage so people are depending on tips) or being homeless, then yes it is modern slavery.

Yes, and to add to your comment, in Germany the Employer is responsible for monitoring those 10h limits of its employees. If for example and employee would die in an accident due to falling asleep while driving after more than 10h of work, the employer can be held accountable.

The problem is how do you define „make a living“ and what do you do if someone just wants extra €€€ beyond that?

I make fair money yet I still moonlighted a lot. Should I be allowed to work extra to have money for a sweet bicycle or travelling?

Most people in the US doing two or more jobs are not doing it for extra money, they are doing so for sheer survival.

Poor US. Glad I'm in eastern europe.

Sadly, the titans of industry have become very focused on short time horizons.

Giving employees reasonable working hours, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable pay for the cost of living is trivially the right move if your ambition is to build a lasting monument of human accomplishment and a lasting legacy of human kinship and solidarity.

Well, at one time something like 20% of the deaths in Pittsburgh were happening in Carnegie's steel mills according to the Economist [0]. So it's nothing new, unfortunately. It seems to almost be a pre-condition for getting really really rich.

[0] https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/01/30/pittsbur...

Hey, do you want to become the next In-N-Out Burger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger#Culture) or the next McDonald's? If you want to really reach for the stars (like Bezos is currently trying with Bue Origin), you can't let such trivialities like humane working conditions get in the way...

</sarcasm>

Have you ever worked in a warehouse?

The last thing I wanted at 18 was not being able to earn 50 to 100% more an hour.

Also what your proposing is what the company did to everyone who didn’t work overtime but instead focused on working more than part time hours, so they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits.

Work 2 months at 40 hrs per week? Great, have a month with no hours. Voila, now after 3 months your average hours per week is part time.

Yeah this was a union shop too, so don’t want to hear any nonsense from anyone about how great things would be if a union was skimming an additional 10% off the workers pay.

I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. Unions, mgmt, govt, workers comp, it’s all fucked and skims massively off people doing the work and towards the lifers.

Sorry if this comes off as a personal attack, but it brings me back to that life and the struggles everyone is going through. You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.

>they would qualify for full time hours and thus benefits.

This is not how stuff works in Poland. There's no difference between full-time and part-time benefits, instead, there's a difference between employment contract (UoP) contracting (UZ, UoD) and self-employment.

There are also legal limits on working time, although it's not clear to me which would apply to a warehouse worker.

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/emcc/erm/legis...

Take a look at "Work involving continuity of operation" part. Amazon warehouses have 4x10h system AFAIK.

You can legally opt out of the working time limits in most professions, except for limited few like truck drivers. I'm yet to see an employment contract that doesn't have a clause for the opt out. I work as a programmer contracted for 37.5h/week but of course there's a clause in my contract to say I agree to work more "if needed"(never had to in my 7 years of work here, but still).

Overtime on UoP is permitted, but regulated. You can't do over some limit (like 400 hours yearly); except if you're a doctor.

Interesting. Here it's company to company, you can have benefits part time, but most don't offer it as most part time jobs are low wage. (Less likely to have bennies)

Also, "benefits" mean very little at that level in Poland, since healthcare is state run - and shit, but equally shit. Private healthcare is usually diagnostics only (also, dentistry and some "luxury" operations like LASIK).

Check your privilege. You got 50 to 100% more an hour for working overtime BECAUSE it was a union shop. Yes the union that you resent for 'skimming' was getting you a way more than 10% bump in every paycheck.

If it wasn't a union shop, then you would have been working overtime at the same hourly rate as regular hours.

This is what GP objected to - if there's no incentive for management not to demand excessive overtime, they do it all the time and burn people out. If there are overtime limits or statutory pay increases for overtime, they manage their resources properly.

At least here in the US, minimum 50% pay increase is literally federal law: "Nonexempt workers must be paid overtime pay at a rate of not less than one and one-half times their regular rates of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek" [0].

[0]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/compliance-assistance/handy...

Well that's what the union would say. We did this. You are welcome.

His point is that they are interfering with employer/employees relationship, and skim a percentage. One could argue the unions aren't getting the best deals in the long run, and skim a percentage on top. The amount of corruption those involved get tempted to participate in is significant, hard to know what we don't know. What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits. Perhaps well paid workers figured there is no need for fighting against well paying employers, for discrete reasons. Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there.

> Amazon warehouse employees? If it's so bad, leave. It's just feeding the beast to accept the now well known conditions there.

Unfortunately, the current economic system comes with an air-tight protection from such dangerous ideas: if you don't work, you can't live. So, unless there is some place that deigns to offer better conditions than Amazon warehouses, your choices are to work in these conditions or just die.

> What I observe is that more prestigious jobs get away without unions getting in the way. In tech, there is generally a distrust in political factions forming to supposedly fight for employees benefits.

This happens more in newer industries, where unions are more actively discouraged from the get go. Older prestigious professions do tend to have unions, at least in my country. Dctors have unions. Actors and screen writers have unions. Magistrates (at least those working for the state - prosecutors, judges, public defenders) have unions. I think civil engineering is not unionized, but that is more of an exception.

Even more, some areas in tech are some of the most disfunctional working environments around, and unionization is becoming a hot topic. Look at the recent Activision Blizzard or Ubisoft or Riot Games scandals.

Unions are for sure not the silver bullet that will solve all problems, but just look at the different working conditions across countries and you will see that generally speaking, unions do lead to better working conditions and overall well-being of the employees. After all, that's literally their purpose and why they exist in the first place.

> I wish people who weren’t doing the work would fuck right off with interfering with other peoples working relationships. [..] You feel fucked from every direction at a warehouse.

It's precisely the POINT to interfere, because they cannot fend for themselves. It is literally the reason why unions were invented and why governments of pretty much all advanced nations choose to regulate work: There will always be those who have no choice but to accept the work that is given to them, and unless someone fends for them, they will be exploited.

Try to keep your own emotions out of it, and look at the raw numbers & statistics across countries. The patterns are evidently clear.

I think big corporations like Amazon should be more tightly regulated. They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time, so workers wouldn't have to do overtime, but this is a exploitative and greed driven business. They also don't pay right amount of tax and because of that all workers are taxed more to make up for it.

Quick estimate: amazon retail had about about 8 billion in operating income for the six months ending in just [0] so estimate 16 billion a year. They also had 1,335,000 employees [0]. At least for the US, their starting pay is $18 an hour [1]. 18 * 40 * 48 is $34,560. If we assume 1 million of those are front line workers, just doubling their pay would increase their costs by 34 billion dollars putting them in the red by 18 billion dollars a year. Obviously pay varies by location so not a perfect estimate.

[0]: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-star....

> threads

> in operating income > so estimate 16 billion a year.

Amazon is in control of that number. They could easily quadruple that if they pulled money out of avoidance schemes and cut fake costs.

What? No they cannot. This is the document they report to investors, not the IRS, so it is global across all countries and subsidiaries. And their incentive is to report maximum profits to investors. What avoidance schemes and fake costs are you even thinking of?

> They could easily afford cutting hours by 50% and quadrupling the pay at the same time

Source? Retail business profit margins are 2% to 3%, with labor being the biggest cost.

Without a law requiring all retail businesses to do the same, Amazon retail prices would become wildly uncompetitive to other large retailers.

I wish Amazon would disappear overnight.

Just like with ousting dictators, that would leave a power vacuum which will be filled ASAP by an equally evil corporation, since Amazon proved what one can get away with.

The solution is to legislate companies with despicable practices out of business, but that ship has sailed some time in the '70s -'80s when globalization and unscrupulous capitalism kicked into fifth gear.

Of course, and "obliterating" Amazon would still leave all the other corporations who behave similarly and the broken system they lay their foundation upon intact.

Still, it is fine to me to express frustration using a childish dream for revenge every once in a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com