Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

More in-depth article on The Guardian here:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/18/amazo...

Most importantly, they only need to pay ~$27/hr immediately.

This seems OK at first, as it is above the ~$25/hr minimum wage for casuals (note to non-Aussies: this figure includes a 25% "casual loading" to account for the fact that there is no sick leave, annual leave or guaranteed minimum hours).

However, this doesn't consider the fact that the drivers supply their own vehicle as well as out-of-pocket expenses for fuel, maintenance and general depreciation on the vehicle itself. When you take these additional costs into consideration, that initial ~$27 looks closer to an illegally low ~$20/hr.

The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law as well as given a free pass to continue for another 3 years (despite literally being Amazon and therefore having the working capital to pay their drivers properly immediately) looks like it's a win for them.

Australia's biggest and most profitable publicly owned company certainly doesn't pay their drivers anywhere near that to do the exact same job (literally delivering packages).

A note for people thinking this is groundbreaking, it will be when it applies to the vastly larger competitor who pays hefty dividends each year to the federal budget.

Are you talking about Australia Post? If so, the numbers I’m finding are $27-$28/h part time gigs that include leave etc. Are you seeing different numbers or have I got the wrong company?

Right company. And unless things have changed in the last 12 months, a sizeable number of their delivery drivers are contractors, not part timers (though they do exist)

Not an Oz Post fanboy at all, but in the interest of comparing oranges with oranges, don't they supply vehicles? And what is their casual rate?

I see plenty of auspost delivery drivers working in vans hired from hertz etc. I've always figured that they were contractors who hired the van for tax reasons.

From a business standpoint I would think it'd be cheaper short term for AusPost to rent Hertz vans than own and maintain those assets themselves. Especially over the past 2 years when it's been impossible to buy new vehicles in Australia at a normal price or timeframe.

> The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law

Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes? By definition, loopholes are perfectly legal. They may be against the spirit of the law, but they are still legal.

Loopholes are legal in theory but not necessarily in practice. They could have just as easily ruled that the use of a private truck requires compensation on top of pay.

If you declare loop holes some how illegal you introduce arbitrary judgement.

All judgement is arbitrary

Often they are exploring bugs in the legal system which unsurprisingly give arbitrary output when litigated.

For what it's worth, etymology of the word "arbitrary":

late Middle English (in the sense ‘dependent on one's will or pleasure, discretionary’): from Latin arbitrarius, from arbiter ‘judge, supreme ruler’, perhaps influenced by French arbitraire .

Literally comes from the Latin word for a judge!

>Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes?

You answered it yourself. They're against the spirit of the law.

In any other circumstance where rules or obligations are enforced, exploiting loopholes is completely unacceptable behaviour.

(To clarify, I'm not arguing that the judge made the wrong decision in this particular case. Instead, I don't think this type of behaviour should be tolerated by the system at all.)

In a system based on the rule of law the only way to make people stop using loopholes is to close them by changing the law. People are entitled to do what's in their best interest by staying within the law to the limit. If the issue is one of interpretation of the law then courts are there to decide.

This is entirely opposite of how our courts are designed and obliged to work. Please educate yourself.

How does this lead to anything other than the justice system being able to selectively target entities?

> They're against the spirit of the law.

and if you're against the spirit, but find a loophole? you do not technically break the law, and achieve your objectives.

The law maker is at fault, if there are loop holes.

> The law maker is at fault, if there are loop holes.

It's very tough to distinguish loopholes that were added accidentally by lawmakers, and loopholes that are added intentionally to appease corporate donors.

Either way the lawmaker is at fault for adding it.

A lawmaker isn't legally required to include your provision just because you donated to them.

Finding the spirit of the laws is usually just trying to judge how it matches with the ideals of the society as a whole (at least, best case scenario), as interpreted by the courts, so if you're against the spirit then you're probably against some ideal of the society.

Taking the idea of wage theft as an example, the spirit of the law is that as a society we typically don't want to be exploited by companies, but there exists no shortage of capitalists who are against the spirit of that suite of laws. I would call them antagonists to those ideals of society.

It would be interesting to hear about a law who's spirit you are against, and to try and match it up with a societal ideal. I can't come with anything myself right now. Perhaps weed? It's still mostly illegal here, but I think many courts in this day and age would be lenient, as it becomes clear that society's ideals have changed in that area.

(edit: I edited this comment a lot as my thoughts evolved on it, sorry if anyone caught it mid-edit)

> You answered it yourself. They're against the spirit of the law.

This is not right. If the spirit of the law is obvious, write it down.

Otherwise you're just advocating for people having to know the letter of the law (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money), and the spirit of the law, whatever that is.

If a state's only job in this regard is to write down some rules that let it get free money from workers, it should take responsibility for writing the rules down properly.

That can’t happen. This is why there are courts to interpret the law. Otherwise, the law would be an algorithmic decision maker.

Well, that would be ideal :) But I think a loophole isn't "something that's not yet been interpreted by a court". It's "something that's agreed to be the case, but the people writing the rules to get money didn't foresee."

A whole lot of people would love to but legislatures across the globe are colluding with oligarchs to impede the legislative process.

Writing down law that would close loopholes with specificity is bad for business, which has symbolically been expanded to include other skin colors and genders so it can be argued the people having their agency back is actually regressing gains for some (gains in an intentionally manipulated ledger of exchange value thanks to loopholes).

Never mind the industrial mess threatens the species. The tribal fractal anyone happens to live in must never change!

It’s become a truism we want this because no alternatives are allowed to be.

Most laws have some ambiguity, it's the reason we have courts that have the ability to make somewhat arbitrary rulings, so that they can enforce a fair and just outcome that supports, 'the spirit of the law'. It goes both ways too, sometimes someone breaks a law in literal terms, but by the spirit of the law it isn't actually important. Courts dismiss cases of broken laws all the time based on that.

You simply can't codify everything, just like in software, there are bugs in law, and people will take advantage in weird and unusual ways. Courts come in and remedy the outcome of the bug, and that ruling is used in future cases to make better decisions, so you can consider that a hotfix.

> (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money)

The literal law is to not pay people below Australia's legal minimum wage. It's not a "target wage", so going over it is obviously not relevant, it is the bare minimum. The spirit of that suite of laws is to stop companies from exploiting workers.

Now it’s the responsibility of people to judge the spirit of sets of laws? It’s not enough to navigate the spaghetti of modern legislation, you have to rationalize the intent across several strands and ensure that you’re following it?

No, your lawmakers made overly complex, bad laws.

Because we live in a society. Illegals sub contracting delivery vans, delivery drivers using their kids as free labor.

The whole industry is screwed. And I'm a hypocrite because I order stuff online as well.

> By definition, loopholes are perfectly legal. They may be against the spirit of the law, but they are still legal

As long as you can bribe - oops sorry I meant donate to your local politician(s) to keep these 'perfectly legal' laws intact...

It wouldn't be called a loophole if it was legitimate. Loophole implies there's some kind of something wrong with it. The fact that you can't quite point out what it is is what makes it a loophole.

It absolutely would be. Labeling things as loopholes is politically motivated. It also absolves lawmakers of the responsibility to create functional laws when they can label people who follow them abusive.

Why should hackers be prosecuted for using systems as they're programmed?

Same reason people breaking into a website using a bug should be punished. The bug shouldn’t be there, and if you find the bug and do a responsible disclosure that should be fine, but to ezploit the bug for your own gain is not ok.

But it’s still not illegal, which means it’s legal, which means it’s perfectly acceptable to do.

From a legal perspective, perhaps, but many it's neither a moral or ethical one

Do you live your life by the idea that anything not specifically illegal is acceptable for you to do?

Probably not because a lot of societal norms are regulated by shame and shared ideas of decency. This decision was made by a person or small group of people inside Amazon. Maybe those people wouldn’t have made that decision if their identities could become public?

> Do you live your life by the idea that anything not specifically illegal is acceptable for you to do?

it should be acceptable.

> a lot of societal norms are regulated by shame and shared ideas of decency.

and i think that's wrong - if it's not a good idea to perform certain actions, then enshrine it in law, and explicitly say it's not alright to do.

Where do you draw the line? When religion gets a foothold in a place then popular sentiment, imparted by religion, can be made law. Examples: Homosexuality, women showing their faces, women travelling without a male family escort, all illegal.

There is a saying: "Legislate in haste, perish at leisure". Not all things should require legislation, and those that are to be legislated should be fully and thoroughly considered. Often times it can be best to rely upon the moral will of society to impart a desired action than it is to strictly enforce compliance with that action. Its not perfect, but neither hard-line or soft-line is.

> Do you live your life by the idea that anything not specifically illegal is acceptable for you to do?

This seems like deliberate silliness. Someone somewhere is writing down rules about how much money they get from you. If you don't obey the rules you get locked up. If you do obey the rules you don't. This isn't about doing things not specifically illegal; this is about how it's okay to obey the rules someone wrote down.

I hate to godwin this, but you realize that a lot of atrocities that have happened throughout history have been legal, right? Japanese internment was legal. South African apartheid was legal. The trail of tears was legal. American slavery was legal. The holocaust was legal under Nazi law. Legal != perfectly acceptable.

> However, this doesn't consider the fact that the drivers supply their own vehicle as well as out-of-pocket expenses for fuel, maintenance and general depreciation on the vehicle itself. When you take these additional costs into consideration, that initial ~$27 looks closer to an illegally low ~$20/hr.

Pardon my ignorance on AU tax law, but is there anything the contractors do with those costs? For instance, in the USA if you are a contractor you are able to 'write off' those costs from your taxes (to be clear here, in most/all cases you are only getting back the taxes you paid on the money you paid for the service, e.x. if you are taxed at 20% and you paid 100$ for repairs to your contractor vehicle, you get 20$ back on your taxes, not 100$)

Yes contractors/self employed are able to write off a lot of those same business expenses

> However, this doesn't consider the fact that the drivers supply their own vehicle as well as out-of-pocket expenses for fuel, maintenance and general depreciation on the vehicle itself.

You don’t think drivers consider that?

> The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law

Is it a loophole ? Close it

Drivers have proven time and time again very bad at calculating the externalities correctly.

To the people downvoting you for a lack of political correctness...

It isn't even relevant if potential drivers are excellent with money. If you advertise a position with excessive externalities -- a really, really terrible job -- the only people that accept it will, by definition, have miscalculated the externalities, and certainly some people will still accept it. Are we then supposed to just say "they are smart so they wouldn't have taken it if it wasn't a good job" and ignore it? People get scammed all the time.

idk if this applies to the case of Amazon AU. I'm just saying it's very in vogue to deny that anyone could benefit from help and that doesn't quite seem right.

It’s the same thing with landlords - there’s a reason that the only single family homes being rented are owned by individuals. Banks will have nothing to do with it because the externalities are too high.

Things like insurance alone can be a tipping point - and drivers famously didn’t carry enough of the right type of insurance, which works fine most of the time …

Taking advantage of the fact that most people are bad at the math is frankly immoral (a similar argument probably applies to the lottery also but nobody likes mentioning that either).

>a similar argument probably applies to the lottery also but nobody likes mentioning that either

In a vaccuum, yes, people are losing money on the lottery. I personally see it as kind of a "lesser of two evils" kind of thing, though.

It allows people to scratch the "if I were rich" itch that causes some folk to risk everything they have (note that the exact same imagery is used to advertise both the lotto and high-risk speculative investments/ponzi schemes) while limiting the losses to the cost of a ticket each week.

Not saying that lottery addicts don't exist, but they're far less likely to lose everything than a problem gambler/day trader.

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