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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

They were the first to $15, literally leading a nationwide wage increase for low skill labor, and now they pay closer to $18 by me. For people trying to hate Amazon at any cost, the goalposts keep shifting. If Amazon announced $20 minimum tomorrow, there is no doubt in my mind that people would still be griping.

And even when people concede that Amazon pays industry leading wages, it's "whatabout" the urine bottles as if the heavily unionized UPS drivers don't also do this.

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-you-do-w...

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles.36...

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles-in...

Turns out public bathrooms aren't always available around suburbia, and leaving a truck unattended is a bad idea. I'm not trying to lick boots here or anything, but the constant shitting on Amazon's non-tech business gets really uninteresting. As if it's all generated by a GPT-3 bot.

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I'm sure people would still be griping, but nothing is static. The cost of everything keeps increasing and honestly, depending on where you live even at 20 dollars an hour it will be hard to make ends meet.

There will always be a struggle between labor and employer where each will seek to maximize their share, it's the system we have set up. I really don't think people should be faulted for pushing for more when it's literally a companies goal to pay people as little as is functionally possible.

Amazon is the target because they are the largest. If you increase the wage Amazon pays, you increase the wage their competitors pay.

> when it's literally a companies goal to pay people as little as is functionally possible

The meme that “fiduciary duty” means “maximise revenue at all costs” needs to die. This is a falsehood that has been debunked repeatedly.

Your two sentences in this thread is hardly debunking anything. What is Amazon maximizing if not profit? It certainly is not employee share of revenue or employee well being.

The point is that there’s no law that says companies must maximize profit at the expense of everything else. The fiduciary duty is to be responsible with shareholder’s money, not to maximize return on investment.

It doesn't matter if it is the law or not if Amazon is made up of a large group of managers with competing interests that all boil to maximizing profit in order to meet their individual key goals. The GP said nothing about it being the law, simply that it is how Amazon, as a giant megacorporation, acts in practice.

It does matter because assuming it as a matter-of-fact prevents discussing or even conceiving alternatives. It prevents you from asking: What should the companies fiduciary duty be? (Perhaps respecting the law and not busting unions?)

Corporations are allowed to exist to create a positive net good. ie: the social contract works so long as we can plausibly reason that they, you know, actually benefit people more than they harm. Maximizing profit is a lie told to children for reasons I won't get into, but when it displaces the social contract, the end result is a justification of all sorts of socially pathological behavior, this included.

Everything you just said stopped being true in the 70s and 80s. Yes, B-corps are a thing, but the laws as currently constructed encourage profit extraction above nearly everything else.

That would be true if people believed economists like Milton Friedman created reality instead of what was really much more mundane. Those who do so are attributing supernatural powers to a mere mortal.

It is true, regardless of what you believe. There is a ton if empirical evidence for it.

Having the patience to push and set legal precedent isn't a superpower. Not sure what your point is here.

I just don't base truth on what Milton Friedman supposedly says or what legal precedent is. There are much better epistemological firmaments than those on which to ground reality.

Corporations have no fiduciary duty to produce a profit. Thinking that they do has been attributed to Milton Friedman's 1971 NY editorial [0], but some argue that the notion can't be pinned on him [1] It's more accurate to say that fiduciary responsibilities are to ensure the corporation doesn't violate the law and that the firm doesn't go out of business [2].

[0] 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits', Friedman

[1] https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value-Myth-Shareholders-C...

The only point of a company is to maximize shareholder value. You're right, that doesn't always mean "maximize revenue at all costs.” It usually does though, because especially as a growth company that's what shareholders want. Obviously there are competing priorities, but overall most shareholders want to maximize discounted profit, and all their priorities reflect how that should be done.

That’s not true though. The shareholders are people so what they want are as varied as what people want.

Does Elon want SpaceX to be super profitable or does he want to make life multi planetary? (They aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’s weird to think that he is just trying to make as much profit as possible).

One can also consider that the state is also a party because they license and privilege corporations and stockholders.

> but it’s weird to think that he is just trying to make as much profit as possible

Why is it weird to think that?

More wealth isn’t enough to satiate his ego, he absolutely craves legacy. As of now he’ll still be a small footnote in history, kids will likely learn about Henry Ford 150 years from now but Musk isn’t worth much of an appearance. Tesla is just an iterative step in EV / battery manufacturing, and is likely to be dwarfed by competition over the next 50 years, even if it does really well.

SpaceX gives him the chance to truly make history. People will learn about our first manned trip to Mars and the first colony. Perhaps even for thousands of years.

I wasn’t trying to guess his motives. More his actions don’t match someone trying to maximise profit.

Because all their profits come from NASA and starlink… so building a mars capable vehicle doesn’t really make sense from the profit motive perspective. It won’t be profitable in his lifetime.

People in control have much more ability to have the company execute their vision. As an investor the only thing you can do is say yes or no to management. Since the group of investors all have different side goals the one thing they agree on is making money, so management optimizes for that. Then everyone sees that the company exists to make money, so people that are interested in other things self select out. In the end all the shareholders are interested in maximizing the share price.

> The cost of everything keeps increasing and honestly, depending on where you live even at 20 dollars an hour it will be hard to make ends meet.

And if you bump everyone to $20, things will get more expensive and then you'll have to bump them to $22, and then everything will get more expensive so you'll...

A wage-price spiral would be preferable to the asset inflation that two decades of zero-interest policy have brought us.

I think you’ve just invented the Wage-Price Spiral.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage-price_spiral

Except that's not at all true. Historic raises in the minimum wage did not cause an inflationary response in goods nor currency.

>Historic raises in the minimum wage did not cause an inflationary response in goods nor currency.

The "historic raises in the minimum wage" were also very conservative and decried by proponents of $15/$20/whatever minimum wage as being too low. A one time pay bump won't cause serious issues, but giving in to ever increasing demands for minimum wage (ie. $15 last year, $20 this year, $25 the year after) will.

Minimum wage should be going up all the time to keep it inline with inflation. That's the point of minimum wage.

Minimum wage used to ride regularly, then since 2005 has remained constant while in real terms reducing by about 40%

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-val...

> Minimum wage should be going up all the time to keep it inline with inflation. That's the point of minimum wage.

Except that if you adjusted the minimum wage in 2005 to account for inflation, you'll only get $7.93 today[1]. I doubt the people clamoring for a $20 minimum wage today are doing it on the basis of "keeping up with inflation".

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

May I ask what are your sources for that claim? Honest question.

This is so exaggerated as to be silly. The cost of "things" has many components, and only a small fraction of them trace back to the hourly wage of low-paid domestic workers. Increasing low-end wages by 10% does not result in 10% additional inflation.

Considering that at the same time that inflation has been at the highest in years, corporate profits have been the highest ever. Maybe those two are much more related than wage and inflation?

> They were the first to $15[...] now they pay closer to $18 by me

This is bullshit.

I'm sure there's some Hollywood accounting justification for this claim, but over 10 years ago close to $18/hr is what you could expect to make as associate working in the distribution center of another big corporate behemoth: Walmart. We're talking low-skill grindwork smack dab in the post-economic collapse, and that $18/hr figure does not account for the "veteran" workers on the receiving end of the more-or-less guaranteed annual pay bumps that come with just continuing to work there. (They were making $20+/hr.) Again, not now in the current post-COVID era (because otherwise who cares), but over 10 years ago.

It blew me away when a few years ago I learned that Amazon was only paying something like $13.

So Amazon is $15 today? Who cares. Almost every fast food place around is paying close to that now, I'm told. $15 is so low that no one was getting paid that low at the Walmart DC that I'm familiar with, which (again, since it bears repeating) was over 10 years ago.

Relating to those pay bumps: Amazon has targets for staff turnover, which will potentially purge anyone who gets incremental pay increases even if they start doing that (which AIUI they don't really)

If the workers want unions… why not just let them have unions? Amazon is hell bent on suppressing worker power. Acting like Amazon isn’t doing anything wrong here is wishful thinking. We can keep pretending like the needs of the workers are immaterial to the functioning of society or we can let workers have some modicum of control over their workplace conditions. But right now Amazon is trying to crush workers rights and that’s deplorable even if you’re tired of hearing about it.

In theory, a union is merely an organization of like-minded people much like the workmans' guilds of the medieval era. In practice, a union is a country club operating as an extension of state power. It is highly liable to create perverse incentives. There is no such thing as worker power in and of itself so long as the government dictates the terms of unionization.

> Amazon is trying to crush workers rights

What workers' rights are being violated when Amazon decides who may or may not be a future employee at an Amazon warehouse? That's what an employer should do. Amazon is not obligated to hire union-friendly workers.

There have been a lot of things done in the USA to make unions worse. Such as the Taft-Hartley act which placed significant restrictions on union power. This isn’t the fault of unions but of state power meant to weaken unions as a concept. Whatever flaws there may be with unions in practice in this country, I believe they still do offer an opportunity for workers to directly advocate for their needs in a way that has real consequences for an employer who tries to trample them. This is what Amazon is opposing. If you have an issue with how unions are implemented in this country, complain about that. But don’t misunderstand the value in workers rights.

> What workers' rights are being violated when Amazon decides who may or may not be a future employee at an Amazon warehouse?

You can try to distill the action in to its parts to rob it of its meaning. I could say “I’m merely holding this pointy object and moving my hand forward? Surely I should have a say over how I move my body?” But you would know you’re being stabbed all the same.

I don’t know why you want to pretend like Amazon’s efforts to crush unions are valueless. Workers are human beings who deserve some control over their workplace. Amazon is trying to prevent that. That’s what I and many are calling out as wrong and worth opposing.

EDIT: By the way the issue is not just about amazon’s hiring practices. I am referring to the wide variety of anti-union tactics Amazon is using to interfere with labor power. Take the point of this article. Amazon will try to make donations to sway political power in their favor so they can continue to get tax breaks without unions. These individual actions can be imagined as devoid of context and valueless, but the point of this action is clear: Amazon does not want its workers to have a say in their workplace.

The goalposts are “good working conditions”. You can track this with retention, which is notably terrible at Amazon.

That’s because the higher pay comes at the cost of peeing in bottles aka losing human dignity.

It feels like there’s no shortage of people out to defend Amazon either.

Did you read the comment? It claimed that amazon is not the outlier here.

If someone is willing to sell their dignity (which I guess is now defined by whether or not you urinate in a bottle) then why should we stop them?

We’re not talking about safety or child labor where there’s a moral duty to put up guard rails.

Because what happens is every single company will start doing this in practice. Not to mention that overworking people to the point that they do not believe they can even take a real rest break is a safety issue.

This already happens at other companies, check the grandparent comment.

I have found a few articles which claim Amazon's contracted delivery drivers (which is a pretty sketchy practice tbh) work 14 hour days.

14 hour days aren't great, but I don't think it's particularly stunning. Nurses regularly work 12 hours shifts and often pick up more hours for overtime pay. Truck drivers drive a maximum of 11 hours a day, which is probably pretty close to what Amazon delivery drivers do once you consider time picking up packages and getting up to deliver them.

If delivery drivers work ~40 hours a week (~3 days a week on, 4 days off) that sounds like a pretty okay arrangement. If they're working 14 hours a day, 5 days a week, then that's rough. Based on some quick Googling it seems like they target a 40 hour work week, but maybe there are some articles of them being pressured/forced to do more.

As a society we should not create our support creating through inaction an environment where people feel it’s necessary to sell their dignity. Would you agree?

Amazon is big enough that it can create systemic problems where free market doesn’t work. If everyone in a town is being run out of business, people feel they have no choice but to take up that job.

> As a society we should not create our support creating through inaction an environment where people feel it’s necessary to sell their dignity. Would you agree?

I would agree, but how do you reconcile that with many desiring legalization of sex work? Surely that is 'worse' than urinating in a bottle?

Does Amazon run other local warehouses 'out of business'? I wouldn't imagine there to be much competition between local warehouses unless there was a shortage of labor.

Because every time something like that gets accepted, that moves the Overton window down, and makes it easier to take the next step. "What if they want to sell one of their kidneys? They are theirs. What if a little action in the backroom is needed for a promotion? They can always say no".

We should be building a better society for future generations, not for a few billionaires.

> What if they want to sell one of their kidneys?

I thought of this specifically when I wrote my comment, which is why I added the bit about "moral duty". Selling your kidneys is harmful. There's the inherent risk of surgery, not to mention it's a part of your body that you would otherwise keep.

I think the examples you are giving are things we should protect against, but I do not believe that urinating in a bottle is comparable at all.

You're going to urinate no matter what. The only thing different here is where it is at. Many people choose to go camping and urinate outdoors. Most choose a toilet. Some people (even those that aren't on the clock at an Orwellian-esque company!) choose a bottle when they are desperate, e.g. on a road trip.

>If someone is willing...

I'm gonna stop you right there and point out that while nobody ever puts a gun to one's head when it comes to taking a job, it's never that cut and dry. They may not normally be willing, but they may be desperate enough under the right circumstances. That desperation, hell even willingness in and of itself, doesn't justify on-the-job abuses.

I think that there might be some disconnect here. I personally wouldn't want to urinate in a bottle, but it really isn't that big of a deal to me. It's gross, but not something I'd really care about if it meant I got paid decently. There are also purpose-made products for camping that turn urine into a gel.

Of course I say this as a software engineer, so I'm very privileged and probably a bit disconnected from the choices these workers have to make.

Does any job have dignity anymore?

I'm a white guy on a team of a all Indian developers and I spend half of my time kissing butt to fit in, just so I can get the basic information I need to do my job.

Before that I was a truck driver and peed in a bottle and that actually had more dignity then kissing butt all day.

Single moms useing only fans to keep paying these skyrocketing rents.

They literally made half the work force submit to experimental vaccines or get fired.

This is 2022 America.

There's no such thing as work place dignity in the majority of jobs anymore.

Amazon is far from the first company bumping to 15$/hour. Even when they finally joined the 15$ club they where still underpaying people at the time as shown by their retention statistics.

That’s the thing about free markets, workers get to say no. They can trade lower pay for a vastly less crappy job, or get better treatment for similar pay elsewhere etc.

What’s less obvious is Amazon benefited from building out their infrastructure more recently than other companies which let them target sweet spots with large untrained workforces which made their jobs more appealing locally. But eventually they needed to pay market rates.

> as shown by their retention statistics.

>That’s the thing about free markets, workers get to say no.

I like how these sentences are consecutive.

That’s because $20 is still humiliatingly low for the workload

They do actually require that you work, yes.

There are plenty of lower paid jobs for those only interested in being a chair filler.

But the pay is quite good for the required skillset.

I'm not sure which planet you are on, but warehouse workers earn way less than $20/hr in most of the US, Europe or anywhere else.

Just because warehouse owners have the leverage to make it impossible to demand more doesn't make it any less humiliating.

Many warehouses pay well over 20$/hour and others significantly less. What’s rarely mentioned is while Amazon’s compensation is roughly in line with industry norms, the workload is however much worse.

Care to give some support for this intangible and unverifiable complaint?

Just take a look at amazon warehouse worker turnover rate. No other company in the industry comes anywhere close. Amazon's strategy is to gamify work and force the workers to put the pedal to the metal until they burn out and quit.

>Just take a look at amazon warehouse worker turnover rate. No other company in the industry comes anywhere close.

But all that says is "people don't want to work on amazon". It doesn't say why they don't want to work there. The parent post made a specific claim (ie. "the workload is however much worse"), which is consistent with worse working conditions, but not proof of it.

Well what are the reasons people would quit?

1. Low pay. As this thread pointed out Amazon actually pays above average for the warehouse industry. It doesn't make sense that their turnover is higher than other warehouse if people leave because the pay is too low.

2. Dislike of "big tech" and corporate capitalism more generally. Basically these are people who saw someone complain on twitter and quit. I doubt people that would quit of morals would take the job in the first place, this seems like a non-issue.

3. Unprepared for the workload that comes with warehouse work. All warehouse work is tough, if this is your first warehouse job you might not be ready for physical labor. This seems reasonable to me since Amazon advertises their warehouse jobs more than other warehouse companies.

4. Amazon's workload is higher than other warehouses. Given what we know about the workload on their white collar workers and the stories I've heard about the warehouse work this seems like the biggest contributor to their high turnover to me.

Interested in hearing what you think the cause of their turnover could be.

1 and 4 are linked.

Fit able bodied workers willing and able to put in a full day of hard labor have more options and are therefore more expensive. Aka if you get laid off of a 25$/hour construction job you might temporarily work at Amazon while looking for work, but you’re not staying for years. Amazon workers may therefore be under paid for their capabilities independent of industry norms.

5. Double the workplace accident rate of the rest of the industry also plays a role. You don’t just lose workers directly as people also quit out of fear for their health.

6. It’s in part a seasonal job. Amazon doesn’t need or want a steady workforce and can play with their quotas to lay people off without paying for unemployment.

> No other company in the industry comes anywhere close.

Arguably not the same industry (but devastatingly adjacent): have a look at FedEx warehouses. Recently as low as $13.xx/hr, same sort of grueling work, plus the privilege of not knowing whether you'll need to show up at 4:00 AM or 7:00 AM. You don't get to know that until the night before, when you call a phone number around 8 or 9 to listen to a recorded message that will tell you. (Even then, you might show up only to find tape over the time clocks with a note that they're going to be starting later, after all, with the expectation that you'll just hang out off the clock in the meantime and then start at the new designated time.¹) And you have no idea how long you'll be working, either (except that it won't be 8 hours). 5–6 hours is possible. ~3 hours is probable. So you'll need to work 6 or 7 days just for the chance that you might get close to 30 hours. Ridiculously high turnover, as expected.

1. Yes, really. This is begging for a DoL inquiry; "Package Handlers are always paid for TIME WORKED [...] In the future please meet with your manager before just leaving. Thank you." — says a FedEx Ground facility's Area Manager, "Crystal", in an email.

Just because you don’t like a statement doesn’t mean it’s unverifiable, objectively:

Average Warehouse Worker Hourly Pay “Avg. Base Hourly Rate (USD)” $14.99/ hour and $19.57 is top 10%. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Warehouse_Worker/Ho...

As to the job sucking, “Amazon warehouse workers suffer serious injuries at twice the rate of rivals, study finds“ https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-...

You didn't provide any info regarding the workload, but it seems like the injury rate is a legitimate issue. Amazon says that it's getting better in the article, and that it spent $300 million on safety (a very low number considering how much the company makes).

I said the workload was worse, higher injury rates than norms is worse.

If you want verification: "We’re developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from MSD risks.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xeba/amazons-new-algorithm...

In other words they are concerned that are pushing people to do their jobs faster than humanly possible but assumed they could make that pace sustainable by rotating jobs over the day rather than say reduce the pace to a sustainable level.

Quoting statistics from labor union coalitions [0] (usually mob controlled and heavily influenced by their agenda) is really flimsy evidence, aside from the fact that causal inference is not a part of it. So, yes, I reassert this is 'unverifiable' unionist talking points.

According to their own data, Amazon only had higher rates of "light duty" injury (most of which are not "serious" as they claim). This is easily explained by Amazon's need to report all cuts and bruises due to the targets on their backs, while others gladly omit them--especially say, unionized ones where the leaders would logically tell them to keep cuts and bruises silent to juice their numbers.

[0] The Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) is a democratic coalition of four labor unions: Service Employees International Union (SEIU), International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Communications Workers of America (CWA) and United Farmworkers of America (UFW). Together, SOC-affiliated unions represent more than 4 million workers.

Well, clearly their mistake was failing to consult hwers on Hacker News when evaluating the market for warehouse labor.

$20/hr is increasingly difficult to live on in higher COL areas of the US, but annualized at 40 hours per week, it's pretty close to the US median individual income. a household with two adults making that much would be well above the median household income. "humiliatingly low" is an exaggeration.

> "whatabout" the urine bottles as if the heavily unionized UPS drivers don't also do this.

Anecdotal I guess, but every time I see either an Amazon or UPS driver at my house they seem pretty relaxed. They pull into the drive, walk to the door with the package, and walk back to the truck. They don't seem rushed. Maybe they pee in a bottle in their truck but based on my observations that's probably just the easiest thing for them to do, at least for the males.

When I delivered pizza in the late 1980s I ran back and forth from my car to the customer's door. 30 seconds saved could mean being ahead of the next driver getting back to the store, where it was FIFO.

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