Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing | Hacker News Reader

Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

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381 pointsrntn410 comments

This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal. The definition of sub-contractor has got to change and/or have laws/policies in place that actually make sense in a sub contractor relationship. These are shell companies that spin up and exclusively deliver for amazon, they aren't gig workers delivering when they want, they have strict quotas.

The solution is to enforce the laws we have, not feign powerlessness every time some crackerjack claims to have identified a profitable loophole.

Absolutely. The courts are supposed to be the last vestige of common sense. It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense.

> It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense.

See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits.

However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...

We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here.

1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.

I kind of think that everything is pretty much inevitably fucked once it becomes tacitly accepted that all politicians are liars.

> It’s judges dropping the ball here

It's also a work culture. (What can you generally expect from an employer?)

I've never worked in the US.

But it sounds like workers are not protected.

The American Dream is a story of entrepreneurship, not of employment.

I'd also be happy with better base level care for everyone. Would start requiring more taxes on corporations, largely because that is where the money is siphoning to. But would be far more efficient than the current efforts we do where every time a new rule is made, bypasses are found.

As long as the bills proposing tax increases also contain where the tax money is going to be allocated, I'd be all for it. America's track record for directing tax money towards the public good, is poor.

Nobody has a track record of using money well. Basically period. At best, you can find some examples that were short lived, but by and large, building wealth turns to either wasting it, or hoarding it.

With that framing, I honestly don't like "as long as we tightly control where it is spent" arguments. They all beg the question that we know where money should be spent. Where history is a great guide that, no, we didn't. We have examples to look to, to be sure. Some decent guidelines, as it were. But they are often last year's guidelines, and that year came and went.

So, I'm game to "keep our eyes open" as we increase allocation. But, by and large, I think insisting on winning bets is a fools errand that will likely cause more problems than it solves.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I disagree with the idea that everything be pre-allocated, but you make the point in a civil way.

Earmarking everything is almost impossible to do right. Tax revenue streams go up or down from forces outside the legislature’s control. If there’s a bumper crop of corporate receipts, the right move might be to save them in a rainy day general fund for disasters, or when times are lean, etc.

Put another way, if we can’t seem to spend money well doing it in an annual budgeting process, I don’t know how we will do any better trying to do the same thing years in advance when the tax is passed.

I can't see that it is getting downvoted. Agreed that they were civil, so apologies if my response sounded uncivil. I legitimately think it is a trap of a framing. While also hating the idea of wasting money. :D

Even this doesn’t work. A drug tax earmarked for school funding can be followed with a coincidental cut to school funding in the same amount. Money is fungible.

Often what happens is delay, delay, delay, appeal, delay… and then you are “too big to fail” and everyone has to “think of all the jobs that will be lost”.

This is why the US uses the common law system. Laws are written and the courts then interpret them. The courts should be telling these yahoos that these actions are against the intent of the law.

> courts then interpret them.

correct. They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends." If the legislators really wanted it to say something else, they should have written it that way.

I think that's splitting hairs a bit. Laws are written fairly broadly all the time and it's left up to the courts to determine the specifics.

Patent claims are also written broadly, deliberately by the lawyers. There's a whole part of every trial where "claim construction" takes place, and I personally helped with many of those briefs when in Google Legal.

The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs.

"Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today.

That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.

Not trying to be rude here, but I highly recommend you do a little more research on the common law system and how it works. At it's core, common law states that laws are interpreted over time and these interpretations become the official law of the land. There is no requirement that every conceivable form of infraction be enumerated within the law itself.

Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.

When people say "not trying to be rude" they are, but prefer to not own it.

Maybe you need to do some research. Patents are construed in exactly the same way as any other law.

I don't know what your legal credentials are (are you a lawyer?). I had an article cited in an amicus brief to SCOTUS for the CLS Bank case, plus a shorter one in Law360. What have you published? Aside from that, I helped with numerous claim construction briefs.

I highly recommend you educate yourself about the distinction between common law and statutory law, since you seem confused:

> A clarification of the term "common law" is in order at this point. While common law may have originally referred to a body of law thought to exist in common across jurisdictions under generally accepted standards of legal reasoning, I use the term here to distinguish statutory law made by legislators from case law made by courts. It is well understood that each state has its own common law, crafted by its courts under the supervision of the state supreme court, subject only to the supremacy of federal statutory and constitutional law.

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...

https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

Corporations' relationship to their contractors is most definitely not "common law." At most, it's administrative law, and if we come to questions of interpretation, it's statutory law.

I'm not talking about contracts. I'm talking about labor laws and there have been prior instances where interpretations of labor law, the intent of the law, and how contractors were treated trumped what was written in the contracts (e.g. permatemps).

I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. Contracts? What does that have to do with it and when did those come up?

Before, you were "not trying to be rude" about "common law," and I just demonstrated that common law has nothing to do with labor laws. Common law is judge-written law developed over centuries, as those references I gave you lay out.

Labor laws are statutory law, sometimes modified by administrative rulings. As I said at the start of this, laws are construed by judges, much like patent claims are. Whether Amazon's indirect contractors are "employees" or not comes down to judges' constructions of the relevant laws, which in turn is influenced by the briefs submitted by each side. That's why California has had voter initiatives to change the laws.

So what is the dispute, again?

> They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends."

Within the bounds of the viable interpretations of the words actually written into the law, courts are, in fact, often guided by their reading of legislative intent in choosing which of the superficially viable interpretations is correct.

The idea that interpreting what the laws say precludes interpreting what legislators mean seems to implicitly invoke the idea that any given set of words has only one tenable interpetation to start with, so you never need to look to external context to resolve meaning.

This is a not-too-unpopular conceit, but its quite wrong.

"quite wrong" -- no, you're wrong.

"legislative intent" is in fact deeply controversial among judges. What counts as "intent"? Something a bill sponsor said, but other sponsors disagreed with?

the only certain thing is what the bill says, and the fact that it passed.

They claimed a specific thing is quite wrong. "the idea that any given set of words has only one tenable interpetation to start with"

Do you really disagree with that claim?

If legal words only had one tenable intepretation we could resolve contract disputes so quickly...

> Do you really disagree with that claim?

why don't you say what language is being misinterpreted, and we'll go from there?

Okay, let's start with "the entire body of law".

If even a small fraction of laws have multiple tenable interpretations then that comment is correct.

If you don't think that's the case for some laws, then I'm shocked.

And this is before introducing the concept of "legislative intent", this is just at the base level of looking at the text of laws.

I didn't mean MY language. I meant "what laws are being interpreted wrongly"

I don't think anyone said that laws were being interpreted wrongly?

The claim was that some laws have multiple tenable interpretations. So for those laws you can have multiple distinct options, none of which are wrong ways to read the text.

The thing called "wrong" was the idea that laws never do this.

I guess you think this is an important point. Judges exist to determine what is the correct way to read the law. They don't always get it right, but that doesn't mean anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's.

GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.

> I guess you think this is an important point.

I don't really want to get into the importance of it here. But I do think it's true, so I replied when you called that specific point wrong.

> GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.

Which comment? I don't see it.

we're done here.

It would only take seconds for you to link the comment if it actually existed. I accept your "done here" with performative lack of capitalization.

you had the last word there. Happy now?

Reply stupidly to this and you can have it again.

> why don’t you say what language is being misinterpreted

Because that was the opposite of the claim made that you disagreed with? Unless, you mean, “what language in a post you responded to in this thread was being misinterpreted by you”…

Legislative intent is a factor in statutory interpretation. You start with the text of the law and read it using the statutory interpretation statue. If it's still unclear then you look at legislative intent and previous interpretations to fill in the blanks.

Completely. There are lots of laws already on the books but there is nobody actually enforcing them. Everyone from Uber to door dash to Amazon are profitably evading their responsibilities to their employees by miss categorizing them as contractors.

This is bad for the employees, bad for society and bad for competitor companies who are playing by the rules.

The solution is fairly obvious. Invest in bodies to proactively enforce the laws we already have.

This stuff follows the law though. Its not illegal, not even close.

Not even sure how you would go about making it illegal. What, paying money to another company is illegal? You can't contract out work? It doesn't make any sense.

Simple. If your contracted out work employs more than XYZ number of employees then those contractors must provide benefits/meet employment requirements/etc on the same level as a company with the (aggregate of all contract providers headcount for the contracted service type) employee headcount.

I think the real issue is the political problem that most people like the exploitation that is happening. When ride-sharing laws were changed in California to protect hired drivers, the counter ballot initiative passed easily.

Or maybe because proposition didn’t made a whole lot of sense and wouldn’t have improved the situation that drivers that much on average.

These aren't contractors like Uber drivers. They are corporations that are contractors of Amazon, and the drivers are employees of those companies. How would this possibly be a legal issue?

The fact that the employees of the contractor companies ultimately work for only one company - Amazon - that means they should be treated like employees of Amazon.

This is the same situation when independent contractors have only one client.

We all ultimately work for IRS

Why? A company hiring another company like this seems perfectly reasonable to me. There is no argument to be made about contractor vs employee status because the employees are still full time employees. Why should they have to be an employee of a single corporate parent?

When companies like Amazon buy other companies and vertically integrate, people complain. When Amazon contracts with vendors instead, people complain too. I don't think there is any legitimate point to this and it's just "I hate Amazon."

Yeah, you're just wrong. It's not like Amazon is doling out work to local delivery companies out of the goodness of their heart.

They're setting up these companies as part of their DSP program to limit their liability. They're following the chicken industries playbook(which shouldn't be legal either) by requiring the DSP use Amazon equipment, with a loan from Amazon, pay back by revenue from Amazon.

They're also using this as part of an anti-unionization strategy. One of their DSPs recently unionized and Amazon just cancelled their contract.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-deliv...

Because courts are supposed to see through flimsy fictions like this. These companies are not in an ordinary vendor/customer relationship: they are controlled completely by Amazon, they do not and cannot serve customers other than Amazon, their conditions and working hours are set by Amazon, etc. They are Amazon subsidiaries in all but name, and their treatment by the law should reflect that.

Tell that to every government contractor. Many companies (that I'd wager you wouldn't take issue with) exist due to the contracts they have with a single government organization.

that kind of setup is actually fairly rare -- most of the work done in this sector is by large companies that have tens to hundreds of concurrent contracts from various government agencies. speaking from experience

> Many companies (that I'd wager you wouldn't take issue with) exist due to the contracts they have with a single government organization.

But the government doesn't tell those companies "you cannot work for anyone but us." The government doesn't tell those companies "your employees must work these hours" (it may say "we require coverage for X period of time").

And so on.

They are companies who's employees wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon branded vans, deliver packages only for Amazon, Amazon determines the routes and performance metrics for the employees, Amazon can dismiss the employees without waiting for approval from the companies management.

These employees are Amazon employees in all but name.

"Shell company" isn't a legal term and has varying definitions, but generally is a company that only exists on paper and doesn't do anything. These companies deliver products for Amazon.

Make sense to whom? People that have no experience with running a business and hiring subcontractors?

If you have a single product that kills people, you aren't legally allowed to put all your liabilities and none of your assets into another (non-shell, by your definition) company to get out of your liabilities. [0] What's happening here is quite similar.

[0] See, for example, the J&J case, which was an even more generous form of the same.

Let's say I have $100 in assets and $10 in liabilities. The assets consist of Nike sneakers I'd like to sell; the liabilities consist of bags of trash that would cost me $30 to throw away at the dump. I'm lazy, so sell some shoes and I pay the trash man $35 to take the liabilities away.

I have put all my liabilities in one company (the trash man) and left all my assets in my company.

Now, I have a company with a few Nike assets and no liabilities. One of the pairs of shoes catches on fire and becomes a smelly, smoking liability. I sell the rest of the shoes and return the money to the shareholders, leaving the company only owning the burned shoe liability. Now all of the company's assets belong to the shareholders, and all the company has is liabilities.

Which law did I break?

That's not what assets and liabilities are ...

Your bag of trash would still be listed on the Assets side but expenses on trash removal would be on the liabilities side.

It depends. If you feel that metaphor is poor let's try this:

One bag of trash magically turns into a loan that I have taken from a bank. I am obligated to repay $35 at an adjustable interest rate. Because I don't like risk, I pay another bank $45 and they take over the loan. Now I have assets and the second bank has the liability (the first bank, of course, still lists the loan as an asset).

How are they remotely similar? Amazon has trillions of products and hasn’t spun off its liabilities anywhere.

Amazon simply decided they want to limit the extent to which they are in the the last mile delivery business.

> [0] See, for example, the J&J case, which was an even more generous form of the same.

I think you have seen a very simplified view of that situation, likely provided by the opposing lawyers. J&J has agreed to give that company 2 billion dollars and the bankruptcy filing would, essentially, be forcing the lawsuit against them to be settled for 2 billion dollars and then, most importantly to J&J, the matter wouldn't be a concern for the future. They are trying to limit being perpetually sued for the same issue.

There's also the situation where the bankruptcy judge has to accept the situation, [1] which did not happen, twice.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/j-j-is-left-wei...

> They are trying to limit being perpetually sued for the same issue.

Why shouldn't they be perpetually sued for the same issue, until they've fully paid their debt to society, and every person they've harmed is made whole?

I made no argument that they shouldn't, that's just what they are doing.

I replied to point out that the attempts to limit their liability to 2 billion dollars has, so far, failed.

Somewhat. There's not a whole lot that can actually be done.

Georgia Pacific was faced with 62,000+ claims. They went through this same process. Spun off their subsidiary. "Pledged" to fund it with an "initial" billion dollars, and that GP would fund all claims.

Never happened. They actually only funded $175M. Less than $3,000 per claimant for asbestos related injuries. That is, less than $3,000 before legal fees.

And there was nothing defendants could do, because there was no legal obligation that could be created to force GP to fully fund. "That entity is independent and is in bankruptcy. So sad, too bad."

Great. That's not currently happening in the J&J case. You spoke as if it had already happened. It has not and is not trending that way.

It's pretty close to identical. Especially when you consider it's the same law firm.

GP tried to limit their liabilities. Court said 'no'. GP said, "Okay, fine. We'll put an initial $1B in the pot and GP will fund all lawsuit payouts against Best Wall" (emphasis mine).

All agreed.

Then GP decided that after review, they were only going to put $175M in Best Wall's bank account, which could pay off a few of the lawsuits, and then finalized its bankruptcy.

When plaintiffs and others came to GP to get it to honor its commitment, they said "Best Wall is a fully independent entity with no legal connection to GP. So... no."

Let's not act like J&J is trying to be in any way 'fair' about making sure claimants are taken care of.

When the judge initially dismissed their bankruptcy filing, they updated the number and refiled within hours. That's taking the piss.

I don't know what you're trying to explain. You cited J&J in your original post as a company who got away with it, they didn't, you were mistaken. They're trying but are not successful. The situation, as of today, is that J&J (through their subsidiary), will be able to be sued an held liable for any negative health effects from their products.

> Let's not act like J&J is trying to be in any way 'fair' about making sure claimants are taken care of.

Nobody is. The legal system, however, is currently doing it's part to keep them fair.

> When the judge initially dismissed their bankruptcy filing, they updated the number and refiled within hours. That's taking the piss.

Who cares, they can file whatever they want. The bankruptcy was dismissed because the company they created was not in danger of insolvency at all because they're wholly owned and funded by J&J who is not insolvent. That's what _should_ have happened in the GP case and what _is_ happening in the J&J case.

Your cynicism is completely unwarranted yet you seem very inclined to keep it up.

According to Matt Levine (in his Jan 31st column), this is an incorrect summary of the J&J case (though a correct summary of Texas Two-step in general), because according to J&J's proposal, LTL could draw on up to $61.5 BILLION dollars of J&J's value to backstop the talc suits, a value agreed to be far more than any plausible sum of the claims. According to Levine, the purpose was for the settlements to be orderly.

I have no horse in the race, and no ability to assess the law. I just thought it was a pretty interesting claim, and in general my experience has been that Levine seems pretty savvy. Though he hasn't given an update on the July 28th ruling, so shrug.

"They are trying to limit being perpetually sued for the same issue"

Isn't that what class actions are for?

> These companies deliver products for Amazon.

Amazon is essentially claiming this is not the case. These are independent companies that delivery for anyone.

If Amazon were to directly run the firms, then they would be Amazon employees, which is what they're attempting to avoid.

Of course, you may notice these companies only ever deliver for Amazon, use Amazon software, etc. There is a lot of pretend going on.

This is a pretty slippery slope you are getting on. Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes. What you are proposing will essentially make anybody a criminal, because there's always a way to second guess one's intentions.

What your point is however illustrating is how wrong the union legislation is. It's essentially forcing free people into organization they didn't choose. I'm not questioning the usefulness of trade unions in old days of industrialization, but now those just became cancers that suck out resources from businesses and consumers

> Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes.

It's common and (sort of) fine if the subcontractor has many different clients. Like a cleaning service or whatever who works for a ton of separate companies all needing to have their floors mopped.

But if the "subcontractor" only has one client? That reeks of escaping union or other labor agreements, illegal liability shielding, questionably legal tax / social security evasion schemes or other unethical behavior.

You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate. The threat of a strike and labor action is far scarier to Amazon than nosey lawmakers that can just be silenced with enough campaign donations.

> You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate.

The problem is, with jobs that do not require more than a driver's license and the ability to read names you are a fungible cog in the giant machinery of Amazon. It's a job that virtually everyone with a half working body can do: no need for special training, certifications, not even language - here in Germany, it's been reported that the Amazon phone app their delivery people use has like at least half a dozen languages.

Fine, you go on strike with your colleagues? Your official employer won't pay as he can't because Amazon pays shit, barely enough to keep the lights on. You keep striking. Amazon will just terminate your employer's contract. Your employer shuts down. Amazon finds someone else willing to start up a "delivery company", and that person finds another bunch of people desperate to make a pittance.

Amazon won't find other people in this labor market--the service sector has been absolutely on fire with hiring, employment, and wage growth now and throughout the pandemic. Letting COVID rip has killed and disabled millions of workers and put tons of pressure on service jobs.

Amazon maybe not, but their contractors? If in doubt they'll just use undocumented people like farms do all the time. They got caught multiple times doing that in Germany and Austria, no reason to believe the situation in the US with massively more pervasive labor exploitation would be different.

It's funny, Amazon always says "we expect that our partners comply with laws and regulations", and yet they absolutely have to know that their "partners" have to skirt the law to survive on their extremely low package rates. Hell, they probably have enough data from the delivery smartphones to be able to easily detect labor law violations (overtime beyond 10h, no / not enough long breaks).

[1] https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-...

[2] https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengl...

[3] https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html

[4] https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia...

> The problem is, with jobs that do not require more than a driver's license and the ability to read names you are a fungible cog in the giant machinery of Amazon.

Right. Where I am, Amazon was running ads that literally said: "Need a job? Pass a background check? Apply today, start tomorrow, no interview required."

It would be interesting to try and make that work. It sounds like basically you'd define a monopsony as effectively an employer relationship, rather than a contractual one. But there are lots of regular everyday businesses that work together in a monopsony relationship. Should we force all of them to consolidate into a single business entity? Or does this only happen for larger companies? Or only gig-style companies?

It's not going to happen because of existence of corporations like Infosys that do exactly that, except with IT workers.

edit: In the UK, we done worst of both worlds - exempted big corporations and "sub-contractors" can still be hired, but they don't have any employment rights.

The real fix is to stop tying various benefits to employment, so there'd be no need to worry about who is full time or part time, or who they work for.

Unfortunately, changing most of those programs is political suicide, particularly anything health care related.

It's political suicide for Republicans. Left leaning Democrats like Bernie are all for it.

Not enough far left leaning Dems to make Bernie a reality.

1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die every year in the US. 4 million voters turn 18. We're just arguing time horizon and cohort turn out rates. Bernie was just too early after Reagan, globalization, and deregulation.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generation...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generat...

https://archive.is/iRyQE

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-polit...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-mil...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennia...

Except that people also age out of far left ideas. The 18 year old who's like "hell yeah, ownership is theft, raise the taxes" feels differently when they turn 35 and have to pay those taxes.

Third citation in my comment addresses your argument. Hard to become conservative when you have nothing to lose.

https://archive.is/iRyQE/f34b0a039aef880774f7d7d1dac5c0f5545...

It's not hard when you have the will and work ethic.

I'm well off and I work considerably less hard than many people making close to minimum wage. I'm treated better, trusted more, respected more, and have much more flexibility in my work.

Will and work ethic are weakly necessary for success, but they are not at all sufficient for it. (not successful) -> (not work ethic) is denying the antecedent: (successful) -> (work ethic) is, if not always true, at least often true, but that doesn't imply its converse.

Even in the face of hard facts, people resort to self deception in order to protect treasured illusions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...

I'm well into my 30s, in the top few percent for income in the US, and live in California (one of the highest tax states), and I happily pay them. I'm alive today because of their benefits, and I'd be the worst kind of hypocrite to pull the ladder up after me.

People's objection to social safety nets mostly isn't their desire to keep their money. It's a perception that the people who need those safety nets are lazy bums who don't deserve help. That's a particularly common perception among hard-working professionals, whose logic is "I worked hard to get where I am, so if others worked hard, they wouldn't need help". What they miss in that analysis, of course, is that their hard work combines with talent, luck, privilege, and health, things that many people who suffer lack. As a relative newcomer to the economic elite, I find it pretty distressing to hear how wealthy people talk about the poor when I myself was homeless less than five years ago.

> in the top few percent for income in the US, and live in California (one of the highest tax states), and I happily pay them.

Well, thats not surprising but at same time not default for most people. Universities have been leaning left since at least 60's and 70's . If all the people who attended university remained influenced by those ideas over the years. Most of the people with higher income and influential positions in society would be overwhelmingly left but that has not happened. It just shows a lot of people become conservative after leaving colleges.

Education is incredibly strongly correlated with not voting republican.

Although at this point that might be more class/intelligence signalling than any principled belief in social welfare. You don't have to support the poor to realize that it's a bad idea to support a mad death cult full of people who are toxic to your career.

White college graduates are almost evenly split between the parties..

And what does the white highschool dropout split look like?

Obama lost the white non-college educated vote by 26 points to Romney, by the way.

> Obama lost the white non-college educated vote by 26 points to Romney, by the way.

I’m sorry what??

It was the complete opposite. Obama won the “high-school dropout” vote overwhelmingly. Had narrow majority amongst those who graduated and actually lost college graduate vote to Romney by 4%…

Romney also won every income bracket above 50k

Less educated people started voting for the Republicans in 2016 but not quite to the extent they voted for Obama.

In 2016 the split between college educated voters was 49-45 and the majority of white college graduates voted for Trump.

Some college educated white voters shifted to the Democrats in 2020 so the gap was a bit wider so I wouldn’t say “incredibly” unless you think 3% is incredible..

It’s a different matter for postgraduates though (62-37% in 2020)

> If all the people who attended university remained influenced by those ideas over the years. Most of the people with higher income and influential positions in society would be overwhelmingly left but that has not happened

Uh what? higher educational attainment correlates with voting Democratic https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/education...

Universities are also not the leftist indoctrination camps that right-wingers have deluded themselves into believing they are. There are lots of conservatives on campus, especially the faculty.

Yeah, the sad fact is that people who received the fewest benefits and outside help are people more likely to reject a social safety network. What's sad is that these are the people who are most likely to benefit from this progressive change.

It's suggested that they fear that a (small) fraction of people are lazy and parasitical and will manipulate and abuse these systems. In some ways, I'm more cynical, and believe the cause is more deeply rooted: Since these people were hazed at some point in their lives (even if they're middle class, e.g. they took a job they hated beacuse gave them decent health insurance), they believe everyone should be hazed.

It's the old chestnut: "Do this shitty pointless thing, it builds character. (subtext: I was forced to do this shitty pointless thing, so why shouldn't you younger folks be too)."

This sort of "suffering is a virtue" thinking is, unfortunately, VERY deeply rooted in American (and more broadly, Anglo-Protestant) culture. It's good old fashioned Calvinism wrapped in capitalism.

You're an exception. Plenty of people are just fine with pulling up the ladder after them. Second generation immigrants don't like immigration, people that benefited from free tuition want to make schools paid and so on. It's really insane if you stop to think about it long enough: our whole society is based on the fact that we have each other, and yet, we can't spare a dime for our fellows because we're on a short leash ourselves and 'keeping up' is a big part of our satisfaction. All of this is programmed against you and anybody that wants to change the system is ostracized. And that's all before you get into the really big problems, this is just personal stuff.

I am an exception, yes. But I think the reason I'm an exception - the fact that I've experienced, very directly, very personally, and very nearly fatally - the insane hell that is American poverty - is important.

People aren't opposed to helping people who need it. They just don't understand that people need it.

> feels differently when they turn 35

I’m actually not salty about the taxes I pay (Ontario, Canada) I’m salty that I seem to get sweet FA for them compared to similar rates in Western European countries.

Seems like a problem with governance, not taxes.

Especially once they get some of that Greatest Transfer of Wealth, ever.

Except that logic is old. Nowadays the 35 year old still doesn't have a home, can't afford kids and forget about retirement because of usurious student loans and sky-high real-estate.

This is a religious belief, not an observation. Discounting all allegations of shenanigans, 45% of the Democratic Party primary voters supported him in 2016, and probably around or not much less than that in 2020. The man consistently polls as extremely popular (although that popularity took a hit after 2020), and is as old as dirt, along with a huge number of his voters.

Your views of the situation disregard your observations about the situation, if you're at any way aware of the data about Sanders' popularity over the last 10 years, the popularity of his policies, the fact that he was nearly President in 2016, and the fact that instead of him, a bunch of over-35s elected a wrestler game show host, it's nuts to still pretend that people generally mature into middle-of-the-road conservatism.

I am a very dedicated Sanders supporter, and to say he "was nearly President" in 2016 is just not true. Yes, by the end of the primary he'd gained a lot of steam, but that was the end of the primary. Sanders was in a pretty hopeless situation delegate-wise by Super Tuesday, and only briefly polled within even ten points of Clinton.

He was closer in 2020. But in 2020, Democratic primary voters got a very simple choice: double down on moderate neoliberalism, or try progressivism. Democratic primary voters made a very, very clear choice, and Biden wiped the floor with Sanders from the day it became a two-man race. Biden won nearly two-to-one in vote share and in delegates and won numerous states that were Sanders' base of support in 2016.

Is there a progressive wing in the Democratic Party? Yes. Is it a lot bigger than it was ten years ago? Yes. Is the fact that we've been right all along becoming more obvious by the day? Yes. But are progressives the majority of the party? No. Are we competitive in national primaries right now? No. We have simply not convinced half of the half of the country that votes Democratic that we are in the right.

Part of that is our serious problem with the black vote - it's very hard to win a Democratic primary without it - but it goes well beyond that. Republicans have very successfully painted us as a bunch of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who want to waste all your money sending men to leer at your daughters in locker rooms, and we need strategies to convince people otherwise. We need to play politics. What that looks like, we can debate, but we have so far failed to win the game of rhetoric even though we are, objectively, right.

Clinton won 2016 in large part because of her overwhelming majorities in deeply red states which wasn’t that helpful during the elections.

Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.

IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…

Of the states that Bernie won, only seven were solidly Democratic-voting (Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Democrats Abroad). Five more are dem-leaning swing states, or were at the time (Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire). The other 11 are solidly Republican: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and West Virginia, and Alaska. If anything, it was Bernie, not Clinton, who overperformed in Republican-leaning areas.

That's largely because both the 2016 and 2020 generals, and the 2016 and 2020 primaries, were highly split along racial and educational lines. Black voters voted overwhelmingly for moderates in primaries and Democrats in the generals in all three contests, while white voters tended towards the more radical candidates in both primaries and the general (although the Bernie -> Trump vote gets exaggerated, it certainly existed, and his massive upset in Michigan foreshadowed Clinton's weakness there).

> Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.

Well, in terms of delegates, sure. But Bernie didn't win the vote, either. Clinton beat him by 12 points, not all that much different from the margin Biden was beating him in '20 prior to him dropping out.

> IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…

The polling was a wash, ish, between the two. But of course the polling was also wrong in undersampling critical demographic groups that probably preferred Sanders to Clinton (although I'll note that Clinton won the primary in Pennsylvania, which she ultimately and decisively lost).

With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Democrats would have done a lot of things differently. (I certainly would have - I was so frustrated after Bernie lost that I ultimately voted third-party, although I might not have had I lived in a competitive state.) But certainly conventional wisdom at the time for virtually anyone in the know was that Trump was very unlikely to win, even as his popularity endured through things it never should have, and I don't necessarily blame them for mis-reading an electorate whose simmering frustration was suddenly at a boil.

My point being that Bernie being right does not mean he was, even with the benefit of hindsight, the correct electoral choice, nor does it mean there's some silent majority of Democrats who want progressive action but aren't voting for it.

My specific objection to raised taxes is the relatively low assurance that that will go to worthwhile causes.

Fix roads, improve access to mental health, etc., etc.? Sure. Raise my taxes (I moved to the US from a country where I was taxed at a higher rate than now.

Make empty promises, divert to pork, enrich the 0.1%, increase military spending? No, don't raise my taxes.

This trend is actually slowing and will likely disappear.

Yeah sorry, this is wrong, I’m 35 and would not support a reduction in taxes even if it benefitted me. I want national health insurance, I want the total demolition of Prop 13 in California, and I would pay higher Federal taxes if it meant that we had a functional European-style social safety net. I have been a high income earner and have experienced nothing but frustration with our idiotic system of private provision of what ought to be public benefits.

This post really indicates how deep the mainstream misinformation networks have penetrated the minds of the American.

The "real" Republican party, consisting of younger voters, is by-and-large populist. Majority of them are pro-gay (though, anti-trans), pro legalization of weed, pro gun, and pro free healthcare.

The problem is that the real Republican party consists of 80 year old neoliberal sacks of garbage. These are the people making the laws. The Democrats are not different. It may seem to be a cliche that "both parties are the same" but when you observe effected policy vs proposed policy both parties fall along the neoliberal line almost perfectly. What we have a neoliberal gerontocracy. Not a democracy.

This is why internally there's a struggle for the R's to keep young voters. The same problem D's are having. While the D's are blowing their own foot off going too far off to the left socially, the R's are blowing their own foot off sticking to their dogmatic 1960s neoliberal policies.

It's far more complicated than left/right dynamics. Its absurd to me how much misinformation CNN/Fox/MSNBC/NPR put out about this. If anyone on the left actually wandered to their nearest blue collar bar and asked people what they thought on "the issues" you'd probably find they are more "liberal" than you were let on by your favorite misinformation artist.

I don’t imagine it would be popular with unions, either.

They are against universal healthcare. Not because it's not a good idea, but because unions in general have negotiated for healthcare benefits. It's sad they're being so petty about this.

What's to stop your local city government from increasing taxes to hire a doctor and provide them with a building and staff in order to provide medical services to locals residents?

It seems to me that the problem is that everyone wants a federal solution to healthcare and the United States is generally structured to limit federal power.

Fire departments are funded locally generally speaking, it didn't take a federal mandate to create them. If you think medical services should be provided to people as a civic service, go convince your local government to do it.

https://www.actuary.org/sites/default/files/pdf/health/pool_... ("For a risk pool to remain viable, it must be of sufficient size and comprised of a broad cross section of risks.")

There are US states more populous than some European countries. Maybe a city can’t do it, but plenty of states could. It’s just damn expensive to try.

Reading your comment, I had the thought "I wonder if California's done it?" Turns out they've tried it 10 times. I'd imagine there's a lot of money being thrown against the initiative by for-profit insurance companies, which is an industry with a lot of cash to buy laws.

https://stateofreform.com/featured/2023/05/california-seeks-...

That reads like they've tried to try it 9 or 10 times. They haven't even gotten to the point of finding out what all might turn out differently in a US state than in an EU country surrounded by other EU countries, all with roughly similar approaches to public health care.

I work in public health at a state government, in a western state. The biggest hurdle I see is that America has freedom of movement and residency. If my state creates truly affordable health care, we will of course have refugees from conservative states coming here for medical care.

We'll probably end up with a public option of some kind that will somewhat function like health insurance but who knows.

This is an interesting point. And perhaps worse yet, high quality doctors will have the freedom to move out of your state.

I'm an American living and Germany and sadly, my GP who is also a personal friend of mine, will be shutting down their practice at the end of the year because their small practice simply isn't financially sustainable. They will instead start treating the prison population, which apparently pays more / is more consistent.

So I can also imagine how doctors in your state would feel if suddenly their rates are dramatically capped by the state.

I'm not aware of any public health care systems where medical care services are as expensive as in the United States, but perhaps it's possible to maintain relatively similar doctor pay as currently exists AND provide socialized health care benefits. I really don't know enough about this topic and the financials of American (non-public) health insurance companies to comment accurately on whether that would be feasible.

There is no chance that the state would cap rates, I'm not sure they even could. The real pull would be trying to expand Medicaid, which is free,creating a single payer system and raising taxes, or creating public health insurance, or some combination of both.

The public option would be the best in a vacuum, but if its truly affordable, we will still attract uninsured and under-insured people who come here when they get sick.

Prices could probably drop if the market was saturated with doctors. And the best way to do that would be eliminating medical-school debt.

I thought the limited number of residencies was the real bottleneck?

Both

Both are important. The high cost of medical school means people are only going to try and go for the specialties that pay the most (surgery, oncology, radiology, etc) leaving a shortage of Drs in other specialties like primary care/family medicine.

Primary care reimbursement rates also need to be raised and we need more preventative treatments that insurance is required to pay for.

I'm comparing to the best public healthcare system I'm personally familiar with (Germany) and saying:

* Medical-school debt is not a thing here. * Prices are low. * I know doctors who can't make a sustainable income to keep their small practices open.

Somewhat puzzlingly, for a handful of services, there can a medium length delay in getting an appointment because of how busy the doctors are.

This is definitely all much better than the situation is in Canada, where the typical person struggled even to get a GP, and friends with cancer would be forced to wait a life-imperiling year to get a routine scan that be the difference between life and death.

This is a challenge. It would be unconstitutional to out right ban individuals from getting the benefits, but maybe a waiting period would be constitutional(i.e. must be a resident for 1 year to sign up).

They haven’t actually tried it. The last time it was yanked from being voted on because politicians make promises to get elected and are then told by their donors not to dip into their profit pools.

But in many ways California already has it if you qualify based on income (Medi-Cal / Medicaid).

It actually works well which is why it won’t be made available to everyone. Stock prices and profit margins would drop too much.

If you want consumers that spend more money on your products, you need consumers with more money. To some degree, an inefficient healthcare system stands in the way of every other industry's profits. A suitably ambitious middle manager at a large company could probably make a dent. A CEO of such a company might actually capture some of that inefficiency.

The problem with doing it at the state level is that then all the sick will move to that state. Which won’t work from a risk pool perspective

It would seem unlikely that all sick people would move just for one perk. Most people do not take moving as a light decision.

Also most people that actually do move would likely have jobs with taxable wages that helps to subsidize things.

The real risk population is maybe the homeless sick that migrate. But those tend to be in a different category entirely (e.g mental illness, addiction, trafficking etc.)

Well sharts, most people don’t take dying too lightly either. Free care for the gravely infirm would be, to a point, the only perk that mattered at the exclusion of all others. Likewise with the possibility of total bankruptcy.

This problems is mostly solved for in state vs out of state tuition. Just institute 12-15 month waiting period or 3 months waiting period with full time job.

Mainly, that one city or state doing it will likely cause an influx of sicker people. You can't require a visa to come to, say, Austin TX, and "only to residents who've lived here longer than x" would raise equal protection constitutional issues.

(This is the same reason the ACA had the individual mandate, and why said mandate's striking down is likely to result in the ACA's failure or needing significant amending soon.)

> "only to residents who've lived here longer than x" would raise equal protection constitutional issues

States seem to apply residency consideration all the time to college tuition and taxes, among others. Why would equal protection be an issue here?

Austin, TX can't implement this on its own without state support, but cities don't have any federal constitutional rights apart from their containing states, so that's too bad

> States seem to apply residency consideration all the time to college tuition and taxes, among others. Why would equal protection be an issue here?

Because you're either going to have to pick some fairly short period of time - a year or less - which won't be that much of an obstacle to folks seeking healthcare (especially if private healthcare remains available in that interim period), or you'll run afoul of Zobel v. Williams if you try to make a permanent or long-lived distinction.

Yes, that is a trade-off.

You structure it as paying into a plan. For each year lived in the state you get 20% coverage (upto 5 years) which would smooth out the cost and provide fairness to poorer local residents.

Do you count the influx of homeless as residents? These people absolutely need healthcare, but they are a resource drain that can move in suddenly, unpredictably, and overwhelm a local solution with static resources.

Then you get a situation where the wealthy, even (and sometimes especially) the diehard leftists who voted for the situation, turn up their nose at what’s shown up in their backyard, and fuck off from California to Colorado or Texas. This reduces the tax resource pool, stressing the residents and businesses that can’t afford to leave further. This creates resentment.

Coupled with the overly dramatic and personal shitshow that is local politics, frankly I see local initiatives as a fantastic way to fail tens of thousands of times.

Fixes have to take place at least at the state level, and even that is less than ideal, because expenses have to be spread out (especially in regards to the wealthiest 1% that pay a huge chunk of income tax, and are not equally distributed across local towns) without creating an attractive hotspots for tax resource competition.

Except the only demographic of net in-flow _moving to California_ are those in the top 5% or so.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-income-t...

Note: this article is from 2019, which is obviously pre-Covid. I still think it’s too early to predict any trend on post-Covid migrations (which would really be captured and 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, assuming you started planning to leave mid-pandemic 2021-2022)

California had its largest tax surplus in the history of a state ever the 2022 fiscal year.

FYI, unless they fix their tax system, they are currently headed towards a (last I checked) 30+ billion dollar deficit this year. They also recently raised taxes on income over (I think) $1 million again last year, and I believe plan to continue to do so.

Also for a more up to date perspective on migration and money: https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/08/california-is-leak...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/San-Francisco-migrati...

Regardless, this still supports my point that state level healthcare while far more durable than local gov, still can’t compare to national level stability.

Hospitals and public health systems owned and operated by city and county governments are not actually unusual in the US. They're fairly common.

There really isn’t anything that constitutionally prevents the federal government from establishing universal healthcare. See Medicare and Medicaid.

In the large, the issue is taxes are too low to support current spending. Only the federal government can run a sustained deficit. Republicans aggressively take advantage of this to cut taxes while disingenuously complaining about debt.

I don't know about other states, but my state Tennessee and its counties do just this. I'd be willing to bet it's more common than not across the US. https://www.tn.gov/health/health-program-areas/localdepartme...

San Francisco started doing something like this in 2007: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_San_Francisco

Bernie isn't a Democrat.

He's a three term Senator elected to that body as an Independent that has always caucused with the Democrats (as he did in the House befor that), is currently given by the Senate Democrats the position of Chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and was the #2 Democrat in the last two Presidential nominating contests.

Anyone can try and get the Democrat nomination for president, they don't limit it to card carrying Democrats.

Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist. You can, of course, call him whatever you want, but it won't make him identify himself differently.

> Anyone can try and get the Democrat nomination for president,

Yes, and lots of people do.

People who aren’t accepted by other Democrats as part of the team don’t end up with large blocks of convention delegates and a major role in shaping the rules going forward due to that.

> they don't limit it to card carrying Democrats

No such thing exists, unless you are talking about people who pay membership fees to the DNC, but that's a pretty narrow definition.

Yes, Democrat is just a label that you use to identify yourself, and if Bernie says he isn't a Democrat, he isn't a Democrat.

The Republican Party has been becoming more of a populist party. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start backing such policies or universal income as we deal with several societal and economic changes.

I would be surprised!

… but only for folks who “deserve it” (aka white)

Populism is mostly separating people in two groups, "the people" and "the elites" and saying you're from "the people". You don't actually have to do anything for the people, just convince them you're with them (hence all the populists winning elections out there, like Trump).

Odds Republicans would ever do something like this with the current party are nil, a large part of republican donors are big businesses that would never back anything that empowers workers.

Odds Democrats would ever do something like this are slim too. Democrats receive more money from Wall Street than Republicans now

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/17/902626429/wall-streets-big-mo...

Till we all realize that both parties are the problem and stop calling the party we don’t support the boogey man, we will be stuck in this hamster wheel of absurdity.

They take a lot of money from unions as well so I'd say while the odds are low it's more likely to happen with Ds.

and fix immigration so there are fewer illegals reaping those benefits

Uh yeah, you're just being a nativist. The US has absurdly low immigration limits(Canada a county a 10th the size accepts the same number of permanent residents each year)and the 'benefits' are compensation for the job they worked.

That might help with health insurance, but what about worker safety, or reasonable hours, resting, etc?

It makes the fight for those much easier when you’re not worrying about your family getting sick or in an accident and bankrupting you

The thing is, I see a huge difference between high-end health plans (for example, at places like Meta, which include IVF coverage) and middle-of-the-road plans (like my employer provides) and bare-minimum plans (like MediCal).

Which plan would we be talking about for government coverage? I assume barebones plans.

In that case, it still matters who you work for, because some employers still provide much better coverage.

Almost all health insurance you get through an employer is part of a government program to subsidize health care.

About 1.28% of US gross domestic product is spent subsidizing employer health plans: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-06/57962-health-insura...

Agree completely, it's easy to gloss over what that coverage would look like.

But just want to point out that "low end" Medicaid plans are frequently better in many ways in states where the program is well supported as far as coverage vs middle-of-the-road employer plans. Zero out-of-pocket expenses, and in Oregon, Washington and California they cover routine dental care as well, for example.

They typically have very restricted networks however vs employer provided plans.

He didn't say anything about government coverage. He said to stop tying coverage to employment. Doing the latter doesn't mean we have to switch to government coverage.

Instead of your employer paying you $S salary per year + paying $M per year for the premiums for whatever group plan they use they would pay you $S + $M salary and you would buy whatever health insurance you wanted directly.

Uh that is naive. Employers will simply pay you the same $S as they were and pocket the $M as profit.

Yep...This isn't really new to anyone that has any exposure to the business world that deals with actual good/services. Amazon had some program where they'd give a loan to business operator money to lease trucks, buy uniforms, etc and you get routes. The terms work out such that you make a certain amount money, almost guaranteed. To them, it's a form of insurance.

You deliver their goods. They track your performance. It's your business, but from a distance, they control everything. They have zero liability for what happens...it's not their company, their employees. But they can "union bust" by cancelling your contract. If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee.

> If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee.

This right here should get Amazon.com classified as a joint employer. A franchise model is suppose to delegate HR decisions to the local owner.

Yep, sounds like the legal term of 'distinction without a difference'.

Congress had the right idea when they made ERISA pension liabilities joint liabilities among controlled companies. Of course, that’s probably one of the factors that contributed to the decline of private sector pensions, but I think some new joint liability laws would be a great idea.

Something like:

- laborers presumably have social security numbers

- if a laborer is working in the premises of a company (and a van is definitely that) WITH THE MARKETING, then you have a direct line between the worker and the company using its labor.

- if a laborer is working on a company's premises, it must report that labor for the hours.

- if the total labor for a company exceeds a "full time" trigger, then it triggers all that employment law about "full time employees" or "part time employees".

- you can have a cutoff amount for lucrative consulting that this doesn't apply to. So if your bill rate is like 100+/hr, you can be exempt from the tracking.

Basically, companies are going to utilize corporate law, limited liability, shell company obfuscation, and supplier relationships to obfuscate full time vs part time vs employee vs "contractor". This isn't really that new. Use the social security number system to break through this. Of course it relies on reporting and compliance, but there's numerous examples of big bad hammers that can be employed, especially if it tracks back to a big bad company like Amazon.

But the real issue is that government oversight of corporations is basically nonexistent except where the regulatory capture is valuable. The SEC and FTC are total jokes, the mortgage crisis showed that in plain view. So even if I come up with some good tieback mechanism, it won't work.

... unless there is a consortium of companies that will push it against Amazon, which I'm surprised hasn't happened. Everyone seems to be competing with Amazon in the marketplace, which at this point they are now monopolized. Walmart / Bestbuy / Target don't seem to be fighting in government regulation yet which is what they need to do. Likewise Azure and GCP aren't fighting AWS in antitrust either.

But I think at some point it will happen.

The real fix is to just stop tying benefit requirements to who the employer is and what the employee's full time status is. A lot of these problems go away with just universal healthcare, and providing benefits beyond pay via society rather than via companies.

Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. It might hurt some, but if these companies can not survive without workers, they will hire full time. And if they can not afford they don't deserve to exist.

> Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed.

Isn't that what Universal Healthcare does? They obviously charge premiums, but they are a percentage of income that goes all the way down to 0.

Universal healthcare takes healthcare from being a concern to companies at all, and now they can just hire who they want for however long they want. It also makes the labor pool much more fluid, and makes low end jobs much more viable (morally and economically).

Some people specifically want part time work. Tying things to employment that don't cleanly scale up or down with hours removes useful flexibility.

We have socialized healthcare in the USA, we just deliver it at the emergency room, the worst possible place. The more we get people to realize that we already have this the more we can reduce the resistance to expanding it in a sane way. America 100% has socialized medicine. Go to the emergency room and you will be treated.

I don't think that's a productive tactic-- it leads people to believe the situation isn't as bad as it is. The only people who get actually free care at the ER are too poor for debt collectors to bother harassing. There's no reality in which giving someone a bill for tens of thousands of dollars constitutes socialized medicine just because they don't have to pay upfront.

We pay for a socialized healthcare system already, we just pay the same amount again of private overhead on top of an already socialized system. Our system is just a huge waste at this point.

We certainly waste more money than we'd spend on socialized health care. I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment. Those two things are only tangentially related and tying them together in that context doesn't seem like a great position to argue from.

> I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment.

This is why countries like Switzerland require everyone to buy insurance. The system doesn't work if everyone freeloads.

(I guess we would still call Switzerland socialized, since the insurance prices are heavily regulated, everyone is basically in the same risk pools, and subsidies are given to those who don't meet thresholds)

If everyone in the US was in the same risk pool, and we had some good rules in place to prevent insurance company fuckery like denying legitimate claims based on spurious accusations that are difficult to prove wrong or preexisting conditions, then it probably wouldn't matter that it was private. But at that point, why make it private? If we acknowledge that insurance is so fundamental to existence that we require people to buy it, and the individual mandate says that we do, why add stockholders into the mix? At least make it a gov-owned private company like the fed if people are worried about executive dexterity.

I went the ER, was treated, and was sent a bill that must get turned over to god knows who if I didn't pay it. They took an x-ray, a blood sample, sent me home, and I got billed $4,800.

> ” This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal.”

It comes down to priorities.

In the US at least, regulators are very pro jobs & job creation.

People employed contributor to society in many ways (eg purchase goods, taxes, lower crime, etc).

Which means, US wants to make it easy for someone to create a company so they can hire a people.

Now if the business that’s created to employee people is a subcontractor for a Mega Corp, the US regulators don’t care. Because again, it comes down to priorities - which is pro job creation.

Note: I’m not anti-unions. I’m just trying to depict it comes down to what’s highest priorities for regulators. And pro job creation / making it easy to create a company, is pretty high on this list.

"pro jobs" here meaning... not pro workers...

Pretty sure this has been solved in other countries by allowing sectorial unions (so in this case all delivery drivers would be in one union and they negotiate collectively regardless of the particular business they work for).

But I don't think these kind of laws can really pass in the USA, the political will is just not there.

The very system of contractors vs part time vs full time getting different levels of benefits is designed to avail employers of paying their employees benefit. The end to the loophole is simply ending these arbitrary classifications and it won’t happen without a serious fight because why would employers give up their right to hire employees at a discount? The modern day purpose of the system is to allow employers to misclassify their employees for the purpose of stealing their wages.

I’d entertain a policy proposal that does this without too much damage to the ability to flexibly hire for part time and contract and freelance type work.

Just buy from the physical store. Otherwise at the end of day you will choose a online retailer that successfully prevents unionization because it is more efficient and cheaper.

Workers are the physical store are also subject to these same issues. Consumer side activism doesn't work.

Unfortunately "subcontractor" is politically equivalent to "small business owner". You have a whole class of people who think they're being pandered to by tax incentives and other programs.

Thesw workers already agreed to Amazon employment contract. If they are not happy they can quit and join high paying programming jobs by Apple or Meta...assuming they can code. Instead, they wish to renegade on their employment contracts and blackmail Amazon (which indirect jack our price) via a cartel known as union. Union tactics are usually very straightforward....we want more....in exchange we dont go on strike to renegade on your employment contract because we too lazy to learn to code to get paid better so easier to just blackmail you. And that is how America lose out to China.

Why do you think the answer to labor issues it to get everyone to learn how to code?

IIRC there are provisions in the NLRA that address situations like this. If Amazon primarily directs the activities of the workers, not the contractor company, if Amazon can dismiss individual employees then they're consider a kind of joint employer and can still be unionized against.

Nothing shows the power of unions more than the lengths companies go to fight them.

In a Union there is Strength.

What strength do they have? Unions routinely cause jobs to be eliminated and offshored.

Would Amazon drivers unionizing cause Amazon to offshore drivers?

If Amazon drivers unionizing would cause Amazon to eliminate drivers, does that suggest unions lack strength, or that unions have strength that Amazon fears?

Amazon drivers unionizing would cause Amazon to hire FedEx or DHL. Unions don't have a monopoly on drivers.

And would the drivers be paid more or less (and what of other conditions)?

the whole reason Amazon has it's own drivers is because they can pay them way less. your example would actually represent a big success since ups/dhl/FedEx drivers have much better job security and benefits.

Yes, it's the unions, not the execs.

Well no, it's literally the employers who move their capital to regimes which allow more exploitative working arrangements to boost their profit margin. That they are so unwilling to accept a reduce share of the company's net income that they will pick up their toys and move to Bangladesh just indicates that we need to be more aggressive against capital mobility.

For unions, workers are the profit center. For corporations, workers are the expense.

Blaming the unions for corporate greed (going offshore for cheaper labor) is utterly hilarious.

This sounds like just the opposite of a capitalist monopoly from the other side. Why would I want any party to control the way a market works? You'll get stagnation both ways. see many historical examples where both monopolies and unions refused change and were overturned, leading to failures. i.e. Detroit

I want a functioning competitive market where workers and firms compete and have to adjust and innovate to fit what people want. Neither side should be able to lock down and define the way things must work.

> Nothing shows the power of capitalist monopolies more than the lengths unions go to fight them. Oh wait

You say this as if it's some clever proof, but I'd say it's literally correct. It's why all sorts of people in all sorts of countries fight capitalist monopolies.

And, I should add, for all sorts of reasons. I believe strongly in the power of markets. They're incredible optimization machines. Which is why I'm also for strong markets. Monopolies are just as anti-market as the most ardent communist. People who believe in free enterprise should all fight monopolistic behavior.

Yeah I was saying that the original claim was self-contradictory since if you use "resistance exists" as a proof that something is good, then you've already admitted that anti-unionism is good too, since it's also strongly resisted.

GP said it was proof of power. Power can be used for good or ill.

Rewriting a comment after somebody has already responded is very rude. Now your comment is differently wrong, but I'm sure not going to bother with it or you given that you may just keep rewriting the thing I'm responding to.

Apologies, I was adding detail and don't realize you were already responding. I don't think we disagree though - do you? I still agree with what you responded to, I just removed that phrase because it seemed inflammatory

But the problem is that the labor "market" has many weird inefficiencies not found in the usual "buyer X selling widget Y" model of the free market. For example, the poorer you are the less elasticity you have in your labor "product"; by the mere necessity of paying rent and buying food you have to accept virtually any offer that comes your way. On the other hand, employers often negotiate from a position of substantial strength because of their deep capital reserves. I'd consider this a market distortion, and a harmful one at that. Labor laws and unions provide counterbalance which is important to ensuring a healthy labor market.

I agree that this is a theoretical weakness. In the US currently, though, it seems that this rarely ever comes into play. i.e. in SF the city gives anyone money to survive for food/etc. w/out working. I think truly not having options is very rare in the 1st world in general. If you think this is an active issue here, I'm open to looking further into it.

So I agree that while exploitation by monopolies is possible (in the extreme, just via slavery or indentured servitude/debt peonage), I think we have mostly taken care of it via social support mechanisms. If that's true, then further intervention in markets doesn't seem necessary. Of course, I still would support health inspections, etc to root out local corruption since it's too hard for the public to monitor that themselves. In a sense, the fact that voters approve the FDA and other inspection-style measures is just them commissioning someone to do that for them, and that's okay.

But when it comes to California coming in and saying that Uber drivers shouldn't be allowed to voluntarily work as contractors, it seems really strange. Drivers like it and the company likes it, so what's the problem? Yet the state still wants to intervene in the relationship.

I'm not sure where things stand now, but just prior to the pandemic I remember reading that the labor market was historically inelastic for workers of all stripes. Between non-computes, implicit collusion, and the emergence of gig work people who sold their labor for wages were the least able to change jobs or negotiate for better wages since like the 70s.

Your characterization of SF's social safety net seems (charitably) hyperbolic, I think you need to diversify your news diet.

> I think we have mostly taken care of it via social support mechanisms

As with labor elasticity, these are again at historical lows. Basically since Reagan we have gutted our social safety net and replaced it with tax cuts for the employers who then take their extra capital overseas.

> Drivers like it and the company likes it, so what's the problem?

I don't know who you're talking to, but drivers definitely don't "like it". They need it, yes, but the ones I've spoken to seem to have major problems with Uber who has stonewalled them for years.

Overall it sounds like we are starting from very different assumptions about the state of play in the labor market right now, not sure if we're going to bridge this in a comment thread debate. Have a good one!

The free market has options and then showing something that was designed in SF precisely because the free market fails people is not a very good argument for the free market.

A capitalist monopoly is a conspiracy in favor of the firm. Unions are a conspiracy in favor of the people.

Exactly. And somehow people fail to see a difference between human needs and the needs of a profit seeking machine.

Without unions individuals basically NEVER have bargaining power. And of course it's not like you can choose to not work. At least not for the crushing majority of people, I guess.

Unions are often monopolies too - monopolies on labour. Monopolies often lead to inefficiency in the market and an inefficient market is bad for everyone.

Unions are just another corporation. They balance the corporation that owns the assets. Nobody is locking anything down, they're just signing contracts. This is healthy for competition, not stifling.

Not quite “just another corporation”, they are often monopolies on labour.

Frankly, power imbalances in either direction isn’t good - because we all know it will be abused.

The main way people compete, outside of vampire-FAANG, is by a willingness to work for lower wages

There's a massive power imbalance, a lack of alternative employers, but employers all have a huge number of potential employees, so we end up with zero real wage growth in the last 50 years or more while profitability is soaring

And if you don't like unions, I hope you're looking forward to the age discrimination in your future as you, instead of gainins security as you age, lose all your job prospets in tech

There is some justice in that the young will get old and experience the same system they helped perpetuate. The young should be willing to hire the old, or else they themselves will become old and find that nobody is willing to hire them.

I'm always confused by the framing of these articles. Are companies supposed to help unions form against them? If they supported unionization efforts, why not just save everyone the time and money and listen to employee demands without one?

It's like, you can love your wife as much as anyone, but you are not expected to help her get her own divorce attorney.

Yeah, companies are going to be against unionizing. That's the point of unionizing. That's the bar you have to reach.

Like calling up the pinkertons and paying them millions is just the inevitable reflex of any fully evolved corporation lmao. Natural as breathing is for you and me.

The government is compelled to argue against itself at trial. Manufacturers are compelled to inspect their own products. Banks are compelled to limit the money they lend out. Employers are compelled to allow unionization.

If we never compelled people to do something they didn't want to do, we would have no need for laws.

Besides, Amazon is allowed to fight unionization. The problem is using dishonest or abusive means to combat it. That means no classifying employees as contractors, no Pinkertons, and no Two Minutes Hate.

That's such a bad analogy. Unions are only really brought up when people are being mistreated, underpaid, overworked, etc. People don't unionize when their needs are met (even if they should).

Your analogy doesn't work even if you also include the fact that the husband has been abusing his wife as much as possible without getting caught. What they are doing is making an active effort to make sure the wife can't get to an attorney at all.

I truly don't understand how so many can side with this abstract concept of a profit-seeking machine over human needs.

Poor Amazon might have to reduce their profits by 0.00001% to allow workers to pee while driving!

I think you are the one not understanding the situation. As you point out, amazon is a "profit-seeking machine". It makes perfect sense that they would not want unions. The wife-beating husband also is not going to want his wife to meet with a divorce attorneys and is certainly not going to take the initiative of hiring one for her.

Both of these statements have a significant number of cases where they are not true.

Yeah it makes sense they don't want unions, but that's not the point of it. Anti-union behavior is still mostly illegal, isn't it?

There's a difference between expecting companies to help unions vs actively engage in shady behavior to avoid them.

In this case, we're describing what I consider a loophole, but it's still wrong (even putting aside the morality of it).

OP said the framing was weird, but expecting companies to not be that shitty is perfectly normal in my view. After all, we sometimes forget that at some point a human decided this was the right move.

The alternative is to normalize it and assume every company is the shittiest possible. On second thought that might be a lot closer to reality though.

Uhh, that's kind of my point exactly. If a husband is beating his wife, expecting him pay for her to have an attorney is such a weird expectation to have. If I am a loving husband, I can just stop beating my wife.

If Amazon can improve their working conditions, either willfully or through the enforcement of labor laws, whether or not they are anti-labor is kind of irrelevant.

In your analogy, the husband has a fiduciary responsibility to keep beating his wife. It's kind of a bad analogy.

If the situation was that the husband was obligated to beat his wife, forcing him to pay for a referee to control how hard he beat his wife would be a good thing.

Obviously it would be better if he just stopped beating his wife, but the guys in suits upstairs would be pretty upset about that... So let's limit the beatings in the meantime

I don't follow. Corporations have a fiduciary duty to be terrible to employees?

Not directly, only by proxy. Profit is king.

At Amazon scales, you weigh in how much money you'll save by breaking laws and eventually getting a slap on the wrist fine versus all other alternatives. Unsurprisingly it's often much cheaper to be terrible to your employees and replace them endlessly, than it is to not be terrible. Especially once you make unionization nigh impossible.

Yep. You understand it.

If thats where the uncaptured profit is, then yes.

IDK man, irrelevant for who?

It's definitely relevant to me. I would never work at Amazon because of these practices, even if they probably don't extend to developers (at least at the same scale).

Maybe it's not relevant for you but I'm sure it's relevant for many others too.

Are companies supposed to help unions form against them?

You're framing it as an inherently adversarial relationship. Owners of a company are allowed to coordinate, and do so by voting their shares to select directors and officers. Workers should be similarly free to organize in pursuit of their interests. In many cases, the interests of shareholders and labor will coincide because the workers understand a lot of things about the business that the shareholders (and indeed management in many cases) do not.

Help? No. Be prevented from actively hindering? Absolutely.

I'd be willing to accept a 0.25% less return annually on the S&P index if workers had meaningfully better existences. It might even increase returns if workers could be more productive by having dignified lives. This is the best way to frame thinking about things in our current macroeconomic environment.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of investors are not willing to accept anything less than "the highest possible returns legally achievable". Therefore,, everything that can legally be thrown under the bus in exchange for profit eventually gets thrown under the bus. Including workers' pay and conditions, product quality, customer service, customer privacy and security, every manageable cost. The minute one company realizes they can cut some good thing to provide a higher return, all companies will (and eventually must, due to competition) cut that thing. It's an inevitable race to the bottom.

"the vast majority of investors are not willing to accept anything less than "the highest possible returns legally achievable""

One important correction because they definitely aren't getting the highest return by those antics

Fixed: "the vast majority of investors are not willing to accept anything but the highest expected return when only considering easily quantified first order short term effects"

That's an important distinction that should not be left out.

also returns now, who cares about the future of the company or other investors. Short-term thinking is like taking poison in exchange for a golden coin.

.25% is nothing. That's the problem.

I think the issue is that it might not be a small difference. Most companies don't make that much money on a profit per employee basis.

https://i.imgur.com/SF6RGxX.png

Amazon makes $21,000/employee per year and that's just the direct employees, not including all the subcontracted stuff like this. Walmart makes $6,000/employee per year.

Walmart might be an easier example to pick on because they have fewer subcontracted employees and they're on a more stable basis (rather than trying to take over the world like Amazon).

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=wmt+profit+per+employee

From 2012 to 2021, Walmart has ranged from $3,000-8,000 in profit per employee per year. The average hourly wage for for frontline workers at Walmart is $17.50 or around $35,000/year. If Walmart were to increase salaries by $3,500/year (a 10% raise for frontline workers and substantially less for many workers), it would decrease profits by more than half.

So many people think that margins are way better than they are. Whether it's a 10% increase in salaries or a 10% reduction in workload, companies are often operating on thin margins.

You're not talking about accepting a 0.25% less return. You're probably talking about accepting 6-10% less return - unless we start talking about redistribution.

Let's say that Walmart gives their frontline workers a 10% raise and reduces the pay of their knowledge workers to compensate (and for the moment let's say that those knowledge workers can't quit and move to a different job). Then we've potentially created a situation where we've materially made workers lives better.

Are you willing to accept a lower salary for yourself to pay workers better? That's not a rhetorical question. I think many people would be. Living in a good society is important. In fact, many people basically vote for this through expanded government programs. They vote to reduce their income to make things better for workers who make less money than they do.

How can we practically implement what you want in a way that can actually exist? Well, we can increase the minimum wage. Yes, increasing the minimum wage can create some unemployment, but there's a decent amount of economic research showing the impact is smaller than we used to believe and we're also in a period of record employment. Things like this can also cause some inflationary pressure in certain sectors, but it doesn't have to be across the board since, for example, there aren't a lot of software engineers making minimum wage.

Of course, some of this goes back to power. In the Walmart example, I said we'd assume that the knowledge workers couldn't quit for a new job basically to protest the redistribution of wages from them to lower paid workers. Well, one of the issues we have is that many knowledge workers have the power to get higher wages. A problem to overcome is that many knowledge workers would likely argue that if things at Walmart are getting more expensive to pay the higher minimum wage (aka, some inflation is happening), then they should get paid more. At that point, the inflation can be more general. If everyone earns 10% more, then no one has actually earned 10% more. If only some people get the 10% raise, then they actually have a larger share of the pie.

But the problem is that there isn't an easy solution like "if only companies would give up 2% of their profits to their workers we'd be in a workers' paradise!" Yea, we'd all be willing to accept a 0.25% less annual return IF workers had meaningfully better existences. However, your proposal is more like giving Walmart workers a $150 bonus. That isn't nothing, but I don't think you'd say that's a meaningfully better existence with a more dignified life. The problem is that your 0.25% less return just doesn't mean much in a lot of cases.

This assumes there isn't a situation where worker output is static. I think there's an argument that treating workers better would increase their job satisfaction and overall attitude. When workers are happier, they are better at their jobs - this could nudge up sales and margins.

My hypothesis as to why companies don't do this is 1) smart ones ARE doing this (see FAANG), 2) it's harder to measure whereas cost savings are a great way to focus on short term.

> Amazon makes $21,000/employee per year and that's just the direct employees, not including all the subcontracted stuff like this. Walmart makes $6,000/employee per year.

Workers who are paid and treated better will be healthier both physically and mentally, and will be happier to come to work. That will improve their productivity. It's not zero-sum.

They will also have more money to spend at places such as their employer, although that results in a Tragedy of the Commons scenario. Each individual business gets back only a fraction of that increased buying power.

(Yes, yes, inflation, etc., etc.)

Is this a theory, or proven? It makes a LOT of sense to do what Amazon is doing here. Why would you want to have a ton of depreciating vehicles on your balance sheet? Why would you want the maintenance burden? No need to worry about all the regional differences with vehicle/transport law - you allow people who are based in that region to do it (better).

One could also argue this is good for the economy, in that there are hundreds of small business popping up all over the country to become these service partners.

Unions aside this feels like a smart business move so I don't understand the hate here.

it probably is good for Amazons bottom line but all of this just results in greater wealth disparity. since you're on you probably make a good living in tech but don't think that makes you immune to replacement. likewise having a bunch of people in neighboring cities who can't afford housing or groceries is going to have repercussions in your daily life as well.

Is it really a smart business move from an economic point of view? Aside from some regional differences in vehicle/transport law (which I bet are not as different as you'd expect, a lot of this is federalized), this should cost Amazon more, not less. The scale works to their advantage. Having subcontractors is strictly more expensive since there's an extra layer of profit.

> which I bet are not as different as you'd expect, a lot of this is federalized

I've lived in 5 different states over the course of my life. The operating environment varies substantially. Local ordinances vary greatly. Fuel costs. Climate (vehicles in Phoenix are not exposed to rust, salt, etc while here in Michigan they are). Local labor laws, unemployment costs, insurance costs and restrictions. It's literally completely different in every state.

Businesses love to subcontract, particularly when it is outside their core competency. It's a line item on the expenses.

If unions did not exist I would posit that they would still operate this way.

> If unions did not exist I would posit that they would still operate this way.

Yes, I think so. Furthermore, if unions were mandatory and universal, businesses would still favor subcontracting when paying for work outside their core competency.

Delivery is Amazon's core competency, IMO.

By which I mean, their superior quality of delivery is the reason I buy stuff from them.

The worst Amazon driver is better in every way than the best Fedex or UPS, and I'm loathe to dignify Canada Post by even mentioning them.

"outsource anything that doesn't make the beer taste better" as Jeff Bezos put it.

> there are hundreds of small business popping up all over the country to become these service partners [of one company]

Sounds like a monopoly to me.

a monopoly implies domination and zero competition. where do you get that sense?

Well, if there are hundreds of companies doing deliveries for Amazon, then isn't "doing deliveries for Amazon" it's own industry? If hundreds of companies don't form an "industry", then I don't know what does.

In the industry of "companies doing delivery for Amazon", Amazon has a dominant position. They can destroy any one company, or destroy the entire industry on a whim.

Why would you want to have a ton of depreciating vehicles on your balance sheet? Why would you want the maintenance burden? No need to worry about all the regional differences with vehicle/transport law [...]

Why did Amazon build its own delivery fleet in the first place? Unless you were strenuously against that idea from the outset, the answer is that even with the costs it was probably cheaper than buying the service from other corporations.

> Fuel, tolls, and ongoing maintenance paid for by Amazon

https://freightpartner.amazon.com/marketing/opportunity

I think Amazon still owns the trucks and pays for their maintenance.

> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer

> Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.

Right, but see, that leadership principle is only relevant to employees, and the leaders decided that these people are not employees.

What's that thing where you come up with a metric to measure success but then people over-optimize on the metric itself rather than actual success?

What I’ve gathered from reading this thread is experience varies widely. One thread, Amazon sucks. Another, UPS is horrible. Another justifies it based on unionization and someone counters with highlighting FedEx’s lack of Union.

What gives? Well, I guess world wide companies have a spectrum of quality and your mileage varies based on too many factors to generalize.

It's the same thing with cloud providers: don't bother using HN comments trying to figure out which one to use. "AWS is terrible, use Azure", "No, Azure is terrible, use GCP", "No, GCP is terrible, use AWS". Zero useful information. This is why you don't use anecdotes as data, which is a lesson people remember until they don't.

Yes, they don't want to pay actual employees because their costs would be higher. But, they're also likely taking R&D tax credits, and having a 1099 makes the accounting much easier for them.

They make an update to the routing software, or anything, roll it out, 'measure', boom R&D tax credit. This is a boon to their bottom line.

Always amazing when it takes “disruptive” Silicon Valley businesses so much legal wrangling just to turn (barely) a profit (not including AWS).

Amazon is in WA, not the valley

Good thing we pay so much tax to the government to address things like this.

In Germany Amazon uses subcontractors for deliveries. Those are only allowed to have a maximum of 25 (can't remember the exact number) of drivers. That's a strategy to prevent any one subcontractor to become too powerful or merge with others.

I live in Germany. I'm pretty sure DHL has more than 25 drivers ...

And yet folks still proudly flex that they work at a company like this.

Around here they use multiple different local companies and make them compete against one another. And there's no guarantee of contract renewal so they can just keep dropping whoever costs more. It ends up being super toxic for the employees and the service quality reflects that. I stopped using Amazon.

That's true for all such jobs be janitor, cleaner or cook in almost all the companies including the government.

They can unionize the firm they work for. However, if they unionize, then the union needs to work with the business to ensure they remain competitive with the other firms offering the service. However, unions don't appear to be terribly interested in a business remaining competitive.

FedEx does the same thing. This is pretty standard in the shipping industry.

I'm always amazed at the stark differences between UPS drivers, and Amazon drivers.

UPS trucks are always clean. They follow the rules of the road. The drivers wear neat uniforms, they walk on the sidewalks, they're polite, they're just professionals held to a higher standard.

Then there are Amazon drivers. They park blocking half the road, music blasting, the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month, most of the time it's not even an Amazon marked van, it's just some generic white rental. The drivers often don't have Amazon clothing, maybe just a hi-viz vest, they walk through your grass and plants, lazily toss a package on the porch and walk away.

Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile...

You get what you pay for. UPS drivers are unionized, and Amazon's aren't.

FedEx delivery drivers aren't unionized.

They very much want to be. FedEx is more effective than UPS at union suppression: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/14/fedex-anti-u...

Why would I want to pay for somebody else’s clean trucks and neat uniforms? Sounds like a scam to me.

That is not the only thing he said, though.

Good service needs good equipment.

If the employees charged with doing the work are miserable and uncomfortable, how well do you think the packages are getting treated?

Wait, UPS fucking sucks though. Amazon drivers make a attempt to hide packages, UPS tosses it 10 feet over the gate and mark it delivered in person.

> Amazon drivers make a attempt to hide packages, UPS tosses it 10 feet over the gate and mark it delivered in person.

The only driver I've actually caught throwing a fragile, expensive package was an Amazon driver, but I’m going to guess that the variation between different individual drivers and teams (and contracted firms, in Amazon’s case) is probably bigger than that between which big co they are delivering for when it comes to that kind of behavior.

It was a FedEx driver for us. Eventually they moved on to another route or job, but the guy was throwing packages up over a fence onto the porch and kept breaking things.

And DHL doesn't bother walking up to the porch, just leaves things on the steps out by the street.

> I’m going to guess that the variation between different individual drivers and teams (and contracted firms, in Amazon’s case) is probably bigger than that between which big co they are delivering for

I would hope this is obvious but clearly not based on this entire thread.

UPS has, for me, been the most consistently atrocious.

One anecdote:

During the later part of the Covid hysteria, I had a large check arriving overnight. It was in the truck of a driver who supposedly got exposed to Covid. They left the truck parked in the lot, filled with packages. I went to the distribution center counter. The envelope I needed was literally 100m away in a truck I could see behind the fence in the parking lot, according to their internal tracking system.

Rather than simply going outside to get the envelope (that contained a huge check from cashing out a 401k to buy a house,) instead they said that there wasn't anything they could do until that driver returned from a two-week quarantine.

And to top it off, I didn't get a refund for the "overnight" shipping costs.

So if that's "union," then I want no part of it. I have had minor issues with all shipping companies, but compared to UPS, they've been minor. DHL, FedEx, and Amazon -- they consistently perform much better in my experience. Amazon drivers are a bit punk-rock in that they aren't so polished and can be "sloppy" -- but my stuff always arrives on time and I've never had a damaged package. FedEx is quietly consistent for the most part.

This idea that "unions make it better" is just false.

It's also interesting that UPS wanted to force FedEx to be reclassified under the NLRA in order to harm FedEx. FedEx was formed in 1971 and since their original focus was air freight, they were under the Railways Act, while UPS was formed over 100 years ago as a trucking company, thus putting them under the NLRA. UPS doesn't like that because since the Teamsters run the show over there, FedEx had an advantage due to lower costs.

The Teamsters union has annual revenues of almost $200 million and have over $300 million in assets. How does an organization that simply negotiates labor contracts accumulate that many assets? That $300 million isn't pension fund money. That isn't money going to the workers, that's money going to the union. That's money that customers are paying, employees aren't getting, but the union is getting. It's essentially a private tax that benefits the few at the expense of the many. That the Teamsters has a long history of corruption and organized crime involvement is no secret. Why would anyone support such a corrupt organization?

FedEx driver salaries in Texas are $34k-52k, while UPS drivers make $30k-43k. Additionally, the UPS driver salaries also have deductions for union dues. So how exactly is a union benefitting UPS in Texas? Competition for drivers is extremely fierce, especially in long-haul trucking.

Here are some thoughts on unions from readers of the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/unneces...

Fair enough, but I wonder how much areas and personal experiences matter.

My experience with UPS over last 2 decades, as a receiving individual, has been dismal (condos in Toronto and now house in satellite residential community). I understand they optimize toward businesses, and I'm sure as a business their procedures are streamlined and efficient, but as a resident receiving package, it's awful. Majority of packages don't get delivered when I'm in the house eagerly expecting a package. Sour attitudes when I do. Amazon delivery on the other hand is always with a smile and a wave - and it gets here every.single.time.

But I recognize it's a personal / individual experience. I don't know what a broader picture is.

My experience with UPS has been similarly poor. For two addresses in different states, whenever UPS sent me a package that required my signature, they simply forge it and mark it as delivered. They don't even bother to ring the doorbell.

In my hood they might look at your door before marking you as not home requiring a trip out to a holding facility.

At least in my area, forging signatures for "must have signature" deliveries started during COVID and hasn't stopped even though many people are not actively dodging human contact any more.

It is also likely, as pointed out here, an employer difference: You may regionally be seeing Amazon drivers from different employers who add different expectations beyond Amazon's.

Dude, they all suck. I wish they would stop shipping or accepting shipments that are in retail boxes or obviously improperly packed.

I get heavy packages that are blown open and missing half the contents constantly. They throw it on the porch and run.

Amazon has caused the market to shift this way with their cheap ass practics and skewed incentives and garbage customer service.

Oh..AC unit was shipped in a retail box meant for the shelf in a big box store? AC unit is dented on all four corners? Better break out your hammer because the process to send it back and get a new damaged one is gonna cost you. The sellers game the system and so does Amazon.

> music blasting

Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work.

> the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month

Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources.

> Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile

This is such a weird American fixation. Here, take my money and hand me my burger and receipt, there's no need for a conversation or a fake smile. You don't care how my day is going, I don't really care about yours. Let's keep this transaction professional and solely focused on this exchange of money for burger.

I can not stand people who love setting weird standards on others.

Music? They didn’t say hello to you when giving you your delivery?

Why on earth do you care.

Because they culturally see anyone "beneath them" as NPCs that exist to serve them, and anything other than perfect servility is seen as a personal insult.

American customer service mentality is supremely fucked up. I actively avoid businesses that more actively force employees to interact with customers in certain artificial ways, because some are even worse than the norm.

Playing music is fine. Blasting music is the problem. I don't like it when anyone blasts music in their car, not just mail carriers.

Gosh, whenever you find the world you want to live in, please let me know because I don't want to live there.

I'll keep the smile and the clean trucks, thank you. A lot of good manners are "fake" and simply a social convention that people follow even if feeling miserable inside - "Good Morning", "Excuse me", "Thank you" etc.

In a world filled with hostility, disease, death and danger, good manners and social conventions such as cleanliness help signal safety.

>Gosh, whenever you find the world you want to live in, please let me know because I don't want to live there.

Yes. Yay for hypocrisy and forced smiles for the customer-king.

> This is such a weird American fixation. Here, take my money and hand me my burger and receipt, there's no need for a conversation or a fake smile. You don't care how my day is going, I don't really care about yours. Let's keep this transaction professional and solely focused on this exchange of money for burger.

As a Canadian cousin over here, if you can't tell the difference between a smile/a polite "Hi, how can I help you?"/a "have a nice day", and an actual conversation involving smalltalk, then you clearly don't know about what you're criticising.

In our part of the world, is there a social/cultural difference in expectations of the interaction with people around us, including workers in the service industry?

Yes, absolutely.

Is there something "weird" about that? No, absolutely not, and you can put down the superiority complex.

>Is there something "weird" about that? No, absolutely not, and you can put down the superiority complex.

There is something weird though. Getting service from those minimum wage workers is not enough: people also demand their fake pleasure to serve and sympathy.

That's the other way around. They should be paid more. ;)

Humans are all humans. Irrespective of their income level. Not sure what minimum wage has to do with whether or not being polite and pleasant conversation is exchanged.

It's much easier to be polite when you're well-paid and not overworked.

Economic hardships cause emotional distress, and you can't rationalize feelings. Your civil expectations probably match your income level, but not that below you.

E.g. Not getting enough sleep because your poor neighborhood is a ruckus provokes bad mood, chronically.

My civil expectations match what I expect from other people and how I treat people in the world. Has nothing to do with my income and is based on how I was raised by my parents to treat people you interact with in the world.

I've done hard labor (construction, landscaping), I've done food service (sandwich shop) and I've done lots of white collar office work. Wealthy people can be nice and decent to people who have a much smaller income AND vice versa.

Humans are all humans, but some humans have it better than others, and even have the gal to demand those less fortunate, working some mind-crushing job for a pittance, put on a show for them...

At least waiters and strippers get tips for their show...

Politeness and respect is sadly a service in the world of consumer-facing business, which means the amount of it that you get is going to correspond with how much you pay and how much the server is willing to give away for free. If the argument is that politeness should be a free service, same as a bathroom and drinking water, then just be mindful of the quality of said bathroom and water relative to the amount the employees are being paid to take care of those things, and wonder how politeness would fall into it.

Yep. I’ll choose UPS ;)

Well if I don't like my job and I am only doing it in order to feed myself being nice to you when I am tired and want to go home and it's only 15:00 is work.

I get that some people are naturally nice and some others are not and find excuses not to be but all of cashiers in the supermarket I go to give you tired unconvincing robotic "Good morning/evening" and "Goodbye" and you can tell they are tired of it. Also they have to.

Would I be nice in a restaurant as a worker where people come to spend a special moment ? Yes, and I expect to be paid accordingly as it is part of my work. Serving people waiting in line in a fast food, will I be hostile ? No. Would I care about conversational etiquette serving people waiting in a fast food ? Hell no, I am not a smile delivery machine.

In the end it's all about stepping out of yourself and consider the reality the person in front of you is facing. Of course, if you've ever had to do a shitty job, that may help you.

It sounds like you and I were raised differently. In the end, it is all about stepping out of yourself and understanding the reality of the person in front of you. That is a two way street.

""" In every single person there's a Slim Shady lurking He could be working at Burger King, spittin' on your onion rings """

Given long enough doing robotic work under what you seem unfair/dehumanizing conditions, the Slim Shady may come out. But who knows maybe you are a different breed, good for you.

I don't think it is a valuable use of your time to try to dismiss me or try to generalize humanity.

At what income level does one need to start treating the customer, that is enabling one to have a job, like a real human being?

Why does one's income level dictate how they treat others? I was always told treat others how you would like to be treated.

The better question is at what level customers start treating service employees like real human beings.

>At what income level does one need to start treating the customer, that is enabling one to have a job, like a real human being?

At a sufficient enough and above. Below that the Clerks (as in the Kevin Smith movie) treatment is good enough.

In any case, "treating like a real human being" and putting on a show of smiles and friendliness US-style, is not even close to being the same thing.

In "real" human interaction, we understand the other as a person with their own feelings and mood, and we don't demand from anybody to exhibit a certain cheerful mood for us.

But of course this isn't about real human connection. It's more about "When I pay I demand those serving me to entertain me with smiles and pleasantries". The customer could not care less about the person serving them, or their condition, otherwise. "Real person" my ass.

Exactly. There’s something fundamentally sadistic about American culture, I expect inherited from its legacy of slavery, where customers demand that workers perform a frightened but also “joyful” subservience to them as evidence that they’re getting their money’s worth.

This is an unbelievable take that I suspect if fueled by an over extrapolation of online culture and the news. Get a grip.

It’s fueled by my working in restaurants for ~7 years in my 20s. If you’d experienced people throwing food at you because they didn’t like how it was made, sexually harassing and hurling racist insults at your coworkers, among other, myriad abuses, you’d probably feel the same. And that’s just describing the customers, not even addressing how management behaved.

Not all of us have had the luxury to spend our lives musing about trivial things like RuneScape, in between posting on white-collar tech forums.

I've worked plenty of food service in my life. You're making the mistake of overrepresenting the worst behavior. All of those things are out of line in American society.

I don't think you should read so much into my hobby either.

I don’t think you should be telling others to “get a grip,” because their experience differs from your own, but here we are. Perhaps don’t make such obnoxious assumptions if you don’t want to be treated that way in kind.

I’m also skeptical of the extent of your actual experience if you think this behavior is “out of line” in American society. It was quite routine in mine. The first time I saw someone throw food at the head of a cashier I was shocked, but quite quickly became inured.

> I don’t think you should be telling others to “get a grip,” because their experience differs from your own, but here we are.

You tried to attached the American cultural norm of manners and courtesy to their history of black slavery.

"Get a grip" is a pretty mild response to something so absurd, hyperbolic, and flat out insulting.

Barbara Ehrenreich (RIP) wrote several excellent books about that.

Customer: Not only should the servants serve, but smile while doing so.

Worker: F you, pay me.

Amazon delivery drivers make around $20/hr. that's well above the federal minimum (about 7.50) and above all state minimums. it won't make you rich, but it's not minimum.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2022/10/24/how-...

Also, expecting friendly service is reasonable. Expecting poor service because the pay is low is backwards. We should expect better pay.

Flex drivers don't get mileage though. If a driver drives 25 miles an hours they are making more like ~8 dollars and hour.

This is it in a nutshell. I could always put on my game face when things were going bad at home, but if you caught me after another customer calls me stupid or lazy (for having the job I did, during a recession, instead of, I don't know, being on welfare, I guess?), then the facade started to slip. I'm not really inclined to assume good intent from yet another rich asshole complaining about over-priced Chinese crap in regards to the $40 printer they're loading into their brand-new Porsche Cayenne.

>As a Canadian cousin over here, if you can't tell the difference between a smile/a polite "Hi, how can I help you?"/a "have a nice day", and an actual conversation involving smalltalk, then you clearly don't know about what you're criticising.

That's literally his point, the whole friendly-service-with-a-smile thing is forced on them by their managers/corporate, it's not from a sincere desire to have an actual conversation with customers. And people will literally complain and get them in trouble if they don't do it.

Talk about irony, sitting here talking about a superiority complex while defending requiring that kind of stuff of "lowly" service industry workers.

> That's literally his point, the whole friendly-service-with-a-smile thing is forced on them by their managers/corporate,

Courtesy with customers is forced on them? My god!

The next thing you'll tell me they're expected not to curse at their co-workers, too! What kind of world is this?!

> it's not from a sincere desire to have an actual conversation with customers.

Once again, and as I already said in the very text you quoted, no one is expecting a "conversation". Maybe you just misunderstood my point? I admit I was being a bit circuitous, there.

> Talk about irony, sitting here talking about a superiority complex while defending requiring that kind of stuff of "lowly" service industry workers.

I never mentioned anything about their being "lowly", and I'd appreciate you not insinuating such things about me. It's a veiled insult and it's unwarranted and unnecessary.

See, courtesy. It's a thing, both in the real world and online.

“Unsmiling” is not “unprofessional”.

Smiling isn’t about courtesy, respect, or professionalism. It’s a US cultural habit that is not universal in the rest of the world, ingrained into service industries, in service of demands that workers subsume all emotion in favor of providing “service with a smile”. Covid masking protocols were looked upon fondly by service industry workers specifically because they didn’t have to fake-smile anymore.

Don’t hold your breath for the return of fake-smiles, and don’t confuse the absence of a smile with the presence of negativity, discourtesy, disrespect, or unprofessionalism. It’s just a neutral face, delivering a neutral package to a neutral stranger.

> “Unsmiling” is not “unprofessional".

And now we're back to cultural norms and expectations, and there's no point in arguing about something so very subjective.

The original complaint was about "weird" Americans and my entire point was that it's not that weird, it's just different.

And now we're just around and back where we started.

I've offered my perspective and there's little point in repeating it again. If you want to know how I'd respond, just go read my first comment on this thread.

Please don’t frame your personal disinterest in discussing subjective viewpoints that contradict your own, as though everyone at HN becomes disinterested in discussing subjective viewpoints once disagreement occurs.

HN users regularly discuss conflicting subjective cultural norms and expectations: when discussing Linux window managers, emacs, tabs versus spaces, the expectations of junior engineers in a startup, how much oncall is too much, the exact bytes of the new SVG logo when it first launched, and your own subjective viewpoint expressed above: whether smiles are a necessary part of courtesy at all.

> as though everyone at HN becomes disinterested in discussing subjective viewpoints once disagreement occurs.

Except you didn't present your viewpoint as subjective, did you?

No, like many of the other folks participating in this thread, you delivered it as objective truth:

> “Unsmiling” is not “unprofessional”.

> Smiling isn’t about courtesy, respect, or professionalism

Now in fairness, I'm not sure you even realize that's just an opinion.

Unfortunately, if you can't see that difference, then conversation devolves into an argument about those supposed "truths" and that's a conversation that cannot go anywhere since they aren't truths at all.

A meaningful conversation about differing cultural norms, how they might've come to be that way, how they work today, etc?

Yeah, that's interesting!

But if the goal is to just sling insults at folks and call people "weird" for having different subjective values? Yeah, I'll pass.

> I’m not sure you even realize it’s an opinion.

All descriptions of cultural norms are opinion by definition. Cultural ‘norms’ are, themselves, vastly more complex and interesting than any single statement can declare. Editorial word choice is necessary to express and discuss those perceived norms, and care must be taken to not overstate a viewpoint. I appreciate your concern, however. Thank you for taking the time to express it.

"Courtesy with customers is forced on them? My god!"

I worked in a call center for two years, for three different companies. Yes, (fake) courtesy is forced. The customers of one site were so difficult that courtesy was scripted (there were scripted interactions for frustrated and for rude customers)

Well you have clearly missed the point of my comment.

Yes, it's "forced" on them, in the same way that many many other behavioural expectations are "forced" on a worker. They're "forced" not to abuse their co-workers. They're "forced" to treat their workplace with respect. They're "forced" to dress in a certain way.

That's called "having a job", and it's all stuff I've had to do, too, in every job I've ever had.

No, no. It seems I was not clear enough.

By forced courtesy I mean there was a metric for that. Those with the worst metrics were let go and we were reminded of that weekly.

On the other hand, I suppose people except sociopaths treat others well, anywhere, most of the time, not out of an obligation.

Is it "having a job" to be required to say "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm dedicated to meeting your needs. Let's see what we can do to help you!" in cheery tones after the customer says "you stupid [racial slur], your mother should've aborted you, why can't you get it through your [explicitive] [racial slur] head that I want [thing that was never mentioned, and is, in fact, illegal]"

THAT is the forced courtesy we're talking about.

Here’s a counter anecdote.

> Another issue was the smiling. Walmart requires its checkout people to flash smiles at customers after bagging their purchases. Plastic bags, plastic junk, plastic smiles. But because the German people don’t usually smile at total strangers, the spectacle of Walmart employees grinning like jackasses not only didn’t impress consumers, it unnerved them.

https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...

Yes, because this is about relative cultural norms. At what point did I claim otherwise?

Unlike everyone disagreeing with me, I'm not the one claiming my values and expectations are in some way universal or superior (though I can see how I might be read that way giving I'm defending our shared culture in this area, which can appear that I'm in some way advocating for its superiority, something I assure you I'm not intending to do).

It was the original commenter, complaining about "weird" Americans, who seems to think their values are the "normal" ones, when as you've just illustrated, normal is meaningless when talking about social and cultural conventions.

Do Germans have different expectations? Of course. And Russians have theirs. And the Australians have theirs. And the Canadians have theirs. None are right or wrong or "weird", they just are.

I think pointing to an opposite case here was meant to highlight the arbitrary nature of the norm.

I would even say It seems absurd when you realize it’s not universal.

Just because it is, doesn’t mean it should be.

So would you expect that kind of attitude from your doctor and complain if you don't get it? Your lawyer? A police officer pulling you over? A judge? Your boss? Don't think so. So yes, with that (which is admittedly an assumption) in mind I don't think it's any kind of jump to say you think service industry workers are beneath you.

Verbal abuse and general surliness isn't the only alternative to the false sincerity and you immediately jumping to the opposite end of the spectrum is frankly just arguing in bad faith. It can just be a neutral interaction, you can require your employees to have have common courtesy and be polite without being completely servile and obsequious.

"That'll be 10.97, cash or card?" "Cash, here you go" "2.18 is your change" "Thanks" "No problem"

Businesses have policies that you're supposed to do this for the same reason that businesses have policies that you're not supposed to spit on people; basic human decency needs to be encoded because some minority of people won't go for it otherwise.

Being pleasant to strangers even when you're having a bad day is basic human decency, and of course it's supposed to go both ways. If I'm a customer at a burger shop and I'm having a bad day, I still smile and say thank you when a stranger hands me a burger or holds a door for me in public, not because any boss is forcing me to do it but because this is simply the decent thing to do. Just because I'm having a bad day doesn't mean that I should make that somebody else's problem. Spreading misery around doesn't help me one iota, and only makes things worse for everybody. Having a surly attitude with strangers is basically social vandalism.

This is true outside of commercial contexts, and still true within commercial contexts. You're complaining about the power dynamics of the commercial context, which fine, fair enough, but the basic principle of treating people decently instead of making your problems into their problems applies in all public contexts, including the customer side of those commercial interactions and also when no money is being exchanged at all. And of course some minority of the public won't reciprocate, there are some people who treat service workers like trash and unload their problems on those workers... they're wrong for doing it. Those kind of people existing are the reason businesses have to encode common decency into their rules and policies.

Edit for Stefan's remark: "It's the least the servant class can do - fake joyfulness to avoid saddening their betters, right?"

"Servant class"? What I said is that everybody should be decent to other people. Read my comment again if you didn't catch this the first time. It's supposed to go both ways. It isn't a matter of class at all.

Reading what you wrote, I'm concerned that you may be suggesting that all disclosures of negative emotions to strangers are verboten.

I worry, because my spouse had a rough upbringing and it's taken a lot for her to feel comfortable expressing how she feels in a candid way. I strongly desire that people feel comfortable expressing how they feel without judging themselves as burdensome, inappropriate, needy, selfish, or out of control. This includes in my view, expressing themselves in public.

To be clear, if someone tells a child "Stop glaring, people will think we are bad parents" or "Smile or I'll show you what an actual rough time is like", I consider that to be emotional abuse. It teaches the child to deny their emotions and instead present the emotion the parent wants.

I don't see it as any less abusive when an employer (who holds power) tells an employee "Stop glaring, people won't buy our stuff" or "You need to smile more when talking to customers".

But further from that, and closer to your point, I see it as a problem when society tells people the same. This is a different matter than refraining from violence, yelling, overt aggression, etc. in public (which I would agree is preferable).

Perhaps this is because I believe that most problems originate in society. If a kid is beaten every day, and then blows up and hurts someone, and their neighbors knew, and teachers that knew, etc. Then they've really been failed. But more than that, if teachers in general create a culture where it is hard not to fail individuals, then teachers have failed. And if we've voted in and/or encouraged systems that permit or encourage that culture, than we've all failed. And of course this stuff will always happen with some probability.

But if people are in mass overworked, tired, and frustrated. Then I see that as societies problem, not just their problem. So if they are at the store and they are just standing there staring at the aisle and someone asks if they are okay, and has a short talk about it, that's what society handling it's problem looks like. Because the person that was overworked and the person that asked them if they were okay were both part of the problem. So for me, everyone's problems are everyone's responsibility (up to a point). Like even if it is intensely personal. Let's say someone is pushy in their relationships, and the other person is giving ultimatums. Maybe they are old, maybe they are kids, but society taught them how to manage their relationships. If alcohol is involved then it's society that gave them that too. If binge drinking is a piece of it, then society romanticized it and sold it to them. Yeah, they have their own responsibility, but they didn't do it alone. Even when people get illnesses - society told them they'd live longer; it told them to think long term; it told them to forego gratification for a more promising future; etc.

So to me, the perspective that all of people's emotions are their problem and they should keep it to themselves is a way of society avoiding responsibility for the way it influences the emotions of the people who compose it, and ultimately the consequences of its collective decisions and characterizations.

With respect to boundaries around emotional disclosure, my view also isn't incompatible with people feeling free to tell others they don't want to hear how they feel or asking someone exhibiting aggressiveness to go elsewhere.

Perhaps this can be summarized by saying that I think if people are not happy, that's a symptom of society, and having them smile in public will only succeed in hiding a festering wound. And also that I don't believe being decent is incompatible with authenticity, honesty, or emotional disclosure.

> Reading what you wrote, I'm concerned that you may be suggesting that all disclosures of negative emotions to strangers are verboten.

I'm glad to alleviate your concern then: No.

What should be considered verboten is using strangers as your punching bag because you're having a bad day for reasons unrelated to them.

The reality is no matter how genuinly your delivery driver ask "hi how can I help", he/she does not care about it. There is simply no time for him to care about it. Otherwise, you will see your delivery fee increase since.

Great! Delivery fees are already unsustainably low.

Getting a product to my door cannot possibly be free! That cost is simply being borne somewhere.

And since the cost of products isn't rising (or wasn't until COVID), then those costs are being borne elsewhere, and that very much includes the workers who are seeing lower salaries, longer hours, and worse working conditions.

So I say yes, please, bring on the shipping fees. And if that means my delivery person smiles while dropping my package, and then goes home a wealthier, healthier person, then absolutely I am all for it.

> Great! Delivery fees are already unsustainably low.

Just where are you from? Sure, I see delivery fees that are "free", which means they're included with the cost of the product. But any time I see a delivery fee tacked on, it's almost always in the double digits, many times up in the 20-30s for a box that is about the size of an Micro ATX computer case.

Not to mention when I have to ship stuff internationally myself and it goes into the triple digits, not even doing UPS which would have costed almost half a grand.

Edit: And I'm just in the US

I take it you've never heard of Amazon? You know, the company this article is about? The largest online retailer in the world? The one that typically offers free two day shipping?

Nobody expects a delivery driver to ask "how can I help?" because their job isn't to take requests. They expect that from workers who's job is to take requests. A simple smile and "what can I get you?" from somebody taking food orders or the like is the expected norm in most of North America.

It's just common decency. Imagine I'm having a bad day and go to shop to get lunch where I meet a worker who's also having a bad day. We could both smile and say hello/thank you and go about the rest of our days, or we could both lay into each other and make our bad day the other guy's problem. If we both choose the first, we both benefit. If we both choose the later, we both come out worse. So which is better?

>>is there a social/cultural difference in expectations of the interaction with people around us

For me, that is why I am glad automation is decimating the service sector. for the first time in years I was traveling so i decided to go into a fast food place so I could stretch my legs. I walked in, Ordered my meal on a Automated Kiosk, no one even around to talk my order verbally. Then when my order was ready someone called out my number and sat a bag on the counter. I took the bag and that was it, No interaction at all

It was the BEST experience getting food... I almost want to go in more because it had even less interaction than the drive thru.

And I'm glad that, for those more introverted among us and/or find those social conventions difficult or tiring, that you have that option!

I don't think anyone has a problem with the workers listening to music while they drive around. But I can hear the Amazon truck's music from the opposite side of the block, which is a little excessive.

Honestly it doesn't bother me all that much, just saying there is a stark difference between them and FedEx/UPS/USPS when coming through my neighborhood.

I care how your day is going and it sounds rough. Coffee is on the house.

It’s definitely a regional thing. You’re an asshole if you don’t engage with people in Seattle, for example.

Always weird to hear people calling it “fake” friendliness because nobody here feels that way.

> Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work.

I have no problem with anyone listening to music while they work.

I just don’t want to be forced to listen to their music while they are parked across the street from my house that I’m inside.

I'm like 50/50 here.

Listen to music, but not so loud as to be unaware of your surroundings.

Washing a vehicle is about more than aesthetics. Dirt, salt, asphalt, etc, can damage the vehicle itself. Delivery vans also get a lot of miles on them. It doesn't need to "sparkle", but if you've got a month's worth of dirt and grime on the truck, it's not great either.

I don't need a whole song and dance with transactions either. But silence doesn't work either. Enough words to conduct the transaction and acknowledge it is over.

Weird how a conversation that should be about the richest corporations shirking their responsibilities to employees is hijacked by someone complaining about fake smiles instead

Exactly...how is this thread taking up half the post?

> Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work.

If they're listening at a volume where it isn't noticed by / bothering other people, then there's no problem. Otherwise, it's noise pollution. Trucks are too loud as it is, we don't need even more noise thrown into the mix. Whether it's people playing music through their phone speakers on a city bus, or a guy reving his unmuffled motorcycle at 4:30 in the morning every day, or somebody blasting heavy bass music through their car or truck speakers when they slowly cruise through through your neighborhood, it's all assholish behavior.

> > Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile

> This is such a weird American fixation.

You appear to be confusing

> They are doing their job like they don't care about doing it well... like the fast food employee that doesn't try to make your experience enjoyable by saying "hi" and maybe "have a nice day"

and

> They didn't talk to me, I'm upset

As applied to the delivery person, it's things like putting the package to the side of the garage door instead of right in front of it (where you'll drive over it if you don't notice it)... and putting it under an obvious overhang if it's raining. The little things, that show you care about doing a good job; they matter.

It's not fun buying garbage one doesn't need from a horrible company unless everyone along the chain suffers. Are they really suffering unless they drive in silence?! /s

> Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources.

The point of the clean truck is that it shows the delivery company it willing to lose money to maintain their equipment. It means they are probably also willing to lose money to care for your package better.

It's the same reason Lexus requires their mechanics to wear white lab coats. To show you that they are willing to spend money to take care of your stuff.

> Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources.

Washing them is a "canary in the coal mine". You don't need them sparkling obviously, but they need regular maintenance. And with a fleet under heavy use, that's often measured in weeks, not months.

I've witnessed the music blasting. It is a nuisance and easily a violation of any towns' ordinance. If their exhaust was that loud the vehicle would be down until it is repaired. Both are equally embarrassing to the company.

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to nationalistic flamewar, which we neither need nor want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Here's something anecdotal: as someone from Eastern Europe, I was looking at reviews on Google for a few local dental clinics, to better decide where to sign up for my vaguely-twice-a-year dental hygiene appointment. What I noticed was that most of the places across the board in the center of the capital had around 3 star ratings. I looked into it and while there were generally good reviews of the service quality, almost all of the negative feedback had to deal with the attitude of the reception staff.

People complained about the receptionists not being too interested in small talk, just telling them where to go, urging them to move on, or being terse and presumably uncaring in their responses. Same for cloak room staff. Now there were also complaints which could impact the service itself (professionals not wanting to walk the client through the steps needed for a checkup or whatever, for other procedures), but in general I got the vibe that people expected to be pampered/encouraged more.

And then I noticed that a sizeable amount of the negative feedback came from foreign folks, who might not necessarily be used to some of the cultural and "to the point" interactions that you sometimes get over here. I found that interesting, though it's not like the people here are not nice at all, it's just that you might not always be that way to complete strangers and just be reasonably polite instead. Or maybe most of the staff just didn't care, I can't read minds of course.

So yeah, cultures differ, sometimes quite a bit! I remember going on vacation to a country with a higher population density and getting used to people standing in what I'd assume is my "personal space" without batting an eye took some getting used to, hah.

It might be an American thing, but I'm fine with that. Keeping it professional means having a professional attitude - smiling and being courteous. At least it does in America.

One time, I had amazon delivery driver show up and they just threw my package at the door. Literally, just chucked at my door and I heard the thud in my home office.

They were beta testing a new SNS feature.

Around here, UPS and FedEx are equally noisy. And the Amazon trucks are brand new Rivian EVs. Pretty clean so far. FedEx drives the fastest.

I wish this were not true, but on multiple deliveries I have had UPS falsify a delivery attempt and status. Amazon drivers have never done that.

This has to be a systemic problem with UPS selling service level agreements they can't actually meet. There is no way that UPS's tracking system don't know this is happening.

Just another day UPS was supposed to deliver an item with signature. I needed the item. I was waiting for driver, but even if I wasn't, my whole family was at home. Looked outside, bam! UPS label "sorry we missed you" on the door.

Well, at least you got the notice.

I was in the same situation at my parents' house. Three people in the house, loud doorbell, my mom doing whatever in the garden. UPS says no-one was home and they left a notice. Didn't leave anything.

And unless they had an electric truck or something similarly quiet, they didn't even drive down the street.

To the other commenter's point up the thread, I've never had such an experience with deliveries made by Amazon.

I live in an apartment, and if I have a bigger item that won't fit in the mailbox, only Amazon will call me up to see if they can deliver it in hand. They usually call anyway instead of defaulting to the mailbox, but not always. Other delivery services will never call, just leave a slip in the mailbox, if that.

Here in Detroit the Amazon drivers are pretty great. I would say they are no different than UPS. Always in uniforms. I also see them about 10x as often, so there is a bigger sample size. Once in a while someone will be blasting music, but tbh I would probably be doing the same if I were in their shoes.

FedEx drivers are hands down the worst.

"lazily toss a package on the porch and walk away"

I tried to help an Amazon driver by taking the package from him at the edge of my driveway. He stopped me, told me he had to take a photo of it sitting on my property first. He was very serious about this. I doubt this behavior is from these contracted drivers unless the photo requirement is new and your experience is not.

Same here, just last week. He politely told me that he could hand it to me, but then I'd need to sign for it. If he put it on the front step, he could just take a picture.

I opted to just let him continue his normal routine. Undoubtedly faster than doing a one-off signature because I happened to be standing out in front of my house.

I think the requirement is basically only in areas that have high rates of people complaining about things not turning up, and even then, Amazon doesn't really seem to care.

For a while, my home had very poor labeling of its address on the building, and getting anything delivered was always a crapshoot of drivers giving up and just picking a random location to leave it instead. They would happily take photos of them having left it at a home that was not mine, not remotely mistakable for mine, and Amazon didn't treat that any differently from the cases where there were no photos at all.

It's very driver dependent. Sometimes I'll get the super professional, uniformed delivery driver driving a marked van who seems to actually care about doing a good job at his job. Other times it'll be the guy in jeans and a t-shirt who throws the package on to the porch from 8 feet away before going back to their nearly broken down white rental van. Both get the picture before leaving though.

My guess is this is just a difference in contracting companies and not anything specific to how Amazon contracts the work out in the first place.

This comment and sibling comments read like bizarro world for me. I've never seen anything close to this level of attention to detail.

I've had my packaged signed for by "mailbox". This is practically the default message for me.

I've been on vacation and seen "Handed directly to a resident". Which would be more disturbing if I didn't already know the whole system was broken. In this case, the package was sitting on the front steps.

(Edit: These are all Amazon branded van deliveries, fwiw).

>Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile...

They aren't even putting on a little dance for each customer, to celebrate the wonderful minimum-wage soul-crushing git they got!

There is a middle ground of basic social interaction between failing to acknowledge a party in a transaction and being forced to do an impromptu dance for them.

In the case of Cold Stone Creamery though I agree, those kids should not have to sing for tips.

No there isn't; you pay for a service you get that service. Let these people live their lives, society is already massively underpaying them.

We should have to apologize to them when they hand us our meal, that should be the "basic social interaction".

> that should be the "basic social interaction"

Well, it's not.

If "living your life" involves being rude to people and ignoring even the most basic social courtesies, you're an asshole. Part of the service people pay for when they go anywhere is not dealing with rude employees, and yes ignoring basic social courtesies is rude. If you're in Europe you get to have the European social courtesies of minimal interaction, no small talk, etc. If you're in North America you don't get that, sorry.

My friend you have not visited the northeastern part of the US if you think not actively smiling while serving fast food is abnormal.

Further it is rude in no part of the world to not be cheerful, and the fact that you require this of people who are paid unlivable wages shows a distinct lack of compassion or empathy.

They’ll smile when you pay them what they’re worth.

Nowhere did I say anyone needed to be cheerful, only that ignoring basic social courtesy is rude. Going up the thread a bit, we're talking about "no greeting, no thank you, no smile" - now I can't speak for @coldtea but IMO all it takes to not be rude is one of those things. A single "hello" or "good morning/afternoon/whatever," a single thank you, literally any form of acknowledgement. Nobody is talking about making people dance or "actively smiling" except the people trying to willfully misrepresent others' opinions.

My point, and I think @coldtea's point, is that if you basically ignore customers, you're rude and shouldn't be in a customer service position. I grew up in the northeast US and it was rare to have any customer service interaction where you received no greeting, no thank you, nothing - precisely because it's rude, and most people aren't.

Are you kidding me? The alternative to these people being in “customer service” is to be homeless.

You think these people should choose homelessness because they don’t want to cheerfully work for slave wages?

That’s callous and hateful.

... throws packages through our open windows instead of ringing the doorbell ...

Your comment rings true.

Amazon Corporate has NO love from me. The employees seem to me to be pressured to be sociopathic:

A few days ago in Seattle I was threatened by an Amazon driver - I was walking my small dog across a large two-lane street in my neighborhood and an Amazon driver (wearing the vest) driving a White Honda Fit floored-it, revved his engine at me, gave me the middle finger, and drove into the opposing lane of traffic.

Bizarre.

I regularly hear music in UPS vans, and they always seem to be happy that they have music. Their vans are dirt brown which does notably reduce the cleaning burden.y apartment complex regularly has one road out front blocked all day long by private delivery cars, commercial delivery drivers of every sort, police cars, and people double-parked to use the ATM. UPS and Amazon show up at different times, and stay for the same length of time.

However, you’re still seeing something valid, but I want to call it out plainly: Amazon contracts delivery to the lowest bidder in each region, exactly the same as FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) does. The variability you describe in Amazon drivers and vans stems directly from Amazon trying to be “hands off” enough to not get them all labeled employees; whereas UPS just employs them, with a resulting degree of consistency in appearances and behavior that Amazon cannot match.

But .. music? They all listen to music.

I suspect this is very regional. My Amazon deliveries come in a marked van, clean enough, with a uniformed driver. They have been just as personable as the UPS & FedEx drivers, they don't walk through my lawn, they all deliver packages to my doorstep just the same. But the Amazon guy does take a quick picture. Can't really just toss it and walk away.

> Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile...

That's a sad place for sure. I don't eat a lot of fast food, but our closest restaurants are usually courteous. But that might also be partly how I address them. I decided many years ago that common courtesy just made the whole world a nicer place, whether in person or driving down the road. Even if you start out forcing it, as your mood improves so will the moods of the people you interact with, and it spreads. Bad attitude also spreads. So I don't choose that.

I think even the "outside consultants" can use the Amazon marked vehicles, probably getting them leased cheaply just to as a further f-u to employment law. Just don't hurt yourself on the job, because nobody's there for you when it happens.

I've not had the same experience w/ UPS drivers. I had a lawsuit with UPS for them hitting my gate. They're in such a hurry they can't let it finish opening. After 6 years they finally paid the $14k to replace it. I'm still trying to get them to pay the attorney fees that were awarded.

Amazon drivers stop, wait for it to open, and drive down the drive at a reasonable speed. Amazon takes a picture after they have left the items.

It must vary from area to area. In my area, you could swap "UPS" and "Amazon" in your story and it would fit. (Minus the music blasting - neither do that around here- and both wear identifying clothing.)

I always cringe a little when I get a UPS shipment notification, and I try my best to be home for it, for the best chance of success.

Interesting how you can rehabilitate your image by just the existence of someone else that people want to hate. On the Internet, now:

- UPS is now apparently the height of professionalism

- Zuckerberg is the hero fighting off Elon Musk

- Microsoft are the good guys reining in OpenAI

Of course, this doesn't really match the common brand view. Really goes to show how Internet commenters are not representative.

As to UPS. It is weird. Now, I mostly don't pay attention to which service I'm getting stuff from. Mostly because I don't have the option most of the time, I'm getting it from the service the seller is using.

A while back, I did notice that USPS was by far the best option in the area I was in. They were often faster and had fewer problems. Now, it's pretty much all the same. I never have any major issues with any of them.

Regarding the Zuckerberg/Musk thing, I think it's just mostly an artifact of it being completely fucking bizarre. Two middle-aged billionaires are about to throw down in a fucking cage match. I believe people are mostly rooting for Zuckerberg because he seems to be able to actually fight whereas Musk has strong "street fight/smarts" vibes. The kind of guy who says he doesn't have "conventional" training, but is secretly really competent because of reasons.

> Then there are Amazon drivers. They park blocking half the road, music blasting, the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month, most of the time it's not even an Amazon marked van, it's just some generic white rental. The drivers often don't have Amazon clothing, maybe just a hi-viz vest, they walk through your grass and plants, lazily toss a package on the porch and walk away.

I despise the company as much as the next person but let's stick with the truth and acknowledge that this doesn't seem to be universally true. At least not in my neck of the woods.

I see drivers from UPS and FedEx speeding through my neighborhood in huge trucks, hip hop music blasting, and see the drivers carelessly toss packages on doorsteps. While children are around.

Amazon trucks at least are smaller.

My experience in the US with Amazon drivers is sometimes similar, except for walking through the plants. I don't think the professionalism is necessary to receive my package on time and in good condition.

When I've been outside and received the package directly, I never felt any disrespect in either direction.

How many other countries have Amazon drivers? Is it the same there?

> Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile...

For some reason this disturbs me, like something an NPC in a cyberpunk dystopia masquerade ball level would say, to underscore how little they think of the people who serve them...

> Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile...

Do you expect them to do so? Are you ensuring that they're paid and treated well enough to do so?

News flash: being a sullen jerk does not make you feel better. On the contrary, it kills any chance of receiving good vibes from anyone that might, just might brighten your day fora second.

companies have been doing this forever. google for example hires staffing firms for this reason.

The lengths that American businesses go to avoid the cost of labor is beyond stupid.

Henry Ford paid his employees well, bc he treated his employees as an investment, not as a line-item cost on an excel spreadsheet, and new that higher wages would mean a more prosperous middle class that would buy more model Ts. [1]

The US economy has become extractive in nature - extracting as much value from the resources available (humans included) rather than betting on growth and optimism. This has been the case since 2008, its like c-suite managers are emotionally scarred, and it trickles down to lower level managers, training them to adopt this broken mentality.

No wonder quality of life is declining in America over time.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/01/27/267145552/the-middle-class-to...

Henry Ford did not give a shit about his workers. That’s just the fairy tale. They absolutely were a line item on a spreadsheet. Once in a while business goals and societal/human/worker goals align - but that is just serendipity.

Our economy (extraction) has been like this since day one lol.

That doesn't conflict with 'employee as an investment'.

It's all about enlightened self-interest. Henry Ford had some idea how that might work, and campaigned for it e.g. the 5-day work week.

If Henry Ford really believed all that, then why was he such a union-buster?

Ford's famous pay was actually tied to a crazy and intrusive set of requirements that employees were to adhere to. Most employees were not part of the program.

To the extent that Ford helped propel the middle class, it was his ruthless and often illogical chase to the lowest possible cost.

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