Everyone Wants to Work at Ups After Teamsters Deal | Hacker News Reader

Everyone Wants to Work at Ups After Teamsters Deal

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13 pointsalbertop12 comments

We've heard so much abut how people just don't want to work, but it turns out that when people can get decent wages and working conditions they'll rush to line up for jobs. UPS should have little trouble finding and keeping great employees.

At what point do you just have robots deliver packages though? The downside is that the higher the pay today the sooner more jobs are automated out. Is paying someone the salary of a doctor to carry packages to a house sustainable?

> At what point do you just have robots deliver packages though?

At the point where it becomes cheaper and more reliable than hiring humans to do the work. Right now, we don't have the technology do the job well and do it under all required conditions, but once that changes we should absolutely replace the human workers with robots so that humans are freed up to focus their efforts on other things.

> Is paying someone the salary of a doctor to carry packages to a house sustainable?

The majority of unionized workers at UPS are only working part time and under the new contract they'll make $21 an hour to start, eventually making $23 an hour. I suspect that doctors tend to make more than that, and if they don't they should probably get themselves a strong union too.

I don’t understand this idea of not paying people a good salary just because they are not doctors.

If people want to get packages delivered to their house, they should pay for it, and they should pay enough so it is sustainable. If you are not able or don’t want to walk to a central package collection station you can pay a premium.

Should only doctors be able to afford rent ?

These issues are mostly separate.

As a society, we need doctor's to make more money than delivery drivers because we expect them to be smart, competent, diligent, and extensively trained (sometimes for >10 years). You will not get enough doctors that meet this bar if you don't heavily incentivize them to sacrifice a huge portion of their life to achieve excellence in their craft.

Home prices are high mostly because our society has promised the demographic with the highest voter turnout (old folks and property owners) that their homes will fund their 10+ year retirement - a time when discretionary spending jumps dramatically. Anything that threatens these high home prices is shut down immediately by the voting portion of the public. As a result "A good salary" can't afford rent.

I think doctors should be paid enough so they don't need to worry about making ends meet. I don't want the guy operating me to worry where he'll sleep because the landlord kicked them out.

Same thing for delivery drivers, though. I want the delivery driver to make enough money so he'll actually drive up to my house and drop off the package, and not be distracted by money troubles while he drives past my kids biking on the street.

Every person deserves a livable wage, and there's no reason that people who start working earlier should struggle all their life to make ends meet, just so the better educated people get cheap deliveries.

Society, in the USA, is not designed around finding the best and brightest doctors. It is about finding people to pay into being a doctor. "Need to spend money to make money" as the saying goes. Odds are some of those UPS works would make great doctors. Just that they neither have the finances to peruse being a doctor nor do they known they would be good doctor. School is not focused on help us find what we are good at. Those that do are just lucky to live in an environment where you can. No different than some of those UPS works would make a great athlete, actor, or other profession. They just don't know it because lack of opportunity to learn and find out.

I like your part about home prices. There always multiple factors in play. Such as not limiting land lords buying up properties to make home owner ship a scarce resource. Or limiting construction zoning for homes. Or turning homes into Air BNBs. Or people owning more than one home. Or companies raising prices to increase profits to drive up stocks which limit affordable building materials.

Multiple factors drive up home prices. No different than multiple factors limit our selection of quality of doctors. Doctors, home sellers, and home builders benefit by limiting and creating a scarce resource.

I think you're vastly underestimating the complexity of the task.

At some point far, far in the future. If you think this through you’ll see it’s one of the hardest tasks to get a robot to do.

Stairs, judgement, packages of different size and weight, dogs, gates, doorbells, lobbies. Have you ever tried to get a robot to walk? It’s hard. Climb steps? Open a gate? Open a lobby door? Ring a doorbell to get into a lobby? Do all that while holding a package of arbitrary size and weight?

I would sooner try to automate the job of a lawyer, software engineer, customer service rep, marketer, CTO…

So maybe you cheat. Standardize box sizes. Standardize delivery points. Good start! Go cost out 300M steel delivery boxes and 300M unique install jobs. And 200M of those don’t have room on the property for it. Think about people who live in cities for a moment.

Just deliver to mailboxes! Try that one out and report back!

Ooh! Drones! Amazon spent a billion bucks on it before giving up.

I’m not saying you posted your response in bad faith, but might I humbly suggest that in the future you try to think things through a bit more?

Total compensation isn’t salary.

Also, at what point? Maybe like 30 years after there is a robot robot that isn’t garbage or a vacuum. The Fifth Element didn’t even imagine a robot taking jobs beyond Worst Airport Bartender Ever and Roomba.

Ah! A robot that can drive a vehicle in all weather conditions and deliver a package of any size and shape through a snowy sidewalk up three flights of stairs and open any style of gate with a key or code and read and understand signs like “deliveries out back” and communicate with shipping and receiving departments for the same or lower cost and speed as a human driver.

I bet UPS is kicking themselves for not thinking of this sooner! I’m thinking 8 story points, maybe we can get a pizza ordered and get an MVP out the door this weekend.

https://archive.is/9AHJw

Everyone Wants to Work at UPS After Union Scores $170k Driver Pay

Previous Discussions on HN: (5-comments - 2023-08-08) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054416

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