Amazon fined $5.9M for breaking labor law in California

They also have a separate labor union in many regions.

The law applies to all warehouses.

That's not what I was talking about.

If you make a law saying that quotas have to be communicated to employees so they can know what they're working up to, then you need someone to physically go to the workplaces and make sure that quotas are being communicated. It's as simple as that.

If you are enforcing this in, say, 500 warehouses, one person can probably do all the inspections, as that's a little less than two locations per day to go to all the locations in a year.

If you're enforcing this in every workplace in a state the size of California, the inspection apparatus necessary becomes unwieldy, and likely doesn't happen, making the law unenforced and ineffective.

As an aside, while this isn't what I was talking about, creating new laws does in fact mean you need more courts and judges. I'm not sure how you think this could not be the case--do you think you can just add more cases and the same number of workers will simply work more to absorb the additional workload? Keep in mind that most courts in the US have massive case backlogs, and create incentives to settle out of court to avoid court time, which results in all sorts of problems such as dangerous criminals getting away with slaps on the wrist on the one hand, and non-violent offenders being pressured into dangerous CI situations to avoid jail time on the other hand.

I think I've seen instances where automated traffic camera fines just go into a city's street/road safety improvement fund, which seems like a good way of handling things.

I’m not certain how a person could read that from my text. The premise is:

  1. Employer does some harm to employees 
  2. State fines employer the value of employee harm
  3. State general fund receives money (minus lawyering costs)
  4. Employees receive no remuneration for harm
  5. General fund pays for general government activities 

It’s a quiet consensus, but few are claiming that Gen Z is just crushing it on home ownership or any other credible proxy for doing as well as the baby boomers.

Cheap consumer electronics are not substantially wealth! High-fructose corn syrup might be cheaper than ever, but anything north of that is rapidly becoming a boutique luxury. A public university education is triple what it was 20 years ago.

Hacker News is in many ways the best thing on the Internet, but people trying to finely parse this and that nitpick under a headline “Amazon Pays The Fines So They Can Continue to Exploit Workers with Impunity” makes me embarrassed to hang out here.

Waters-Pierce Oil Co. v. Texas, 212 U.S. 86 (1909)

Or at least that’s what my argument would be in court.

And worst case scenario define revenue in the fine's terms in a way that it disallows accounting tricks.

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/#:~:text=turnover

Still surprising.

You stole $1000 and if you are caught, your fine is $10.

No, it's not like that at all. The fine was for two specific locations and it was for not disclosing specific quotas in writing. Drawing analogies to a person stealing from a store doesn't make sense.

The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas, whatever that may be. So again, your analogy about getting to keep what you stole doesn't make sense.

Basically none of these analogies or proportionality arguments in this thread make sense at all. I suspect half of the reason is that nobody read past the headline far enough to realize that it was for two specific locations, not for Amazon the entire giant business. The people trying to use Amazon's total earnings across all business units across all locations as part of their argument are extremely misleading.

  It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.

If their revenue was $100M from breaking the law, but the margins were only 1%, then they profited $1M.

So a $5.9M fine would have been almost 6x the benefit.

Quoting top-line is misleading.

Only if you ignore consumer surplus?

To me, that alone is definitely helping society.

You want every politician you don’t like in the country having this power?

> if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board

This is expropriation. (It’s also fines with extra steps and ongoing costs.)

> think a corporate equiv to a death penalty

Corporate death penalties are fines with extra steps. They’re a red herring to avoid what companies actually fear, massive fines that force them into liquidation. Anything you want with a corporate death penalty, massive fines achieve more cleanly. The only function bringing the former up has is to distract from the latter.

The reality is that shares are absolutely useless as a distribution of responsibility. Shareholder decisions are dominated by a few majority shareholders who likely hold shares as part of a portfolio, and in the context of a portfolio, it's the whole thing that matters, so it may even be good to tank the share price of one company if it benefits the value of other holdings. Minority shareholders are held responsible for majority decisions they may have directly opposed. And shareholders are limited in what they can do to hold people responsible anyway: if approve a bonus check to the CEO for a successful quarter and then find out that the success was built on murdering toddlers, the CEO still has the bonus check and there's nothing the shareholders can do to retract it.

I think a better solution is to admit the basic fact that people, not corporations, make decisions, and when people make unethical decisions, hold those people personally responsible. Stop trying to fiddle the knobs of your economic Rube Goldberg machine to get the invisible hand to hold people responsible, and hold people responsible.

Plus standard baseline?

Adding mass of the vehicle as a component to fines would also be a sensible measure to make the fine reflect the hazard.

> “Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks,”

What you're saying about:

> make sure you are a bit better than the people other people applying for the job.

Is literally that. It just adds pressure which leads to accidents. When you don't know the playing field, you're going to assume the worst and then work yourself to death. It's sad to see HN defending this approach.