I’m not sure why the general sentiment here is that Amazon workers do not deserve a living wage and should be replaced with robots.
All the best to the union, I sincerely hope they meet your demands.
All the best to the union, I sincerely hope they meet your demands.
We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.
Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.
Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.
Maybe your area suffers from that, but mine doesn't.
Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:
Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.
Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.
Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.
Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.
These are two entirely unrelated issues.
If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots.
Until that happens, the workers should be treated humanely.
The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no other realistic opportunities for gainful employment and thus is much, much less likely to resist when faced with exploitative and/or abusive conditions.
Warehouse work and logistics in general is the last employment opportunity many of these people have, and while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests), just standing by idling around while the markets enforce the shift is going to be a political disaster.
While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.
Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.
Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.
We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...
Percentage of US labor force working in agriculture by decade: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
1950 was 15.2%, 1970 was 4.7%
People are allowed to move for work. I have. Shipyards are expanding in the Great Lakes region.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/navy-expands-shipbuil...
The shale gas revolution has created a lot of blue collar jobs. The chemicals industry is booming in Ohio.
https://www.jobsohio.com/news-events/news-press/energy-chemi...
So, yes, the shipyards need to be on the coast. But much of the material on the inside of the ship may be built elsewhere.
My buddy who is a union welder at a shipyard doesn't have to piss in a bottle to make his quota. His job is fucking fantastic, thanks to the union, and the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
It's predominantly a lot of professional work by tradies, NOT grunt work. Use the proper PPE and you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage. Take your time and follow the rules and you won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors like with the Thresher.
Well, that and using the proper PPE so that you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage and taking your time/following the rules so that you probably won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors or coworkers.
Compare that to putting the wrong shipping label on the package. I'd rather piss in a bottle than be a welder, to be honest.
Get your AI-boosting company to spend some of its money buying lawmakers and telling them to make UBI happen.
"should be replaced with robots"
I also think it's funny we are having this discussion. When songwriters and other creators were complaining about piracy in the 2000s, the general response from the tech community was that this was the future and you didn't deserve to earn a living.
My response is the same.
I don't think it's worth considering the comparison.
But sure, maybe working at a distribution center pays well enough where you're located. Likely that's not the case where these strikes are happening. It's expensive out there.
Also, what you wrote gives the impression of "I've got mine already so I don't care what happens to you."
After that, we need to ask how much profit a person should be allowed to make on their labor.
Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.
If I am a small shipping company, and all I need is someone to wrap boxes and store them, and the load isn't much, then should I be paying them full time for the job? Heck, should I pay them a living wage? No. I pay them the value of the job.
Obviously, we need a certain minimum wage because nobody deserves to get scammed and make 10 cents a day, but at the same time, this push for all these benefits isn't realistic. I wish it was, but it isn't.
Obviously, my example is different from Amazon, but this is more a business owner perspective.
Keep in mind, I'm not opposed to companies providing benefits, but I think regulating this would create more trouble than good.
On top of fair pay, companies owe their employees more. Businesses don't exist in a vacuum—they're tools we use to make life better for everyone. The entire economy is just a system we built to serve people, not the other way around.
Right now, companies often act like mini-dictatorships, where the tradeoff — giving up freedoms in exchange for money — ends up hurting society even if it props up the economy.
In short: if a company isn't contributing positively, it's failing at its purpose and should either disappear, or forced to fulfill its role.
If the workload is so low why don't you just do the work yourself?
In most of Europe workers wouldn't have to worry about any of that, everyone enjoys the basic package. So your competitors wouldn't be able to undercut you on price by not providing healthcare and thus force you to do the same.
Is it the best system for startups, corporate profits and the stock market? Obviously not but people are happier.
I wish all the benefits are possible, but it isn't feasible because different countries function differently, and I think your point explains it much better than I could have explained it.
America and Europe are different places, with different economies and as a result have different luxuries they can afford and costs they must bear. This means it is easier to offer benefits in Europe than America.
Each was offering only part-time hours (16-24h) but required "full-time availability".
That is not an fair exchange of effort.
Small business owners all too often (as much as they are also a valuable part of the community) think that they are entitled to far too much of their employees, and seem to think they have some inherent right to not just their business, but to their desired profit margins.
One local business here closed recently with this self-centered, presumptuous and tone-deaf message:
> It is so sad to see that our dream with all its potential has collapsed because the community was not willing to support it.
In theory, if one employer offers a job with great benefits, they will win over the employer with not as many benefits. Clearly, that wasn't happening in your example.
> Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start.
This is literally the (by-law) standard of living for people with full time jobs with employment contracts[1] where I grew in Italy... that's not Silicon Valley, but one part of Italy that has been depressed for many years. (It's also the second top region in Italy by life expectation, that's between the 6th and 7th place in the world ranking by country) So much that in this very town Amazon is building a new warehouse that opens next year.
[1] Granted, permanent positions are rare; but permanent or temporary positions do offer this stuff by law. Fake contracts (partita IVA) and the gig economy exists there too.
Free college almost... public universities tuition fees are 500-4000 EUR per year, depending on the location and prestige.
But seriously, no US state is as poor as Italy, in GDP per capita terms (Mississippi 50K vs Italy 40K).
Here is one calculator: https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
They're striking not for better wages, but so that some local or state politician wins an election in 2026.
Anyone thinking this is a one time thing and is going to blow over hasn't been paying attention.
There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling.
The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not complain about piracy and even partake in it (see Trent Reznor being part of oink/what, or Dead Kennedys encouraging people to record music on their tapes). I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said.
This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything.
I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.
Perhaps you could clarify - what do you mean by "everyone", and what do you mean by "anything?" Does everyone deserve UBI? Do workers deserve disposable income? Do the homeless deserve housing? Healthcare? Food? An attorney, if arrested? Do children deserve college? High school? Primary school? Orphanages?
You can't say that nobody inherently deserves anything, then say I'm intellectually dishonest when I take you at your word.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.
The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.
What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.
That's enough to thrive in lots of places in the USA, in some cases. Maybe not the most desirable places, though.
I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.
You failing to come up with an answer at least readers will know that you don't have their good conscious in mind.
There are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't require schooling and can make a comfortable living. If you are talking about a job anyone with a pulse can get? This won't ever pay well.
"I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said."
All the indy artists I knew ended up having to get out of the business because they couldn't sell their music anymore (people would just download it and expect it for free) and making money from live performances are mostly controlled by large corporations.
Piracy only hurt independent artists and forced all of them with talent to sign with large labels to make a decent living.
Again, with piracy, you want no protection for the artist (and even justify why taking their music, without asking, is fine). Yet, you want the unions to collude with the government to force corporations to halt all technological advances, so workers don't lose their jobs.
Doesn't make much sense here.
$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.
What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.
You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.
Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.
These people are just doing what they have to do to survive. If anything, going on strike a truly desparate move. Insinuating that they are childishing in doing so (as if they feel they "deserve a pony") on the other hand, seems simply -- snide.