to the employees at Amazon trying to unionize: good luck...this is a hard hard road in the US.
I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year.
Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.
I'm glad to hear your story had a happy ending (with the notable exception of those injured by the old owner's negligence). I do wonder how much better the US economy would look if these kinds of investments against corruption were more commonplace.
I would be interested if you might be able to share lessons from this experience that could be used to shape the building of tooling to help workers organize at scale. Email in my profile.
My gripe with the American unionization debacle is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're the pillars keeping the problem standing. It's the same with tipping. If everyone suddenly stopped tipping, then people would not have enough wages to meet their obligations. This results in people not being able to pay rent etc., however, this also leads to a walk-out of the servers that don't want to work for under minimum wage anymore. The problem is that people that are tipping and servers that are encouraging the tipping are keeping the problem alive.
It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.
That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth.
So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction.
I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!
>It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.
This is very true, the "best" (or should I say most succesful?) unions are those that have a monopsony (they control all the supply and there is only one buyer). The only recent victory I can recall is that airport workers are guaranteeda $19/hr minimum wage [1].
The other dimension that is brought on is that unions tend to be "corrupt" with the leaders taking advantage of their positions to "extort" money if they don't get favorable deals; some of these leaders also just pocket their earnings and don't spread the wealth. The mafia also infiltrated many of the unions in shipping and distribution to control the flow of drugs which has sullied the reputations of many unions in New York. [2]
Nowadays it’s even more ridiculous with payment terminals all set to 15%, 20%, 25% options and to tip $0 you have to go to “custom amount” and type 0. The most idiotic part about it is that most of the places that use this practice provide no service at all! You pick your food! You clean after yourself! What are you tipping them for???
Over the last five years or so I've noticed this movement where restaurants think it's cool to make the customer do the work. Wait in line and order, no table service, then walk to pick up your own food cafeteria style and finally to top it off bus it to the trash. Add to that have they charge you the same prices that a table-service restaurant would AND have their payment terminals setup as you describe. So I ask myself every time I unfortunately find myself in one of these restaurants, why would I tip for doing all the work? If I do tip, who is receiving the tip? I'm guessing it's not the people doing the work, i.e. the kitchen staff.
Why don't restaurant owners increase the food prices and pay servers a fair wage? Opening a $100 bottle of wine or $400 bottle of wine requires same effort, why do i pay extra for a $400 bottle of wine?
Now if you bring up the "service" provided argument,
That is literally their job. If they are getting paid a decent minimum wage or little bit more than that, i think it's fair. Do you tip McDonald's employee? Do you tip your garbage men? Do you tip the people who helped you at the clothing store?
I think it's somewhat insidious in that it forces a confrontation between workers and customers and the benefit goes to the owners. it also gives the impression that the product (lets say food) is 20% less than what is printed. yes I u/d tipping is optional, but it is more or less expected (at least in nyc) and you can be ostracized if you don't participate.
Because it sows division amongst subcultures of the US that dont subscribe to the tipping culture. You have people in the lowest socioeconomic classes validating their disdain for some minorities because they don't tip, instead of affecting change to wage system itself, this is a useful distraction for people in higher socioeconomic classes.
In places like Miami where English comprehension is very low, mandatory gratuity is added with a further line item for tipping
Disparate hospitality minimum wage excecptions across the country exacerbates the level of research and discretion needed to adequately consider tipping. With some places paying a seperate lower minimum wage to restuarant workers and some places like California (where over 10% of the country lives) having normalized minimum wages but the same compulsory guilt driven tipping expectations.
The same as the problem with not including the tax in the price up front: it hides the true cost behind a series of computations that most people won't do and a tourist certainly cannot do without research.
It is essentially a trick to get people to not think about how much money they are spending.
Technological innovation can also arise as a consequence of the minimum wage being high. By increasing the cost of human labor, automation becomes relatively cheaper / more cost effective.
Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition.
Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.
I feel strongly that any economic system where automation is bad for laborers is fundamentally broken. Each automation should lead to shorter work hours for someone, without loss in pay, because it's not like the productivity has gone away.
I just want to say, threads like these almost always make me embarrassed to be an SE. For every level headed or compassionate comment, there are 10 more not understanding the problem from the pedestal they don't realize they are standing on. 'why not get another job?' 'no one is forcing them to work'. Seriously sometimes its disgusting and akways frustrating that wome people cant seem to even realize the bubble they are in.
Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered, regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'
You're missing the point that people are making when they say "they have a choice". They're not saying their lives are not rife with hardship and very difficult choices. They're saying that their lives are not being made worse by some employer somewhere offering them a bad job. You can't place the burden of providing them with a living income on the first person who hires them. It's just an immature way of assigning blame and responsibility, that resorts to first association thinking. It's not rational/correct.
It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down. Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone any favors by reducing their employment options.
Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated.
An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or contract.
> [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot."
Freudian slips.
> She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets.
Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.
> “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement.
Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’ at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”
There's definitely a parallel but I don't think you can put on the same level the sort of pressure unskilled and low-wage workers get in Amazon warehouses to the stress we get as skilled workers in the software industry. We are (on average) much better paid, we can (usually) find an other job easily and overall we (generally) have a much better quality of life.
My brother worked in one of these warehouses (not for Amazon, but more or less the same crap) and frankly I think it's a bit obscene to compare this situation to software engineering. It's exhausting, it's boring, it's unfulfilling, the turnover rate is huge, you can't really socialize with your coworkers (partly because they change so fast, but also because you have no time and you're often competing with each other).
I'm sure in the near future the vast majority of these jobs will be replaced by machines though. It's a bad thing for employment but I don't think I'll be sad to see them go. Let the machines to the boring work then take the wealth generated and redistribute it to the population to do actually interesting things! Technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines.
I wouldn’t have an issue with these power hours if not engaging in this little game meant you simply got to miss out on the “prizes”. However if not participating in them have employment reprecussions (affect raises, promotions, lead to concerted teasing, peer presdure, etc.), then that would be troubling.
The key word here is "pressured". There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon. You can work on your own pace, or choose to dropout. Almost all of the people who participate do so because of their interest and not to win a trophy or some cash.
Firstly, they are not prizes, they are microscopic chances at prizes. The company is cutting down on cost by playing prospect theory-based games with their employees' salary.
Secondly, it is not a reward for working efficiently, it is a reward for working the most efficiently. There is only one winner and the other participants get nothing. The company gets the added value either way of course. This is a great if you want to break up employee solidarity too.
Thirdly, the term 'efficiency' implies there is some sort of process optimization going on; the same energy goes in, more value comes out. I doubt workers are suddenly provided with better tooling during 'power hour', so 'efficiency' probably just means 'run faster, exhaust yourself'.
Finally, you can bet 'power hour' metrics are used to adjust regular productivity targets related to other 'incentives', overall making the jobs more demanding and less rewarding over time.
The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor, treating workers as mere goods that can be bought and systematically manipulated, and thinking about living, feeling humans in this way is disgusting to me.
Unions form to prevent a race to the bottom. Individual employees have no power at all, so employers can keep pushing them. Changing jobs is not frictionless, even in a good job market. Most people who work in low-paying positions can't afford to miss a few months of pay because they quit their job to look for something better. Since people have to work to survive, especially in the US with its poor social safety net, you get situations where people are forced to take a job no matter how exploitative it is.
Why is it disgusting? In a lot of job people are expected to rush to get things done. I know a lawyer who was fired because she didn't get a payment executed by 5pm (it ended up costing someone a lot of money)
It's disgusting because it's undignified. Workers should receive a decent wage for work performed, not pressured to perform as fast as possible for gimmicks in an ever quicker race to the bottom to see who can wreck their health the fastest.
It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.
Lawyers are compensated better for their time than Amazon warehouse workers. The raffle tickets aren't for, you know, a performance bonus or anything of value, it's just a cheap gimmick.
I agree with your sentiment, but I can see how this would be different. A lawyer has a career of very unique hard work that requires much self discipline, but success brings great rewards. I imagine a fulfillment center probably feels somewhat like a a cage, where "working harder" just means running the hamster wheel faster.
Relatively mundane work doesn't get any more interesting the faster you do it.
The gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening. You can rationalize it any way you want but more and more people are shocked by the obscenity to have people like Jeff Bezos sleep on mattresses filled with dollar bills while the people working for his company are paid crap wages for an exhausting and unfulfilling job.
I'm not saying that Bezos and the people packing goods in a warehouse should be paid equally but the absolutely obvious unfairness of the modern capitalist economy is simply unbearable for more and more people. The fact that many people still don't seem to have any issue with having somebody earn effectively a thousand times more money than their employees is absolutely baffling. And then they go around shopping for tax rebates for their new headquarters. Everything is fine people, the system is working.
IMO this (and global warming) are going to be the downfall of capitalism. There's too much greed. Too many rich people complaining about taxes while people sleep in the streets. As a result people will turn more and more towards populists as they feel betrayed by the elites. That's how you end up with Trump, Bolsonaro, the populist government in Italy and the current protests in France. People know that they are getting shafted.
Oh, Amazon won’t explicitly say they’re being fired for trying to unionize. There’ll be some cover story that the workers violated some rule no one ever heard of and everyone else ignored, too.
New York City is an expensive place for a warehouse. I believe it only exists so Amazon can offer same day delivery to millions of people. I have no idea how valuable that is to Amazon, but it’s apparently valuable enough that they already accept incredibly high costs. They may just accept the union as one of those costs.
But I understand that it’s possible to put a passage in the employee handbook that “if you belong to a union, the following does not apply to you; check your union agreement for details,” and to offer some benefits, such as profit-sharing, only to nonunion employees. Since labor law is complex, I don’t know what limits exist on that approach.
Income inequality is not the issue here or in the Gilded Age. It's monopoly power.
Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.
The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.
It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.
Capitalism doesn't have to cannibalize. Often it works to everyone's benefit.
Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.
Of course, a union has to recognize that it's not blindly serving its members, if it drives companies out of business. Like hindering technological advancement by refusing automation.
$19 an hour for warehouse work? I can see why they need to unionize instead of just finding somebody willing to pay more, nobody else is going to pay that for any comparable unskilled workload.
$19ish/hr seems like a perfectly fair mid-teens wage for warehouse work with a couple dollars tacked on to make up for the fact that it's a shitty, "fast paced", meat-grinder that doesn't give you enough time to take a piss.
The workers want less crappy working conditions. I understand that. The problem is that their pay is what it is in order to make up for the crappy working conditions.
I don't think unionization will help here. Warehouses can already be automated to a much greater extent than Amazon does. I suspect that at ~$19/hr Amazon is very close to the break-even point for replacing pickers with automation.
Edit:
Picking inventory is fully automated in some warehouses in places with lower wages than NYC (Summit Racing for example). It stands to reason that combined with the higher than typical wages, whatever the break even point is an Amazon warehouse in NYC is far closer to it than anyone else.
They're occasionally the largest company in the world, headed by the richest man in the world. I'm sure they can find the money somewhere to pay their employees a decent wage.
Ahhh, the "XYZ is a billion dollar company!!1! they can afford to pay $x to their employees" argument.
Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
You gave them a 2% raise, the article mentions $18.60. We don't know if this is before or after tax, so let's say it's before.
If they work 40h a week, rent a single bedroom apartment at ~$1600 and the cost of living for one is ~$800 this leaves 2976 - 2400 = ~576 a month without special circumstances. In this case they don't have a car, drinks or meals outside the home, going out (movies/etc.), alcohol, dog, sport membership or travel and certainly no family. If they have one family member at ~600 a month they are down 24 dollars a month so they'd better not. [1]
Simply seeing that Amazon is doing so mindbogglingly well for itself that the value of their assets has grown by 52.65% in 2017[2] and while still holding ~22 billion dollars in reserve[3], workers are not adding some value (as is required in a Keynesian capitalist system) but an insane amount of value. And it is all trickling up while workers cannot afford to have a family.
New Yorkers earning $18.60/hr are not going to pay $1,600/month for a single-bedroom apt in NYC. Yes, NYC is an expensive city, but not every Amazon warehouse worker has to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights. There are actually plenty of affordable housings in many lesser-known neighborhoods -- eg, Sheepshead Bay is known for a large community of retirees; Brighton Beach for Russian immigrants, etc. Amazon's warehouse is in Staten Island where the cost of living is generally even lower.
Sure, you need a lot of money to enjoy life in NYC and $18/hr isn't exactly a lot of money. Even then, for folks without any other marketable skills, this isn't the slave wage as you falsely depict here.
At this wage, it would be unwise to live alone in a single bedroom apartment and would be much smarter, although more difficult, to get roommates to reduce rent costs by 25-50%.
A warehouse worker doesn't add a lot of value. To be specific, the average profit extracted from one of Amazon's 500,000 workers is 6000$ and that includes all the far more profitable business segments.
You also should be properly reading that balance sheet. Those $22 billion in cash stand against $36 billion in short term liabilities, for example. Long term debt is over $37 billion.
Clearly the two are miles apart but I've long been curious if any of the attitudes Amazon has towards Warehouse staff filter through to those in engineering roles. I would be especially interested in hearing from any Amazonians here.
I work at Amazon as a Senior Software Development Engineer. (Obviously, my opinions are my own, and I don't speak for the company in any official capacity.)
I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that.
At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many people around.
When Amazon first launched they only had a few FC's in the US, and as a result claimed they did not need to collect local taxes because they didn't have a "presence" in all the states of their shoppers.
Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes.
Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete.
The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch.
The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?)
If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.
And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars.
I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income).
>If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.
It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.
Actually, workers increasing the cost of labor will certainly accelerate deploying automation.
There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.
Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as to make robot deployment feasible.
But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.
I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity and that’s directly in worker control.
I disagree that this is an example of the "cobra effect". That term properly refers to situations where efforts to improve a problem have misaligned incentives that wind up exacerbating the same problem.
Ideally, we'd have fulfilling, well-paid jobs for everyone. If we can't have that, at least robots don't suffer when you make them do mindless, repetitive tasks at high speed for no money.
The status quo is humans suffering in miserable jobs. A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.
One way or another, we're going to have to figure out what humans do in an automated world, because the robots are coming for everyone's job, not just warehouse workers. (Unless climate change stress collapses society before then, which might happen)
>>A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.
By prohibiting monotonous work, you're preventing those low-skilled workers from contributing to the total production, which reduces the rate at which the economy automates. Automation is a product of investment capital (surplus productivity). Anything that reduces total production results in less productivity being invested into upgrading the economy.
It's sad to read how the workers respond "they are talking to us like we are robots". Commodified labor is what they are, ever since the Fordist model of capitalism people have been gradually reduced to salary numbers and I for one am happy to see people standing for their rights. Or to remind they have rights, to begin with. Just I think there's not much left of the Left, a lot of people make it less about the economy and more about their hurt ego, at least that's what I think about postmodern leftists which I happen to know quite a lot.
Readit News
I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year.
Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.
It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you.
That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth.
So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction.
I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!
This is very true, the "best" (or should I say most succesful?) unions are those that have a monopsony (they control all the supply and there is only one buyer). The only recent victory I can recall is that airport workers are guaranteeda $19/hr minimum wage [1].
The other dimension that is brought on is that unions tend to be "corrupt" with the leaders taking advantage of their positions to "extort" money if they don't get favorable deals; some of these leaders also just pocket their earnings and don't spread the wealth. The mafia also infiltrated many of the unions in shipping and distribution to control the flow of drugs which has sullied the reputations of many unions in New York. [2]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/nyregion/airport-workers-...
[2]https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio...
Nowadays it’s even more ridiculous with payment terminals all set to 15%, 20%, 25% options and to tip $0 you have to go to “custom amount” and type 0. The most idiotic part about it is that most of the places that use this practice provide no service at all! You pick your food! You clean after yourself! What are you tipping them for???
A self-fulfilling prophecy would be if the belief that unions fail to help workers made them fail to help workers (which also happens).
The institution of beggary is surviving in India for the same problems.
The government even has beggars cess, taxes to train beggars into a decent profession.
Nothing works because some one always pays, and therefore there is an incentive for it to continue.
Now if you bring up the "service" provided argument, That is literally their job. If they are getting paid a decent minimum wage or little bit more than that, i think it's fair. Do you tip McDonald's employee? Do you tip your garbage men? Do you tip the people who helped you at the clothing store?
In places like Miami where English comprehension is very low, mandatory gratuity is added with a further line item for tipping
Disparate hospitality minimum wage excecptions across the country exacerbates the level of research and discretion needed to adequately consider tipping. With some places paying a seperate lower minimum wage to restuarant workers and some places like California (where over 10% of the country lives) having normalized minimum wages but the same compulsory guilt driven tipping expectations.
It is essentially a trick to get people to not think about how much money they are spending.
Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition.
Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.
Dead Comment
Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered, regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'
It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down. Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone any favors by reducing their employment options.
Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated.
An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or contract.
> [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot."
Freudian slips.
> She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets.
Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.
> “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement.
Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’ at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”
The proven solution is to rename "power hours" to "hackathons".
My brother worked in one of these warehouses (not for Amazon, but more or less the same crap) and frankly I think it's a bit obscene to compare this situation to software engineering. It's exhausting, it's boring, it's unfulfilling, the turnover rate is huge, you can't really socialize with your coworkers (partly because they change so fast, but also because you have no time and you're often competing with each other).
I'm sure in the near future the vast majority of these jobs will be replaced by machines though. It's a bad thing for employment but I don't think I'll be sad to see them go. Let the machines to the boring work then take the wealth generated and redistribute it to the population to do actually interesting things! Technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines.
The key word here is "pressured". There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon. You can work on your own pace, or choose to dropout. Almost all of the people who participate do so because of their interest and not to win a trophy or some cash.
What's weird to me is that these people aren't forced to work there. They're working there because it's their BEST option.
Secondly, it is not a reward for working efficiently, it is a reward for working the most efficiently. There is only one winner and the other participants get nothing. The company gets the added value either way of course. This is a great if you want to break up employee solidarity too.
Thirdly, the term 'efficiency' implies there is some sort of process optimization going on; the same energy goes in, more value comes out. I doubt workers are suddenly provided with better tooling during 'power hour', so 'efficiency' probably just means 'run faster, exhaust yourself'.
Finally, you can bet 'power hour' metrics are used to adjust regular productivity targets related to other 'incentives', overall making the jobs more demanding and less rewarding over time.
The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor, treating workers as mere goods that can be bought and systematically manipulated, and thinking about living, feeling humans in this way is disgusting to me.
It’s a job. If you add more value, you ought to be paid for it in dollars, not raffle tickets.
keep everything private
do not collaborate
> let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.
I highly recommend the latest Reply All - https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/132-negative-mount-ple.... It's about that town in Wisconsin that "won" the new Foxconn factory.
It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.
They're being treated like dogs, pressured to perform tricks in exchange of a treat.
I mean, move fast to receive raffle tickets? Seriously?
Relatively mundane work doesn't get any more interesting the faster you do it.
I'm not saying that Bezos and the people packing goods in a warehouse should be paid equally but the absolutely obvious unfairness of the modern capitalist economy is simply unbearable for more and more people. The fact that many people still don't seem to have any issue with having somebody earn effectively a thousand times more money than their employees is absolutely baffling. And then they go around shopping for tax rebates for their new headquarters. Everything is fine people, the system is working.
IMO this (and global warming) are going to be the downfall of capitalism. There's too much greed. Too many rich people complaining about taxes while people sleep in the streets. As a result people will turn more and more towards populists as they feel betrayed by the elites. That's how you end up with Trump, Bolsonaro, the populist government in Italy and the current protests in France. People know that they are getting shafted.
I remember reading that are a gazillion rules and regulations on attempted unionization, so "you're fired" might not be it.
But I understand that it’s possible to put a passage in the employee handbook that “if you belong to a union, the following does not apply to you; check your union agreement for details,” and to offer some benefits, such as profit-sharing, only to nonunion employees. Since labor law is complex, I don’t know what limits exist on that approach.
I'm thinking in particular of Amazon Flex.
If you are not happy, with Amazon policy, they will just not give you any package to deliver.
Deleted Comment
Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.
The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.
It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.
Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.
Of course, a union has to recognize that it's not blindly serving its members, if it drives companies out of business. Like hindering technological advancement by refusing automation.
The workers want less crappy working conditions. I understand that. The problem is that their pay is what it is in order to make up for the crappy working conditions.
I don't think unionization will help here. Warehouses can already be automated to a much greater extent than Amazon does. I suspect that at ~$19/hr Amazon is very close to the break-even point for replacing pickers with automation.
Edit:
Picking inventory is fully automated in some warehouses in places with lower wages than NYC (Summit Racing for example). It stands to reason that combined with the higher than typical wages, whatever the break even point is an Amazon warehouse in NYC is far closer to it than anyone else.
Why do you suspect this? The labor market is far from an efficient market.
https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-sta...
Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
Dead Comment
If they work 40h a week, rent a single bedroom apartment at ~$1600 and the cost of living for one is ~$800 this leaves 2976 - 2400 = ~576 a month without special circumstances. In this case they don't have a car, drinks or meals outside the home, going out (movies/etc.), alcohol, dog, sport membership or travel and certainly no family. If they have one family member at ~600 a month they are down 24 dollars a month so they'd better not. [1]
Simply seeing that Amazon is doing so mindbogglingly well for itself that the value of their assets has grown by 52.65% in 2017[2] and while still holding ~22 billion dollars in reserve[3], workers are not adding some value (as is required in a Keynesian capitalist system) but an insane amount of value. And it is all trickling up while workers cannot afford to have a family.
[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Long-Island-NY-Unit...
[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/...
[3]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/256-billion-apple-cash-amazon-...
Sure, you need a lot of money to enjoy life in NYC and $18/hr isn't exactly a lot of money. Even then, for folks without any other marketable skills, this isn't the slave wage as you falsely depict here.
You also should be properly reading that balance sheet. Those $22 billion in cash stand against $36 billion in short term liabilities, for example. Long term debt is over $37 billion.
"[Amazon] is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable"
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that.
At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many people around.
Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes.
Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete.
The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch.
The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?)
If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots.
And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars.
I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.
There’s currently a cost of robots and a cost of humans. When the cost of humans goes above the cost of robots, automation kicks in.
Technology innovation is dropping the cost of robots. A fulfillment center unionizing will increase human costs, unlikely that it will go up so much as to make robot deployment feasible.
But workers definitely can do, or not do, things to affect the timetable.
I would expect that human cost would also increase with lowered productivity and that’s directly in worker control.
Ideally, we'd have fulfilling, well-paid jobs for everyone. If we can't have that, at least robots don't suffer when you make them do mindless, repetitive tasks at high speed for no money.
The status quo is humans suffering in miserable jobs. A unionization push that results in better-paid, more humane jobs in the short term, and robots taking over the awful jobs in the long run seems like a net gain for humanity to me.
One way or another, we're going to have to figure out what humans do in an automated world, because the robots are coming for everyone's job, not just warehouse workers. (Unless climate change stress collapses society before then, which might happen)
By prohibiting monotonous work, you're preventing those low-skilled workers from contributing to the total production, which reduces the rate at which the economy automates. Automation is a product of investment capital (surplus productivity). Anything that reduces total production results in less productivity being invested into upgrading the economy.
I'm sure they've thought this through more than some random poster on Hacker News.
Deleted Comment