>“Amazon does not tolerate violations of labor laws," Leah Seay, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. "Where we find repeated violations, or an inability to correct labor violations, we terminate contracts with DSP program participants.”
At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. The general population are becoming aware of these practices. Amazon may not have directly committed the violation but they've created and shaped an environment ripe for rampantly abusive labor practices.
If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. Don't just leverage cheaper labor from labor abuse until it gets public attention and then terminate a contract set in place to pass blame and responsibility.
Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands?
The whole thing seems to be a corporatized version of a carny game. Amazon is behind the counter, promising gullible passersby top prizes if they can toss a ring over a bottle.
"Watch me, I'll show you how easy it is!"
But instead of young couples on dates being taken for $20 a pop on promises of large stuffed animals, they're luring in new business owners with promises of riches. The problem is, it's a rigged game. Amazon know it, otherwise they'd do this work themselves.
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. spoiler warning
The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive.
If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
It's amazing to me that people often accept these kinds of "explanations" from corporations; as though it was some unintended eventuality, mistake, etc.
Not to mention the sheer gall of repeated corporate responses when caught like these that are ridiculous even at face value.
Most people don't seem to notice these "mistakes" are always to the benefit of the corporation. NEVER to the benefit of the customer, employee, etc.
It's rude to call someone incompetent at their job. Unless they overlooked corruption, in which case it's rude to call them competent at their job. How odd.
The latter, and this is the accepted practice in modern corporations. How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced.
The greatest lie ever perpetuated in the United States corporate system is that a company's fiduciary duty justifies or excuses malbehavior.
You do not get to formulate sketchy ways of doing business because you must make shareholders money. They invested, and took a risk. They don't always get to win. Losses are not something that should be unfathomable. The fact that people haven't done that great a job at rooting this stuff out sooner is a bit on the mystifying side only up until you realize the folks we'd count on to do it are having their checks paid by the people getting investigated.
They "terminate" the contract with a "supplier" who often it just a holding company or "contractor" in a 5 level deep shell game, and the "new" contractor is a name on a form but the same factory is making the same product with the same labor inside a week...
At some point we have to admit that the richest corporations and people in the world, with the most power to change the system, are not just playing in the system but are a part of what makes it broken. From their perspective the system is not broken at all — it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to make shareholders (themselves) fabulously rich at the expense of laborers.
On one side of the equation we have people being paid poverty wages, on the other side we have the richest man in the world with the power to change that. This isn’t a coincidence or just a strange, second-order, unintended byproduct of the system. It’s cause and effect. It’s what the system was designed explicitly to do. The system is in fact working to spec.
> How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced.
Strange how these companies keep getting hoodwinked into profiting immensely from slave labor. I mean, how could a billion or trillion dollar company know whether or not its supply chain uses slaves to produce the goods they sell? It seems like the only way to know if slaves produced their goods is to get caught red-handed by someone else. How do these underfunded NGOs and regulators catch the companies innocently profiting from slave labor?
> Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands?
The same thing companies do when they go to a different state within the US with weaker labor and environmental laws. And the same thing individuals do when choosing to purchase products at cheaper prices from places with weaker labor/environmental laws.
Blaming individual companies for regulatory arbitrage is a fruitless endeavor.
The problem here as seen from Amazon's point of view isn't that someone broke the rules, it's that they were busted for doing so. Same with Apple and any other corp where a contractor violates the rules; you punish them for being discovered, not for breaking the rules in the first place.
> If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions.
We can see from Amazon's actions, and lack of actions, that they're as committed to not breaking labor laws as they are committed to not committing fraud and IP & trademark infringement by selling counterfeit items on their marketplace.
That is to say, it's all rhetoric and PR. After all of this time, and reading countless words from Amazon promising to fix it, I still cannot report to Amazon that I received a counterfeit item from them via their return process, and Amazon drivers are still making less than minimum wage.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
People criticize this logic... But it's absolutely correct.
If it doesn't come out with results you like, then the inputs are wrong. Specifically, settlement amounts are probably too low.
People who claim all safety related issues should get a recall are just wrong. If there is a 1 in a billion chance my car explodes and kills me, then a recall should not be done, because my chances of dying on the way to the dealer to have the repair done are higher.
We shouldn't expect corporations to be so recklessly amoral. I'm all in favor of higher costs for doing shit like this, but the humans making the decisions bear moral responsibility for them. When they bury critical safety issues, they should be held accountable whether or not this particular financial calculus went their way.
Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.
I don't think it's correct and I don't think its correctness is objectively decidable.
It's one thing when companies have unforeseen flaws that end up causing injury or death. No one is perfect and, while they should pay reasonable restitution in line with the level of their mistake, it seems fine overall.
Other the other hand, knowingly producing a product that you are reasonably sure will unexpectedly[1] kill or hurt sometime should have severe penalties. Those penalties should be imposed not through individual lawsuits (which are a poor tool for assuring the rights of whole classes of people - class action lawsuits not withstanding), but through prevailing regulatory action. To be honest I don't think it would be going too far to, as a standard action, nationalize a company in that situation.
We really, really do not want a situation where companies are choosing to kill their customers because they think they will come out ahead in the end. Think about it - are we happy that the leadership teams of the tobacco industry, or the oil industry, or the fiberglass industry were kept in place? How much better of a world would we be in if tobacco companies were at existential threat from their behavior? Where they needed to sell cigarettes like the USA sells guns (with the understanding they may kill)? I think we should seriously consider that standard of product safety.
[1] Products like guns, which are intended to injure or destroy, are their own thing imo.
Modern society has become incapable of proper Risk Analysis
COVID has really highlighted this rather well. People do believe there should be zero risk, they will only accept risk when it has already been assimilated into their lives, but as a society we seem incapable of assimilating of new risk.
I use to think we would get fully autonomous cars, but now I am pretty sure we will never see this technology on the public roadways, not because it is infeasible, but because it can never ELIMINATE all risk to human life, as such it will be rejected by society.
Just like the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" transformed to "everyone self isolate until covid is no more" Automated driving is no longer about being "safer" in an objective way, it has to preventing all death, and if an automated car even causes one death then we must continue with human drivers, at least that is the view of many in society. We can not allow an algorithm to resolve a trolley problem, it is better a human do that.
As a society, we have become very very very risk adverse.
About this: I have a relation who works for a relatively large upstream auto part supplier. I asked him somewhat jokingly about this fight club scene, and he immediately and unabashedly told me he'd been involved in a number of such conversations. In retrospect, I can't understand why I was at all surprised: how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary)?
(To be clear, I'm not saying that I find this morally correct — I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect, honestly, except icky at the surface level. I more means that it seems retrospectively to me that, well, of course that's how it would go, given the incentive structure)
> how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary)
This isn't really a corporate issue at all though. Given scarce resources (whether physical or human), we need to be able to allocate resources efficiently. A conversation along these lines happens in public health systems all the time: how much money should be spent on medical interventions? There, the concept of a QALY (Quality-adjusted life year) is used, and typically, a price limit is set per QALY. Then, only interventions below that threshold will be funded. The idea is that since the healthcare system has limited funds, it doesn't make sense to spend exorbitant amounts delivering marginal results for one patient.
Now, one could argue this is simply a monetary issue, and if we didn't use money to measure these things, the issue would go away. The thing is, even if money isn't an issue (somehow), scarcity is still something we need to deal with. Developing and administrating medical interventions takes human labour, and spending a disproportionate amount of person hours on small gains is still an issue.
This comment is probably a little rambling, but the TL;DR is that given scarce resources (whether that's money in a corporation, or chemists and doctors in a health system), doing calculations on human lives is necessary if we want to make sure we allocate resources effectively.
It's easy to detect "time-shaving", what with everyone having a trackable cell phone today. If time at work exceeds time on the clock for multiple employees, that shows wage theft.
The Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor should be able to demand triple damages for wage theft. 2/3 goes to the employee, and 1/3 goes to enforcement efforts.
Not "never", but when it does happen, they've got vastly more resources to hold their employer accountable. Moreover, if a single employee notices it happening, they can report it to their steward, and then word gets out to all employees to double-check their paychecks. Source: this happened to folks in a union I belonged to.
Should the reverse be treated the same way? That is, being on the clock but not working? I work a low wage job and have seen co-workers go to pretty extreme lengths to avoid having to actually work.
Time theft is estimated at $400 billion per year, much higher than unpaid wages.
No, it should not. If an employer has an issue with the way an employee conducts themselves during working hours they can discuss it with the employee and take disciplinary action if needed. That discipline can include reduction in wages, withholding wage increases or bonuses or firing. Plenty of options for an employer to deal with the situation.
If an employer denies legal wages they are thieves and should be held accountable by law enforcement for theft, just like any mugger or burglar would.
> I work a low wage job and have seen co-workers go to pretty extreme lengths to avoid having to actually work.
It's not as if employers don't have the means to remediate this.
If we cut down to it, there is a fundamental tension - the average employer wants maximum productivity for the least amount they can get away paying, and the average employee want the maximum possible income with the least amount of work. As a thought experiment, if your employer were to offer to reduce the length of your work-week while maintaining your current salary, what is the minimum number would you agree to? Zero is acceptable with no consequences.
> Though Amazon's delivery drivers operate Amazon-emblazoned vans, wear Amazon uniforms, and are trained by Amazon employees, they are technically not employed directly by Amazon but by small contractors, known as "delivery service partners," that operate out of Amazon warehouses around the country.
As much as it is a problem of Amazon and its algorithm. It also shows how dysfunctional is USA despite being richest nation. I believe that the fact that they find people to do this job at the price, is a fundamental problem.
I really want to see how the US being the richest is calculated.
Not that I doubt it, but simple metrics like GDP per capita have obvious problems.
For one, if two women instead of taking care of their own families take care of the others for pay, GDP has increased (and the government took money from both).
Those two families, however, just lost money (taxes on income) while having inferior care and losing 1-2 hours of care a day (travel time).
Maximizing GDP can be negative to well-being and it’s possible that untracked labor such as traditional wives in other countries could actually be a gain for their populace over a higher GDP nation.
I think how to measure wealth in real terms is difficult.
(This is all setting aside that Wall St is cooked book stew at this point and much of US wealth depends on that fabrication.)
>I really want to see how the US being the richest is calculated.
I don't think it's really a mystery. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the US has the largest GDP (total, not per capita) in the world. Of course there are pros/cons to this measure. That said, while your hypothetical is true, I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.
It's not some one-for-one trade where Mom A shows up at Family B's home for her shift as nanny, while Mom B does the reverse.
In reality Mom A is a nurse, and cares for 20+ people in a day, and Mom B is a school administrator, both provide more than one-day-of-mothering value per day worked, so it's actually in everyone best interest that they leave their kids at daycare, consuming 1/6th of a less-talented person's day, enabling their professional output. Even the daycare worker multiplies their output by watching multiple children.
In the 1970's (before outsourcing and immigration became significant) tgere wasnt anyone in the country who would work in those conditions because there were so many better jobs and so few other workers.
Immigration improves job prospects because immigrants are customers. If you're making supply and demand arguments you need to consider both supply and demand not just supply.
And in the 70s I think the poor population (esp. the black one) was much poorer and possibly not employed at all.
I had some doubts that this is Amazon's problem, but the fact that they drive vans with Amazon logo, wear Amazon uniforms and are trained by Amazon employees convinced me this is just a pathetic attempt by Amazon to hide these practices, push the risk and move the blame on contractor companies. This is as bad as it goes.
Well, at some point you cannot blame a store for the postal services abuse on their own workers, but in Amazon's case this is their service, not an completely independent external service. These are the 2 sides of the problem and this tells who is responsible.
> Amazon does not tolerate violations of labor laws," Leah Seay, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. "Where we find repeated violations, or an inability to correct labor violations, we terminate contracts with DSP program participants.
That is NOT a no-tolerance policy. They're literally saying they tolerate some violations so long as its not so bad. Amazon is responsible for this and I'm guessing it stems from a work culture that sees some abuse as inevitable or okay in small amounts. Its not okay. You can't violate worker rights just some of the time and think you're being responsible. This is well outside acceptable business norms in the US. The fact that the official spokesperson thought it was okay that to publicly admit they sweep violations under the rug so long as it doesn't become too bad speaks volumes to Amazon's toxic and amoral work culture.
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At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. The general population are becoming aware of these practices. Amazon may not have directly committed the violation but they've created and shaped an environment ripe for rampantly abusive labor practices.
If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. Don't just leverage cheaper labor from labor abuse until it gets public attention and then terminate a contract set in place to pass blame and responsibility.
Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands?
"Watch me, I'll show you how easy it is!"
But instead of young couples on dates being taken for $20 a pop on promises of large stuffed animals, they're luring in new business owners with promises of riches. The problem is, it's a rigged game. Amazon know it, otherwise they'd do this work themselves.
The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive.
If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
Not to mention the sheer gall of repeated corporate responses when caught like these that are ridiculous even at face value.
Most people don't seem to notice these "mistakes" are always to the benefit of the corporation. NEVER to the benefit of the customer, employee, etc.
Amazon is just playing in the same broken system.
You do not get to formulate sketchy ways of doing business because you must make shareholders money. They invested, and took a risk. They don't always get to win. Losses are not something that should be unfathomable. The fact that people haven't done that great a job at rooting this stuff out sooner is a bit on the mystifying side only up until you realize the folks we'd count on to do it are having their checks paid by the people getting investigated.
On one side of the equation we have people being paid poverty wages, on the other side we have the richest man in the world with the power to change that. This isn’t a coincidence or just a strange, second-order, unintended byproduct of the system. It’s cause and effect. It’s what the system was designed explicitly to do. The system is in fact working to spec.
Strange how these companies keep getting hoodwinked into profiting immensely from slave labor. I mean, how could a billion or trillion dollar company know whether or not its supply chain uses slaves to produce the goods they sell? It seems like the only way to know if slaves produced their goods is to get caught red-handed by someone else. How do these underfunded NGOs and regulators catch the companies innocently profiting from slave labor?
The same thing companies do when they go to a different state within the US with weaker labor and environmental laws. And the same thing individuals do when choosing to purchase products at cheaper prices from places with weaker labor/environmental laws.
Blaming individual companies for regulatory arbitrage is a fruitless endeavor.
We can see from Amazon's actions, and lack of actions, that they're as committed to not breaking labor laws as they are committed to not committing fraud and IP & trademark infringement by selling counterfeit items on their marketplace.
That is to say, it's all rhetoric and PR. After all of this time, and reading countless words from Amazon promising to fix it, I still cannot report to Amazon that I received a counterfeit item from them via their return process, and Amazon drivers are still making less than minimum wage.
At what hypothetical point is this? I'm pretty sure you can do this indefinitely, which is why they do it.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
If it doesn't come out with results you like, then the inputs are wrong. Specifically, settlement amounts are probably too low.
People who claim all safety related issues should get a recall are just wrong. If there is a 1 in a billion chance my car explodes and kills me, then a recall should not be done, because my chances of dying on the way to the dealer to have the repair done are higher.
Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.
It's one thing when companies have unforeseen flaws that end up causing injury or death. No one is perfect and, while they should pay reasonable restitution in line with the level of their mistake, it seems fine overall.
Other the other hand, knowingly producing a product that you are reasonably sure will unexpectedly[1] kill or hurt sometime should have severe penalties. Those penalties should be imposed not through individual lawsuits (which are a poor tool for assuring the rights of whole classes of people - class action lawsuits not withstanding), but through prevailing regulatory action. To be honest I don't think it would be going too far to, as a standard action, nationalize a company in that situation.
We really, really do not want a situation where companies are choosing to kill their customers because they think they will come out ahead in the end. Think about it - are we happy that the leadership teams of the tobacco industry, or the oil industry, or the fiberglass industry were kept in place? How much better of a world would we be in if tobacco companies were at existential threat from their behavior? Where they needed to sell cigarettes like the USA sells guns (with the understanding they may kill)? I think we should seriously consider that standard of product safety.
[1] Products like guns, which are intended to injure or destroy, are their own thing imo.
COVID has really highlighted this rather well. People do believe there should be zero risk, they will only accept risk when it has already been assimilated into their lives, but as a society we seem incapable of assimilating of new risk.
I use to think we would get fully autonomous cars, but now I am pretty sure we will never see this technology on the public roadways, not because it is infeasible, but because it can never ELIMINATE all risk to human life, as such it will be rejected by society.
Just like the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" transformed to "everyone self isolate until covid is no more" Automated driving is no longer about being "safer" in an objective way, it has to preventing all death, and if an automated car even causes one death then we must continue with human drivers, at least that is the view of many in society. We can not allow an algorithm to resolve a trolley problem, it is better a human do that.
As a society, we have become very very very risk adverse.
(To be clear, I'm not saying that I find this morally correct — I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect, honestly, except icky at the surface level. I more means that it seems retrospectively to me that, well, of course that's how it would go, given the incentive structure)
This isn't really a corporate issue at all though. Given scarce resources (whether physical or human), we need to be able to allocate resources efficiently. A conversation along these lines happens in public health systems all the time: how much money should be spent on medical interventions? There, the concept of a QALY (Quality-adjusted life year) is used, and typically, a price limit is set per QALY. Then, only interventions below that threshold will be funded. The idea is that since the healthcare system has limited funds, it doesn't make sense to spend exorbitant amounts delivering marginal results for one patient.
Now, one could argue this is simply a monetary issue, and if we didn't use money to measure these things, the issue would go away. The thing is, even if money isn't an issue (somehow), scarcity is still something we need to deal with. Developing and administrating medical interventions takes human labour, and spending a disproportionate amount of person hours on small gains is still an issue.
This comment is probably a little rambling, but the TL;DR is that given scarce resources (whether that's money in a corporation, or chemists and doctors in a health system), doing calculations on human lives is necessary if we want to make sure we allocate resources effectively.
It's easy to detect "time-shaving", what with everyone having a trackable cell phone today. If time at work exceeds time on the clock for multiple employees, that shows wage theft.
The Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor should be able to demand triple damages for wage theft. 2/3 goes to the employee, and 1/3 goes to enforcement efforts.
This never happens in union shops, by the way.
Time theft is estimated at $400 billion per year, much higher than unpaid wages.
If an employer denies legal wages they are thieves and should be held accountable by law enforcement for theft, just like any mugger or burglar would.
It's not as if employers don't have the means to remediate this.
If we cut down to it, there is a fundamental tension - the average employer wants maximum productivity for the least amount they can get away paying, and the average employee want the maximum possible income with the least amount of work. As a thought experiment, if your employer were to offer to reduce the length of your work-week while maintaining your current salary, what is the minimum number would you agree to? Zero is acceptable with no consequences.
While that exact problem many never happen (and I have by doubts about even that statement)
unions are not the panacea of all virtue nor are they the solution to all labor problems
Dead Comment
After a certain point you have to call it a duck.
Deleted Comment
Not that I doubt it, but simple metrics like GDP per capita have obvious problems.
For one, if two women instead of taking care of their own families take care of the others for pay, GDP has increased (and the government took money from both).
Those two families, however, just lost money (taxes on income) while having inferior care and losing 1-2 hours of care a day (travel time).
Maximizing GDP can be negative to well-being and it’s possible that untracked labor such as traditional wives in other countries could actually be a gain for their populace over a higher GDP nation.
I think how to measure wealth in real terms is difficult.
(This is all setting aside that Wall St is cooked book stew at this point and much of US wealth depends on that fabrication.)
I don't think it's really a mystery. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the US has the largest GDP (total, not per capita) in the world. Of course there are pros/cons to this measure. That said, while your hypothetical is true, I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.
In reality Mom A is a nurse, and cares for 20+ people in a day, and Mom B is a school administrator, both provide more than one-day-of-mothering value per day worked, so it's actually in everyone best interest that they leave their kids at daycare, consuming 1/6th of a less-talented person's day, enabling their professional output. Even the daycare worker multiplies their output by watching multiple children.
Deleted Comment
And in the 70s I think the poor population (esp. the black one) was much poorer and possibly not employed at all.
Deleted Comment
That is NOT a no-tolerance policy. They're literally saying they tolerate some violations so long as its not so bad. Amazon is responsible for this and I'm guessing it stems from a work culture that sees some abuse as inevitable or okay in small amounts. Its not okay. You can't violate worker rights just some of the time and think you're being responsible. This is well outside acceptable business norms in the US. The fact that the official spokesperson thought it was okay that to publicly admit they sweep violations under the rug so long as it doesn't become too bad speaks volumes to Amazon's toxic and amoral work culture.
> What is the pay rate at Amazon?: $15 an hour is the Amazon minimum wage—although you can make more based on your location and the shift you choose.
Source: https://www.amazondelivers.jobs/faqs