It's hard to take Amazon seriously given this series of revelations. Probably not everything is true but we all know they have low ethical standards...
I agree with what you're saying about "low ethical standards" -- many large companies fall into that bucket -- but you responded to a comment asking for more evidence with a reference to a "series of revelations" but no link, or even specific mention of you're talking about. "We all know" is also not the greatest argument; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I've had it in the back of my mind for months that I need to get away from Amazon for the reasons you've listed. How have your shopping habits changed since ditching Amazon? Did you go back to more conventional stores or are there any online marketplaces that you've found to fill some (obviously nowhere near all) of the Amazon-sized hole?
Instead of window shopping in stores and buying on Amazon, I now window shop on Amazon (all prospective purchases go into the shopping cart to monitor prices), and then I bundle my purchases every 2-3 weeks at brick and mortar stores. ALL of our baby purchases (diapers, wipes, etc) have been switched to Target.com. I don't even really miss Prime (my packages were already not sticking to within 1-2 day delivery deadlines, so not much loss there). I also don't impulse shop as much, and plan my purchases out, which is nothing but beneficial to my wallet.
It's not perfect, but if principles were easy everyone would do it.
Is Target.com any better? My understanding is that almost every major online store outsources its fulfillment centers, and Amazon's are basically par for the course.
Say what you will about the conditions at places like Foxconn in China, but at least they provide food and shelter.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.
> to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus
I was recently in South Korea and was surprised to see that there were a lot of large apartment buildings around Seoul which appeared to be employee dormitories from previous decades (1980s I believe). Some even still said Samsung and LG on the side.
However, I don't think this concept would work in Western society. The cultures between Asia and the West are very different. It's common for several generations to live in the same house in China/Japan/Korea, but this isn't the case in the West.
I agree it would make sense to build dormitories, from a transportation and economic perspective it makes perfect sense. Economies of scale.
But people in the West don't want to move to live near the factory/warehouse. They want to have a social life, and dorm life really doesn't facilitate having a social life.
Many Samsung buildings in Seoul are simply regular apartments - Samsung and other chaebols (family-controlled megaconglomerates) have divisions in many more sectors of the domestic economy than one sees in the rest of the world. In particular, in South Korea Samsung manufactures a large portion of the country's automobiles, and developed and owns much of the residential real estate.
Many Samsung buildings in Suwon, Samsung's HQ town slightly south of Seoul, are still company dorms. I went there for 10 days and it scared the hell out of me.
I'm a little confused on why you think dorm life is less social. I went to college, and am now employed/live in a major US city. In my college, we had regular dorm events and I knew everyone on my floor, and was friends with many. If I try to talk to my neighbors, they treat me with suspicion. If I make a neighborhood event, 1-2 or two people come to eat my food, then leave.
Ancedotal, but my intuition is that dorm life is much easier, though that may be inherent to college. It's extremely frustrating to know that few will give you any of their time to form friendships, no matter the effort you try.
Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
> In my college, we had regular dorm events and I knew everyone on my floor, and was friends with many.
I'm sure dorms are great if all you want to do is party all the time. However given that people working at Foxconn/Amazon are probably working 8-16 hours every day, I'm doubtful that they'd really be in a partying mood after working that long.
Hence, when everyone is finished working their shift and just wants to sleep, and you don't, it's a bit hard to be social without pissing off people around you.
> Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
You're talking about old warehouses which have been converted into trendy apartments. This is gentrification. No one actually wants to live in a functional warehouse.
I'm not sure about Foxconn and others, though Amazon fulfiment employees can't take two sick days in a row, else be fired. This is coming from an aquantence that is human and got sick.
> I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.
The Netherlands has several 'Company neighbourhoods', I was raised in one. They were typically built before the second world war and they were actually meant to 'enable the working class'. Build quality was good and had quite some space for the time. Layout of the neighbourhood was not dense but left spaces open for nature and play.
Facilities included schools, sports accomodation etc. PSV, a dutch premier league football team is a project of Phillips the former electronics giant. PSV -> Phillips Sport Vereniging.
And Phillips built neighbourhoods, schools and public swimming pools too.
Ah well ... sigh ( I was not raised in a Phillips neighbourhood btw ).
Not always. For example the village built up by the Cadbury family in Bournville was designed to favour the wellbeing and living standards of their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
Does FoxConn have company scrip? As far as I know, you can take the money you make at FoxConn and save it until you find another job. Or send it to your family to support them.
Company scrip served to make it so you could never save up money to leave, which was the biggest problem.
Exactly. But it is always interesting to me that when the cost of living is high, and a job doesn't pay enough to afford to live near it, people think it would be "helpful" if the employer offered discounted or free housing. The alternative is to think it is "horrible" that they don't pay you enough to live there.
In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.
Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.
An aside that's probably relevant here is how the welfare state here deals with the unemployed: if you refuse a job offer, you cease being eligible for any welfare. This can (and does at times) push people to accept jobs where their cost of commuting takes up almost their entire income and leaves them worse off than the relatively small amount they were getting as welfare.
In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.
I know the Foxconn suicides and subsequently installed nets got a lot of play in the US press, and I don't have any incites into the overall conditions at Foxconn, but considering the number of people they employ, I've heard it said that they have a lower suicide rate than some American demographics like males attending college.
As an aside, I worked with an ex-Foxconn engineer who lived in the dorms to save money. They wired up his office phone to also ring in his room. When foolish US engineers would call him, not aware of the time difference, it would wake him up in the middle of the night. He took his phone off the hook to get some sleep but got in trouble for it.
A few years ago my wife was working for an airline in the Middle East, and they provided accommodation for all crew. They had a few buildings in various places around the city (some right in the city centre, some further out), and provided regular buses between the buildings, HQ and the city centre (for buildings outside).
Inside the buildings were apartments that housed up to three people, everyone had their own private bedroom and bathroom. The quality of the buildings was fairly good, not luxury but not cheap.
You could also opt to receive a stipend if you wanted to find your own accommodation, but it was a bit low to get something of the same quality.
Workers living at the factory working for a low wage sounds like something from 200 years ago, a bit like a lite version of slavery. I think we should try to make peoples lives better in the future, not worse.
I worked for an Amazon fulfilment centre in Scotland, I don't want to say too much on the matter, as it'd be quite negative. It's suffice to say, this does not surprise me in the slightest.
Doesn't that imply that Scotland's inadequate legal and social structures leave them to <hope> that Amazon behaves in a morally generous way? Let's say that Amazon starts paying their workers more. Should the workers of Scotland then go to sleep, comfortable underneath the blanket of Amazon's incidental moral generosity?
Shouldn't the workers of Scotland, if they have the ear of their fellow countrymen, move to change the legal and social structure in which Amazon is only one of many members? What about the company that behaves cruely but isn't big enough to reach the news like Amazon does?
This is why I don't have faith in moral narratives.
I think you intended this comment as snark, but the irony of it is that Scotland is today part of the UK, but was almost --- and will likely be within the next few years, as a result of Brexit --- an independent country precisely because its citizens don't agree with the policies set in England on its behalf.
Scotland is quite a bit more liberal than the rest of the UK; it does indeed see more of its future in the social democracies of northern Europe.
I don't think it's unnecessarily pedantic to ask people to refrain from using the word "liberal" in the American sense when referring to countries in which the original sense of the word is retained.
When it comes to regulation of the labour market, Scotland is decidedly less liberal than England.
So, we're currently talking at cross purposes, and I'm not convinced that I'm really adding much to this discussion by furthering it. However, to clear up any confusion between us, if your point is that Scotland favours a more heavily regulated labour market then you are both correct and in agreement with me.
My point was simply that this is an illiberal position. Liberal only means "economically statist" in America. Everywhere else in the world it still means classically liberal - i.e. in favour of free markets.
Again, I don't think I'm making this discussion any better by pointing this out, so I'm going to leave it there.
Parent means "liberal" in the JS Mill / Adam Smith (whose statue is in the middle of Edinburgh) sense, rather than whatever it means these days in the US context.
laingc is making the reasonable point that in most of the world the word "liberal" means "brutally laissez faire". If you are talking about Scotland, then why not use the word "liberal" as it is understood in Scotland?
As an example, a Scot would never say "The government increased the minimum wage today, that was very liberal of them."
It's my hope that people in the USA will eventually go back to using the word "liberal" in the classic sense. But then, I keep hoping people in the USA will adopt the metric system, and I am always disappointed.
No I don't mean for my comment to deliver emotional impact or to be carried through vehicles of sarcasm or irony.
And whether Scotland becomes independent, my point remains -- you can ask why Amazon pays minimum wage, or you can ask why minimum wage is so low.
Depending on Amazon to be moral is as inadequate a solution as hoping for noblesse oblige. It's more interesting to discuss the <mechanics> of why Amazon class entities will pay higher wages.
Or people can morally shame <one> Amazon event, just like people who disagreed with Peter Thiel's influence in the sex tape case instinctually shame <one> Peter Thiel event. Whether you're asking for Amazon or Peter Thiel to "do the right thing", you're asking for noblesse oblige.
This kind of moral shaming does not scale, it depends on flash outrage, and companies that play the long game in media will beat this kind of ad-hoc moral shaming.
I also wanted to discuss not merely government structure, but also social structure, to imply that multiple parties need to fail for classes of workers to be exploited. The net of your society is the reason why Amazon is permitted to exploit an individual, and that includes churches, advocacy organizations, unions, etc.
I thought that discussion of both hard and soft structures is the better way to go, or we can hope that outrage continues to shows up at the right time and the right place.
No, we can ask why any profitable large corporation thinks its ok to pay starvation wages to their workers. Its not right; they have the money to pay more; they don't. I'm asking why.
Is it right for you to have drinking water delivered through modern technologies and systems? Is that your moral right?
Should we discuss whether you have the moral right to water, or should we discuss the formal plans to erect an infrastructure of water?
The latter doesn't require you to do any serious moral labor (deliberation and consensus work). You need only want. Do we both want something? Then we already have a basis for discussion. The question of whether you want workers to be paid more is far easier to answer than the question of whether moral consensus on workers wages can be achieved in your lifespan.
Also, how many moral frameworks for achieving moral consensus are you aware of? There are certainly frameworks for achieving empirical consensus on policy effectiveness.
How would more money improve the situation described (besides a fancier tent)? We have no indication there was any real estate for sale or other lodging opportunities nearby. For what it's worth, the land in that rural area might not be zoned residential or have proper infrastructure (roads, heat, gas, water, sewage).
The person has a house and could already commute from far out, they chose not to.
This is hardly Amazon's problem: If the minimum wage is not liveable, MSPs such as the one criticising Amazon in the article should work to increase it.
Amazon is getting tax cuts because it's creating a few jobs.
Maybe it's time we realize that people don't need these terrible jobs in order to survive. They need water, food and shelter - all of which there's an overabundance of, in developed countries. An unconditional basic income would put a swift end to these abuses.
It's absolutely partly Amazon's problem. They're highly profitable, and they could choose to pay a living wage (other companies do), but they do not. I don't understand this impulse to absolve companies of all responsibility save from things they are legally mandated to do.
The only reason most companies pay a living wage is because they have to, to attract enough employees. Amazon pays as little as it does because it can. Almost the entire employment age population is qualified to work in a warehouse (I've done it). There is almost no competition for employees at that level, they're everywhere.
People who can code and run huge network operations are relatively rare, so they're paid a lot; it's competition for scarce employees. It has nothing to do with responsibility. If Google could pay minimum wage it would.
Not defending Amazon, just pointing out that they're paying the least they have to, just like Google is paying the least they have to.
So some poor guy who works for a company that doesn't make as much money as amazon doesn't also deserve a living wage?
Wages are about supply and demand. There is enough supply of the caliber of workers that amazon needs willing to work at minimum wage to fill their demand for workers.
If we think that amazon is making too much profit, and should distribute it more, then we should tax them more; that way, the benefit can spread to more people and not just the lucky ones who happen to work at amazon.
Because it's the government's responsibility to ensure people have a minimum quality of life. It's naive to expect corporations to act charitably — a company is an organisation mandated to make as much money as possible. Even when a company does seemingly charitably things it's rarely anything other than a marketing/branding exercise.
I doubt it's a wage problem per se, it's that these are temporary, seasonal positions and it's not worth it for these employees to find a low-cost place for just a month, given the hours they'll likely be working.
Yeah, it's not the company's fault, they should continue to pay below market wages and collude with other tech companies to artificially depress wages[1].
The case you link is about wage collusion on high-tech jobs, hardly the same as this case of minimum-wage workers.
Of course, if you have any evidence that Amazon is colluding with other employers of low-wage workers to keep their wages down, that would be germane and very interesting indeed.
Well they certainly shouldn't break the law as they did in the case you linked to. But if law is insufficient to ensure people that have a minimum standard of living — it's the law that should be updated rather than trying to shame companies on an ad hoc basis.
>I focus very heavily, especially in peak times, on associate experience.
Why do they call their workers that? I also can't imagine how much I'd hate working for minimum wage in a warehouse for an alleged 60 hours a week with a DJ playing. It doesn't sound all that fun.
Amazon is the new Wal-Mart. I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2008 I think. I stopped shopping at Amazon after returning to the states. The real price of low prices is too high.
Let me describe my experience with the application process. I did not accept the job.
I applied to be an Amazon Fulfillment Specialist (or whatever they're called) back when I was without a job in Silicon Valley a few months ago.
I applied online and got the job offer without any interview at all whatsoever. They asked me to attend a 'training session' in a conference room at a nearby hotel. When the doors opened, there were tables lined up on the perimeter of the conference room with a small projector in the middle that illuminated the Amazon logo on the screen. In one corner, people started lining up to get their photo taken and were also given a piece of paper with their name and other information like a candidate number. After you had your photo taken, you had to take a seat at one of the tables which had a swab stick for a drug test as well as some other paperwork for the drug test (like a consent form). The presenter was a real prick because when people asked him questions he would be very assertive and act as if people were wasting his time trying to get through the slideshow, which described their work ethics and talked more about the job. At some point we got to the drug test part which involved the presenter slowly going step by step through the process and checking to make sure we were all in sync. Once we were done, we put the drug test into some kind of bag and were free to go.
Overall, the process was horrendous and really showed that Amazon just wants anyone and everyone to become part of their fulfillment center. It doesn't surprise me that people would sleep outside of the fulfillment center given how smooth sailing the hiring process is, if it's anything like what I went through. It's meant to be open and 'friendly' to anyone without any recent drug usage.
Is this a direct position with Amazon? I did contracting for Apple (working at their facilities with direct Apple employees) and this sounds like the experience I had there. No interview, low wages, strict work environment, and everyone made me feel like I was wasting their time, even when I had a relevant question to my job. We had "required" overtime a couple times a month, meaning I had to be at the facility by 5 am on a Saturday. it was miserable, and the pay was crap. I took it because I was in between jobs, and it would at least keep a tech company on my resume.
> process was horrendous and really showed that Amazon just wants anyone and everyone to become part of their fulfillment center
It sounds like you're saying this is a bad thing. Here we are with a hiring process that really lives up to the ideals we've been preaching for the past 50 years. Equality. Actual, real equality. Women, Blacks, Ethnic Undesirables, Special Needs... It doesn't matter who you are, you can get the job.
And it's "horrendous."
For what it's worth, I actually agree with you, but it does seem telling that this process that clearly lives up to the requirements all the underprivileged of our society demanded, we call it horrendous.
From what I've heard Amazon doesn't seem like a great place to work and this comment isn't meant to defend the company's overall work culture, but as someone who was once without any real marketable skills, little education, no job, and homeless, that honestly sounds like an awesome hiring process to me.
They will more or less hire anyone, but that's because they're essentially hiring meat robots to perform repetitive tasks for ten hours a day, six days a week at peak, until actual robots become economical. There is no reason for Amazon to care about the interview process when they hire and fire constantly, and any particular task is so compartmentalized that you can learn it in an hour. It's tedious and brutal, but in my experience, no one ever told me it would be otherwise.
How is this different than Brandon living out of a truck in a Google parking lot? (Ignoring the separate issue of whether Amazon is a good/bad place to work.)
I would imagine a software engineer at Google is earning a lot more than £7.35 an hour, and could easily move into a better place to live if they wanted to.
If you are earning £7.35 an hour, assuming 37.5 hours a week, that is £1,076.11 per month after taxes. Zoopla has quite a few properties to rent in Dumfirmline for under £500 per month [0] - it isn't SF prices.
I'd take a guess and say that the people doing this are seasonal workers who live further away. It's not worth relocating for a few months, and commuting for 2 hours per day isn't nice (from Edinburgh during rush hour it could easily take over an hour to get to Amazon's warehouse), so this is their choice.
It's not the governments job to provide welfare to companies by subsidizing the labor force. Government should provide infrastructure and safety nets. The employer should provide sufficient payment for the employee to use the resources without needing special government subsidies.
If a full-time employee needs government subsidies then the company is not paying enough.
Why are these people working for Amazon if it's so bad and what would they be doing if it were not for Amazon? It's not like they're conscripting workers in the dead of the night and shackling them to the warehouse. I'm not saying there shouldn't be labor rules, work week hours, etc, but if they're not breaking any laws what's the big deal?
Every few months we see articles about programmers working at $SILICON_VALLEY_BIG_CORP that lives in a van outside the office or sleeps under his desk at night. The worker is usually a combination of frugal and nutty. What's the difference between that and this?
> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
For those with no idea about the geography of this part of the world: it's about a 30 minute drive down the motorway, and from memory congestion only gets particularly bad further south on it at rush hour, so even at rush hour it won't be that much longer.
Of course, the big difference with the programmer under the desk is the programmer is unlikely to be earning minimum wage. Anyone 25 and over, working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, is earning £432/week. If we assume they're working those hours or on vacation all year, their take home pay is £355/week. If we assume fuel costs of ~£4.50 each way, then if they're working five days a week that's ~13% of their income, or if six days ~15%.
Yeah, why don't they just get a job paying twice as much where they don't have to sleep in a tent? Silly peasants. And how is a Google software engineering making six figures, sleeping in a van in 68 degree California, any different from a minimum wage worker sleeping in a tent in a field in the middle-of-winter Scotland?
> Yeah, why don't they just get a job paying twice as much where they don't have to sleep in a tent? Silly peasants. And how is a Google software engineering making six figures, sleeping in a van in 68 degree California, any different from a minimum wage worker sleeping in a tent in a field in the middle-of-winter Scotland?
If the circumstances are so dire that the worker has no other choices for employment, the alternative is no employment at all. That's the baseline comparison point for whatever job Amazon is providing and the worker always has that option as well.
Amazon is not a charity, it's a for-profit company, and arguably by building the warehouse and providing jobs it's doing more long term good than a charity would by handing out sandwiches.
Comments like yours bring to mind the phrase "No good deed goes unpunished". Would they be better off with no jobs at all?
I'm kind of amazed by the basest level of empathy that seems to be missing among many in our industry. I'm not even arguing what the right solution is - that is certainly debatable. But given how good we have it as software engineers, when someone's best option is to sleep in a tent for their work, and we comment "how is that any different from someone making twenty times as much voluntarily choosing to live in a van?", it sounds awful close to "Let them eat cake."
I am not an economist but Krugman is, a left leaning one at that which spent a large time arguing against Bush/Trump. And he is arguing a similar position:
I think it could be argued the other way around. The point he was making, of which there are many examples, is that these jobs are better than no job at all.
You can be "empathetic" by pushing for higher minimum wages, but your empathy will more likely hurt the very people you want to help - the unskilled workers.
As is often the case with "feel good" legislation it typical does more harm than good - in the long run.
> You can be "empathetic" by pushing for higher minimum wages...
But that's my point - I'm specifically not advocating any particular policy solution. I'm just advocating that we, who were lucky enough to be born in a highly developed country and are lucky enough to be highly compensated for our work, can at least acknowledge that someone else's position sucks and is unfair, instead of basically thinking "he's lucky he even has a job, he should be grateful."
I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
> But that's my point - I'm specifically not advocating any particular policy solution. I'm just advocating that we, who were lucky enough to be born in a highly developed country and are lucky enough to be highly compensated for our work, can at least acknowledge that someone else's position sucks and is unfair, instead of basically thinking "he's lucky he even has a job, he should be grateful."
> I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
Not using every critique on a topic as a chance to express empathy does not mean one does not have any. IMNSHO, I think I have a ton of empathy. But I have a hell of a lot more rationality and I'd much rather express the latter.
If you're cold, empathy might get you a hug but rationality will get you a coat.
I don't know. It sounds an awful lot like your position is that we're only allowed to criticise whoever offers work, and not allowed to defend them. Because they're offering work to poor people?
Should companies only ever offer work to rich people? That sounds a lot like class-based genocide.
Maybe you should try harder to see if maybe there's an underlying assumption you're making that's incorrect? Have you heard of the Double Crux? Read up on it on Less Wrong.
See my answer below to another commenter. I'm not even criticizing Amazon. I'm criticizing tone-deaf people on this board who think that it's the same thing when a rich software engineer chooses to live sparsely as when a poor person lives in a tent so they can get a minimum wage job.
I'd rather Amazon pay higher wages. I would pay more for Prime to support that. I also shop at Costco because they pay their employees good wages. We should avoid races to the bottom.
Alternative title: "Amazon gives jobs to local homeless population". But seriously, I fail to see how this is on-topic on HN other than Amazon being a tech company.
Haha, was just about to post this. From what I hear, it's very hard to get a job if you're homeless, so this is a good thing. Imagine the outrage if the opposite narrative were being reported; "Amazon refuses to employ homeless people".
There's no suggestion that they are paying below the minimum wage, so I think singling out Amazon is quite disingenuous, regardless of how in vogue it is to bash the quality of their work environment.
If there is a story here, it is that there aren't enough homeless shelters in Fife right now, or that the minimum wage is too low; this has nothing to do with Amazon.
Someone very close to me works at a newly constructed Amazon fulfilment center. She was told she would be a "sortation expert" and when she arrived was told her job had changed and she would now be the person loading trucks with packages that weigh up to 49 pounds... Not ideal considering she weighs 110 pounds bit whatever, she has agreed to the job. The shady stuff is how they schedule workers. Only 4 hours a day "so your muscles are fresh" according to a supervisor. They also mysteriously had no work to do on Thanksgiving so everyone was sent home (so they didn't have to pay time and a half we later learned). But the next couple days after they we absolutely slammed. Also they reward employees that are forced to stay late with $5 swag gift cards for the Amazon store, not Amazon. It's seasonal and temporary so it's not a huge deal but I couldn't imaginr working for a company like that permanently.
The 4 hour days for truck loading may not be unusual. I worked for ups loading trucks many years ago after high school. Aside from a 15 minute break, we were lifting boxes non stop and it was very fast paced an grueling. They paid a lot more per hour than other jobs (you were only working 20 hrs a week) and after a few months I was in the best shape of my life. It was a pretty good job for a high school kid at the time.
The other stuff still sounds shady though, when I got the ups job I knew what I was getting into.
It is. (Or rather, 50 lbs is; I'm guessing someone rounded down here.)
You probably see this most often when traveling: Normal checked suitcases must be at most 50lbs. (Typically up to 70lbs is allowed if you pay an extra fee, but the bag then needs a "HEAVY" sticker, which alerts ground crew to handle it carefully to avoid injuries.)
I don't like this article because it seems like a purely emotional appeal.
To be sure, there's a lot of people who have said that Amazon is a shitty place to work: not just in entry level jobs, but even as a well-educated 6 figure software engineer. I would not choose to work for Amazon unless I was desperate, period. It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work and the few good things about working there that I've heard like small teams don't outweigh all of the negatives.
That being said, Amazon isn't a government entity that is responsible for your housing and they have no right to tell you where to sleep at night.
Look at this section of the article in particular.
> One worker, who did not wish to be named, was reluctant to speak to The Courier but did describe the firm as a “poor employer” and criticised working practices at the Fife site. He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
This is a guy took the best job that was available to him (even though it's far away from his house) who is doing this by choice for a period of time as he believes that this decision benefits him the most. I don't see anything wrong with this. I feel bad for him if his stuff got stolen because of the extra media attention there: the reporter was probably intending to do something nice for them and it might end up backfiring.
But really, what can Amazon do about this? For that one example, that's a guy that already has a home but chooses not use it out of convenience. If they offered seasonal workers some extra resources and facilities (say use of the parking lot to sleep in safer at night) to make their lives easier, they'd instantly be accused of exploiting workers and there would be images of tent cities on the news every night trying to make them look bad.
I don't think you should be downvoted. Its amazing to me that people will spout high minded "living wage" nonsense and then spend an hour on their computer searching for the cheapest retailer on the whole internet.
If Amazon took the advice and paid higher, the products would cost more and the web-potificators would congratulate them profusely for their magnanimity while putting them straight out of business with their buying habits.
Amazon is huge so it distorts the picture and seems to muddle the thinking a bit but even the largest of ships are beached by a receding tide.
I'm not saying that this is the desired order of things, just things work at the moment.
I don't see how you could be down voted for this on a forum that specializes in exactly that: supply and demand.
Amazon needs the work done, people are willing to do that work for that wage under such conditions - supply and demand. At least people have that option; impose restrictions, and many go from having that option to not having it (while the employer finds cheaper options).
> it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth
so it would be fair if somebody who did a poor job in his school days (probably, I never heard that anybody work at Amazon with higher education and even than in germany amazon pays way more than other employers Zalando for example) and already have a home to get as much money to have two homes because one of the fact that his job is too far away from his regular house?
Btw. I'm dropped out of "College" (in germany it's called different) but I tried hard to get a decent job and search a place to live (which is extremly hard here in Freiburg) but I got a cheap one that I can afford, besides the fact that it's not big, but it's fine. And I never complained since It was my own fault that I don't live like the rich boys now and "only" drive a "small" car, but some people are just ridicoulus.
I know there are a lot of problems in the world but actually Europe and USA are actually still not the one's with "really really" big problems, actually we discuss about problems that some people did not get enough money blabla, while in other countries they barly get any money, food and water, it's just ridicoulus that we live in the cockaigne and call out some big companies because they don't pay their workers more. What all people forgot, they have a job, without one they would get way way less.
Can you provide evidence to support how your solution addresses the issue?
Would the wage you propose all workers make allow this individual to live closer to his work site? Does the wage he makes now specifically disallow him from living close to his work site? Would his employer treating him better mean he doesn't sleep in a tent?
This article doesn't give us enough information to know.
They pay them what the market dictates. Unfortunately these jobs are less than a decade away from being completely automated away.
This is sad but is not Amazons fault. The people of the western world need to demand Universal Basic Income. Maybe if the government provided such a safety net, Amazon would have to pay people more to get them to work.
> The people of the western world need to demand Universal Basic Income. Maybe if the government provided such a safety net, Amazon would have to pay people more to get them to work.
In the US, at least, we seem to have elected a President with a mandate of dismantling what little regulatory and progressive protections already exist, adding more would be culturally and politically unthinkable.
We'll see the repeal of the minimum wage and the establishment of China-style "free trade zones" long before we see UBI.
They could but they won't unless powerful entities such as government force them to do it. Then might as well government provide the cheap or free housing themselves.
If Amazon isn't paying workers enough for them to get reasonable accommodation and participate in society, that employment is a net negative overall. We are all paying Amazon to mistreat its workers, be it in direct payment, health care or crime.
Amazon SDE. I know this was not the primary point of your post but I need to respond to "It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work".
There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive. A lot is expected from you. The perks are nowhere near a Google's or many SV shops.
But corporate and micromanaged are the furthest thing from the truth. There are VERY few "top-down" directives. (we call them S-team goals for the SVP team). And each and every team is given a TON of autonomy, independence and ownership.
This of course has its own problems, and why sometimes some teams breed awful internal cultures that lead to NY times articles. It's why the AWS console is built with 23 different web technologies and each one is slightly inconsistent from the other. It's why most of the company's internal services are still not on native AWS (though we are essentially 100‰ on EC2).
But this ownership and independence is 90% Fabulous and genuinely freeing. You are given a tremendous amount of autonomy over your technical decisions. You get a chance to decide on the working culture and attitude towards software development that makes sense for the people on your team, depending on your strengths, preferences, projects, and customers.
Amazon is not for everybody. But it is far closer to a group of a few thousand startups than a corporate behemoth.
Also, the SDEs here put a stop to all that Proctor-driven interviewing, though sadly Amazon PR doesn't want to make a public declaration as such. Oh well.
I want to see if I can clarify your last point, because it'd be huge if this is true.
You're saying that internal pressure has caused HR to drop ProctorU across the SDE/intern pipeline? What's the replacement, traditional phone screens + onsites?
Yes to all that, internal pressure from the SDE community. Except the onsites for interns - Interns in the US sometimes get only multiple phone screens - it's been like that for a while. I think they had some issues with cheating which is what led to the Proctor overreaction.
Micromanagement critically comes from the next-person in the heirachy.
It is rare to have a workplace like Apple, where the CEO was rumoured to involve himself in every aspect of the company.
Most workplaces' simply suffer from bad team leads, bad middle managers, bad shift managers, bad scrummasters, and the like.
In fact, it may be that extreme team autonomy allows micromanagement to flourish since the top leaders don't know what's going within the teams, and do not try to stop poor team dynamics from occurring unless it affects performance in a visible way.
Sure. But I've been on 3 different Amazon teams in 3 different offices. I've never experienced this (though I have experienced a bad manager, micromanagent was not their issue)
Fair enough, you gave a great response and I'm sure there's some nice things about that and many things outsiders don't know As a computer guy, my opinion is probably most heavily influenced by Steve Yegge's infamous software platforms rant which was both fascinating and painted a mixed picture.
Given all the handwringing on HN in the last month about fake/biased news, it's ironic to see so many comments latching onto this story with "well duh, we always knew Amazon was a terrible employer, and here's more proof!"
I'm not going to try to defend Amazon - it certainly has many employment issues both in the FCs and at HQ. But this story specifically is virtually content-free. Most of it's content is to be found in the first sentence: "At least three tents have been spotted in woodland beside the online retail giant’s base just off the M90 in Dunfermline in recent days" and then later it emerges that they managed to find one occupied tent whose occupant was using the tent to avoid commuting from his home. The rest of the article strings together innuendo and rehashes talking points to try to build the desired narrative and mental picture of a tent city full of freezing, starving Amazon FC workers.
A truthful headline would have been "An Amazon worker sleeps in a tent near Dunfermline site to avoid long commute", but then that would neither have sparked the same moral outrage nor garnered the same number of clicks.
> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
Perth and the Dunfermline site are roughly 30 miles apart, on public transport the trip would take roughly 2 hours.
Sounds like a great idea castigate an employer in a semi-rural area with piss poor public transportation.
Honestly, you're never going to have good public transportation in rural areas. There simply isn't the density to support it. It's a given that efficient transportation in such areas happens via car, which is a huge problem if you're working a job at a place like an Amazon warehouse that doesn't pay enough money to be able to easily afford a car.
Some potential future network of public transportation provided via self-driving cars excepted.
There's hourly buses from Perth to Dunfermline and very infrequent direct trains: the real problem isn't the ruralness of it, it's getting out to the industrial estate on the edge of town where Amazon's site is located that makes it take so long.
Ruralness is the exact problem, though. That's why the buses are only hourly and trains are infrequent: Not enough population density to justify the increased expense of running more. I live in Manhattan, and trains and buses are waaaay more frequent.
Right, but at the same time there's still a very large difference between a token, once-a-day service and an hourly service: an hourly service is sufficient for many to use it for commuting (and while I haven't ever been on the X55, the majority of other buses in the area which have hourly services are heavily used by commuters and I've seen them have to turn passengers away upon occasion).
I've read an article about some person working in Google sleeping in an RV on a parking lot. So am I supposed to make a far reaching conclusions from this one person to whole company? Looks like lots of people here don't bother to make any distinction between one case of one guy in UK doing something weird and the whole Amazon company everywhere. And then they go around and complain about "fake news" misleading them.
We need to do more to make low cost housing legal. By allowing more low cost alternatives, builders could create low cost housing or rentable units, so people wouldn't have to camp in tents. This is a problem nationwide, too many regulations are stifling housing innovation.
Here we have the consequence of trying to solve poverty by making it illegal. Having raised the standard of living so high, on the notion of ending bad conditions by simply prohibiting them, we now have to reverse regulations so people can live as they can at their level.
Regulating away "bad conditions" doesn't get rid of the cost for it. It merely eliminates your choice in the matter, forcing everyone to upgrade. It's like, if you outlaw all car designs that don't have leather seats - all the sudden, everyone gets leather seats in their car, but they're still paying extra for it, whether they like or not. that's what regulation does in the housing markets, but much more extreme.
This is not Amazon's fault. This instead is the choice of the worker. He is choosing to work for Amazon and is choosing to sleep in a tent because he does not want to make the long commute back to his house. All his choices, not Amazon's.
Edit: to clarify, I am not advocating that Amazon is a stellar employer. My opinion of how they treat their workers and handle the interviewing process is actually very poor. I however do not see the decisions this particular worker is making is Amazon's fault.
I just bought $250 worth of about a dozen Christmas presents from Amazon. Assuming $20 per item, I'd like to know how much goes to wages (I'm guessing less than $1). If it may not significantly raise prices to double wages, I'd like to know why companies are so reluctant to do so. It seems illogical when customers would generally pay more to know they aren't ripping someone off.
Short of that, I recommend that we stop pointing the finger at these large multinational corporations. They are incentivized at every level to skirt the law as close as possible to maximize profits. Historically the only thing that ever changed that was pressure from the demand side (unions, consumer protection programs, lawsuits, legislation, etc etc).
Off the top of my head, a fairly straightforward way to effect change might be to get every worker signed up in a time-wage union. Pick a target wage for every employee and have them go home at the end of the day a few hours early by however much their wage is short. Women earning 75% of men would leave at 3:00 instead of 5:00. For every firing, send one or more employees who have a lot of savings or are thinking of changing jobs home with them as leverage.
The core of the issue is that currently labor is undervalued against capital which is self-evidently incorrect since time is priceless but we can always print more money. I would even argue that as we approach full automation, labor has been devalued to such a degree that it no longer makes sense to measure it against the inherent worth of a person's life. The inevitable conclusion is that at some point labor will not have enough value to support a minimum quality of life and we’ll move to a non-labor form of compensation. We already do it in various forms for the bottom half of earners and it’s only a matter of time before that fraction becomes the majority.
Why is it bad that they're sleeping in tents? I've heard homeless people say that it's extremely hard to find a job while homeless. If Amazon is willing to give homeless people a chance at a job, that's a good thing.
There are people working for Google living in their cars/campers/motorhomes. There are posts about how people intentionally choose to live in tents and enjoy it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
Is the Amazon PR unit active here? ;)
1. They treat their engineers terribly.
2. They treat their fulfillment center employees terribly.
Either Bezos is tone deaf, or just doesn't care. Either way, voting with my wallet.
It's not perfect, but if principles were easy everyone would do it.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.
I was recently in South Korea and was surprised to see that there were a lot of large apartment buildings around Seoul which appeared to be employee dormitories from previous decades (1980s I believe). Some even still said Samsung and LG on the side.
However, I don't think this concept would work in Western society. The cultures between Asia and the West are very different. It's common for several generations to live in the same house in China/Japan/Korea, but this isn't the case in the West.
I agree it would make sense to build dormitories, from a transportation and economic perspective it makes perfect sense. Economies of scale.
But people in the West don't want to move to live near the factory/warehouse. They want to have a social life, and dorm life really doesn't facilitate having a social life.
Ancedotal, but my intuition is that dorm life is much easier, though that may be inherent to college. It's extremely frustrating to know that few will give you any of their time to form friendships, no matter the effort you try.
Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
I'm sure dorms are great if all you want to do is party all the time. However given that people working at Foxconn/Amazon are probably working 8-16 hours every day, I'm doubtful that they'd really be in a partying mood after working that long.
Hence, when everyone is finished working their shift and just wants to sleep, and you don't, it's a bit hard to be social without pissing off people around you.
> Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
You're talking about old warehouses which have been converted into trendy apartments. This is gentrification. No one actually wants to live in a functional warehouse.
I guess at-will employment is very at-will.
How quickly we forget history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
I mean with some strong regulation things might be different, but with the political landscape as it is I don't think it would work out.
Facilities included schools, sports accomodation etc. PSV, a dutch premier league football team is a project of Phillips the former electronics giant. PSV -> Phillips Sport Vereniging.
And Phillips built neighbourhoods, schools and public swimming pools too.
Ah well ... sigh ( I was not raised in a Phillips neighbourhood btw ).
Company scrip served to make it so you could never save up money to leave, which was the biggest problem.
In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.
Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.
In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.
But more often it goes wrong, like Fordlandia.
And nets!
As an aside, I worked with an ex-Foxconn engineer who lived in the dorms to save money. They wired up his office phone to also ring in his room. When foolish US engineers would call him, not aware of the time difference, it would wake him up in the middle of the night. He took his phone off the hook to get some sleep but got in trouble for it.
Inside the buildings were apartments that housed up to three people, everyone had their own private bedroom and bathroom. The quality of the buildings was fairly good, not luxury but not cheap.
You could also opt to receive a stipend if you wanted to find your own accommodation, but it was a bit low to get something of the same quality.
Shouldn't the workers of Scotland, if they have the ear of their fellow countrymen, move to change the legal and social structure in which Amazon is only one of many members? What about the company that behaves cruely but isn't big enough to reach the news like Amazon does?
This is why I don't have faith in moral narratives.
Scotland is quite a bit more liberal than the rest of the UK; it does indeed see more of its future in the social democracies of northern Europe.
When it comes to regulation of the labour market, Scotland is decidedly less liberal than England.
http://www.snp.org/pb_employment
My point was simply that this is an illiberal position. Liberal only means "economically statist" in America. Everywhere else in the world it still means classically liberal - i.e. in favour of free markets.
Again, I don't think I'm making this discussion any better by pointing this out, so I'm going to leave it there.
As an example, a Scot would never say "The government increased the minimum wage today, that was very liberal of them."
It's my hope that people in the USA will eventually go back to using the word "liberal" in the classic sense. But then, I keep hoping people in the USA will adopt the metric system, and I am always disappointed.
And whether Scotland becomes independent, my point remains -- you can ask why Amazon pays minimum wage, or you can ask why minimum wage is so low.
Depending on Amazon to be moral is as inadequate a solution as hoping for noblesse oblige. It's more interesting to discuss the <mechanics> of why Amazon class entities will pay higher wages.
Or people can morally shame <one> Amazon event, just like people who disagreed with Peter Thiel's influence in the sex tape case instinctually shame <one> Peter Thiel event. Whether you're asking for Amazon or Peter Thiel to "do the right thing", you're asking for noblesse oblige.
This kind of moral shaming does not scale, it depends on flash outrage, and companies that play the long game in media will beat this kind of ad-hoc moral shaming.
I also wanted to discuss not merely government structure, but also social structure, to imply that multiple parties need to fail for classes of workers to be exploited. The net of your society is the reason why Amazon is permitted to exploit an individual, and that includes churches, advocacy organizations, unions, etc.
I thought that discussion of both hard and soft structures is the better way to go, or we can hope that outrage continues to shows up at the right time and the right place.
Should we discuss whether you have the moral right to water, or should we discuss the formal plans to erect an infrastructure of water?
The latter doesn't require you to do any serious moral labor (deliberation and consensus work). You need only want. Do we both want something? Then we already have a basis for discussion. The question of whether you want workers to be paid more is far easier to answer than the question of whether moral consensus on workers wages can be achieved in your lifespan.
Also, how many moral frameworks for achieving moral consensus are you aware of? There are certainly frameworks for achieving empirical consensus on policy effectiveness.
The person has a house and could already commute from far out, they chose not to.
Maybe it's time we realize that people don't need these terrible jobs in order to survive. They need water, food and shelter - all of which there's an overabundance of, in developed countries. An unconditional basic income would put a swift end to these abuses.
People who can code and run huge network operations are relatively rare, so they're paid a lot; it's competition for scarce employees. It has nothing to do with responsibility. If Google could pay minimum wage it would.
Not defending Amazon, just pointing out that they're paying the least they have to, just like Google is paying the least they have to.
Wages are about supply and demand. There is enough supply of the caliber of workers that amazon needs willing to work at minimum wage to fill their demand for workers.
If we think that amazon is making too much profit, and should distribute it more, then we should tax them more; that way, the benefit can spread to more people and not just the lucky ones who happen to work at amazon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Of course, if you have any evidence that Amazon is colluding with other employers of low-wage workers to keep their wages down, that would be germane and very interesting indeed.
They can't. The level of the minimum wage is reserved to Westminster.
Whatever the wages are, the prices of everything (starting with accommodation and food) will adjust to burn most of it.
That is very effective in major cities and that's why they are so hard on everyone.
Why do they call their workers that? I also can't imagine how much I'd hate working for minimum wage in a warehouse for an alleged 60 hours a week with a DJ playing. It doesn't sound all that fun.
I applied to be an Amazon Fulfillment Specialist (or whatever they're called) back when I was without a job in Silicon Valley a few months ago.
I applied online and got the job offer without any interview at all whatsoever. They asked me to attend a 'training session' in a conference room at a nearby hotel. When the doors opened, there were tables lined up on the perimeter of the conference room with a small projector in the middle that illuminated the Amazon logo on the screen. In one corner, people started lining up to get their photo taken and were also given a piece of paper with their name and other information like a candidate number. After you had your photo taken, you had to take a seat at one of the tables which had a swab stick for a drug test as well as some other paperwork for the drug test (like a consent form). The presenter was a real prick because when people asked him questions he would be very assertive and act as if people were wasting his time trying to get through the slideshow, which described their work ethics and talked more about the job. At some point we got to the drug test part which involved the presenter slowly going step by step through the process and checking to make sure we were all in sync. Once we were done, we put the drug test into some kind of bag and were free to go.
Overall, the process was horrendous and really showed that Amazon just wants anyone and everyone to become part of their fulfillment center. It doesn't surprise me that people would sleep outside of the fulfillment center given how smooth sailing the hiring process is, if it's anything like what I went through. It's meant to be open and 'friendly' to anyone without any recent drug usage.
Is it really that this job is too easy to get?
It sounds like you're saying this is a bad thing. Here we are with a hiring process that really lives up to the ideals we've been preaching for the past 50 years. Equality. Actual, real equality. Women, Blacks, Ethnic Undesirables, Special Needs... It doesn't matter who you are, you can get the job.
And it's "horrendous."
For what it's worth, I actually agree with you, but it does seem telling that this process that clearly lives up to the requirements all the underprivileged of our society demanded, we call it horrendous.
Are you suggesting that a meritocracy is better?
They will more or less hire anyone, but that's because they're essentially hiring meat robots to perform repetitive tasks for ten hours a day, six days a week at peak, until actual robots become economical. There is no reason for Amazon to care about the interview process when they hire and fire constantly, and any particular task is so compartmentalized that you can learn it in an hour. It's tedious and brutal, but in my experience, no one ever told me it would be otherwise.
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/this-google-employee-lives-in-a...
I'd take a guess and say that the people doing this are seasonal workers who live further away. It's not worth relocating for a few months, and commuting for 2 hours per day isn't nice (from Edinburgh during rush hour it could easily take over an hour to get to Amazon's warehouse), so this is their choice.
[0] http://www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/property/dunfermline/?price_...
Not necessarily. Depends on the location and the experience.
There are places where the pay would be in this range and the rent would be half of that.
1/10th costs of living of the valley is nothing extraordinary.
If a full-time employee needs government subsidies then the company is not paying enough.
Every few months we see articles about programmers working at $SILICON_VALLEY_BIG_CORP that lives in a van outside the office or sleeps under his desk at night. The worker is usually a combination of frugal and nutty. What's the difference between that and this?
> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
Of course, the big difference with the programmer under the desk is the programmer is unlikely to be earning minimum wage. Anyone 25 and over, working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, is earning £432/week. If we assume they're working those hours or on vacation all year, their take home pay is £355/week. If we assume fuel costs of ~£4.50 each way, then if they're working five days a week that's ~13% of their income, or if six days ~15%.
If the circumstances are so dire that the worker has no other choices for employment, the alternative is no employment at all. That's the baseline comparison point for whatever job Amazon is providing and the worker always has that option as well.
Amazon is not a charity, it's a for-profit company, and arguably by building the warehouse and providing jobs it's doing more long term good than a charity would by handing out sandwiches.
Comments like yours bring to mind the phrase "No good deed goes unpunished". Would they be better off with no jobs at all?
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
(This is getting close to politics, a really tiresome subject which happily is banned right now on HN.)
Nope that ban is gone[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
You can be "empathetic" by pushing for higher minimum wages, but your empathy will more likely hurt the very people you want to help - the unskilled workers.
As is often the case with "feel good" legislation it typical does more harm than good - in the long run.
But that's my point - I'm specifically not advocating any particular policy solution. I'm just advocating that we, who were lucky enough to be born in a highly developed country and are lucky enough to be highly compensated for our work, can at least acknowledge that someone else's position sucks and is unfair, instead of basically thinking "he's lucky he even has a job, he should be grateful."
I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
> I'd also argue that it's one thing to say what is possible in the current system, but I think it should be possible to acknowledge that something about the system feels wrong. I mean, some of these exact same arguments are made by the aristocrats in Downton Abbey ("These servants sure are lucky that we exist to give them jobs.")
Not using every critique on a topic as a chance to express empathy does not mean one does not have any. IMNSHO, I think I have a ton of empathy. But I have a hell of a lot more rationality and I'd much rather express the latter.
If you're cold, empathy might get you a hug but rationality will get you a coat.
Should companies only ever offer work to rich people? That sounds a lot like class-based genocide.
Maybe you should try harder to see if maybe there's an underlying assumption you're making that's incorrect? Have you heard of the Double Crux? Read up on it on Less Wrong.
There's no suggestion that they are paying below the minimum wage, so I think singling out Amazon is quite disingenuous, regardless of how in vogue it is to bash the quality of their work environment.
If there is a story here, it is that there aren't enough homeless shelters in Fife right now, or that the minimum wage is too low; this has nothing to do with Amazon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
The other stuff still sounds shady though, when I got the ups job I knew what I was getting into.
You probably see this most often when traveling: Normal checked suitcases must be at most 50lbs. (Typically up to 70lbs is allowed if you pay an extra fee, but the bag then needs a "HEAVY" sticker, which alerts ground crew to handle it carefully to avoid injuries.)
To be sure, there's a lot of people who have said that Amazon is a shitty place to work: not just in entry level jobs, but even as a well-educated 6 figure software engineer. I would not choose to work for Amazon unless I was desperate, period. It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work and the few good things about working there that I've heard like small teams don't outweigh all of the negatives.
That being said, Amazon isn't a government entity that is responsible for your housing and they have no right to tell you where to sleep at night.
Look at this section of the article in particular.
> One worker, who did not wish to be named, was reluctant to speak to The Courier but did describe the firm as a “poor employer” and criticised working practices at the Fife site. He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.
This is a guy took the best job that was available to him (even though it's far away from his house) who is doing this by choice for a period of time as he believes that this decision benefits him the most. I don't see anything wrong with this. I feel bad for him if his stuff got stolen because of the extra media attention there: the reporter was probably intending to do something nice for them and it might end up backfiring.
But really, what can Amazon do about this? For that one example, that's a guy that already has a home but chooses not use it out of convenience. If they offered seasonal workers some extra resources and facilities (say use of the parking lot to sleep in safer at night) to make their lives easier, they'd instantly be accused of exploiting workers and there would be images of tent cities on the news every night trying to make them look bad.
They could pay their workers a living wage and not treat them like dogs.
Here's the deal: How about you and me go into a big pit, with knives. And if I win, I get all your stuff.
Oh, I see, suddenly you'd rather get the State involved.
If Amazon took the advice and paid higher, the products would cost more and the web-potificators would congratulate them profusely for their magnanimity while putting them straight out of business with their buying habits.
Amazon is huge so it distorts the picture and seems to muddle the thinking a bit but even the largest of ships are beached by a receding tide.
I'm not saying that this is the desired order of things, just things work at the moment.
Amazon needs the work done, people are willing to do that work for that wage under such conditions - supply and demand. At least people have that option; impose restrictions, and many go from having that option to not having it (while the employer finds cheaper options).
so it would be fair if somebody who did a poor job in his school days (probably, I never heard that anybody work at Amazon with higher education and even than in germany amazon pays way more than other employers Zalando for example) and already have a home to get as much money to have two homes because one of the fact that his job is too far away from his regular house? Btw. I'm dropped out of "College" (in germany it's called different) but I tried hard to get a decent job and search a place to live (which is extremly hard here in Freiburg) but I got a cheap one that I can afford, besides the fact that it's not big, but it's fine. And I never complained since It was my own fault that I don't live like the rich boys now and "only" drive a "small" car, but some people are just ridicoulus.
I know there are a lot of problems in the world but actually Europe and USA are actually still not the one's with "really really" big problems, actually we discuss about problems that some people did not get enough money blabla, while in other countries they barly get any money, food and water, it's just ridicoulus that we live in the cockaigne and call out some big companies because they don't pay their workers more. What all people forgot, they have a job, without one they would get way way less.
Would the wage you propose all workers make allow this individual to live closer to his work site? Does the wage he makes now specifically disallow him from living close to his work site? Would his employer treating him better mean he doesn't sleep in a tent?
This article doesn't give us enough information to know.
This is sad but is not Amazons fault. The people of the western world need to demand Universal Basic Income. Maybe if the government provided such a safety net, Amazon would have to pay people more to get them to work.
In the US, at least, we seem to have elected a President with a mandate of dismantling what little regulatory and progressive protections already exist, adding more would be culturally and politically unthinkable.
We'll see the repeal of the minimum wage and the establishment of China-style "free trade zones" long before we see UBI.
There is your intellectual appeal.
There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive. A lot is expected from you. The perks are nowhere near a Google's or many SV shops.
But corporate and micromanaged are the furthest thing from the truth. There are VERY few "top-down" directives. (we call them S-team goals for the SVP team). And each and every team is given a TON of autonomy, independence and ownership.
This of course has its own problems, and why sometimes some teams breed awful internal cultures that lead to NY times articles. It's why the AWS console is built with 23 different web technologies and each one is slightly inconsistent from the other. It's why most of the company's internal services are still not on native AWS (though we are essentially 100‰ on EC2).
But this ownership and independence is 90% Fabulous and genuinely freeing. You are given a tremendous amount of autonomy over your technical decisions. You get a chance to decide on the working culture and attitude towards software development that makes sense for the people on your team, depending on your strengths, preferences, projects, and customers.
Amazon is not for everybody. But it is far closer to a group of a few thousand startups than a corporate behemoth.
Also, the SDEs here put a stop to all that Proctor-driven interviewing, though sadly Amazon PR doesn't want to make a public declaration as such. Oh well.
You're saying that internal pressure has caused HR to drop ProctorU across the SDE/intern pipeline? What's the replacement, traditional phone screens + onsites?
It is rare to have a workplace like Apple, where the CEO was rumoured to involve himself in every aspect of the company.
Most workplaces' simply suffer from bad team leads, bad middle managers, bad shift managers, bad scrummasters, and the like.
In fact, it may be that extreme team autonomy allows micromanagement to flourish since the top leaders don't know what's going within the teams, and do not try to stop poor team dynamics from occurring unless it affects performance in a visible way.
I'm not going to try to defend Amazon - it certainly has many employment issues both in the FCs and at HQ. But this story specifically is virtually content-free. Most of it's content is to be found in the first sentence: "At least three tents have been spotted in woodland beside the online retail giant’s base just off the M90 in Dunfermline in recent days" and then later it emerges that they managed to find one occupied tent whose occupant was using the tent to avoid commuting from his home. The rest of the article strings together innuendo and rehashes talking points to try to build the desired narrative and mental picture of a tent city full of freezing, starving Amazon FC workers.
A truthful headline would have been "An Amazon worker sleeps in a tent near Dunfermline site to avoid long commute", but then that would neither have sparked the same moral outrage nor garnered the same number of clicks.
Perth and the Dunfermline site are roughly 30 miles apart, on public transport the trip would take roughly 2 hours.
Sounds like a great idea castigate an employer in a semi-rural area with piss poor public transportation.
Some potential future network of public transportation provided via self-driving cars excepted.
(sorry)
Amazon should be made accountable.
Edit: to clarify, I am not advocating that Amazon is a stellar employer. My opinion of how they treat their workers and handle the interviewing process is actually very poor. I however do not see the decisions this particular worker is making is Amazon's fault.
Short of that, I recommend that we stop pointing the finger at these large multinational corporations. They are incentivized at every level to skirt the law as close as possible to maximize profits. Historically the only thing that ever changed that was pressure from the demand side (unions, consumer protection programs, lawsuits, legislation, etc etc).
Off the top of my head, a fairly straightforward way to effect change might be to get every worker signed up in a time-wage union. Pick a target wage for every employee and have them go home at the end of the day a few hours early by however much their wage is short. Women earning 75% of men would leave at 3:00 instead of 5:00. For every firing, send one or more employees who have a lot of savings or are thinking of changing jobs home with them as leverage.
The core of the issue is that currently labor is undervalued against capital which is self-evidently incorrect since time is priceless but we can always print more money. I would even argue that as we approach full automation, labor has been devalued to such a degree that it no longer makes sense to measure it against the inherent worth of a person's life. The inevitable conclusion is that at some point labor will not have enough value to support a minimum quality of life and we’ll move to a non-labor form of compensation. We already do it in various forms for the bottom half of earners and it’s only a matter of time before that fraction becomes the majority.
Amazon annual revenue: $107 bil
R&D annual expense (where engineering compensation is typically stuffed): $12.5 bil
General expense (everybody else's compensation): $20 bil
There are people working for Google living in their cars/campers/motorhomes. There are posts about how people intentionally choose to live in tents and enjoy it.
http://mashable.com/2013/06/11/homeless-entrepreneur-thomas-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a8sjz/hi_i_am_a_guy_...