You're assuming some data hasn't been delicately fudged in order to anonymize the source. Maybe he worked there between August 2016 and September 2017. Maybe is a Navy, not AF veteran. Maybe he isn't a he at all. Who knows?
If you have a beef with this person, and set it up so your statements seem like they are coming from them, then you are playing with fire. If the person is very adamant that they weren't the leaker, the next question might be "well, who could leak and have a motivation to make their details look like this person's?", which may point to you.
If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
Isn't that worse than just not revealing personal information at all? Fudging dates could be quite bad in particular if it were to become apparent that policy changes were made after the supposed time period.
I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
While maybe not particularly valuable, it is pertinent when saying "x is worse in place y than in the military": without experience in the military, it would be impossible to say (not saying the words, but for credibility).
Yes, when it comes to anonymizing a source, releasing no information is always better than releasing any information, even if that information is a mix of truths and falsehoods. But, releasing a mix of truths and falsehoods or less specific/more generalized truths can only be equally as bad as releasing all specific truths, but it may turn out to be much better. Saying your tenure was September 2016-August 2017 might match 20 people at the company, one of which is your source. Fudging your tenure to August 2016-September 2017 might match 20 people, but not your source. Saying your tenure was 2016-2017 might match 1000+ people, including your source.
There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.
This article indicts Amazon of the following cruelties:
- Expects workers to work compensated overtime during a busy period
- Tracks worker performance
- Expects people to take only their scheduled breaks, and writes them up if they're MIA for 30+ minutes
- Requires workers to show up and work during their scheduled work hours
The humanity! And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
More seriously though: the caterwauling over Amazon's cruel and unusual work conditions is getting a little long in the tooth. I had more sympathy when it's peeing in bottles and passing out from heat exhaustion, but if the above is extent of the complaints now...get over it?
I don't the your part you've quoted undercuts the point at all. If I have a PhD in the area of algebraic topology, I do not expect to get out of band comp for teaching middle school math. If the job only requires a high school diploma, then that's a great salary in most areas.
Here's the crappy thing. We should pay you more to teach middle school math if you're a remarkably better teacher than the rest.
In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering.
I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.
It's pretty well agreed on HN that you get what you pay for, and anyone who complains about being unable to hire good developers simply just isn't compensating well enough.
Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more? You must think that teaching is easy because the math is not complicated, yet most of the people who say this would loathe the idea of teaching for a living.
> Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more?
Maybe I'm misreading what the parent said (and got downvoted like crazy for). My interpretation of it was an indictment of the teachers unions, where someone who comes in with a background like his teacher had (serious industry experience) is going to get bottom of the barrel pay because of the lack of seniority etc.
I absolutely think someone with that kind of experience should be able to make good money as a teacher, even if they're teaching grade 10 physics. There's also some amazing teachers who came into the career through the traditional path that should be making way more than they are.
Compensation once adequate doesn’t yield directly in performance for higher level tasks.
Teachers apply knowledge, experience and work in a way that magically makes you smarter and informed. Their effectiveness is a measure of their skill and the students. The argument against the unions is bunk — paying a premium for a math PhD to teach high school is probably pretty dumb... experience makes you effective at teaching trigonometry, not PhD expertise in math.
Go to any catholic school and you’ll see woefully unpaid teachers doing an amazing job — because the parents and therefore the students are very motivated.
The discussions about developers are similar. You need to overpay for people in a few metros... but you can pay a lot less for skilled people all over the place. The wacky salaries in industry have more to do with control and investors than the actual work.
Pay is not just about increasing performance it also increases retention. Retaining your best performers is harder than the people doing the minimum. Once you get to the point where the people with 10+ years are the unmotivated people not putting in the effort to find a better job you slowly enter a death spiral.
The problem is having a PhD does not make your more qualified -- or even a good teacher.
Teaching something to somebody requires very specalized skills. And frankly most teachers in k-12 seem to lack this -- at least when. I went to school.
A role that requires say 15 years of experience but no collage degree still needs to pay well. Education is often substituted for experience, but the X years of X years or a masters have real value.
Where did you find information that specifies that the area manager job at the Amazon warehouse only requires a high school diploma? Please be as specific as possible with your citation.
I know a pm that earned his JD and is a member of the bar, he was making less than that.
In a number of industries, having your mba and being a manager doesn't put you over $80k. Masters even in relevant subjects don't necessarily put your salary that high in industries including teaching, shipping and logistics, warehousing, factory production.
>More seriously though: the caterwauling over Amazon's cruel and unusual work conditions is getting a little long in the tooth. I had more sympathy when it's peeing in bottles and passing out from heat exhaustion, but if the above is extent of the complaints now...get over it?
Just because the article doesn't explicitly mention peeing in bottles or passing out from heat exhaustion doesn't mean those problems no longer exist, and I don't see any claim that the article somehow comprises "the extent of" complaints about Amazon.
I'm commenting on the article that was posted, which describes the "human cost" of Black Friday. I'm asserting that the complaints presented in the article don't sound like some excruciating human cost, it just sounds like...a job.
That the source was tangentially involved in the military makes it even more comical. A job that requires its workers to be screamed at, put through torturous physical conditioning and possibly blown up by bombs, but I guess that's nothing compared to working a 10 hour shift in a warehouse.
I don't get it. Why the sarcasm? That the person who has worked through ostensibly "torturous" military working conditions, is now complaining about their private sector job, only strengthens their complaints in my eyes.
It could also bring in question the current skill level of our armed foecses.
If a manager job makinking 80k a year with the major complaints bring -- taking orders -- giving orders -- bening on feet for 14 hours -- and no real designated lunch time, then I am not sure how well our armed foecses are going to do in a actual war -- which is sort of what we keep them around for...
Or Vox is just a flame bait instablishment who has a nack at finding people who like to complain about stuff because -- feelings.
Hey, it's in to criticize tech companies. That's not to say there aren't problems, but most people get outraged at whatever society tells them to get outraged at in that moment. No thoughts of their own. This place is mostly a safe haven from that.
Now, it will be interesting to see how soon Amazon workers unionize and how that'll play out.
> The military is known for being a bastion of sexism, but I had a worse experience at Amazon.
> . . . the managers do not get any sort of break or lunch. Most of us just never ate. Everyone is on their feet for 12 hours a day.
> Associates got a 30-minute lunch break, two 15-minute breaks, and an additional 15 minutes of “time off tasks.”
Working 12 hours per day with a total of only 1 hour of break time, split into three smaller breaks – and all tracked to the minute? And no lunch for managers?
> The associates work 10 hours a day, the managers 14 to 18. It’s mandatory overtime, the hours are not voluntary, and they are all on your feet.
Do you really think this is acceptable?
To be honest, I'm quite sick of the general attitude on HN towards Amazon. I get that it's convenient and usually cheaper than its competitors. But let's not pretend that the way they do business is morally acceptable. It isn't.
This is absurd. Instead of trying to convince yourselves that it's Not That Bad, why not vote with your dollars and support businesses that treat their employees better? From what I can tell, most people reading HN have the means to do so.
I don't know that its specific to Amazon but more generally comes from a core ideology of abiding by concepts of free market rules to the exclusion of concepts of humanity.
Sure the issue is when employees don't feel like they can leave, because they can't afford a period of unemployment and don't have the time/energy to seek new employment whilst working 12 hour shifts and potentially supporting a family.
It's a general criticism of the system. Highlighting Amazon's particular behaviour is useful as a demonstration of how/where the system fails, and may produce short term wins if it incentivises amazon to stop being inhumane.
I sincerely don't want to oversimplify your argument, but it seems like the logical end-point would be a global socialist/communist society. Is that your desired/intended outcome?
That's a deceptively complex question. I don't necessarily agree that that's the logical endpoint to my reasoning: it might be that we have to continue to appeal to basic human greed/power drives - in a regulated way - in order to progress and develop as a species. It might be that a global socialist society can't do that. I'm not sure. I just think that right now, many developed countries could certainly do with reinforcement of labour rights.
To answer from another perspective, a society resembling something like socialism or anarchism is what I personally would prefer to live in. I have doubts about whether we can move towards that from the current situation or whether it's workable, full stop. But it sure would be nice.
You get a more functional labour economy by having labour able to access better opportunities. If there's a killer sales agent that won't apply for my sales position because Amazon is dunking him with 14 hour days repeatedly, no one benefits besides Amazon.
I agree, and I would not want to see regulation or laws that prevent labour access to other opportunities. But asking people to work overtime for specific reasons/period doesn't prevent them from looking for other opportunities. That seems like a straw man.
> 1. Most customers choose to buy from the seller with the lowest price.
By setting a floor for the lowest operational cost, defining such basic concepts as:
1. Maximum work schedule (12h/day mandatory is not acceptable);
2. Minimum wage.
If every seller must abide by the same rules, the market is fair. Costs won't be absurd and no worker will work under medieval conditions. I know costs won't be absurd because I live in Europe, where these rules are in place, and we can still buy gadgets and books.
Both your proposals seem likely to result in increased automation, thereby reducing overall employment. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that some people feel they have to work a 12+ hour day, but isn't it better that they have that choice than that their job is automated out of existence?
Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
> Both your proposals seem likely to result in increased automation, thereby reducing overall employment. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that some people feel they have to work a 12+ hour day, but isn't it better that they have that choice than that their job is automated out of existence?
That is not a bug, it is a feature. I prefer to never have people in medieval working conditions. Pushing society to evolve past that need is a good thing.
So far, we have been able to reallocate jobs so that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. When[1] that is no longer the case, we can as a society find another stable working model.
[1] It is possible that automation is already exceeding society's "job reallocation rate". It is still difficult to tell, but something to be vigilant about.
> Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
You are describing one of the large flaws of globalization, which we should, as a society, have already tackled. It is not acceptable, for example, that Chinese or Indian workers get poisoned by producing chemicals without proper hazard protection in place.
That it is possible to circumvent regulation is not a justification to abolish regulation. It is a justification to close the circumvention loopholes.
Hmmm. Lots to unpack here, but I'll focus on your comments about globalization. I suppose you could implement regulations to prohibit importation of goods/services from jurisdictions that don't have acceptable standards in place. By doing so, you would probably destroy the economies of India and China. Without a cost advantage (due to lower labour and environmental standards), the shipping costs would pretty much ensure that you would always buy from local suppliers. Wouldn't the destruction of emerging economies result in more victims than would poor labour/environmental standards?
As a side note, I'm curious about what down votes mean in this context. Are people registering their feelings about the free market? Are they suggesting that the content of my comment is in some way inappropriate or offensive? Or that I have not followed the rules of HN?
Personally, I'm not too concerned about HN karma, but I'm curious about the incentive system that it creates. Does the karma system simply promote adherence to the majority/popular view, or does it improve the quality of discussion?
From what I understand, many hourly workers look forward to the rare opportunity of getting paid 1.5x to work overtime. Also, a lot of the workers in these industries are hired as seasonal temps for the holidays. The salaried managers sound like they have it pretty rough, but I'm guessing that this is actually a pretty good job in the hourly category.
>From what I understand, many hourly workers look forward to the rare opportunity of getting paid 1.5x to work overtime.
Nobody looks forward to working extra hours at a job that is already tiring. What they look forward to is the chance for a brief respite from the constant stress of poverty, even if it comes at great cost to everything else in their lives.
Source: worked as a welder in a shipyard after the first dotcom crash. Took all the overtime I could get, because bills don't pay themselves. I enjoyed the work in a general sense, and my coworkers, but a human body can only push itself so hard before there are long-term consequences, and that is something that most hourly workers have to deal with over their entire careers.
tl;dr- "Looking forward" to overtime is like saying that someone who is drowning is "looking forward" to breathing.
Will you be more specific on the moral aspect here? Because from the article, it seems like the individuals working in the warehouse are compensated at a rate they agreed to (not being cheated of wages), are safe (no unsafe work practices are revealed here), and are given clear guidelines about their work tasks and standards (not being fired for discriminatory reasons).
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, so I will not make any flippant summaries of your post. I just want to know what Amazon would have to do to become moral: how long should the breaks be? How should they modify their performance policies? Etc.
> it seems like the individuals working in the warehouse are compensated at a rate they agreed to (not being cheated of wages)
This argument implies that workers are on equal footing with employers when negotiating for wages. You forget that not all industries are like ours.
We've created a world full of pointless cruelty. "How long should the breaks be" is the wrong question to ask. Progress, to me, would look like a lot more workers doing a lot less work, and being compensated at a level which gives them financial security. Unpleasant work takes a toll on people. 8 hours should not be the goal, it should be the maximum.
> I just want to know what Amazon would have to do to become moral
1. 8h/day max
2. double pay extra work and limit the maximum amount to +3h
3. not 'monitoring' bathroom breaks
4. not fire people on the spot, give them warnings and help them improve
5. don't use metrics as a weapon agains them, instead build programs that help improvements
6. let workers to pack seated as well (to not stay 8h on their feet)
7. hire more occasional workers for very peak days (ie: BF, CM)
8. Not fire for sick leaves nor holidays leaves
9. Not fire for taking holidays during BF
This are the first 9 thing that i can come out with.
It's interesting for me anyway how many of the things related to Unions and workers rights the are at the center of the debate in the US now, are either illegal or totally unacceptable in EU.
I didn't mean to imply anything like that, but instead that we shouldn't fool ourselves when we use our electronic devices or put on our clothes. It's not like bad work conditions are a new thing. We have been profiting from them for a long time. It's always easier to look the other way and find a scapegoat.
Yeah, I think this is perfectly acceptable. If you don’t, don’t work for Amazon. Easy. I worked 12 hour days with a horrible boss as a fresh grad and only made $65k a year with a CS degree. This cat made $80k with a high school qualification, yet he still complains about a job he knowingly accepted.
I’m very interested to learn about Amazon tech, but instead I see an article just about everyday about how Amazon is some horrible sweatshop.
Please don't break the site guidelines, regardless of wrong or annoying another comment is. "Did you even the read the article" is explicitly against the rules. So is downvote-baiting, and flamewar generally.
Can you point to many examples of non-capitalist societies where conditions are better for most people than in the United States?
From my perspective, capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.
By what metric has it “failed” ? Because the bottom few percent live in shitty conditions? Before capitalism, the bottom 90% of people were illiterate subsistence farmers.
Yes Haiti is poorer than Cuba. I was asking if there is any non-capitalist society doing as well as the United States. Not the shittiest, poorest example of a technically capitalist society that you can find.
You can also compare life expectancy in Cuba with life expectancy in the USofA. Cuba with all kinds of trade embargoes and a history of poverty has better life expectancy than USA.
Moreover, if, for arguments sake, you pick the most powerful capitalist state for comparison - I should also be free to pick the weakest capitalist state to balance things out.
The problem lies in the definition of "capitalist". Certainly there are numerous countries that by a variety of metrics have a better quality of life than the US (longer life expectancy, fewer percentage impoverished, smaller degree of economic inequality, and so on). The Scandinavian countries are the classic example, but most of Western Europe, Australia, Japan, are as well. Capitalism vs socialism is a continuum, and it looks like the best place is somewhere in the middle.
Scandinavian countries are capitalist by any standard. They are not even close to being “on a continuum” between capitalism and socialism. As far as I know most businesses in Scandinavia are not controlled and owned by their workers.
We could use more public spending on safety nets in the US. That has nothing to do with whether “capitalism has failed”.
But you can't ignore the reason why the US doesn't have effective safety nets is because corporations don't want them. The reason why the US doesn't have a universal public health care system is because private insurers are doing everything they can to fight it, for example. Countries that put the needs of their people over the needs of corporations are more on the socialist continuum even if they have private businesses.
I must point out that it is disingenuous to look at USA in isolation when discussing capitalism. USA increased shareholder wealth within it's borders by exporting misery and poverty to Latin America. So you need to look at USA+Latin America, Chile etc in totality. Moreover eastern Bloc countries and Cuba had severe trading restrictions imposed on them by usa making their economic survival difficult. Cuba, iran and NK still can't trade with a majority of countries even today because of punishments to trading partners by the USA.
Of all the capitalist countries you could pick you picked Ireland? With a higher per capita income than USA. Sounds less than random. If Capitalism is such magic why not pick Haiti? Its a small country with a primary trading partner - capitalist USA!
Is China capitalist or communist? That's the country that has lifted most people out of poverty.
If you really want to pick a typical capitalist country - pick India. It is a country that is clearly democratic and capitalist and represents several 17% of the worlds population. I can pick a dozen eastern bloc countries that were better off in the 80s than India is today.
If you are looking for clear A/B test examples where 2 exactly similar populations existed and one was treated with capitalism and the other with socialism, then you wont find any. The only one that comes remotely close is Latin America compared with Cuba - because both regions had similar economic and geographic status. One set of countries were treated with capitalism and Cuba was treated with communism. Cleary Cuba did much better than Latin America, but this only yields a sample size of one and it would be overreaching to generalize.
I find the whole debate around capitalism vs communism a red herring. Western Europe and USA have enjoyed great wealth because of historic reasons. Western Europe, thanks to colonization of Asia and Africa. USA - thanks to free slave labor and effective colonization of Latin America in the 20th century and geographic safety in the world wars.
Eastern Europe and Russia had limited colonial resources to plunder and had been ravaged by the 2nd World war. They did not have access to Marshall plan funds to rebuild after World war unlike Western Europe. Moreover they were a small bloc of countries that had to trade within themselves because of economic blockade by NATO. Considering the extremely tough circumstances they had mixed results. Romania did well, Poland not so much.
Cuba, in particular, has heavy sanctions to this day.
While capitalist countries like Singapore (dictatorship), Malaysia and Hong Kong (colony) did well, some did not (Pakistan) and other countries in the immediate American sphere of influence did extremely badly. Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile etc.
If anything that can be concluded from this, it is
- Being independent is good for a countries economy. Colonization or pseudo-colonization via capitalistic banana republics can be devastating - India, Haiti etc.
- Trade embargoes can ruin a countries economy. Except Cuba, almost all countries are ruined by it - NK, Iraq, Iran etc.
- Socialist welfare states can work and avoid terrible poverty and exploitation of workers. Scandinavia, Cuba, Communist Romania etc.
- USA strongly prefers dictatorships as trading partners-Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Nicaragua etc.
> If you are looking for clear A/B test examples where 2 exactly similar populations existed and one was treated with capitalism and the other with socialism, then you wont find any.
Like I said, 2 countries don't make a great sample size. West Germany got a massive boost from the Marshall plan. East Germany did not. NATO represented a much bigger trading block and economy when compared with the Soviet Union.
North Korea and South Korea had comparable economies until the 70s. Very few countries face the same kind of crippling sanctions that NK has. And you can always compare Cuba with your choice of a Latin American country to make a counterpoint.
Don't forget that this time of year is now ruined for this manager. But not enough to stop them from shopping on Amazon during Black Friday and contributing to those human costs.
"I boycott Prime Day, but I do shop on Amazon during Black Friday. I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I don’t think me not shopping will get Amazon to change its practices."
I also found that to be an awesome little tidbit. Just human nature I guess... "I wish it wasn't like this! But it's the most convenient so click click click!"
I deliberately do not shop anywhere on Black Friday, and avoid it as much as possible between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The whole orientation of the Christmas holiday around untempered consumerism seems obscene to me.
>This article indicts Amazon of the following cruelties:
You posted a completely false list of complaints after this
> And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
This is a misleading statement focused on hiding the fact that the area manager being interviewed has an MBA. Moreover the manager never complained about his salary. He complained about how he was forced to fire hourly workers and had to be on his feet for 14 hours a day for several weeks unless he was willing to be fired.
Let’s say the workers unionize as the guy they interviewed suggests, what is the result? Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system. It’s quite possible that it would be better for the workers in that case but I do wonder if amazon could bypass a lot of these issues by just saying that people can’t work more than say 4 days a week during the rush season. So they end up hiring more workers to get the job done but people can’t complain that they are being overworked. I mean I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories but I wouldn’t be surprised if Walmart wasn’t silently cheering all the Amazon hate and pro union talk for their fulfillment centers..
"Basically they will push to change the system so that people don’t have to work as hard, it’s harder to fire people and have a seniority system."
Costco is a union company that's like a walk-in version of Amazon warehouse invented before Amazon. They pay workers well, give them bonuses, and so on. Company makes around $100 billion a year.
If trying to imagine unionized Amazon, walk into a Costco noting how the workers perform and at what stress levels. Better yet, if about vote with your wallet, just buy stuff from Costco and similar companies instead of Amazon to maintain and create more great jobs.
My company is a union company, too. We outperform the competition. They try to poach us all the time, too. The contract allows management to take action against lazy or disobedient employees if they can prove it. Their continued employment is totally due to terrible, ineffective management. All they gotta do is write their name on a piece of paper they present to those workers several times to fire them. Instead, they write up good, compliant workers over technicalities but ignore bad workers that argue back more. The lazy, weak managers get stuff done on paper that way. Although very common in union shops, I virtually never see anyone talk about the management angle on bad employees hard to get rid of.
The other issue is managers backing friends/family, who they buy drugs from, sleep with, and so on. Lots of political backchanneling over the most ridiculous stuff in these big companies. The sales teams are even crazier most of the time but theyre professional bullshitters with incentives to be aggressively outgoing. So, no surprise Im always hearing crazy stories about ex-employees. ;)
I don’t know. Costco is a different business. There workers aren’t focused on customer support. The Costco workers don’t hate the customers but they don’t go out of their way to help customers like I have seen Walmart workers do for example.
It's probably their policy or culture, not union-related. Publix (employee-owned) and Kroger (union) are in that space. Their management orders them to go out of the way for customers even with losses on some stuff. It's a customer loyalty strategy. Costco just has to do enough to keep a member. They have good service at mine, though.
Amazon is a non-union company and they have almost single-handedly destroyed physical retail in the Western world. Amazon has created immense value for consumers and shareholders, Jeff Bezos would not be the richest person in the world if Amazon was not good at what they do. Costco hasn't innovated in decades, if it all.
I was a big fan of Amazon till I saw the behind-the-scenes cost. I agree totally Costco sucks at innovation. They missed huge opportunities. I got a few more ideas. Might try to sell them to them.
Is that a good thing for real? From what I heard Amazon no longer will have lowest price on things. So essentially isn't this a big bait and switch strategy. I do thing in the long run Amazon's near monopoly on things will come back to bite customers as they will destroy the competition. The example of co-mingling of stock is one example. So much customer harm and fraud and they still do nothing because customers still buy from they for comfort. Any smaller company would have destroyed doing that.
>> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions....I was an area manager, inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates. I oversaw the packers, managing about 55 associates. My salary was $80,000...I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s.
Oh yeah, anonymous.
People want their packages the next day or before Christmas. Amazon is paying them overtime and more for Black Friday. I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. Tiring sure, but weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Amazon has no problems finding workers, or else they'd pay $30 an hour
> Amazon has no problems finding workers, or else they'd pay $30 an hour.
There isn't a market solution for every problem. Labor rights abuses are rampant in apparel manufacturing. Are those problems "not serious" enough because people continue to pursue employment there?
OK, fine. Here I have a job to clean my pub's bathroom. It's a messy job as anyone can guess. Should the person hired drag my name on social media because it was smelly, messy etc after he agreed to take the job for the agreed fee?
Hard jobs exists, but people get compensated for the long hours, hard work, smell or whatever.
what is your solution, should Amazon shut down, pay them more or what? Kids want their packages before 12/24
I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am.
I had a temp job like that once. Two twelve hour shifts starting at midnight. I feel asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day on the 2nd day. I lucked out and didn't hit anything, woke up to put my foot on the brakes and rolled to a stop in a parking lot.
"Amazon never trained us in how to communicate with associates. We weren’t trained to be understanding of their struggles or communicate with them. It was all about mechanics."
I wonder if part of the reason a military vet was hired for the floor manager's job was the expectation that they'd act like drill sergeants towards the employees, while the tracking systems acted as a real-time sword of Damocles-type apparatus.
No, its not.
They picked up military vets because they understand the nature of communicating and effecting mission needs when they are performed under difficult circumstances.
No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
Anecdotally, I've been in the Army close to 10 years now and I cannot recall the last time I heard yelling in a non-jovial or non-combat manner. I've also had multiple experiences where people were stunned after I how I reacted in difficult circumstances. I can definitely see how certain employers would value these traits.
I see people have downvoted your comment but I sort of agree with the sentiment.
I grew up in a rural town to working-class parents who hated me spending time on computers and wanted me to get a trade. I'm now 33 and halfway to my CS degree that I should have finished 12 years ago. The Army has been good to me but it's not the life I should have lived.
Even growing up rurally was hard. I was a very intellectual child and rural areas aren't the best environment for that i.e. family that actively squashes your interest as opposed to encouraging it.
On the flip side, my brother hired ex-army driver. Whenever there was a problem of the driver being lazy/not listening, he would 'bark' at them and every time there'd be an instant reaction.
It's pretty amazing the levels of psychological conditioning you guys have had.
> The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.
Or the fact that people get that rich points to a systemic flaw in the system. Bezos earns 4 million per hour, no matter if he's asleep or awake. It's pretty wild to assume he personally creates that much value. The only other justification is that society is distributing wealth in a skewed fashion.
The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws.
I think a funny thing is all this tech and pleasantries modern life gives us -- order anything from home, buy everything you need and not leave house for 2 months and you can live comfortably watching netflix etc.. -- all of this makes us more apathetic to vote or go protest to change the system. atleast in north america, europe has better mobilization I think, e.g. the protests today in amazon warehouses.
> The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws.
The thing that people forget is that democracy is inefficient, but it has less flaws than anything else we have tried in the past. I suspect Capitalism is similarly the least flawed system we've found so far. (don't know enough economic distribution history to be sure).
A lot of people claim socialism is much better, but I am not sure it works well at big scales, looking at say a country like India.
"Bezos earns 4 million per hour, no matter if he's asleep or awake"
That is false. It was based on the appreciation of his Amazon stock at a cherry-picked moment in time. He's probably been losing millions per hour lately. In reality, his total compensation is less than $2M and his salary is less than $100K.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
> [...] I was at a fulfillment center in California from [redacted] to [redacted].
> I was an [redacted], inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates.
Isn't this a lot of info given away?
/edit: in case the original article does the same
If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.
- Expects workers to work compensated overtime during a busy period
- Tracks worker performance
- Expects people to take only their scheduled breaks, and writes them up if they're MIA for 30+ minutes
- Requires workers to show up and work during their scheduled work hours
The humanity! And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
More seriously though: the caterwauling over Amazon's cruel and unusual work conditions is getting a little long in the tooth. I had more sympathy when it's peeing in bottles and passing out from heat exhaustion, but if the above is extent of the complaints now...get over it?
> My salary was $80,000, which is on the higher end. They gave me more because I said I wouldn’t accept anything less, since I had a master’s.
In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering.
I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.
Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more? You must think that teaching is easy because the math is not complicated, yet most of the people who say this would loathe the idea of teaching for a living.
Maybe I'm misreading what the parent said (and got downvoted like crazy for). My interpretation of it was an indictment of the teachers unions, where someone who comes in with a background like his teacher had (serious industry experience) is going to get bottom of the barrel pay because of the lack of seniority etc.
I absolutely think someone with that kind of experience should be able to make good money as a teacher, even if they're teaching grade 10 physics. There's also some amazing teachers who came into the career through the traditional path that should be making way more than they are.
Teachers apply knowledge, experience and work in a way that magically makes you smarter and informed. Their effectiveness is a measure of their skill and the students. The argument against the unions is bunk — paying a premium for a math PhD to teach high school is probably pretty dumb... experience makes you effective at teaching trigonometry, not PhD expertise in math.
Go to any catholic school and you’ll see woefully unpaid teachers doing an amazing job — because the parents and therefore the students are very motivated.
The discussions about developers are similar. You need to overpay for people in a few metros... but you can pay a lot less for skilled people all over the place. The wacky salaries in industry have more to do with control and investors than the actual work.
Teaching something to somebody requires very specalized skills. And frankly most teachers in k-12 seem to lack this -- at least when. I went to school.
In a number of industries, having your mba and being a manager doesn't put you over $80k. Masters even in relevant subjects don't necessarily put your salary that high in industries including teaching, shipping and logistics, warehousing, factory production.
Just because the article doesn't explicitly mention peeing in bottles or passing out from heat exhaustion doesn't mean those problems no longer exist, and I don't see any claim that the article somehow comprises "the extent of" complaints about Amazon.
That the source was tangentially involved in the military makes it even more comical. A job that requires its workers to be screamed at, put through torturous physical conditioning and possibly blown up by bombs, but I guess that's nothing compared to working a 10 hour shift in a warehouse.
If a manager job makinking 80k a year with the major complaints bring -- taking orders -- giving orders -- bening on feet for 14 hours -- and no real designated lunch time, then I am not sure how well our armed foecses are going to do in a actual war -- which is sort of what we keep them around for...
Or Vox is just a flame bait instablishment who has a nack at finding people who like to complain about stuff because -- feelings.
Now, it will be interesting to see how soon Amazon workers unionize and how that'll play out.
> The military is known for being a bastion of sexism, but I had a worse experience at Amazon.
> . . . the managers do not get any sort of break or lunch. Most of us just never ate. Everyone is on their feet for 12 hours a day.
> Associates got a 30-minute lunch break, two 15-minute breaks, and an additional 15 minutes of “time off tasks.”
Working 12 hours per day with a total of only 1 hour of break time, split into three smaller breaks – and all tracked to the minute? And no lunch for managers?
> The associates work 10 hours a day, the managers 14 to 18. It’s mandatory overtime, the hours are not voluntary, and they are all on your feet.
Do you really think this is acceptable?
To be honest, I'm quite sick of the general attitude on HN towards Amazon. I get that it's convenient and usually cheaper than its competitors. But let's not pretend that the way they do business is morally acceptable. It isn't.
This is absurd. Instead of trying to convince yourselves that it's Not That Bad, why not vote with your dollars and support businesses that treat their employees better? From what I can tell, most people reading HN have the means to do so.
(Edited to better follow HN guidelines.)
Wasn't gonna downvote you until I got to this line.
> I'm quite sick of the average HN commenter's attitude towards Amazon.
Which is a bit insulting, as there is no "average HN commenter." We are all individuals and deserve to be treated as such.
1. Most customers choose to buy from the seller with the lowest price.
2. Employees are free to leave their employment if they find the conditions intolerable.
Which of these rules do you want to change?
Is your issue with Amazon, or with the system of capitalism in general? If the latter, why are people criticizing Amazon specifically?
To answer from another perspective, a society resembling something like socialism or anarchism is what I personally would prefer to live in. I have doubts about whether we can move towards that from the current situation or whether it's workable, full stop. But it sure would be nice.
You get a more functional labour economy by having labour able to access better opportunities. If there's a killer sales agent that won't apply for my sales position because Amazon is dunking him with 14 hour days repeatedly, no one benefits besides Amazon.
> 1. Most customers choose to buy from the seller with the lowest price.
By setting a floor for the lowest operational cost, defining such basic concepts as:
1. Maximum work schedule (12h/day mandatory is not acceptable);
2. Minimum wage.
If every seller must abide by the same rules, the market is fair. Costs won't be absurd and no worker will work under medieval conditions. I know costs won't be absurd because I live in Europe, where these rules are in place, and we can still buy gadgets and books.
Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
That is not a bug, it is a feature. I prefer to never have people in medieval working conditions. Pushing society to evolve past that need is a good thing.
So far, we have been able to reallocate jobs so that automation does not cause widespread unemployment. When[1] that is no longer the case, we can as a society find another stable working model.
[1] It is possible that automation is already exceeding society's "job reallocation rate". It is still difficult to tell, but something to be vigilant about.
> Also, if you mandate higher costs for suppliers (through limited hours and minimum wages) then you will create incentives for people to buy from suppliers that aren't subject to those regulations (i.e., foreign suppliers). You can try to prevent that through tariffs and duties, but they have their own problems.
You are describing one of the large flaws of globalization, which we should, as a society, have already tackled. It is not acceptable, for example, that Chinese or Indian workers get poisoned by producing chemicals without proper hazard protection in place.
That it is possible to circumvent regulation is not a justification to abolish regulation. It is a justification to close the circumvention loopholes.
Their job is going to be automated out of existence anyway, so the choice is between being paid less, or being paid more, until it is.
Personally, I'm not too concerned about HN karma, but I'm curious about the incentive system that it creates. Does the karma system simply promote adherence to the majority/popular view, or does it improve the quality of discussion?
Nobody looks forward to working extra hours at a job that is already tiring. What they look forward to is the chance for a brief respite from the constant stress of poverty, even if it comes at great cost to everything else in their lives.
Source: worked as a welder in a shipyard after the first dotcom crash. Took all the overtime I could get, because bills don't pay themselves. I enjoyed the work in a general sense, and my coworkers, but a human body can only push itself so hard before there are long-term consequences, and that is something that most hourly workers have to deal with over their entire careers.
tl;dr- "Looking forward" to overtime is like saying that someone who is drowning is "looking forward" to breathing.
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, so I will not make any flippant summaries of your post. I just want to know what Amazon would have to do to become moral: how long should the breaks be? How should they modify their performance policies? Etc.
This argument implies that workers are on equal footing with employers when negotiating for wages. You forget that not all industries are like ours.
We've created a world full of pointless cruelty. "How long should the breaks be" is the wrong question to ask. Progress, to me, would look like a lot more workers doing a lot less work, and being compensated at a level which gives them financial security. Unpleasant work takes a toll on people. 8 hours should not be the goal, it should be the maximum.
1. 8h/day max
2. double pay extra work and limit the maximum amount to +3h
3. not 'monitoring' bathroom breaks
4. not fire people on the spot, give them warnings and help them improve
5. don't use metrics as a weapon agains them, instead build programs that help improvements
6. let workers to pack seated as well (to not stay 8h on their feet)
7. hire more occasional workers for very peak days (ie: BF, CM)
8. Not fire for sick leaves nor holidays leaves
9. Not fire for taking holidays during BF
This are the first 9 thing that i can come out with.
It's interesting for me anyway how many of the things related to Unions and workers rights the are at the center of the debate in the US now, are either illegal or totally unacceptable in EU.
I’m very interested to learn about Amazon tech, but instead I see an article just about everyday about how Amazon is some horrible sweatshop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From my perspective, capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.
By what metric has it “failed” ? Because the bottom few percent live in shitty conditions? Before capitalism, the bottom 90% of people were illiterate subsistence farmers.
Moreover, if, for arguments sake, you pick the most powerful capitalist state for comparison - I should also be free to pick the weakest capitalist state to balance things out.
We could use more public spending on safety nets in the US. That has nothing to do with whether “capitalism has failed”.
Is China capitalist or communist? That's the country that has lifted most people out of poverty.
If you really want to pick a typical capitalist country - pick India. It is a country that is clearly democratic and capitalist and represents several 17% of the worlds population. I can pick a dozen eastern bloc countries that were better off in the 80s than India is today.
If you are looking for clear A/B test examples where 2 exactly similar populations existed and one was treated with capitalism and the other with socialism, then you wont find any. The only one that comes remotely close is Latin America compared with Cuba - because both regions had similar economic and geographic status. One set of countries were treated with capitalism and Cuba was treated with communism. Cleary Cuba did much better than Latin America, but this only yields a sample size of one and it would be overreaching to generalize.
I find the whole debate around capitalism vs communism a red herring. Western Europe and USA have enjoyed great wealth because of historic reasons. Western Europe, thanks to colonization of Asia and Africa. USA - thanks to free slave labor and effective colonization of Latin America in the 20th century and geographic safety in the world wars.
Eastern Europe and Russia had limited colonial resources to plunder and had been ravaged by the 2nd World war. They did not have access to Marshall plan funds to rebuild after World war unlike Western Europe. Moreover they were a small bloc of countries that had to trade within themselves because of economic blockade by NATO. Considering the extremely tough circumstances they had mixed results. Romania did well, Poland not so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Repub... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_People%27s_Republic#Eco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_Rep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Cuba
Cuba, in particular, has heavy sanctions to this day.
While capitalist countries like Singapore (dictatorship), Malaysia and Hong Kong (colony) did well, some did not (Pakistan) and other countries in the immediate American sphere of influence did extremely badly. Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile etc.
If anything that can be concluded from this, it is
- Being independent is good for a countries economy. Colonization or pseudo-colonization via capitalistic banana republics can be devastating - India, Haiti etc.
- Trade embargoes can ruin a countries economy. Except Cuba, almost all countries are ruined by it - NK, Iraq, Iran etc.
- Socialist welfare states can work and avoid terrible poverty and exploitation of workers. Scandinavia, Cuba, Communist Romania etc.
- USA strongly prefers dictatorships as trading partners-Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Nicaragua etc.
I can name two: Germany and Korea.
North Korea and South Korea had comparable economies until the 70s. Very few countries face the same kind of crippling sanctions that NK has. And you can always compare Cuba with your choice of a Latin American country to make a counterpoint.
It seems we were reading different articles, then. In any case your synopsis provides a very skewed representation of what the article actually said.
"I boycott Prime Day, but I do shop on Amazon during Black Friday. I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I don’t think me not shopping will get Amazon to change its practices."
WE'VE BEEN HERE, it doesn't work. Why the fuck are they still subjecting people to this shit? I thought we were better than this.
You posted a completely false list of complaints after this
> And this poor guy, working a non-specialized manager position attainable with just a high school degree, was only paid a meager $80,000 a year!
This is a misleading statement focused on hiding the fact that the area manager being interviewed has an MBA. Moreover the manager never complained about his salary. He complained about how he was forced to fire hourly workers and had to be on his feet for 14 hours a day for several weeks unless he was willing to be fired.
Costco is a union company that's like a walk-in version of Amazon warehouse invented before Amazon. They pay workers well, give them bonuses, and so on. Company makes around $100 billion a year.
If trying to imagine unionized Amazon, walk into a Costco noting how the workers perform and at what stress levels. Better yet, if about vote with your wallet, just buy stuff from Costco and similar companies instead of Amazon to maintain and create more great jobs.
My company is a union company, too. We outperform the competition. They try to poach us all the time, too. The contract allows management to take action against lazy or disobedient employees if they can prove it. Their continued employment is totally due to terrible, ineffective management. All they gotta do is write their name on a piece of paper they present to those workers several times to fire them. Instead, they write up good, compliant workers over technicalities but ignore bad workers that argue back more. The lazy, weak managers get stuff done on paper that way. Although very common in union shops, I virtually never see anyone talk about the management angle on bad employees hard to get rid of.
The other issue is managers backing friends/family, who they buy drugs from, sleep with, and so on. Lots of political backchanneling over the most ridiculous stuff in these big companies. The sales teams are even crazier most of the time but theyre professional bullshitters with incentives to be aggressively outgoing. So, no surprise Im always hearing crazy stories about ex-employees. ;)
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/03/19/even-costc...
Oh yeah, anonymous.
People want their packages the next day or before Christmas. Amazon is paying them overtime and more for Black Friday. I mean this is the job, like a job that requires you start at 12am. Tiring sure, but weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Amazon has no problems finding workers, or else they'd pay $30 an hour
There isn't a market solution for every problem. Labor rights abuses are rampant in apparel manufacturing. Are those problems "not serious" enough because people continue to pursue employment there?
If Amazon is doing things legally, and we're not happy, then we need to be upset with Congress, if anyone.
Hard jobs exists, but people get compensated for the long hours, hard work, smell or whatever.
what is your solution, should Amazon shut down, pay them more or what? Kids want their packages before 12/24
I had a temp job like that once. Two twelve hour shifts starting at midnight. I feel asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day on the 2nd day. I lucked out and didn't hit anything, woke up to put my foot on the brakes and rolled to a stop in a parking lot.
I wonder if part of the reason a military vet was hired for the floor manager's job was the expectation that they'd act like drill sergeants towards the employees, while the tracking systems acted as a real-time sword of Damocles-type apparatus.
No one active duty yells at people like a drill sergeant outside of a training environment, except marines bc rah
I grew up in a rural town to working-class parents who hated me spending time on computers and wanted me to get a trade. I'm now 33 and halfway to my CS degree that I should have finished 12 years ago. The Army has been good to me but it's not the life I should have lived.
Even growing up rurally was hard. I was a very intellectual child and rural areas aren't the best environment for that i.e. family that actively squashes your interest as opposed to encouraging it.
It's pretty amazing the levels of psychological conditioning you guys have had.
There's the rub. Buried near the bottom.
The guy thinks people should not be allowed to be too rich.
Or the fact that people get that rich points to a systemic flaw in the system. Bezos earns 4 million per hour, no matter if he's asleep or awake. It's pretty wild to assume he personally creates that much value. The only other justification is that society is distributing wealth in a skewed fashion.
The fact that capitalism is the best resource allocating framework we found, for managing society, shouldn't prevent us from discussing its flaws.
The thing that people forget is that democracy is inefficient, but it has less flaws than anything else we have tried in the past. I suspect Capitalism is similarly the least flawed system we've found so far. (don't know enough economic distribution history to be sure).
A lot of people claim socialism is much better, but I am not sure it works well at big scales, looking at say a country like India.
That is false. It was based on the appreciation of his Amazon stock at a cherry-picked moment in time. He's probably been losing millions per hour lately. In reality, his total compensation is less than $2M and his salary is less than $100K.