I hope that union thing works out so there will be more checks and balances in place going forward. Those bottle peeing stories and all that surveillance is quite horrible...
I also heard lower levels don't have access to the company directory anymore. So they basically got cut off from career and socializing opportunities also inside the company.
Don't you think it makes Warren look childish? She said she wants to break up big tech companies so that they aren't able to challenge her. I think that's an absolutely appalling thing for a lawmaker to say. Warren should be defending their right to challenger her, not attacking it, and she should be empowering institutions to challenge her, not attacking those that are. I can't understand how anyone is defending this craziness. It's chilling.
If I have to choose to defend someone, it’s not Amazon and Bezos. He and chosen management had a choice on what sort of company and culture to build. Choose poorly and then be surprised when government and the public come after you? Relentlessly tactless and tone deaf.
Agreed, but I also agree with Warren that Amazon should be broken up. Warren’s stance pales in comparison to the machine of suffering that is Amazon fulfillment/retail. Nuance and pragmatism.
Does she want to break them up for for the benefit of the people she represents, or does she want to break them up because they're 'snotty' to her? She's explicitly said it's because of the latter. I hope it's because of the former, but I have to trust her own words are lies to believe that!
They aren’t making a whole lot of new conservatives in America. Centrist Democrats are either aging out or getting pushed out. Change takes time. Gotta defend against people like Bezos in the meantime ($187B? and still throwing a childish fit about your workers trying to have better working conditions? Really?).
And if you think America isn't minting a lot of new conservatives, I think you've been sleeping the last 6 years. Conservatives just had the biggest voter turnout that they've had since Ronald Reagan.
And despite our Gen X/Millenial social circles which are heavily left, Zoomers are much more conservative than us.
You were attacking and criticizing Warren (not I, as I focused on parties driven by ideas and moors), which doesn’t concern me and has little value regardless unless you vote in her state.
The greater issue is what happens when speaking truth to power garners contempt and harm instead of cooperation and humility. Enter regulation, stage right.
That said, it's reasonable to fear corporations with so many resources they capture regulators and can bankroll astroturfed challengers. I'd like both a balanced, accountable government and healthy, competitive markets please.
Why should big tech companies be able to challenge democratically elected representatives?
Shouldn't political participation be primarily in the hands of people, not special interests?
I get that the question of whether corporations should have a role in politics is up for debate, but I think most of the people who elected Warren believe that there's no place for big money in politics.
If Warren said that to a person I think it would absolutely be appalling and I get that in the current US legal system corporations have a right to free speech. I just don't think that's an intrinsic moral right the way it is for people. I think it's a valid, reasonable view that Amazon should not be able to influence politics in any way.
One way to interpret Warren's tweet is "she doesn't believe that private corporations should have the ability to stand up to politicians." Another way is "she realizes that Amazon has so much political influence that it can tweet anything it wants at elected representatives without any consequences." So which is it? Is Amazon a private American corporation on equal footing with the government, simply exercising free speech, and evil Warren wants to stifle them? Or is Amazon an evil giant corporation making a PR power play because it has so much underhanded influence in politics and public opinion that it is guaranteed to make this end badly for Warren or anyone else who opposes them, and Warren is just looking to put them in check?
Elizabeth Warren comes off looking worse. Probably the most tonedeaf, opportunistic do-little in American politics.
I still remember in the middle of the GME story how CNBC brought her on as the "great financial industry critic" to tow the industry line. Quite hilarious.
Warren and Sanders are the very definition of controlled opposition. If they're your biggest critics, you're probably doing something right.
Having personally been in three different private sector unions, I would say that this is true. I am extremely critical of them, would not join one again and would change careers if my field significantly unionized. I've posted at length about this before.
In the private sector, collective bargaining leads to worse outcomes both for employees and for consumers.
Public sector unions (see federal employment) are an entirely different animal and generally have been very effective.
absolutely this right now the drivers and deliverers are held accountable they get a union in there and get ready to never get your packages on time or if ever
For the latter two, peeing in a bottle/etc. is dictated by physical constraints. For the former two, they are dictated by late-stage capitalism. That's why Amazon drivers are protesting and astronauts are not.
Even before the industry was heavily regulated and hours limited, long-haul truckers chose to pee in bottles for efficiency. Faster, safer and made them more money.
Also do you have any idea how long it takes to get in and out of a construction crane? And how dangerous? It's absolutely a physical constraint. Operators have to climb and it's about 15 minutes each way. They have to take breaks so they don't get sweaty. You absolutely do NOT want to do that when you're holding in piss.
Also most roads are straight and modern trucks are incredibly stable. Plus cruise control exists. Peeing while driving is really easy, especially in an elevated chair seat like they use. I've done it a few times.
Frankly, I believe that capitalism is the strongest it has ever been, and will continuously grow ever-stronger, with stock market indexes growing ever higher relative to wages, signaling a seemingly unstoppable wealth accumulation towards the capitalist class. Deteriorating labor conditions are not a signal of bourgeois weakness, but a show of strength, and workers need to also gather strength if they are to fight back. You might make the argument that unionization only serves to make labor safe for Capital, and that's true to a large degree, but I see no other solution on the horizon.
By the way, I think you got downvoted because using a Marxist technical term such as "late capitalism" without proper elaboration only serves as flamebait. Those who are not already familiar with the theory have very likely only seen them in the context of Marxists airing their grievances on social media and/or aggressively engaging with Conservatives.
All of which pay way more than $15/hour (median $27/hour for the crane operator, $21/hour for the trucker). There's nothing wrong with difficult working conditions - some jobs require it.
But when you see a job where the conditions are really horrible (for no reason, I might add - it's not like a warehouse worker taking a bathroom break puts an expensive piece of equipment on pause like a crane operator would) but the pay is incredibly low, that seems like a sign that the employer is using exploitative practices.
For a community like HN, where a significant part of people do work that can be mostly done from bed, I'd just like to make clear that higher pay would still not make it OK to not have an unlimited amount of bathroom breaks for jobs where there are no real physical limitations that would necessitate such limitations.
$15/hour is the minimum at Amazon not the median - from the news articles I've read, they also do this for temporary/seasonal/part time workers, not just for full time workers. You’re drawing a false comparison.
Also is there any evidence that conditions are “really horrible”? Lots of people love working at Amazon warehouses - it pays well for unskilled labor and includes benefits. How do you know the complaints aren’t just from a small number of workers who are bad at their job and feel the time crunch, while most might be getting along fine? I feel like there isn’t available data to say either way - all we have are anecdotes that are being amplified in social media.
Jeff Bezos apparently has never heard of the Streisand Effect, or he's so rich he just doesn't care about what public perception is...
Seriously, you don't pick a social media fight with Bernie Sanders or Warren they both have very strong social media teams, esp. when you're fighting against unionization....
This makes Amazon look terrible but you do have to wonder about a world where politicians that control the most powerful government in the world are incentivized to play petty gotcha games on Twitter with their supporters cheering on, while we expect private corporations to be the adult in the room. The main reason why this makes Amazon look bad while politicians who do this (not taking sides here, this is clearly a bipartisan thing) get a pass is that our expectations for politicians are now so low that we don't expect anything but petty grandstanding and finger-pointing, while we expect Amazon to rise above partisan criticism.
I'm curious to see how this plays out. The security ticket seems to have the most reasonable opinion - I can't see a scenario where this plays well for amazon but they're a trillion dollar company and I'm not
Any former warehouse workers here want to comment? (I'm guessing this will be astroturfed but might as well give it a shot)
My brother was a warehouse worker. It paid more than other jobs he has had but it also required him to work most of the time he was on the clock relative to other jobs. He quit because of the work load, not because he was expected to pee in bottles.
Having interviewed for dev jobs at Amazon I think the reality is in the middle. Is Amazon a fun place to work? NO. Does Amazon try to abuse its employees? NO.
I think people pissing in bottles probably does happen in Amazon's vast network, but as a very, very rare exception. It makes for good public propaganda, but it's not the issue most salient to warehouse workers.
There's a constant grind that Amazon puts on your body and brain. The work is monotonous. Your joints slowly break down from RSI. You get aches that you learn to compensate for or ignore. You learn to manage the pressure of the little screen at your work station that shows you the rate you've been packing at over the past ten minutes. You learn to manage the pressure of your co-workers at the next step in the process, who have their own little screens, and need you to work faster so they can work faster.
The pay is better than most shit jobs, the benefits are good, the work rules are clear and the managers largely aren't abusive. The trade-off you make is that the physical and psychological demand is intense. There's a reason that the average Amazon FC worker lasts six months—I reckon Amazon's done the math and decided that high turnover is worth the extra productivity they can squeeze out of workers while they're there.
In that sense, it's a bit of a shame that reporters and politicians focus so much on pee in bottles, because working at Amazon is still pretty ghoulish without it. I'm rooting for the workers at Bessemer. It will be very hard to build up the union density needed to really have negotiating leverage over Amazon, but you have to start somewhere!
The peeing in bottles (and defecating in bags) was described entirely in the context of drivers, not warehouse workers, and was said to be very common.
I kind of empathize with Bezos, there's a certain tone of entitlement to this entire saga. Amazon doesn't own anybody a job, if working conditions are shit (but assuming it's legal), you should quit.
If Amazon is your best option, then you should be grateful for it.
If I went to work everyday, complained loudly about how much the job sucks, I wouldn't have a job anymore and I'd understand. To think I'd be able to criticize my organization and still be entitled to a job is lunacy.
But ideas of what is “just” change and the justice system is often slow to react. Sometimes things that are technically unjust (banning gay marriage) are allowed. Slavery was once legal. Justice system at the time said so. Also, as an anecdote, speaking as someone who has participated in the justice system quite a bit, for me it was very rarely the best determinant of what was “just” on the small scale of my life. I would hesitate to assume on the larger scale of society as a whole it is any more accurate.
The problem is that the "justice system" is the only universally agreed upon system. The alternative is everybody upholds their own justice and we have anarchy.
If you want to change the justice system, go ahead. But there's a difference between changing labour laws and going after one specific company.
Sure, but it isn't just legal it's better (in some ways) than most things in the same class. Amazon tracks you and makes you work harder, but compensates you better and doesn't fuck around with hours as much as other jobs in the same fields. It does seem unfair to target them specifically.
For example the piss bottles. It is a thing for truckers and delivery workers to piss in bottles. UPS people, FedEx people, Truckers more than the others will talk about it anonymously. But everyone acts like Amazon isn't acting within the unspoken norms of society.
They're tiptoeing the line. So, yes, you're right; They haven't broken the law, but when they have to stand right on that line to get what they want, it's clear they want to go past it.
So we should change the rules? Accepting laws because that's the way it is to be blunt silly. Why do we have child labor laws? Those families and children should have just been greatful? Or maybe things can be better and the law isn't perfect
You’re all over this discussion trying to argue from a place of “legal = humane/ethical/moral/etc.” and I’m sorry, but this premise just doesn’t hold water.
Same as mine operators employing kids in 19th century England, or current Chinese companies with their fucked 9-9-6 system.
Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism should be mandatory reading for any person commenting online about the modern economic system.
erode peoples' standard of living, erode the laws protecting them from abusive working environments, force them into a position where they only have the option of working for one company, and then blame them for trying to ask for better conditions.
If you went into your job every day and criticized the job with a coworker, you would in fact not lose your job (or have the option for a nice settlement), because American labor law specifically protects workers' rights to talk about their working conditions?
Yet options are dwindling here where I am. As a teen there was a shopping mall packed with choices. Now the nearby mall has so many vacant slots it's a wonder they're still open.
The point is that in many of these communities where retail jobs have been absolutely decimated (because of Amazon), working for Amazon is often the only game in town
Move somewhere else. If you can't find a perfered job in your hometown, you don't force the local company to make a job to your satisfaction, you move to a different part of the country.
Why should these people get any other type of consideration.
You've said that in another branch of this thread.
Do you understand that some people don't have that option? Or cannot move to a new location? Through no fault of their own?
Why can't people use the powers they have delegated to the government to put a stop to these practices, for the growing class of people who are trapped in jobs with conditions similar to this?
I never said they can't lobby the government. I said they shouldn't feel entitled.
If I'm destitute and I'm at a soup kitchen; I wouldn't complain about the food even if it sucks, because the alternative is to starve.
It's the same thing here, beggars can't be choosers. If you want the government to change the rules, go ahead. But don't demonize the company that's literally putting food on your table because you don't like the only job you can find.
When you can barely even pay each month’s rent, just moving to a new apartment locally can require a year or two of savings. And thats assuming you don’t have children or any other unexpected (car broke down, medical bills).
Can you name any of these cities? People keep using this argument in discussions about Amazon, but I've not seen any specific evidence for it - i.e., a town where it really is true.
I'm conscious I'm starting to sound like a broken record, having posed this question several times in another recent thread, but where is the evidence that Amazon has access to an endless supply of workers who are at-once sufficiently able-bodied, able-minded and otherwise capable of doing the work Amazon needs done, and also so desperate for work that they will tolerate any level of mistreatment?
My claim is not that Amazon has no room to improve pay and conditions for its workers. I'm sure it does. I'm just questioning the assumption that Amazon is able to endlessly exploit and mistreat its workers without consequence.
I think it's generally okay to complain about a system that forces you to pee in bottles due to lack of restroom breaks. People have quit, and they still have every right to complain even after quitting
Most people in America would not have any money for food or shelter if they missed just one paycheck. When the option is between pissing in a bottle and becoming homeless, most people will piss in the bottle. That's a choice people shouldn't have to make.
They’re not forcing anyone and most workers don’t do that. The ones that do are probably just not productive and are making up the loss of production by peeing in bottles. That’s not necessarily an indictment of the company. Their policy, from leaked documents, is that workers should not be doing this.
Amazon may not owe them a job, but a government ought to make sure that it's citizens are not treated like animals to just make a living, no matter where they choose to work.
It's a shame that any country allows conditions like this to exist, under the excuse of "the free market will solve this problem, just get a job elsewhere"
The balance of power between government, people + companies has made this extremely difficult, and the "free market" is just optimizing for this imbalance by allowing conditions to get this bad in the first place.
If a politician's solution to "making sure people aren't treated like animals" is going after a single company; rather than fixing the system, then they've failed as politicians.
You fix the system by going after the miscreants and holding them to account, one by one, and accumulating a record that can be used to provide more general laws and regulations for the future. Lawmakers do that by investigating specific companies for specific reasons.
You have, by my count at this time, 14 posts in this thread.
What is it that you might have left to say that you were unable to put in to words in the first 13?
You make it sound like any of the conditions are pervasive, they employ 876,000 people, if the conditions were as bad as the media makes it seem I would imagine there being more outcry instead of the media having to blow up specific instances of things happening.
Where there's smoke there is fire is the saying, so maybe it is that bad but that's not what I understand it to be.
Edit: Also from all the documents we've seen it would appear Amazon leaks like a sieve so I would also expect way more damning evidence to have appeared by now.
Whether or not they are pervasive, they should not have occurred in the first place. What kind of culture allowed this to happen even once? Why hasn't there been a statement or commitment from Amazon on fixing this, rather than doubling down on "it doesn't happen" ?
This specific Amazon incident is just one of may incidents across many major employers where workers end up suffering. Regulations should exist that prevent this from even happening, but political will doesn't seem to exist, sadly.
Blowing up this incident helps refocus the attention on trying to fix this nationwide, rather than this specific incident at amazon.
> This specific Amazon incident is just one of may incidents across many major employers where workers end up suffering. Regulations should exist that prevent this from even happening, but political will doesn't seem to exist, sadly.
Okay if the goal is bringing attention to general workplace issues across major companies, then why is it only ever Amazon taking flak? What is special about them that they're the whipping post? Walmart is egregious, systematically so, shown time and time again over decades, but Amazon is the beacon of workforce mal-treatment? Please.
> Also from all the documents we've seen it would appear Amazon leaks like a sieve so I would also expect way more damning evidence to have appeared by now.
This is some the most impressive circular logic I’ve seen in my day.
No, the article explicitly mentions "Amazon’s pushback on the congressman’s comment about workers peeing in bottles also ignited a new news cycle after The Intercept revealed internal Amazon communications acknowledging that contractors who deliver Amazon packages sometimes defecate in bags and urinate in bottles." (with the latter half being a link to that same The Intercept article)
One of the explanations for this is that due to covid most public restaurants/bathrooms were closed, forcing some drivers to resort to alternative means... At the very least I don't think it's fair to jump to any conclusion about Amazon forcing people to pee in bottles.
You also have to realize that a lot of these people are making deliveries in suburban residential neighborhoods where the number of public restrooms rounds off to zero, and you can't just go inside somebody's house.
Given a choice between peeing in a bottle or driving 30 minutes round trip to the nearest public restroom, I'm not about to condemn anyone who picks the first one purely out of convenience.
It seems it succeeded, by frustrating Warren and making it appear that she is significantly motivated by stifling dissenting voices, a possible abuse of the First Amendment [0].
I know there are lot of people here who identify with Warren's politics (myself included, to some degree), but petty personalities like hers aren't the ones we want in power. Thought there would be more awareness of that after the last presidential term.
Indeed, if politicans are going to adopt the practice of governance by snotty tweets they can expect business and constituents to do the same as they have been doing. I do wish everyone would stop though.
> I know there are lot of people here who identify with Warren's politics (myself included, to some degree), but petty personalities like hers aren't the ones we want in power. Thought there would be more awareness of that after the last presidential term.
I just wanted to say that I identify a lot with your comment. I think tribalism is a stronger factor than you realize though and there seems to be little-to-no "same-sides" criticism in public.
I've always been extremely critical of Warren, despite mostly being on the same side politically. I think she's among the worst that we have to offer...but tribalism is an extremely strong force in public discourse and politics, regretably.
More importantly, she says really bombastic things that no one else is saying and make a subset of progressives feel really good. It gets a strong following. In fact, I think we can probably say the same about Sanders, Beto, Yang and Buttigeg. Each one of them appeals to a specific extreme and pulls all of the disparate voices into a single voting block. I think we on the left rely on this and probably can't cast those people out, no matter how much we need to.
Vox is showing their left/progressive bias by framing Amazon’s response as “snarky”, basically providing a journalistic shield for authoritarian legislators. Consider that Senator Elizabeth Warren threatened to break Amazon (a private corporation) up (https://mobile.twitter.com/amazonnews/status/137552910193152...) for having the temerity to speak against her (for speaking against the government, which is comprised of legislators like her). Personally I do think these giant tech monopolies/oligopolies should face antitrust scrutiny, but not for their exercise of their right to free speech.
I also wonder how else would corporations respond to misleading populist narratives? Amazon provided a minimum wage of $15/hour with benefits without legislative pressure (although some like to claim their pressure caused it). They did so for completely unskilled labor that is not compensated this way by other companies that operate warehouses. Even so, they receive critique from these legislators that seemingly don’t understand how businesses work, how they create value, and how that adds up to a functional economy. That deserves a response - and I don’t think corporations should have to remain silent or speak with undue deference while these legislators whip up populist outrage. Their direct and firmly toned response wastes no words and serves to bring these legislators back to Earth.
Vox was founded by two of the most famous, open liberals in journalism.
They do publish opinionated articles, but the base facts are solid, and they often have conservative ideas and voices given equal consideration. They have also debunked liberal memes and talking points on many occasions, or at least said (truthfully) that a situation is more complicated than liberals would want people to think.
It also looks like Amazon bought likes for just those 2 tweets. All other recent tweets(both before and after) by that a/c get 20/30, nearly always less than 100 likes. And suddenly, these 2 tweets got ~4.8k and 9.6k?
Also tied in with the fact that those tweets weren't by the regular social media team but through a webapp by unknown.
For those criticizing Warren's tweet: remember that the idea that the first amendment applies to companies is a legal doctrine that was created in the 20th century (edit: specifically in a couple of Supreme Court cases in 1975 and 1976), not something inherent to the constitution. Saying that it's not Amazon's place to participate in politics is a view that I think most of her constituents would share.
Corporate personhood =/= corporate free speech. In the very same Wikipedia article you linked it discusses Northwestern Nat Life Ins. Co. v. Riggs (1906), which establishes that corporations, while they are "people" for the purposes of contracts, are not entitled to 14th amendment protections.
Fast forward to Valentine v. Chrestensen (1942), the supreme court unanimously upholds the common law that the first amendment does not apply to corporations. The court suddenly reverses in 76' with Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc.
I can read and that case was well-covered. You're cherry-picking though and neglected to cite all of the contrary instances before it.
It was long held that corporations held some of the protections of the Constitution. Which ones was not so clearly defined. First amendment protection is now so defined, but that does not make it brand new legal doctrine. It's based on long standing legal precedent. It is a clarification of law.
You're making Valentine v. Chrestensen's decision much more broad than it actually is. Specifically, SCOTUS "ruled that commercial speech in public thoroughfares is not constitutionally protected" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_v._Chrestensen). Commercial speech has a very specific definition in law. It's about advertising.
The decisions later about Hobby Lobby have very little to do with Valentine v Chrestensen nor Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, because Hobby Lobby's case was not about commercial speech.
Same with Buckley v. Valeo, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission because they were about political speech.
I wonder who writes the tweets and how much review there is. I would be freaked out if I was responsible for insulting a senator on behalf of a trillion dollar company.
You would be freaked out if you wrote a snarky, aggressive tweet directed at a US Senator on behalf of your employer?
These people all have agency. And if they work in an environment where they'd fear being fired for not posting snarky, aggressive tweets targeting one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country, then maybe they should find a new place to work.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadI hope that union thing works out so there will be more checks and balances in place going forward. Those bottle peeing stories and all that surveillance is quite horrible...
I also heard lower levels don't have access to the company directory anymore. So they basically got cut off from career and socializing opportunities also inside the company.
Don't you think it makes Warren look childish? She said she wants to break up big tech companies so that they aren't able to challenge her. I think that's an absolutely appalling thing for a lawmaker to say. Warren should be defending their right to challenger her, not attacking it, and she should be empowering institutions to challenge her, not attacking those that are. I can't understand how anyone is defending this craziness. It's chilling.
She can't even get her "progressive" credentials consistent as she rarely misses an opportunity to be the hawk. She sure loves those foreign wars.
And if you think America isn't minting a lot of new conservatives, I think you've been sleeping the last 6 years. Conservatives just had the biggest voter turnout that they've had since Ronald Reagan.
And despite our Gen X/Millenial social circles which are heavily left, Zoomers are much more conservative than us.
The greater issue is what happens when speaking truth to power garners contempt and harm instead of cooperation and humility. Enter regulation, stage right.
That said, it's reasonable to fear corporations with so many resources they capture regulators and can bankroll astroturfed challengers. I'd like both a balanced, accountable government and healthy, competitive markets please.
Shouldn't political participation be primarily in the hands of people, not special interests?
I get that the question of whether corporations should have a role in politics is up for debate, but I think most of the people who elected Warren believe that there's no place for big money in politics.
Every person and every (legal) institution should be able to (verbally and in writing) challenge a democratically elected representative.
I can't understand why that even needs stating?
She's literally threatening legislative retribution for being "snotty" to her. That's appalling, surely?
I still remember in the middle of the GME story how CNBC brought her on as the "great financial industry critic" to tow the industry line. Quite hilarious.
Warren and Sanders are the very definition of controlled opposition. If they're your biggest critics, you're probably doing something right.
In the private sector, collective bargaining leads to worse outcomes both for employees and for consumers.
Public sector unions (see federal employment) are an entirely different animal and generally have been very effective.
Then you'll need to avoid jobs like long haul trucker, construction crane operator, Air Force flight crew, or astronaut :-/
Even before the industry was heavily regulated and hours limited, long-haul truckers chose to pee in bottles for efficiency. Faster, safer and made them more money.
Also do you have any idea how long it takes to get in and out of a construction crane? And how dangerous? It's absolutely a physical constraint. Operators have to climb and it's about 15 minutes each way. They have to take breaks so they don't get sweaty. You absolutely do NOT want to do that when you're holding in piss.
https://www.amazon.com/trucker-urinal/s?k=trucker+urinal
Also most roads are straight and modern trucks are incredibly stable. Plus cruise control exists. Peeing while driving is really easy, especially in an elevated chair seat like they use. I've done it a few times.
Ironic considering bothering to use a potty is a very, very modern sensibility.
By the way, I think you got downvoted because using a Marxist technical term such as "late capitalism" without proper elaboration only serves as flamebait. Those who are not already familiar with the theory have very likely only seen them in the context of Marxists airing their grievances on social media and/or aggressively engaging with Conservatives.
But when you see a job where the conditions are really horrible (for no reason, I might add - it's not like a warehouse worker taking a bathroom break puts an expensive piece of equipment on pause like a crane operator would) but the pay is incredibly low, that seems like a sign that the employer is using exploitative practices.
Also is there any evidence that conditions are “really horrible”? Lots of people love working at Amazon warehouses - it pays well for unskilled labor and includes benefits. How do you know the complaints aren’t just from a small number of workers who are bad at their job and feel the time crunch, while most might be getting along fine? I feel like there isn’t available data to say either way - all we have are anecdotes that are being amplified in social media.
Seriously, you don't pick a social media fight with Bernie Sanders or Warren they both have very strong social media teams, esp. when you're fighting against unionization....
Any former warehouse workers here want to comment? (I'm guessing this will be astroturfed but might as well give it a shot)
Having interviewed for dev jobs at Amazon I think the reality is in the middle. Is Amazon a fun place to work? NO. Does Amazon try to abuse its employees? NO.
I think people pissing in bottles probably does happen in Amazon's vast network, but as a very, very rare exception. It makes for good public propaganda, but it's not the issue most salient to warehouse workers.
There's a constant grind that Amazon puts on your body and brain. The work is monotonous. Your joints slowly break down from RSI. You get aches that you learn to compensate for or ignore. You learn to manage the pressure of the little screen at your work station that shows you the rate you've been packing at over the past ten minutes. You learn to manage the pressure of your co-workers at the next step in the process, who have their own little screens, and need you to work faster so they can work faster.
The pay is better than most shit jobs, the benefits are good, the work rules are clear and the managers largely aren't abusive. The trade-off you make is that the physical and psychological demand is intense. There's a reason that the average Amazon FC worker lasts six months—I reckon Amazon's done the math and decided that high turnover is worth the extra productivity they can squeeze out of workers while they're there.
In that sense, it's a bit of a shame that reporters and politicians focus so much on pee in bottles, because working at Amazon is still pretty ghoulish without it. I'm rooting for the workers at Bessemer. It will be very hard to build up the union density needed to really have negotiating leverage over Amazon, but you have to start somewhere!
If Amazon is your best option, then you should be grateful for it.
If I went to work everyday, complained loudly about how much the job sucks, I wouldn't have a job anymore and I'd understand. To think I'd be able to criticize my organization and still be entitled to a job is lunacy.
If you want to change the justice system, go ahead. But there's a difference between changing labour laws and going after one specific company.
For example the piss bottles. It is a thing for truckers and delivery workers to piss in bottles. UPS people, FedEx people, Truckers more than the others will talk about it anonymously. But everyone acts like Amazon isn't acting within the unspoken norms of society.
There's a massive power imbalance between individuals and corporations. In a way they are modern royalty, controlling a large amount of the world
Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism should be mandatory reading for any person commenting online about the modern economic system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8913542-23-things-they-d...
Well I would certainly never want to work for an organization that would fire someone, especially a good coworker, for this.
erode peoples' standard of living, erode the laws protecting them from abusive working environments, force them into a position where they only have the option of working for one company, and then blame them for trying to ask for better conditions.
If you went into your job every day and criticized the job with a coworker, you would in fact not lose your job (or have the option for a nice settlement), because American labor law specifically protects workers' rights to talk about their working conditions?
Why should these people get any other type of consideration.
We're asking them to treat people with the minimum of respect and dignity.
Do you understand that some people don't have that option? Or cannot move to a new location? Through no fault of their own?
Why can't people use the powers they have delegated to the government to put a stop to these practices, for the growing class of people who are trapped in jobs with conditions similar to this?
If I'm destitute and I'm at a soup kitchen; I wouldn't complain about the food even if it sucks, because the alternative is to starve.
It's the same thing here, beggars can't be choosers. If you want the government to change the rules, go ahead. But don't demonize the company that's literally putting food on your table because you don't like the only job you can find.
I'm conscious I'm starting to sound like a broken record, having posed this question several times in another recent thread, but where is the evidence that Amazon has access to an endless supply of workers who are at-once sufficiently able-bodied, able-minded and otherwise capable of doing the work Amazon needs done, and also so desperate for work that they will tolerate any level of mistreatment?
My claim is not that Amazon has no room to improve pay and conditions for its workers. I'm sure it does. I'm just questioning the assumption that Amazon is able to endlessly exploit and mistreat its workers without consequence.
It's a shame that any country allows conditions like this to exist, under the excuse of "the free market will solve this problem, just get a job elsewhere"
The balance of power between government, people + companies has made this extremely difficult, and the "free market" is just optimizing for this imbalance by allowing conditions to get this bad in the first place.
You have, by my count at this time, 14 posts in this thread.
What is it that you might have left to say that you were unable to put in to words in the first 13?
Where there's smoke there is fire is the saying, so maybe it is that bad but that's not what I understand it to be.
Edit: Also from all the documents we've seen it would appear Amazon leaks like a sieve so I would also expect way more damning evidence to have appeared by now.
This specific Amazon incident is just one of may incidents across many major employers where workers end up suffering. Regulations should exist that prevent this from even happening, but political will doesn't seem to exist, sadly.
Blowing up this incident helps refocus the attention on trying to fix this nationwide, rather than this specific incident at amazon.
Okay if the goal is bringing attention to general workplace issues across major companies, then why is it only ever Amazon taking flak? What is special about them that they're the whipping post? Walmart is egregious, systematically so, shown time and time again over decades, but Amazon is the beacon of workforce mal-treatment? Please.
This is some the most impressive circular logic I’ve seen in my day.
As we drift back into company towns here in the Midwest US I do hope change will come before company scrip.
The article missed AOC's tweet where Amazon themselves noted that they found bags with feces and urine in delivery cars [1,2]
[1] https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1375502593863073792
[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...
Given a choice between peeing in a bottle or driving 30 minutes round trip to the nearest public restroom, I'm not about to condemn anyone who picks the first one purely out of convenience.
I know there are lot of people here who identify with Warren's politics (myself included, to some degree), but petty personalities like hers aren't the ones we want in power. Thought there would be more awareness of that after the last presidential term.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-amazon-twit...
I just wanted to say that I identify a lot with your comment. I think tribalism is a stronger factor than you realize though and there seems to be little-to-no "same-sides" criticism in public.
I've always been extremely critical of Warren, despite mostly being on the same side politically. I think she's among the worst that we have to offer...but tribalism is an extremely strong force in public discourse and politics, regretably.
More importantly, she says really bombastic things that no one else is saying and make a subset of progressives feel really good. It gets a strong following. In fact, I think we can probably say the same about Sanders, Beto, Yang and Buttigeg. Each one of them appeals to a specific extreme and pulls all of the disparate voices into a single voting block. I think we on the left rely on this and probably can't cast those people out, no matter how much we need to.
Raise your hand if you believe Amazon execs felt 'terror' in this circumstance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I also wonder how else would corporations respond to misleading populist narratives? Amazon provided a minimum wage of $15/hour with benefits without legislative pressure (although some like to claim their pressure caused it). They did so for completely unskilled labor that is not compensated this way by other companies that operate warehouses. Even so, they receive critique from these legislators that seemingly don’t understand how businesses work, how they create value, and how that adds up to a functional economy. That deserves a response - and I don’t think corporations should have to remain silent or speak with undue deference while these legislators whip up populist outrage. Their direct and firmly toned response wastes no words and serves to bring these legislators back to Earth.
They do publish opinionated articles, but the base facts are solid, and they often have conservative ideas and voices given equal consideration. They have also debunked liberal memes and talking points on many occasions, or at least said (truthfully) that a situation is more complicated than liberals would want people to think.
Also tied in with the fact that those tweets weren't by the regular social media team but through a webapp by unknown.
Doesn't add up.
Precedent (regardless of nation of origin) is probably the second most powerful source of laws, right after Natural Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Fast forward to Valentine v. Chrestensen (1942), the supreme court unanimously upholds the common law that the first amendment does not apply to corporations. The court suddenly reverses in 76' with Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc.
It was long held that corporations held some of the protections of the Constitution. Which ones was not so clearly defined. First amendment protection is now so defined, but that does not make it brand new legal doctrine. It's based on long standing legal precedent. It is a clarification of law.
You're making Valentine v. Chrestensen's decision much more broad than it actually is. Specifically, SCOTUS "ruled that commercial speech in public thoroughfares is not constitutionally protected" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_v._Chrestensen). Commercial speech has a very specific definition in law. It's about advertising.
The decisions later about Hobby Lobby have very little to do with Valentine v Chrestensen nor Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, because Hobby Lobby's case was not about commercial speech.
Same with Buckley v. Valeo, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission because they were about political speech.
These people all have agency. And if they work in an environment where they'd fear being fired for not posting snarky, aggressive tweets targeting one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country, then maybe they should find a new place to work.