What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
theatlantic.com
What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
1–10 of 127 posts
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#2Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#3Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.
Customer is paying for a service that was promised to him and it’s reasonable to complain that the service was not provided.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#4Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#5Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?
I almost consider it clickbait. The writer even states that there's no other option than Amazon in these regions, and obviously the lack of other employers offering more simply means that the real problem is lack of demand for the types of work that the people in these communities can demand a living wage for.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#6I feel like journalists are just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment. Crazy how fast things can change from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia. Theres way too much noise in every aspect of information these days to help society focus on the problems that actually matter.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#7Yes, intensively competitive companies like Amazon sometimes press workers hard. Without endorsing nor assigning blame to the company (which faces pressures from globalization and shareholders), there are many potential approaches to the problems:
1. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits.
2. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs.
3. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions)
4. Consumers can vote with their dollars.
5. Investors can vote with their dollars.
There are many more variations on these themes.
If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#8Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?
There is a middle ground between "barely subsistence wages" and "high-paying, middle class wages" that Amazon could meet, and still be profitable.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#9It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis.
They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway.
At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying double their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.
Re: What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
#10[deleted]