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Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

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Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#531

Post by BookmarkSaver »

kajumix wrote: post #282
kelukelugames wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos. Jeff Bezos is the reason why Amazon treats workers they way they do. Compared to other tech giants, Amazon is incredibly anti-employee. Look at how their stocks vest. I worked at Microsoft during Balmer's reign. The founder/CEO's attitude dictates the work culture. And causes harm if it's bad. I live in Seattle and often hear this joke: Being an Amazon customer is the best. An investor is great. An employee no…

Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers. Amazon is a highly successful company with significant anticipate growth still to come. All that success doesn't come without talent. So maybe not stupid, maybe just irrational? Tech companies in general, and Amazon in particular, are high…

>Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers.

Hacker News hates big companies, Amazon being evil is in the zeitgeist, and people are unable to contextualize criticisms properly.

Being a software engineer at Amazon is fine (yeah, yeah, congrats, out of the tens of thousands of engineers you were able to uncover a few horror stories and terrible teams. Shocking) and very lucrative.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#532

Post by conanbatt »

bbddg wrote: post #331
conanbatt wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, the world had 94% extreme poverty in their time, and its down to less than 10%. The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results…

Extreme poverty is defined as someone living on less than $1.25 a day. Do you think that exploitation isn't occurring as long as someone isn't living in extreme poverty?

The exploitation model needs self-generating poverty. If it is lifting people out of poverty then it is destroying itself, as it will run out of the required poor people.

You can argue its not going fast enough, but the direction is unequivocally upwards so far.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#533

Post by DanBC »

skookumchuck wrote: post #499
DanBC wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the workers don't like it they can work elsewhere Note that the submitted article is from the UK, where the workers might not be able to work elsewhere, and where they may have had some element of compulsion through the current benefit system to apply for and take jobs at Amazon.

> ...might...may... Sounds like speculation.

No, it's accounting for the large numbers of people involved.

For clarity: people claiming Universal Credit will have been compelled to apply for work at Amazon, and will have had their benefits cut if they had refused to apply. And, once employed, people face a minimum 6 week wait before they can apply for benefits if they leave Amazon, and that time is extended if they chose to leave or were fired.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#534

Post by conanbatt »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #363
conanbatt wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, the world had 94% extreme poverty in their time, and its down to less than 10%. The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results…

>had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory. Actually I don't think so. Even Marx saw that socialism was a stage of history which followed from capitalism. In the same way that feudalism's aristocracy provides the conditions which create a merchant class that eventually overthrows the aristocracy, Marx sees capitalism and capitalists as providing the conditions which cre…

He would have revised his economic modeling I mean, not his historical argument which is still sensible to me, albeit potentially irrelevant.

I dont think the reserve army makes any sense in todays world. But it did in his were labor was so interchangeable that people migrated for labor in masse all the time. I dont think out of work janitors put a lot of pressure on software engineer jobs. That unemployment in general drops wages, or that full employment increases wages, is a much older concept than Marx's.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#535

Post by newfoundglory »

pjmorris wrote: post #519
phil248 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Amazon pay one more penny than they have to? To win a nice guys award? To get a warm, squishy feeling inside? There is precisely one solution to this problem, and it is us electing leaders who change the rules in favor of the working masses, and enforce those rules mercilessly against exploitative employers.

Why would anyone with sufficient money and organization to support a candidate support one who would change the rules in favor of the working masses?

Not everyone is a sociopath.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#536

Post by conanbatt »

fastball wrote: post #396
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory. Actually I don't think so. Even Marx saw that socialism was a stage of history which followed from capitalism. In the same way that feudalism's aristocracy provides the conditions which create a merchant class that eventually overthrows the aristocracy, Marx sees capitalism and capitalists as providing the conditions which cre…

You don't think stagnation in wages can be attributed to the massive increase in women in the workforce? Supply and demand, after all.

They do account for some, but not for all the changes. This is significant though, and often avoided to be spoken because of its pseudo-sexist interpretation.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#537

Post by vertex-four »

nv-vn wrote: post #502
bbddg wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe there should be minimum standards for working conditions?

To the degree that workers are not your slaves or property, yes. They should be free to decide who to work for, and employers cannot treat people as their property. But as long as there's informed consent, most things are pretty fair.

Informed consent to piss in bottles to meet impossible quotas, or die from starvation. Good choice.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#538

Post by conanbatt »

tsnont34nt wrote: post #255
conanbatt wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Struggling doesn't pay. What where they doing with the productivity before Uber, thats the question. Are you saying they weren't doing anything at all and uber lifted them out of extreme poverty?

Not the GP, but my guess is that they mean that they were doing equally bad jobs, but without Uber's pretense that it wasn't a bad job.

Poor them, being deluded from a job they had to a job they wanted. IF we could only enact legislation that forbid changing jobs.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#539

Post by wenc »

sn41 wrote: post #295
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, Amazon is a global company with 500,000+ employees. Painting the entire company with this brush is poor analysis. If this portrayal is representative of this distribution center, it could be the result of a general manager whose incentive bonuses motivate him/her to be strict about how pickers spend their time and grant strikes even for legitimate medical excuses. Or it could be true that all of Amazon is t…

I suspect it is a pervasive part of Amazon's work culture. They bought Whole Foods, IIRC, and there were news articles about how that went: http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/02/whole-foods-inventory-syst...

The problem identified in the article seems to point to the OTS inventory system, which was a Whole Foods initiative. Amazon doesn't seem to know much about it (which may partly be the problem), but it isn't evidence against Amazon per se.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#540

Post by conanbatt »

bbddg wrote: post #440
fastball wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think stagnation in wages can be attributed to the massive increase in women in the workforce? Supply and demand, after all.

It might have had some effect but decline in Union membership and collective bargaining power are much more important. After all, we're seeing record profits and a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1%. If workers could effectively organize, the increase in workforce wouldn't matter.

Ridiculous, thats not how unions work. Look at the history of argentina, where unions have constitutional protections, and tell me thats what help grow the economy.

Unions can only raise a workers wage in two ways: by increasing productivity (which they seldom do) or by restricting the amount of workers.

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