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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

#571

Post by fastball »

komali2 wrote: post #562
fastball wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those things make getting/holding a job harder. None of them make it impossible. I never claimed life is fair, but does unfairness really justify criminality? Also, as the underlying discussion is "why might honest people need to steal food?", it's not very reasonable to include felony convictions as the first item on your list.

I know honest people with felony convictions. Do you think a marijuana smoker can't be honest? I'm not arguing morality, I'm arguing reality. Just like a stock broker would be a fool to expect rationality in the markets, so too would a government be foolish to expect everyone to fall in line when the screws start to turn. If you grow up a black kid on a street in Atlanta, and you watch your friends get snatched up by…

I guess by honest I meant "law abiding". Obviously someone that committed and was convicted of a felony does not qualify.

From your example, it sounds like the real issue would be behavior from law enforcement / public officials that encourages criminality. The issue there is not "no food stamps". It's a bad system. Fix the system that you think is broken, and then you won't need food stamps, no?

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

#574

Post by dragonwriter »

conanbatt wrote: post #548
rectang wrote: post #441

We can't. Labor and capital need each other, but they are forever at odds. Good wages and working conditions can only be won through negotiating from strength. Modern America favors capital. Elections have consequences.

Labor and capital are on the same side, they are both producers of wealth. You are barking at the wrong tree.

> Labor and capital are on the same side, they are both producers of wealth.

Neither labor nor capital independently produce wealth, generally, it's produced by the application of labor to capital; the suppliers of labor and capital are on opposing sides of the fight to capture the wealth the two are used together to create.

“Capitalism” was named for the side it specifically favors in that fight, by people who found that a fundamental problem.

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

#575

Post by degenerate »

bahmboo wrote: post #569
rectang wrote: post #441

We can't. Labor and capital need each other, but they are forever at odds. Good wages and working conditions can only be won through negotiating from strength. Modern America favors capital. Elections have consequences.

Costco? A bit apples and oranges.

Costco is a good example of a happy medium. At least they treat their workers like humans, and have proper amount of staff & checkout lines.

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

#576

Post by fastball »

bbddg wrote: post #553
conanbatt wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really know anything about the situation in Argentina but I don't think Unions are an unequivocal good no matter what form they take. Unions in many cases have leadership that don't have the interest of the workers at heart. What I really mean is that workers organizing together and using collective bargaining is a proven way to increase worker conditions and pay.

  leadership that don't have the interest of the workers at heart

  workers organizing together and using collective bargaining
So what you're saying is we need decentralized unions on the blockchain?

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

#577

Post by zitterbewegung »

nostromo wrote: post #278
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a famous quote by Bezos is "Your margin is my opportunity". Also, he runs the company the same way. A lot of capex for Amazon is reinvesting in the company.

I see this quote often, but it hasn't really panned out for Amazon in practice. I see other large tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook) with these huge profit margins every quarter, year after year. Amazon has never made a dent in any of them, nor made a sizable profit themselves, despite all of that "opportunity." Perhaps he's not speaking of tech but of retail, in which case the margins of companies like Walmart…

I'm sorry I was unclear but the reason Amazon is purported to have low profits is due to the massive capital expenditure that they do year over year. Hypothetically they could turn a profit when they want to.

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

#578

Post by bertil »

djhworld wrote: post #204
bertil wrote: post #122

Amazon in general, like Uber, considers that warehouse employees and driver are just a needed adjustment until robots take over. They have the consideration that Google/Waymo has for the people filling in “Is this a Stop sign” Catpcha. Thinking of it as sweat labor is not false, but it won’t convince the company change. If you think of it that way, you understand better how Amazon product managers and engineers are O…

> you understand better how Amazon product managers and engineers are OK with the treatment. Or do they really care?

The closest example I can imagine is, the same way medical professionals care about you, or maybe surgeons more than others, or maybe pre-clinical bio-scientists: most of the time, not really. They have their own paperwork, debt, office rivalries, etc.

They do when you are ‘interesting’ (you very much not want to be ‘interesting’) but they actually care about fixing your problem. They probably care more when they see you, just like Amazon employees care after they have been at a warehouse. It drives them to work on their project that will address one small pain-point -- but they can’t care too much, just because their fix takes so much time, if they cared, it would crush them. Both product managers and medical professional have to respect proper, long, tedious testing procedure to make sure their solution works as intended.

I think few people measure explicitly the amount of that bureaucratic detachment (Chaplin, Kafka, Ionesco did) and even less see how it is necessary to progress.

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

#579

Post by notduncansmith »

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?

For the same reason the mouth passes food to the stomach instead of keeping it to itself. The same reason we remove tumors from the human body. The whole organism (or in the case of human populations, superorganism) depends on nourishment flowing through the whole organism, not concentrating in small pockets.

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

#580

Post by gkya »

snoman wrote: post #492
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.

People deride unions, but collective bargaining has also been a very effective solution in the past.

And that's why people deride unions. It's a defence mechanism.
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