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What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

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Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#151

Post by ppod »

nerdponx wrote: post #133
jakeogh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vote with my money, constantly. So Amazon was out long ago. Plenty of people I know pay attention to who owns what. To us, it's irrelevant how much they sockpuppet.

Where do you buy used books? I like the local bookstore as mch as the next guy, but I don't know of any reliable source for used books other than Amazon.

Also, I don't understand the presumption that independent stores are better on any of the dimensions that Amazon is bad. In my experience as a factory or call-centre worker, the smaller the business is the more likely it is that they will try to avoid tax on cash transactions, ask their workers to work unreasonable hours or accept average rates of pay that are less than minimum wage, violate health and safety laws, etc.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#152

Post by TangoTrotFox »

krapp wrote: post #125
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people actually propose as an alternative? By all accounts it seems like the media examples of things such as 'peeing in bottles' are extremely isolated incidents and not representative of normal working conditions. Anywhere that has hundreds of thousands of employees - you're going to be able to find some crazy isolated anecdotes. The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box…

>The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box mover get paid? The thing is, there is the value of a job to the employer, and the value of employment to the employee. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a full time employee, at the very least, to be paid a living wage. Someone willing to commit that much of their life to a company should be compensated enough to allow them to ho…

Think about what you're doing. I am asking for specific ideas and numbers, and you're responding with homily. This is what I mean. You can't just critique and moralize without offering specific workable solutions. The system we have is not great. Who wouldn't want a world where everybody could just have more or less whatever they want, live extremely comfortably, and for it to all be completely sustainable? But that's also not realistic.

That's why I bring up the GDP and what it actually means. GDP is literally the market rate of every single good and service produced in this nation. And that only equals out to $50k per person. Our wealth really is in complete spite of our economy -- that's without even getting into the fact that the GDP is currently at record levels.

Various areas have tried now increasing the minimum wage to a level approaching $15 with results that have been, at best, 'mixed'. The point is that you cannot simply ignore economic realities when trying to create a better life for people. This is specifically why social economic systems have been tried numerous times, yet they seem to invariably result in literal starvation. They're well intentioned, but out of touch with reality - and the consequences for putting homily above reality tend to be a brief period of feel good, followed by devastation.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#153

Post by gldalmaso »

ams6110 wrote: post #147
bachbach wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people have forgotten or never experience the satisfaction of doing work - especially after being out of work for a while. Keep it up! :) On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat wor…

Right, for someone who sits behind a keyboard all day, working on your feet in a warehouse packing boxes, in a kitchen cooking burgers, or outside hauling lumber around a construction site in the rain, sounds like horrible work. If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I'm sure people get hurt, it's physical work. It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and…

> If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there.

I don't know how the conditions at Amazon warehouses truly are, but this statement doesn't sound correct to me. I can think of countless examples of workers that accept from sub-optimal conditions to outright modern slavery simply because they can't find an exit to the system of cheap labor exploitation.

Maybe this can be scoped down to some developed countries or some cities in developed countries, but certainly doesn't hold true for most developing countries and certainly not for past history in basically anywhere.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#154

Post by detaro »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #113
sireat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer lies in unequal bargaining power, public shaming/awareness is the best we can do. There's the added irony of Mr. Bezos publicly the richest man in the world having his workers hold their pee. Amazon will not care about its least protected workers until Amazon feels the backlash in lowered sales. If your locality has Amazon warehouse as the largest employer your options are quite limited. It is similar to h…

What do people actually propose as an alternative? By all accounts it seems like the media examples of things such as 'peeing in bottles' are extremely isolated incidents and not representative of normal working conditions. Anywhere that has hundreds of thousands of employees - you're going to be able to find some crazy isolated anecdotes. The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box…

Convincingly wiping out those "isolated incidents" would be a good start. Making sure those can be safely reported, and systemic reasons encouraging them are removed. Low pay is one thing, bad working conditions another, the latter being a lot harder to justify.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#155

Post by Moodles »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #152
krapp wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box mover get paid? The thing is, there is the value of a job to the employer, and the value of employment to the employee. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a full time employee, at the very least, to be paid a living wage. Someone willing to commit that much of their life to a company should be compensated enough to allow them to ho…

Think about what you're doing. I am asking for specific ideas and numbers, and you're responding with homily. This is what I mean. You can't just critique and moralize without offering specific workable solutions. The system we have is not great. Who wouldn't want a world where everybody could just have more or less whatever they want, live extremely comfortably, and for it to all be completely sustainable? But that'…

Indeed some would argue that a minimum wage can be quite damaging: for those in society who are unproductive so as not to be worth $x an hour, a minimum wage of >= $x actually definitely excludes them from the workforce. They’re even more damned than before. Now I’m not sure either way if a minimum wage of 0 or $x is a good idea, but I would generally go with whatever the evidence suggestions (and I havn’t looked into it). What I find really bizarre is why yours and mine comments are being downvotes so much. Are we not contributing to the discussion? Bit of an echo chamber around here.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#157

Post by Vinnl »

jancsika wrote: post #138
adventured wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon…

> Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved? Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the…

I think it was an observation of their mental process at work, in which we tend to remember things we read as facts even if we do not know they are true (or even if we know they are not true at the time of reading). In other words: the change of opinion was not necessarily rational, why is why they said "It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda."

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#158

Post by TangoTrotFox »

detaro wrote: post #154
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people actually propose as an alternative? By all accounts it seems like the media examples of things such as 'peeing in bottles' are extremely isolated incidents and not representative of normal working conditions. Anywhere that has hundreds of thousands of employees - you're going to be able to find some crazy isolated anecdotes. The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box…

Convincingly wiping out those "isolated incidents" would be a good start. Making sure those can be safely reported, and systemic reasons encouraging them are removed. Low pay is one thing, bad working conditions another, the latter being a lot harder to justify.

Completely agreed about trying to ensure there are as few systemic issues as possible. But on the issue of 'isolated incidents', you have to be realistic. Amazon's size alone would put it as the 31st largest city in the US. And they, like ever more companies, have massive turnover at all levels.

Expectation of no isolated incidents is equivalent to expectation of never hiring bad apples -- and that's just impossible. It's impossible even at much smaller companies. The only difference is when Amazon screws up, it makes front page international news, and when e.g. you or I screw up, the response is much more isolated.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#159

Post by sonnyblarney »

agwa wrote: post #43

Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses. You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various…

"a serious PR problem" ... just a PR problem?

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#160

Post by ams6110 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #75
eksemplar wrote: post #68

Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? A company that big will have some terrible managers, and the fact that it’s not discovering those easily, is problematic, but that doesn’t mean the entire company is rotten. I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments…

The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk" article from the NYT a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... Anecdotally, as you say, that does seem to depend a lot on your department--good local management ca…

Microsoft in the past had a pretty notorious employee performance system called "stack ranking" where basically no matter how well you did your job you could get classified as a "bottom performer" because a certain percentage had to be ranked lowest. It was a contributor to poor morale and employee stress. Many sales-oriented companies (Oracle?) will have similar performance metrics, e.g. next-to-impossible sales goals, etc. Amazon is not the only company to have a high-pressure work environment.
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