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I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

theguardian.com

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Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#31

Post by sorenjan »

grecy wrote: post #10
Rotdhizon wrote: post #6

A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at le…

So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this treatment is legal? Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.

It comes down to what kind of freedom you want. Freedom for companies and their owners to treat employees however they want, or freedom for all citizens to make a living without being mistreated. It's the same thing with health care, freedom to not pay for others than yourself, or freedom to not have to worry about sudden large expenses and personal bankruptcy in case of sickness or injury.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#32

Post by amyjess »

Rotdhizon wrote: post #6

A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at le…

Amazon's treatment of sick people is horrifying: https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/harassing...

I have an online friend who used to work for an Amazon fulfillment center. I say "used to", because she got fired. For being sick. She got food poisoning one day and had to take a week off. When she got sick, she put in a request via MyLeave. Two or three months later, Amazon retroactively denied her request and fired her because she went negative on UPT. That's right, months. As far as she knew, everything was going well, and all of a sudden she was called into HR and unceremoniously dumped because Amazon decided months after the fact to deny her sick leave.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#33

Post by chrisseaton »

nemo44x wrote: post #2

The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think. This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.

After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly.

I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#34

Post by snarfy »

LitFan wrote: post #29
grecy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially I see so many discussions in US politics that go around and around and bend over backwards to never, ever propose the extremely simple and obvious solution.... (...drum roll...) Companies simply lower profits. Conditions for the workers go up with better conditions & higher pay. The prices…

Lowering profits means reduced shareholder value and a lower market capitalization. Every company is interested in providing as much value to shareholders as possible. I don't know all the ins and outs, but I believe public trading and shareholders are to blame here. And again - the middle to upper middle class people who rely on returns from their investments in companies to support their standard of living think th…

It's not that they are interested in providing as much value possible - they are legally mandated. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#35

Post by devit »

EpicEng wrote: post #26
devit wrote: post #11

The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hour…

>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others.

The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#36

Post by sokoloff »

IMO, it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.

If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.

When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#37

Post by fatalVoltage »

EpicEng wrote: post #26
devit wrote: post #11

The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hour…

>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

How is this dystopian though? If you can't provide for your children why have them in the first place?

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#38

Post by andrewla »

dragonwriter wrote: post #18
andrewla wrote: post #14

There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target. One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance…

> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be…

> corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness

Is there anything about Amazon being a corporation that really touches on this, as opposed to their simply being an employer? I feel like an analogy like this is of limited utility anyway. It's too easy to point out all the myriad ways that the existing system is different from feudalism, and it's unclear whether the negative aspects of feudalism continue to apply after having undergone such a radical transition.

> Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the employer to whom employees are bound.

I mean, isn't the point of feudalism actually the former -- that the public authority (the feudal lords) address the basic needs? It is much easier to switch to a different employer than it is to switch to a different public authority. So it seems like what you are advocating is a return to feudalism, rather than trying to remove it.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#40

Post by swarnie_ »

LitFan wrote: post #19
archi42 wrote: post #15

That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.

Why is this downvoted? The only way to make this change is for people to boycott the service.

I'm not even sure why people work there. The warehouses are universally known to be shitty places but people sign up anyway.

Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?

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