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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

#101

Post by xamuel »

ElBarto wrote: post #22

"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages." Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here. If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.

Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps.

Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them?

This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.

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

#102

Post by will_brown »

sokoloff wrote: post #36

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 compani…

>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company.

In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is unconstitutional.

Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn’t exactly sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon there is a problem, but that isn’t likely.

Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem. Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.

Shouldn’t lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen loopholes? I don’t think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re-evaluated.

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

#103

Post by zaroth »

wetpaws wrote: post #45
la6470 wrote: post #8

TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn’t it? Why is minimum wage still so low and why are all poli…

Just because you don't like it it does not mean this is not true.

That’s just a jab with zero informational content.

It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author’s book on low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so.

I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the warehouses, but it’s really hard to find a neutral source who doesn’t either have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind.

I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog-piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.

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

#104

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

jdpedrie wrote: post #94
ameister14 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and t…

"To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.

Enforcing any law inherently does violence to people. Do you wish to pedestal law above people? And if not, do you want them on equal footing?

I personally would like to work toward a culture that doesn't require law and, barring that, law that peacefully respects a person's decision to revoke consent to be governed at any moment's notice.

Blanket consent for government isn't realistic or sustainable. And even if it were, it isn't consent without being free to revoke it.

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

#105

Post by gagege »

archagon wrote: post #90
gagege wrote: post #70

Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain. The reason this continues to be an issue…

"Why does everyone ignore the fact that is voluntary?" Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they are "fair".

Working at Amazon != selling your body parts.

Some things are immoral and necessarily harmful, working for Amazon is not one of them.

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

#106

Post by notacoward »

sokoloff wrote: post #36

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 compani…

As others have pointed out, the text of the bill does not target Amazon and will likely affect others more. You're complaining about a name.

On the broader point, I think it's highly debatable whether bills should target individual companies. Certainly the arguments against bills of attainder do not apply, because corporations are not people and any doctrine to the contrary is loathsome. They are already given every right that people have, in addition to being immortal and shielded from full liability. The bargain under which they are even allowed to exist has become very one-sided since the abandonment of specific time-limited charters, so allowing them to be regulated individually seems like the least we could do to even the scales.

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

#107

Post by majewsky »

tengbretson wrote: post #73
prolikewh0a wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The American Dream is about inter-generational class mobility. If you bust your tail all your life, you can raise your children's quality of life to a higher standard than your own. Nope. You're just proving my point too. Thanks. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...

If you care to read it, your article doesn't refute anything about what I said. > An American born to a household in the bottom 20% of earnings, for instance, only has a 7.8% chance of reaching the top 20% when they grow up. Again, this article is about intra-generational mobility. The American Dream is about inter-generational mobility.

> The American Dream is about inter-generational mobility.

You're making that claim without any evidence to back it up.

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

#108

Post by majewsky »

amyjess wrote: post #32
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 reque…

To me (as a European), the concept of "denying sick leave" is just bizarre to begin with. When I present a sick note from my doctor, there is literally nothing that the employer can do about it.

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

#109

Post by downrightmike »

sokoloff wrote: post #36

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 compani…

Trust busting was all the rage back with Teddy Roosevelt and Taft against standard oil

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

#110

Post by tzmudzin »

vezycash wrote: post #69
LitFan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Every company is interested in providing as much value to shareholders as possible. To short sellers of Tesla stock, maximum value would be?

Short sellers by definition are not shareholders.
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