Do you want to pay more for Amazon products? Because that's what you'll get if Mr. Socialist Sanders has his way.
I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
121–130 of 210 posts
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#122My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses. Then people will complain they lost their jobs...
If the Amazon warehouses become fully automated and a big group of people lose their jobs and there's no safety net, the warehouses will be burned to the ground within 24 hours.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#123A 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.
I think the problem is working-class people are sufficiently our of sight, out of mind for the comfortable upper-middle-class people with enough sway to actually change things.
When you reduce people to numbers and abstract ideas, you can treat them pretty poorly and still sleep at night.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#124IMO, 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 cor…
That $14B in SNAP benefits is because Walmart is a significant market share grocer and people who receive SNAP benefits buy food at Walmart with those benefits.
I'm not sure how that makes Walmart a villain in the current discussion. Target takes in about $5B revenue from sales under SNAP, Aldi about $4.5B, and Kroger just under $4B. Companies who serve SNAP recipients should be lauded not vilified, IMO. They're serving a generally underserved constituency.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#125The 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…
UBI is an absolutely terrible idea by the way. The problems you speak of would only get worse.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years. The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense o…
> 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…
Raise corporate income taxes, but deduct all employee compensation from taxable income? Tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income? Penalize companies that spend less than X% or their revenues on employee compensation, where X% is the median labor expense fraction in that industry?
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#127How can anyone be so naive as to believe the bill would target a single company.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 o…
> so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).
Who pays for the abortion?
If someone conceives children without permission multiple times, wouldn't be it cheaper just to kill them so as to prevent them from consuming resources without permission? or should we merely forcibly sterilize them?
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#129"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.
But raising minimum wage at what cost?
It's already gotten really hard for high school kids to find work. Raising minimum wage will just make that worse.
Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You're not misunderstanding anything, the problem is there's really nothing true about the anti-Amazon media propaganda. It's important to separate the media fantasy from the facts in the real world. In the media fantasy: 1. Amazon workers are so desperate for jobs they have no choice but to work for Amazon under prison-like conditions. 2. Amazon warehouse jobs are targeted at "left behind" workers who have no other…
> You're not misunderstanding anything, the problem is there's really nothing true about the anti-Amazon media propaganda. It's important to separate the media fantasy from the facts in the real world.
I've hear several conflicting reports on this - enough to understand that there is some variation and Amazon doesn't treat all workers the same way. That's why when one person reports inhuman behavior and another calls it bullshit, they're both right.