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Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

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Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#221

Post by crdoconnor »

ip26 wrote: post #210
crdoconnor wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet sinking the company is not in the interest of the worker. It's not necessarily a big deal. The workers can just go and get another job. It's the owners who are really crying. It's not especially perverse for unions to be indifferent to the risk of sinking the company if the people they represent hold no stake in it. Especially since the threats that this will happen from the owners will be overblown.

I guess I didn't mention, but I'm most specifically thinking of unions that have sunk the company in a fight over pension obligations. Union has a choice of reduced pension payout, or drive the company under & everybody loses their pension as a result. Union, unwilling to reduce pension payout, chooses the latter. Everybody winds up worse off. It almost reminds me of The Scorpion and The Frog

Every time I've heard of this happening it's because the pension fund has been raided beforehand.

I guess it's like that "fairness experiment" where monkeys would rather deprive the other side of 8 berries than take 2.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#222

Post by andrestan »

techsupporter wrote: post #18
andrestan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

In every thread like this, there's an argument like yours, taking the absolutist view that individual workers should have unlimited freedom ("completely and totally incapable," as you wrote) to sacrifice themselves for money. In the micro sense, you are possibly correct. However, as a society, we have decided at the macro level that no, workers are not free to make that decision because to do so would inherently driv…

I'm not taking an absolutist view at all. I was asking questions challenging a blanket statement without any supporting evidence that the workers or society or some very broad concept's welfare was improved by removing performance based incentives. I don't even make a positive statement at all.

These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?

I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#223

Post by andrestan »

cortesoft wrote: post #20
andrestan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide. We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think t…

Possibly, but generally the difference is one of power structure. With OSHA, workplace safety laws are put in place to protect workers from the tyranny of their need for wages. People need to work and therefore their workplaces should pose a maximum amount of risk that society defines as reasonable. What's at stake here is not the general safety environment of the employee but rather the amount of effort the employee VOLUNTARILY chooses to exert. Who are we to define how much effort an employee chooses to exert? Who are we to define incentives that encourage a worker to exert more effort? None of this seems reasonable to me.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#224

Post by andrestan »

mikestew wrote: post #29
andrestan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.

Citation needed. This makes no sense. There's always going to be heterogeneity in output per worker in every role. Amazon pays for a baseline of expected output and wants to ensure that within a role they can manage to capture those workers whose productivity will exceed that. To do so, they provide performance bonuses. Not everyone will get the performance bonuses. Amazon is willing to pay the bonuses because the increased output is worth the increased cost. This race to the bottom isn't at all aligned with reasoning and could only happen in a monopsony which Amazon is obviously not.

For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#225

Post by andrestan »

notfromhere wrote: post #17
andrestan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

Because people have a long-established inability to fully realize the long-term impacts of things when compared to short-term benefit?

"people" aren't but you are able to for them? What makes you so much better than the workers at Amazon?

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#226

Post by tropo »

Fomite wrote: post #102
vkou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it also means the company becomes very adversarial with their work-force and spends most of its time trying to figure out how to get around the demands of the union. Companies don't become more adversarial when they deal with a union - what happens is that the union shines some sunlight on any existing adversarial relationships. When your boss asks you to work an extra hour without pay, and you tell him to poun…

This. It's only "adversarial" because now the workers are capable of being a meaningful adversary.

There is no need to be adversarial as long as workers have the right to leave. These are not slaves. They only stay until they can get a better deal (pay, respect, safety...) elsewhere.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#227

Post by lovich »

ericd wrote: post #213
lovich wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the management gets to decide who gets raises, why wouldn't they give it to themselves. You've never seen companies do layoffs right before the end of the quarter so management can get raises, and then immediately go on a hiring spree when the new quarter starts so they can get the work done again?

I haven't, that sounds like a massive waste of time and energy, so those managers are doing a very bad job if their goal is to get stuff done. Most well functioning companies that I've seen act very much the opposite. I could believe that some companies are crappy enough to do that, though.

Their goal isn't to get stuff done. No one in management other than maybe founder's have a goal to get stuff done. Their goal is to make money and getting stuff done is one possible way to do that. Well run companies manage to properly align the interests of the company and the management and the workers all towards those same goals.

A lot of companies are not well run

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#228

Post by chapekaloco »

mabbo wrote: post #198
ioulian wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but I'm from Europe, and when you are saying "you get $15 an hour", do you include taxes or not and how much taxes do you have there?

Presuming the previous lives in Allentown PA (ABE2 fulfillment center?), and presuming 2000 hours of work per year at $16/hour ($32,000/year), the tax calculator I found online says that taxes and social security add up to around $5222. $500 less under the tax changes Trump passed for next year. So after taxes around $13.40 to $13.70 per hour.

I am indeed at ABE 2. Just FYI.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#229

Post by chapekaloco »

ioulian wrote: post #195
chapekaloco wrote: post #191

Hi, I work at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania. I agree with one of Amazon's sentiments regarding these changes - that it's better to get more direct pay than to "hope" for a bonus" However, the nature of our VCP (variable compensation pay) bonus is such that half of it is actually completely and fully within an individual's control. Half of the VCP bonus is given based on our own personal attendance. If we use pe…

Slightly off topic, but I'm from Europe, and when you are saying "you get $15 an hour", do you include taxes or not and how much taxes do you have there?

The $15/hr figure is gross before any taxation and before any payments into insurance/etc

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#230

Post by tropo »

barry-cotter wrote: post #100
cortesoft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide. We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think t…

If you look at a graph of historical workplace deaths you can’t tell where OSHA was enacted. There’s no change in the rate of decrease of workplace deaths. As far as minimum wage laws go less than 5% of the US workforce gets paid minimum wage, and unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit. Minimum wage laws are a great way to reduce workfo…

OSHA is why I can't have a perfectly normal UL-listed power strip at work, but somehow a UPS (with a battery full of lead and sulfuric acid) is perfectly fine. Every place where I'd want a power strip, I have to use a UPS.

Given the evidence, OSHA looks dumb and useless.

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