Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon is paying above minimum wage already. What do you suggest they should be paid?
A different answer: Pay them when their labor is actually worth.
how do you determine that if not at what the market sets it at?
Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
171–180 of 419 posts
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, can you see that is ineffective ? you want to make me care, you have to force me to care.
You're literally just saying you're a terrible person. Congratulations, you're literally the problem.
Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how provocative another comment is. Please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you'd take their spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is why you are being criticized: for not caring about other people.
Yes, can you see that is ineffective ? you want to make me care, you have to force me to care.
At this point your comments have the effect of trolling others, whether you meant to or not. Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We've had to ask you this before.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is telling me a terrible person going to be useful ? You have to face reality that like many other people, I like fast shipping and cheap stuff more than amazon worker welfare
Cool. You're one tough dude. We're all jealous of you. Congratulations, it's gonna be a fun life.
Please don't do flamewar or make arguments personal on HN.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because job demand is not a zero-sum game but a function of supply. For every job that gets "destroyed" by technology, several new ones are created. The problem is we, as humans, are terrible at predicting the future - for example, try explaining a mobile app developer job to someone thirty years ago in 1989. Now try imagine what jobs we will have 30 years from now, keeping in mind how off a person in 1989 would…
I don't think a mobile app developer would be too difficult to explain to someone from the 80s: they already understood the concept of computer programmers and software, and "everyone has a pocket computer" existed for decades in science fiction by that time. A better analogy would be explaining something like social media consultants (or for that matter, social media influencers). Hell, _I_ still don't understand th…
True, but even a keyboardless PC in your pocket would have been hard to comprehend, as you would have to explain everything from touch LCD screens to the internet. Also talk about online-only businesses or even drop shipping. In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online. There are catalog analogies, but the concepts are so foreign it makes it difficult to visualize 30 years from now without projecting our own biases onto it.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea so that way they'll have no jobs at all!
Did that sound clever in your head?
Please don't respond to a bad comment with a worse one. Maybe you don't owe the other commenter better, but you do owe the community better if you're posting here.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#177I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless. Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them ove…
> The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through. As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that Amazon can easily hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for t…
> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.
This isn't currently the case by a long shot, compensation is more driven by a monopolist control of the market than anything else. For retail, manufacturing and similar positions (like the amazon warehouse) compensation isn't being allowed to freely vary - businesses have become unreasonably entrenched and therefore retain a strong control of the capital for production, leading to an unbelievably strong wealth inequality. If you asked America who would be willing to take Jeff Bezos's job for a tenth of the compensation (including some stock options to make up for the fact that Bezos actually is paid quite modestly) everyone's hand would shoot up, among those there would be plenty of qualified individuals (including plenty with the aptitude but lacking the prior experience expected) - but for some reason the board of directors hasn't taken this action...
This is a sort of "free market" but not the sort of "free market" that I appreciate.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through. As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that Amazon can easily hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for t…
> . It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you ...think about that.
The problem is that workers in this position are getting squeezed by opposing forces.
On the top you have automation. They have jobs because they cost less than robots. But every wage increase or company benefit or break that reduces worker productivity is a step closer to cost parity with automation, and therefore the unemployment line.
On the other side, they can move away from that line by accepting lower pay or worse working conditions. And there is a trade off between the two as well -- if the job sucks more in a way that allows the business to hire fewer people then they can each get paid more without crossing the line where the jobs get automated.
Blaming Amazon for this is like blaming the local power company for world energy prices. They're just providing one corner of the triangle -- you can work there and have a hard job but better pay than most other unskilled work. If you want an easier unskilled job, those exist too, and they don't pay as much.
But the option to do easy unskilled work for high compensation isn't there. That's the corner of the triangle where the humans cost more than the robots. And maybe that's for the best, but the workers don't need Amazon to actually do that to get the same outcome from their perspective -- they can just quit.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#179I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless. Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them ove…
> I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings. One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless.
If it’s a task that can’t easily be automated and needs to be done, the doing it is creating value.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I voted you up for the general point, I also think that perhaps cutting off the parent quote where you did is a little unfair: > rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work. It's appropriate to "demonize" Amazon, but isn't that observation also correct? Amazon's taking advantage of desperate people, and no matter the job market conditi…
Both observations are correct. There's no need for the "rather than" either/or the OP presented, though. We can protest both.
Not if people only have so much time+energy+motivation to protest things. Attempting to get people angry at one thing is implicitly an attempt to "spend" the limited currency of their motivation-to-make-the-world-a-better-place.
Righteous indignation works similarly to the "warm fuzzies" that cause people to donate to charity. Each person craves some set amount of these resources; once they have enough, they're satisfied, and they stop bothering to do things whose only reward is more of that resource.