Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 419 posts

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#241

Post by anarchodev »

derefr wrote: post #180
untog wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 satis…

I think you might be missing out on two important points here. As an amazon worker making ~$15 an hour, what avenue would you suggest to go about "demonizing" market conditions? What does that mean from their perspective? What does that mean at all, to demonize a condition? On the other hand, the people making those decisions have names, faces, addresses, and we can apply pressure on them where they personally feel it.

Secondly, a strike that's limited in scope or duration can help build solidarity among workers which can be drawn on again and again for more elaborate and risky actions. Think about it -- would the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you at work put his livelihood on the line for you? What if he didn't have to because every single worker on your floor would do so at the same time? This is all a process of transferring power from the C-suite to the workers where it belongs, and I think we need to evaluate the results of such actions based on those broader goals.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#242

Post by [deleted] »

fao_ wrote: post #47
jerf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff's net worth isn't in cash. It's going to be affected much more strangely than your analysis suggests. If Amazon has to raise its labor costs that much, Wall Street will react in a way that is difficult to predict the magnitude, but easy to predict the direction. Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected o…

If a company cannot pay it's workers properly then, to be honest, it really shouldn't exist.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#243

Post by Tade0 »

f00zz wrote: post #227

I'll get downvoted to hell for saying this, but $15/hr is upper middle class pay here. I made less than that for much of my software development career...

So did I, but where I come from $1k/month of take-home-pay is enough to rent a two bedroom apartment and live comfortably.

The US is, all things considered, expensive.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#244

Post by fuzz4lyfe »

newhaus1994 wrote: post #205
mikeash wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers. And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduc…

> When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.” You put your finger on the thing that bothers me most about the free-market critique of labor conditions. They all hand-wave away the responsibility that corporations have as entities run by (presumably) empathetic humans. Amazon does not have to automate away jobs ins…

>Amazon does not have to automate away jobs instead of giving workers fairer conditions and wages.

I'm Amazons competitor, I automate away the jobs and pay the lowest wages possible. Now my goods are cheaper than Amazons and you buy from me instead.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#245

Post by just_myles »

matz1 wrote: post #143
just_myles wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? From an approach perspective? Shouldn't the first thing you do to understand the problem is to see it from the other persons perspective? Empathy is not the end all be all. It's a start.

I'm criticizing the approach. Government is the only entity more powerful than amazon. You want change ? Imo more effective to do it through government compared with advocating boycott.

Thank you for clarifying your point. Understood and fair. I think that of course government is one mechanism to create positive change.

However, the problem with our government currently is that there are other outside factors that would get in the way (Like corporate lobbying.) of any kind of labor initiative.

I will say that boycotting used to be a viable means of getting your point across (Civil right boycotts of the 60s as an example.). The problem I think nowadays is that it has lost it's teeth due to lack of a collective follow through (See the most recent Gucci boycott/"protest" from a few months ago.).

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#246

Post by fuzz4lyfe »

mikeash wrote: post #217
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees. Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be. To pay significantly more…

Amazon has a profit of over $11 billion last year. They can definitely afford to pay their warehouse workers better.

When you eat out you can probably afford to tip better, why don't you? Do you hate restaurant workers?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#247

Post by dllthomas »

drup86 wrote: post #240
dragonwriter wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think at this point most smart members of HN should realize that the only reason immigration has much momentum is because the democrat party relies on it to win elections. It's the “Democratic Party” and, no, they don't. > All I see from Democrats is all talk about helping the poor but they don't do the most sensible and easiest thing to help the poor, simply limit the pool of labor by limiting immigration of low…

So effectively you're saying: As far as democrats are concerned, a worker from Bangladesh is just as deserving of a given job as a worker from Florida. At that point, the party doesn't seem to be caring about American workers, but behaving more like a "global party". Thinking further, might as well normalize wages for all low skilled american workers across the 7 billion or so world population. I mean why have border…

IIUC, he's saying that as far as capital is concerned, the worker in Florida is already competing with the worker in Bangladesh.

Not weighing in, just trying to clarify.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#248

Post by TallGuyShort »

influx wrote: post #156
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you just raise the minimum wage. We arrived at this point because those with money use it to influence government to their exclusive benefit.

Amazon is paying above minimum wage already. What do you suggest they should be paid?

This is reminding me of a discussion about Facebook's content enforcement, where I still don't understand the argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20222594. Pressuring people to miss bathroom breaks is wrong, I'd agree - I'm all for that being legally punishable if it isn't already. But the argument gets to a point where people are simply saying that the job inherently sucks anyway, and the people who are voluntarily doing it in exchange for the money would be better off not even being given the option and being involuntarily unemployed, and if necessary, the company employing them shouldn't even exist if that job must be done. I don't understand it.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#249

Post by tachyonbeam »

xtracto wrote: post #70

Between this and the Mechanical Turk article I read earlier today, I am left thinking about these type of jobs. There is this "chasm" of things that machines still cannot but that are repetitive and boring for humans, for which the value to human-effort ratio is small. I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of these types of works. Now, the interesting thing about some of these jobs…

> I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of these types of works.

On the other hand, people are hard at work trying to automate these jobs. Amazon would love nothing more than to have a completely robotic warehouse and a fleet of delivery robots that run 24/7.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#250

Post by drup86 »

dllthomas wrote: post #247
drup86 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So effectively you're saying: As far as democrats are concerned, a worker from Bangladesh is just as deserving of a given job as a worker from Florida. At that point, the party doesn't seem to be caring about American workers, but behaving more like a "global party". Thinking further, might as well normalize wages for all low skilled american workers across the 7 billion or so world population. I mean why have border…

IIUC, he's saying that as far as capital is concerned, the worker in Florida is already competing with the worker in Bangladesh. Not weighing in, just trying to clarify.

The problem is that all the low hanging fruit of offshoring labor has already been picked, so to bring up that point again and again is disingenuous.

We're talking about jobs that have not been able to be offshored for some reason or another.

If amazon could offshore these jobs to some low cost country they'd do that in a heartbeat but these are residual low skilled jobs that simply couldn't be easily outsourced.

And the poster above is arguing in favor of more low skilled immigration to dilute the power of the low skilled worker.

Post reply on HN