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Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

bbc.co.uk

251–260 of 419 posts

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#251
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not an attack, it's a statement.

The OP here is literally saying "I want cheap shipping and I don't care if the companies providing it actually hurt people just to save a few cents".

I can't think of any way to respond that isn't pointing out that holding that position makes you a monster.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you determine that if not at what the market sets it at?

There is no other way. The market ALWAYS sets it, no matter how strong it’s regulated. The real minimum wage is zero.

But the regulation strongly influences what the market will pay. The trend of allowing companies to have employees sign non-competes for relatively low skilled jobs, for example, depresses wages by impeding competition for labor.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#253
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employee, and no one else, gets to decide what they want for their body. The fact is, OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body. What is deeply immoral is third parties using sticks and firearms to overrule that person’s choices. Their body, their choice.

I must admit, this is the first time I've seen a libertarian bold enough to dress up something as inane as dismantling OSHA with rhetoric deliberately evocative of modern progressive social movements. As though, by dismantling an agency dedicated to assuring safe working conditions, you're doing something akin to legalizing same-sex marriages. I have mad respect to anybody that bold, but give me a break!

Why do someone’s own choices about their own body remain valid when you agree with them, but not when you disagree with them?

I have given you a break: I have given you a logical, rational, sincere position, without snark or subterfuge.

I did not argue for dismantling OSHA; these are moral statements independent of any national law.

If anything, I argued against using violence to force people to do things (which is what OSHA, among thousands of other governmental organizations of every flavor around the world, do as a matter of course).

Using violent coercion to alter a consensual agreement between two adults interacting voluntarily is immoral, and denies the agency of the people agreeing to trade on those terms.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#254
If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence to enter our market and outcompete us.

Jussayin'

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I try to tip well. If you think I should tip better, make your case. If I disagree, I’ll make my case. I can guarantee you that if that happens, my argument won’t be that I’m tipping the market rate.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#256
post #254

If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence to enter our market and outcompete us. Juss…

Glad someone finally said it. What's stopping these data collecting companies from cornering a huge amount of markets?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#257
post #240

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…

> As far as democrats are concerned, a worker from Bangladesh is just as deserving of a given job as a worker from Florida.

Nope. I'm saying that Democrats realize that with relatively free movement of capital and goods, stopping a worker from Bangladesh from entering the US doesn't remove that worker from the pool of labor competing with US labor.

I didn't say anything even remotely related to what anyone deserves, and deserving something more doesn't change the facts about what does and doesn't work to achieve it.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#258

Earlier 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.

> That bothers you...think about that.

India went through a socialist phase where for decades people “emphasize[d] with the poor” and implemented public policy. And where did that lead? Decades of economic malaise. In 1991, the World Bank and IMF required economic liberalization as part of a bail out, and starting in 2000 growth accelerated dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

As someone from that part of the world, yes, your mode of thinking “bothers” me. When my family left Bangladesh in 1989, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Since that time, real GDP per capita has grown by a factor of 6. To put that in relative terms, it’s like going from Guatemala to Germany in one generation. Capitalism is a fricking miracle. There are of course such things as market failures which require regulation. But those can be articulated without emotional appeals to “empathy.” Making policies based on “empathy” and notions of power relationships between workers and companies is destructive and perpetuates poverty.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#259
post #180
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…

One of the easiest and best forms of protest is to stop spending money with Amazon, Walmart or >

Sometimes it is difficult - if Comcast is the only game in our area, then we don't have a choice. Otherwise, this hits these companies where it matters most - their profits.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#260
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your system, if I pay an employee to climb an unsafe ladder, OSHA has no right to slap me for that because the employee consented? That sounds awful. There would be many preventable deaths and injuries under a system that neuters OSHA; what you're proposing is deeply immoral.

The employee, and no one else, gets to decide what they want for their body. The fact is, OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body. What is deeply immoral is third parties using sticks and firearms to overrule that person’s choices. Their body, their choice.

That's why hundreds of millions of smokers, smoked, after all. They carefully weighed up the evidence, using their medical training, avoided the lies from tobacco company advertising, used their "it's just common sense" know-everything superpower, and - in an almost unprecedented moment of human rational decision making - concluded that smoking was better than non-smoking.

No, it didn't happen that way. People smoked because it was cool, and it was cool because marketing people explicitly made it look cool. "Torches of freedom"[1] was how Edward Bernays set out to get women smoking cigarettes, for one famous example, generic "cool guy with a cigarette" in Hollywood films wasn't put there by accident, for another. And one of the main reasons smoking was pushed out was that second hand smoking gives other people cancer. People bought arsenic wallpaper and arsenic cloth. They did not decide, rationally and in full knowledge of the best available information, that green wallpaper was a better choice than their infant child staying alive. Or do you think they did choose that?

OSHA has no moral basis to override or overrule that human being’s own decisions for their own body.

OSHA's basis comes from the fact that there are many human biases, many con tricks, and many unintuitive risks, collectively learned over decades, which one human cannot rationally learn and consider in a short time. Even if that were all it was - a single human choosing whether they gamble with their health - it might be OK, but this is in the situation where a large and well resourced company has a profit-motive to exploit the humans, to coerce them and mislead them and pressure them, to take such risks without due consideration.

And worse, like the case of second hand smoke - you might be willing to climb a high structure without a safety harness, but your willingness means other people will be compelled to do so - by their employers and by peer pressure. You'll be faster, and your equipment costs will be lower. But you'll be putting other people at risk too - if you fall on a coworker, if you drop something on a bystander, if you slip on the floor in your gripless boots and knock someone else - your choices affect other people.

And society is willing to say "we don't want that. You must wear a harness, so that everyone can wear a harness. You must wear grippy boots, so other people can work safely around you.", without "fearing for your life" being a thing which excludes you from the workforce.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

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