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Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#401

Post by rayiner »

_bfhp wrote: post #398
rayiner wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your examples are terrible. East Timor is a classic case of conflict based on language and religion (Indonesia is Muslim, East Timor is Portuguese-speaking and Catholic.) Your water example involves a private company being forced to raise rates to pay for a dam that it was forced to build as part of a government I funded mandate.

The "language and religion" bit bugs me: How do you know if any collection of individuals' prejudices has ever caused war when it could be the invisible hand of capitalist economics? It's invisible. If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in pa…

Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalism by definition requires voluntary exchanges, which don’t happen in master-slave relationships. Again, slavery and serfdom predate capitalism by thousands of years. This is a definitional aspect of capitalism. Indeed, Adam Smith’s wealth of nations was expressly a critique of the then-prevalent system of mercantilism.)

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#402

Post by jyrkesh »

rayiner wrote: post #226
viraptor wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People could choose. Slaves couldn't. They were literally not considered people (which then "improved" to 3/5th of a person). Or to put it another way, "the market" may decide that the optional strategy is when you have no voice and are an obedient resource. In that case your opinion about it being the opposite of a market system doesn't matter.

Is this what they’re teaching in school these days? Market systems by definition by definition require freedom of transaction on both sides. Slavery is by definition not a market. In a very real sense, it was the industrial market economy of the north that beat the agrarian feudalist economy of the south into submission and freed the slaves. (Also, slaves were never considered “3/5 of a person. The text of the releva…

> That’s leaving aside the fact that the whole point of this clause was to limit the power of slave states, and it would’ve been better for purposes of this clause to not count slaves as people at all, to further reduce the power of the south.

Always found the irony of this fascinating. Similarly, women and non-landowners were each counted as a "full person" for the purposes of the census, despite the fact that they couldn't vote, which means that states with higher amounts of income/landowning inequality or a statistically significant female gender disparities would put more voting power in the hand of rich white dudes.

One could imagine some horrific historical dystopia where corrupt rich polygamists are bringing in more women and poor people into their state to gain more power in the House.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#403

Post by JudgeWapner »

rayiner wrote: post #258
JudgeWapner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . 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 someo…

I didn't advocate socialism, and I could not care less about what an Asian country did or didn't try for decades. Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries on earth so I think that's irrelevant to a debate about the ethical ramifications of actions perpetrated by the most profitable corporation in the wealthiest country.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#404

Post by therealdrag0 »

DJHenk wrote: post #350
pathseeker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon pays above minimum wage, so the only thing increasing minimum wage will do is reduce the job supply and make people even more desperate to keep the Amazon jobs.

No, no. If you pay unskilled workers more, they will spend more and the overall economy benefits. There will be more jobs and everybody will be happy. This is called Spray Up Economics.

You also price the bottom end out of the market. Sure mega-corps can afford to pay workers more, but half employees work for small businesses which are very sensitive to minimum wages. When wages go up it can be harder for employers to justify hiring teenagers, older, or disabled folk for entry level jobs like being a bus-boy.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#405

Post by tptacek »

mikeash wrote: post #399
tptacek wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could indeed use their other businesses to fund running their retail/fulfillment business at a loss. But at that point it would be just as rational to jettison those businesses (by spinning them off into another company), and now we're a step behind square one: they lose whatever economies they get from being a single company, their cost basis gets worse, and they're in an even poorer position to pay more. These…

It's also a descriptive observation that they can afford to pay more without destroying the company. Whether they should is a separate question I haven't even attempted to address.

I'm not saying they shouldn't, only that it doesn't follow from the economics of their retail/fulfillment business (to which those employees belong) that they rationally can.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#406

Post by cyphar »

BurningFrog wrote: post #381
cyphar wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since Amazon easily hires and retains people at these wages, there very likely isn't anything wrong with these jobs. At least not compared to similar jobs for the same segment of the work force. I agree that there are almost certainly many other examples of inhumane treatment of low-wage workers. We should fix those too. If low-wage workers had unions then you would be able to have those kinds of cross-industry gro…

The US unemployment rate is at 3.6%, the lowest in living memory. It has never been easier to find a new job. The number of people working multiple jobs to make ends meet peaked in the 90s, but the legend lives on... That you find blue collar job conditions unacceptable says something about you, not too much about the jobs.

The official US employment figures (U3) have very well known flaws when discussing the status of ordinary workers (they don't count people working part-time or casually that wish to work full-time, nor do they count people who have stopped looking for a job). U6 (which includes those factors and thus is a much better indicator of actual unemployment) is sitting around 8%.

More than 70% of Americans live pay-check to pay-check, and 40% cannot afford a $400 out-of-pocket emergency. The rate of people delinquent on their car loans (which is an economic indicator of how ordinary people finances are doing, since car loans are usually the most important credit people have to pay off) is increasing at an alarming rate. Economic problems for US workers didn't end in the 90s.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#407

Post by pardavis »

pwinnski wrote: post #395
pardavis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick workers at robotized FCs stand in one place at the nexus point of conveyors and robots. Robots bring them shelving units of products. Conveyor belts bring them empty containers. The human selects products from the robot and puts it in the container.

If they're going to do that much automation, they might as well have the robot put the product in the container. Which they do. Amazon has both human and robot pickers.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment-center-tours/

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#408

Post by zaksoup »

fao_ wrote: post #378
zaksoup wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so much. All of this analysis is predicated on the idea that Amazon has made this value for its owners through legitimate means and not by underpaying, overworking, and dehumanizing vast swathes of their workforce. It's so bizarre to me that people think it's a reasonable argument to make that "X company couldn't do Y if they payed better" and the response is just a giant shrug and "I guess their workers will ha…

You're getting downvoted but your point is bang on. I don't think people realise how horrible the conditions in Amazon's warehouses are. A year or so ago they hired ambulances to wait outside rather than turning the AC on in the warehouse. They would rather their workers risk death as opposed to paying money to cool them.

> They would rather their workers risk death as opposed to paying money to cool them.

Or rather, it’s cheaper to hire EMTs than it is to climate-control fulfillment centers. Frankly, that seems like the strongest indictment of profit-as-sole-motive I’ve heard, but of course the HN thread can’t handle much in the way of criticizing capitalism or FAANG.

Comments spreading FUD that some sort of deep tech attach of google is responsible for all the negative press get upvoted to the top when the simplest explanation is maybe tech isn’t the perfect good thing everybody wants to believe it is?

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#409

Post by dragonwriter »

tekknik wrote: post #382
dragonwriter wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

This is a very globalist view. What about region specific jobs? The worker in Bangladesh absolutely isn't in the local competitive pool for service jobs. When we talk about exported goods, then sure.

> This is a very globalist view.

We have a very globalized economy, whether that's your preference or not.

> The worker in Bangladesh absolutely isn't in the local competitive pool for service jobs

Jobs are not things that inherently exist in places and which people compete for, jobs are created by the confluence of supply and demand. Yes, some demand is highly localized, such as for certain service work, but demand for service work also tends to have very high price elasticity. Reducing supply can work to drive up market clearing price of labor in those areas, but only while simultaneously reducing the number of units of labor actually traded. You aren't keeping the same jobs and reducing competition, you are reducing the number of actual jobs to essentially those that would have been filled at the higher salary whether or not the lower paid worker was also, additionally, employed. And you are reducing domestic economic activity and velocity of money, because the trades that don't happen in the service economy because of the price effect of the labor constraint either become deferred activity or go somewhere else, mostly goods, some portion of which are imported, either of which is a local loss compared to domestic service trade.

Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day

#410

Post by _bfhp »

rayiner wrote: post #401
_bfhp wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "language and religion" bit bugs me: How do you know if any collection of individuals' prejudices has ever caused war when it could be the invisible hand of capitalist economics? It's invisible. If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in pa…

Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalis…

My point was that lot of leftists/anarchists will say that economic forces, including before the capitalist market economies, can create situations where ideological extremist groups will gain power. They will appear out of nowhere and anyone can say "this looks like social animus just happened to win here", but the underlying cause was some group's will to extract resources from a place or population.

I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"

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