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Please explain how this article was: 1. vile 2. right-wing 3. strawman-bestrewn 4. ass-covering 5. spreading FUD thanks
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/quillette/ welcome
Last year, I was interviewed for a public radio show in Europe. There was nothing more exciting for me to be in the spotlight. A week later they ran the interview and it was eerie to hear myself say things I didn't remember saying. I mean, I said it, but I didn't say it like that. At first I thought I was crazy and didn't remember the interview correctly. Luckily, I had recorded the whole session on my computer. I wa…
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Yes and no. I was once in a HR seminar where they welcomed you to the company. When the woman said "we get 19 days PTO a year", you'd be surprised how many people shot up and said "can we start taking them right now?" Before they had even worked a day! PTO days are accurred by hours worked. For me, it's ~6 hours per 15 calendar days. You think you're entitled to PTO having worked 0 hours?...
For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.
He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.
Let Amazon workers fight for their rights, why are outsiders who do not do that work skeptical of their concerns? What is the basis?
We are always talking about free speech, democracy and protest and yet it seems when people use these rights a whole group of prosperous and well off individuals who don't have anything to do the conditions of the protestors rush to trivialize and dismiss their concerns. There is something extremely mean and smallminded about this.
I love this article. It’s so hard to find moderate voices, especially when algorithmic curation tends to surface outrage first. As the author puts it: “I don’t object to journalists writing about the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees. I only wish they would do so fairly. Just because a journalist has found an Amazon employee somewhere who got sprayed with bear repellant, that doesn’t mean Amazon employees s…
Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the infotainment business and need to sell clicks. Reporting that working at a warehouse is “hard work but mostly okay,” is not going to advance that reporters career or help the publication make money. But finding a shocking and at least mostly true story, and ignoring whether or not it’s a 1% outlier, just might. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. W…
Because if journalists stop writing fair articles in the longer term our societies will lose a lot more than just a bunch of $ in the coffers of the press owners.
When I was young I did agency employment for a few years between leaving school and figuring out what I wanted to do. A lot of that was in warehouses (I also worked in greenhouses harvesting cucumbers 45C and 100% humidity, a paint factory moving 15l paint tins all day - never eaten so much or been so fit, 15l tins of bitumen are heavy to handball all day, steel plant that powder coated so hot tanks of acid and full…
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For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.
I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year. He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.
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> It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction. Be that as it may, agitating f…
That's a valid concern and I think there's no really great path forward, aside from broad structural changes that will blunt the negative consequences of automation: how do you balance good working conditions with the specter of automation? If human labor forever has to undercut the cost of automation, then we can't discount the human cost of doing so.
People think it's a huge issue because they misread a study about computer manufacturers producing exponentially faster computers since 1970 as saying the manufacturers fired all their workers.
For a second I thought nobody was going to stick up for the bajillion dollar mega corporation. Every employer I've worked for has had: * Billions of dollars less money than Amazon * Better working conditions Amazon doesn't need your voice. The workers who fear an extended bathroom break might get them fired do.
Last year, I was interviewed for a public radio show in Europe. There was nothing more exciting for me to be in the spotlight. A week later they ran the interview and it was eerie to hear myself say things I didn't remember saying. I mean, I said it, but I didn't say it like that. At first I thought I was crazy and didn't remember the interview correctly. Luckily, I had recorded the whole session on my computer. I wa…