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Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

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Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#201

Post by rtkwe »

bertil wrote: post #127
crazygringo wrote: post #95

> Amazon said earlier this month it had hired an additional 100,000 employees Not the main point of the article, but can I just say that's huge . That's... the same size as Google's entire full-time workforce. Granted they're low-skill warehouse positions, not highly paid engineering jobs, but still. The ability of a company to hire one hundred thousand people in a month is absolutely insane.

What it more confusing to me is whether those jobs are supported by automation, and whether Amazon was able to scale up their internal robot production.

IIRC only a few of the warehouses are the highly automated ones where shelves are brought to pickers, most are still people walking isles with carts, biorobots (to borrow a Chernobol term) of a sort but with less radiation (more bear mace though).

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#202

Post by rtkwe »

crazygringo wrote: post #95

> Amazon said earlier this month it had hired an additional 100,000 employees Not the main point of the article, but can I just say that's huge . That's... the same size as Google's entire full-time workforce. Granted they're low-skill warehouse positions, not highly paid engineering jobs, but still. The ability of a company to hire one hundred thousand people in a month is absolutely insane.

They use a lot of contracting for their warehouses and in some places they completely turn over the entire warehouse on average every year. [0] So they're used to constantly hiring people. They also surge up and down massively already each Christmas, in 2019 they hired 200k workers seasonally for Christmas! [1] They might not have expected to do it now but they have the infrastructure to very quickly hire lots of people.

[0] https://www.nelp.org/publication/amazons-disposable-workers-...

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-double-seasonal-hiring-...

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#203

Post by cco »

jachee wrote: post #200
dmoy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I'm not seeing anything in there that's saying number of deaths per day is rising. Can you help me navigate to where that is shown?

Try here: https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19PublicDashboard/Cov...

Gotcha, thanks. That matches the data I originally linked, i.e. new deaths per day has been flat for greater than a month and total deaths are at 21.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#205

Post by looping__lui »

scollet wrote: post #150
looping__lui wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... force people whose job can be done from home to go to the office for the sake of “solidarity” !?

You purposefully misconstrued the argument to sideline any criticism. Don't attack people in defense of a company's honor, it owes nothing to you.

No. The commentors purposefully reverse the causal relationship present here. The short comings in the political and social system CAUSE the stuff that you feel so strongly about. Amazon has been around for 25 years. They may have benefitted from the destruction of any social safety net - but they are not the reason for the current situation. In fact, they are paying above minimal wage, in fact they were offering paid leaves before other companies did.

I get you hate them and take any opportunity for bashing. But that doesn’t mean that cause and effect relationships should be arbitrarily reversed, should it?

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#206

Post by speedgoose »

strictnein wrote: post #72
speedgoose wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do really disagree. This is a source from today : https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/04/24/coronavir...

Which says what I said. They shut down because they needed to figure out what was meant by the "essential" order. The fine was too large to do anything but pause operations. > On April 15, the online store preferred to close its six large French warehouses, ensuring that it had no other choice, given the amount of the penalty. "How to precisely define food, hygiene or medical products?" " Asked the business.

They have a list. But anyway, why are they restricted to "essential" orders only? To improve the safety of the Amazon employees.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#207

Post by looping__lui »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #149
looping__lui wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what do all the comments on my reply have to do with Amazon then? Yeah, I get it, HN doesn’t like them but you say yourself the problem is something else. So why the company bashing?

Because, counterfactually, no Jeff Bezos means no Amazon means no abuse of Amazon employees. So, to some extent, Bezos and Amazon are responsible, even if they aren't wholly responsible.

As I mentioned in another comment: I think you get cause and effect wrong - and that is imho a big issue and makes the entire discussion really annoying.

The destruction of the social safety net in the US allows companies to act differently in the US than in other countries.

So: Amazon pays above minimum wage, gives more leave to its employees than legally required, has stricter safety standards than legally required (didn’t a president just ask in a press conference recently whether drinking bleach couldn’t cure Corona? Where was that again - rural South America?) - and still they are the evil ones.

In Europe, any Amazon warehouse worker’s has full medical health coverage (including his family), his kids go to university for free, get the same schooling as the kids of a CEO, probably has 5-6 weeks vacation and if he quits his job - all of that will still hold. So per your logic, we should praise Amazon for all of that. But that would be equally illogical - because Amazon is not the root cause for all these benefits.

No Jeff Bezos means: well, no shipments in times of dire need, no cloud compute, no 75+k jobs during the biggest “job recession” in American history. Also means no Blue Origin and no Washington Post.

What I find interesting: You guys seem so paranoid and jealous about giving any benefit you have earned yourself so hard (e.g. health insurance) to anybody that appears to achieve less than you do that you collectively fight any improvement to the system. You DO NOT want all the benefits of a social safety net for everybody - hence nobody gets anything. Don’t blame this on Bezos, but blame it on yourself.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#208

Post by wutbrodo »

TomMckenny wrote: post #164
wutbrodo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you wouldn't quit your job if it pays a lot higher than the new unemployment payouts, and/or if you can easily work from home...and nobody but you is claiming that it's a character flaw to choose not to risk your life working if you have the safety net to avoid doing so. This is a really bizarre, immature reaction to a discussion of the incentives trade-off at play here.

I'm not addressing the extremely wise decision that a government make it financially possible for people not to spread disease. Nor disputing that the vast majority of people are willing to do this under these extreme circumstance. I'm addressing the assumption, wrapped in theories about incentives, that everyone (strangely except any persons expounding the theory) is eager to quit work for "welfare" at the first opp…

> I'm addressing the assumption, wrapped in theories about incentives, that everyone (strangely except any persons expounding the theory) is eager to quit work for "welfare" at the first opportunity

Again, the GP comment didn't say or imply anything like this. You're just accusing random commenters of irrelevant thoughtcrime based on trying to fit into every square peg into the round hole of the same vacuous political gamesmanship that dominates most conversations that touch on the economy. Paying attention to incentives doesn't at all imply that you think it's a moral failing for someone to follow incentives. In fact, I'd imagine that it's quite the opposite: people who get hysterical at the sight of rational, apolitical discussion are infinitely more likely to weight descriptions of incentives with moral dimensions that they don't have or need.

This is what it looks like when people are actually interested in trying to understand the economic situation, without immediately having to snap into us-vs-them political gamesmanship. HN isn't perfect, but it's at least better than that; Go to /r/politics or something if that's what you're interested in.

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#209

Post by looping__lui »

uoaei wrote: post #183
looping__lui wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I am German. Assembly line worker generally earn similar to university graduates. It does not matter whether you are employed or not: your kids will get the same quality of schooling (almost no private schools), you get the same healthcare treatment everybody else gets, your kids will go to university for free - if they can’t afford living expenses the government will give them a free loan for that, you get 6 we…

Amazon routinely involves themselves in social/political systems to exploit the circumstances to their benefit. See: their involvement in Seattle politics vs Kshama Sawant; the recent bidding war between cities for Amazon's HQ2 and all the tax benefits that were laid at their feet; the routine union-busting efforts including literally forcing some workers to attend an online course about why unions are bad... the lis…

The Catholic Church in Germany had it written into LAW that they can deny its employees to unionize or strike and they can discriminate them (e.g., fire them) for their personal and religious beliefs. Oh, and did I mention that thousands of cases of sexual abuse went unpunished because the German Catholic Church made sure that they would not be prosecuted?

So, give me a break with for-profit company morale - or put differently: what is YOUR baseline to compare these actions against?

Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave

#210

Post by looping__lui »

jshevek wrote: post #143
looping__lui wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit shocked that all those people downvoting me apparently do not understand a simple fact: democracies give the power to decide over the distribution of wealth and the justification for “taking a fair share” to the majority; that’s how votes work; democracies justify taking 80% of tax from 20% of population by popular opinion that “high incomes should pay greater shares because it is fair”; so how exactly doe…

I agree with your assessment of the nature and consequences of a well-functioning democracy. I think it self evident that ours (USA) is not working especially well, particular with regard to resisting corruption. On the other hand, I'm not sure anyone has blamed this on a single company? Also, you may be interested in this bit from the site guidelines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never doe…

Yes, fair comment on my downvote rant.

I should have put it differently: for those who disagree: please tell me how I’m wrong - so at least I can learn something from it

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