Why does big always become evil?
It's not evil per se. They just have to serve the moloch:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#42Why does big always become evil?
In someways small companies have more potential to be evil, because they often fly "under the radar". "We shouldn’t fetishize mom and pop operations. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections." See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-...
Nobody "fetishizes" small business. This sounds like big corporation mouthpiece rhetoric. Big business is responsible for wealth concentration and irresponsible economics that hurt everyone. The alternative? Small business. It's easy to see why people might prefer a reality where small businesses continue to exist. Not everyone likes the Orwell novel we're writing.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#43Why does big always become evil?
If you don't do it, your competitors will, and then eat you alive.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#44Why does big always become evil?
Maybe it's that capitalism is incompatible with morality and the government isn't doing it's job to force behaviors that are necessary, but not aligned with capitalism.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#45Seeing this on CNBC really makes me happy that it's getting some actual coverage. I hope having someone who isn't just a wagie quit in protest will make others at Amazon come to terms with their employer, and acknowledge their practices.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#46Why does big always become evil?
The virtues and vices of any large group of people sort of coalesce into a big gestalt "culture." Companies hire for very specific virtues, related to competence and effectiveness, that they then amplify or dampen with metrics and training and so on.
Meanwhile, society and human nature have some baseline of pressures acting on them that amplify or dampen different sets of virtues and vices. Among these are a certain level of greed and cutthroatedness.
Companies rarely actively select against cupidity or avarice, and insofar as they do it's usually fine as long as it flows downward and enriches the company overall. So, as the company scales up it scales up in its capacity for evil too.
Though it's not as if "small" can't be evil as well. Small businesses are still part of a network of small businesses and subject to market forces that also select for and against different behaviors, many of which involve screwing over their workers.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#47Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#48Why does big always become evil?
Big organizations (public or private) are always dominated by internal politicking - there's a lot of scope for opportunistic behavior and very little transparency of any sort. Sometimes a whistleblower throws some light on the dynamics of what's going on inside the organization, as we saw here - but this is incredibly rare. It's a marvel that large-scale profit-seeking companies even manage to be halfway functional, but that's usually because the technical benefits of coordinating effort on a large scale overwhelm the organizational drawbacks; Amazon's logistics operations are actually a case in point.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#49The implication that race or gender is involved in the firings is pretty silly.
If the firings disproportionately or systemically impact races or genders, the firings can be racist/sexist -- even if race or gender is not involved in the firing decision.
Racism and discrimination are related but separate concepts.
Re: Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
#50In my opinion, it won’t do anyone any good for him to quit “in solidarity with” the fired workers. If he wants the situation to improve, he should remain VP and use his power to help make things better. Now he‘ll probably just be replaced with someone who is less sympathetic to the workers.
He also wrote that he was quite happy with the ethics (at least w.r.t. labor management) in his own division in AWS. It seems he had basically no influence on warehouse labor policies otherwise yes he might have stayed