Bye, Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Bye, Amazon

#611

Post by ashtonkem » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #561

ashtonkem wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a few people who worked at Whole Foods before they got bought; they seemed relatively happy with how they were treated.

>before they got bought this is the key - the bigger the organization, the further removed the workers are from the leadership. Consolidation and expansion removes a company's humanity. There's tons of examples of smaller companies that treat all their staff well. There's no examples of huge conglomerates who do.

I mean, Whole Foods wasn’t small before Amazon bought them. They’ve gotten bigger, no doubt, but they weren’t exactly a neighborhood coop either.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#612

Post by supergeek133 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

NullInvictus wrote: post #564

supergeek133 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales). For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was…

I have been involved in both working in services and in the management level of a restaurant business. It is still my opinion that the pay, disposability, lack of dignity, lack of future, lack of community, and disrespect are the primary drivers for bad workplace behavior. Treat people like animals, and they will act like animals. It's just exploitation, and I work my current job with fear of having to go back to tha…

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist.

Yeah, I agree, but I think another false general assumption people might make is "every retail or food service job is minimum wage" and that every owner is just shortchanging their workers to pay themselves more. That isn't the case across the board.

Best Buy doesn't pay minimum wage, heck even when I started there as a part time computer tech in 2002 I was paid $9.50/hr. That being said with the 1 year $80/share price they can damn well afford to pay more.

My friend who owns the pizza business pays more than his franchise based competitors, he has employees who have worked for him for years because of this. So he's not paying close to minimum wage but the "meta market" for a pizza keeps his prices in a certain range. As I mentioned in a below comment there are other market forces at work here (e.g., a national franchise has buying power for food price reductions, etc).

So knowing his very loyal customer base, if he had to increase prices to support extra cost, they'd probably stay to a certain extent, but maybe that results in less employees or hours. Who knows.

> If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.

Yeah, that's my whole point. Any legislation that increases wages has a disproportionate impact based on your business, and SBA says small business makes up 48% of jobs[0].

But like you said, the conversation is a level up from this.

[0]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...

Re: Bye, Amazon

#613

Post by miscPerson » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

roosterdawn wrote: post #392

__s wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very lit…

This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise. With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon…

Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that.

Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer.

Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#614

Post by rosywoozlechan » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

behringer wrote: post #596

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #590

If conscientious people leave Amazon it will result in Amazon being less conscientious, but it will probably not result in Amazon being any less powerful or dominant. I also think Amazon a right to expect its employees to abide by its rules. Individuals have a right to organize and to protest, even when they're supposed to be at work, but companies have a right to want to discontinue their business relationship, that…

AFAIK in the US it's illegal to fire somebody due to union organizing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting#United_States Therefore, the employees made no mistake if Amazon breaks the law by firing unionizing employees.

I am not convinced that the protests were attempts to unionize or that the law is clear that on if these firings at Amazon were illegal.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#615

Post by hourislate » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

Completely anecdotal.

It's possible some Amazon Warehouses are run better than others. A friend who recently got a job (5 weeks ago) at one of Amazons warehouses (NJ/NYC area) has only praise for the way things are run. They take his temperature 3 times a day, provide a mask, constantly monitor social distancing, clean washrooms every hour, enforce social distancing in any break rooms, work areas, etc. He says it's never an issue with breaks, lunch, etc. He has mentioned that they encourage him to keep an eye out for other positions he might have an interest in since he is eligible (after 30 days)to apply (he has some skills that can be more useful to Amazon).

I was always under the assumption from what I have read that Amazon was a sweat shop. It seems that at least his facility is run very well.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#616

Post by maximente » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

raven105x wrote: post #536

stupidcar wrote: post #20

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…

> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. I've wondered since coming to this country how such a large collective delusion continues to persist. The part…

> the weak

well, there you have it. you're labeling a solid billion people (more?) as weak, ergo deserving of their fate. that is about as circular as it gets.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#617

Post by mcguire » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #489

stupidcar wrote: post #20

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…

> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged That's because basic trust and respect shouldn't be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let's focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.

"Why should we focus on those 'disadvantaged' people? My life is hard, too."

Re: Bye, Amazon

#618

Post by supergeek133 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #556

supergeek133 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you owned a margin strained small business before? Or had any experience working in a margin strained retail environment where your only competitive lever is price? > Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management. Nevertheless, this is what happens. If you're running a low margin store of 50 employees, as a store general manager you notice one bad employee more and complain upwards about it. Hiring…

I agree with this. It's not about business owners needing to be more moral (although at the top of the economy maybe that would help a little). The problem is the economic system is based on competition, which means that in the workplace, anything that is good for ordinary people is ground down forever in the name of efficiency. If the boot is ever taken off when there are viable competitors present, the company will…

My contemporary example since quarantine started is exactly Amazon. Have you tried the e-commerce experience ANYWHERE else? Haha.

I tried ordering things from Home Depot for instance (I have extra time on my hands, might as well fix up the house). If it's not available in store, they quoted week+ shipping time.

Amazon had it to me in 3-4 days.

Obviously Home Depot had little to no incentive to do better shipping until now.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#619

Post by tinyhouse » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

DVassallo wrote: post #466

tinyhouse wrote: post #429

|"May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after FIVE years and five months of rewarding fun" 5.5 years means more than fully vested and probably time for a change anyway...

You're never fully vested. I $650K of unvested AMZN stock when I left after 8.5 years.

By fully vested I meant the initial 4 years, which is the package you usually get when joining a tech company. Given his caliber I bet it was a fat one. Add to that the run the stock had in the last 5 years. At his age and with his wealth, it's not unlikely he has been considering leaving regardless.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#620

Post by ajhurliman » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #20

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…

When I switched from mechanical engineering to software engineering people would ask me how the switch went, and I would tell them it was like I became a new class of citizen. The pay was better, I didn't get drug tested anymore, management was friendly, the rules were lax.

This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both.