721–730 of 1001 posts
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Which warehouses are "sweat shop" level?
https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-lik... >I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon warehouse and a third-world sweatshop were the robots. At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans.
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When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town. Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got c…
Maybe if Kmart paid their employees a little more they could afford to buy themselves something to drink at work.
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I think all of them, given that workers are severely underpaid compared to the value they provide, and have no means to influence the future of the company, other than to speak up and be fired. Though it's possible that the parent was referring to Amazon warehouses where workers had to pee in a bottle to keep their productivity points above the cutoff level.
They're paid at the level they will accept for the job they provide. Amazon couldn't hire 100,000 people in a month if they were underpaying anyone. Also, why should they have means to influence the future of the company? They're hired voluntarily to do one job, not to lead the company.
Yes, workers should be able to influence the future of a company they invest their lives in, the same way citizens can influence the future of their countries. The incentives of workers and shareholders can be aligned, when greed is kept in check.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/14/politics/bernie-sanders-w...
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I think it is a mistake to equate Microsoft and Amazon's behavior (active collaboration and voluntary engagement in provision of dedicated/custom services or even one-off entire lines of business) and Apple's behavior (we sell the same hardware, unmodified, to everyone who wants to buy it) in this instance. Addendum (EDIT): Bad phrasing on my part attempting to characterize the behavior. I am not affiliated with Appl…
I hope you can recognize the conflict of interest here. You appear to work at Apple, and that might just make you less likely to acknowledge the overwhelming number of unethical practices Apple partakes in.
EDIT: Sorry, you can ignore ^this^ paragraph - just saw your edit. My apologies for making accusations.
I find it especially interesting you attack Amazon over their disastrous warehouse workplace policies (you are 100% right to do so), and conveniently ignore the even worse manufacturing plant conditions that overseas Apple employees/contractors have to endure.
I should also add, Microsoft and Apple are the two cash-richest companies on the planet. They can afford to drop all DoD contracts indefinitely. They won't, and bad things will continue to happen to PoC outside of the US because of it. I hope, at the very least, you can acknowledge this.
> 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…
All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the wo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/amazon-warehouses-are-cult-lik... >I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon warehouse and a third-world sweatshop were the robots. At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans.
Are there 3rd world sweatshops that pay $16 USD/hour and provide benefits? I'd wager there are a few more differences than just the robots.
> 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…
All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the wo…
The best way to get people who show up for work on time, don't steal from the register and don't call out sick is to pay them enough to have a life that isn't sent into a stress spiral by an electricity bill thats 10% higher.
Corporations especially in the service industry (Fast food, etc) have tested and to their bottom line workers stealing and missing shifts and calling out every 3 days isn't worth more to them than paying people less. Not because they're unprofitable, but because they can, and there's enough desperate people EVEN WITH FULL EMPLOYMENT to not raise wages as long as none of the other corporations do.
So now you have cargoculting amonst the business administrators that pay as low as possible is the only way to run a business. Except of course, when it comes to business administrators and those who interact with them.
As a former employee of AWS, I can vouch for this. AWS and Amazon.com should be looked at two totally different entities in terms of employee experience.
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Have you considered the possibility that Amazon actually treats their workers okay and that it's the organizers are dishonest? Why does the presumption of evil only go in one direction?
Just compare the incentives for both parts to be dishonest and you have your answer. What would workers gain from being dishonest except the risk of being fired or retaliated upon? And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions? Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight? Does Amazon really need your supp…
Pay raises, more time off, better benefits. A newly hired employee has very little to lose by supporting unionization.
>And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions?
Because when Amazon shows good conditions, everyone says that it's a manufactured scenario or just an anecdote.
>Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight?
Which is precisely what organizers want to exploit with publicity that could very easily be taking things out of context. A union organizer has almost nothing to lose by massively exaggerating.
>Does Amazon really need your support, or are the workers one paycheck away from homelessness in need of it?
Depends on whether or not you care about being manipulated into supporting something that could be a lie. It's not even "support" of Amazon, it's just questioning of the accounting of one side of a debate.