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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#831

Very difficult to put emotion aside when thinking about these things. I expect to be crucified for even asking this question because the audience here has a bias towards supporting activism. But oh well here goes: If Amazon condone and even enable employee activism, what bad things could that enable? I don’t mean unions. I mean a group of say 20 employees trying to bring about a change they truly believe in. Amazon h…

Very valid points. But your example of bringing guns to the workplace is just the worst. Thst benefits no one, and maybe satisfies a few. There's literally no one that would straight out reject better work conditions.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#832

My personal snapping point as a consumer occurred several years ago, over something that's definitely not anecdotal: When Amazon employees are frisked at the end of their shift (which is a practice that applies to at least some warehouses), they are not paid for the time they spend waiting in line to be frisked. This is not an anecdote; indeed Amazon fought and won a court case insisting that it has the right to not…

> See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-... . Where is the 2014 Supreme Court ruling mentioned by this article?

Seems to be this one:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-ru...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf

Re: Bye, Amazon

#833
post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* cough * It goes on to give tips to managers for spotting union activity. “Make it a point to regularly talk to associates in the break room. This will help protect you from accusations that you were only in the break room to spy on pro union associates,” the video says. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/how-amazon-is-fighting-back-... On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode…

There is no faster way to stagnate an industry and destroy innovation than by workers unionizing. Enjoy more outsourcing of jobs than before.

Maybe it would increase warehouse costs and thus increase automation. That’s good.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#834

Very difficult to put emotion aside when thinking about these things. I expect to be crucified for even asking this question because the audience here has a bias towards supporting activism. But oh well here goes: If Amazon condone and even enable employee activism, what bad things could that enable? I don’t mean unions. I mean a group of say 20 employees trying to bring about a change they truly believe in. Amazon h…

Part of running a company is keeping employees marginally happy enough to keep working. Whether that's through money, benefits, feelings of solidarity, shared goals, whatever. So annoying high-level employees enough to quit is a failure on one level or another.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can't afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them ri…

It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests. That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

> It's possible that the owner is being exploited too, but the franchise corporation, or financial interests.

Irrelevant. I'm not talking about the owner being exploited. We could just be talking about a independent small business that's trying to get by on small margins.

> That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.

You're assuming that low pay is exploitation when that is the very notion I'm challenging. The exploitation comes from a power differential that is leveraged to the benefit of one party. If neither party has much power over the other, and neither is benefiting unduly from the relationship, then there is not exploitation.

It may very well be that neither the business nor the employee has much to offer each other. The point is that they're still willing to work together for mutual benefit, however small that mutual benefit may be.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? Yes. As an example: > We’re already seeing devastating climate impacts: unprecedented flooding in India and Mozambique, dry water wells in Africa, coastal displacement in Asia, wildfires and floods in North America, and crop failure…

1% is huge. You do the world a disservice by ignoring incremental change. If I tasked you wish improving the speed of a processor and you came back with "This 1% improvement is a drop in the bucket so i deleted it" you would not last long. It can start with Amazon and end with more.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#837
post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* cough * It goes on to give tips to managers for spotting union activity. “Make it a point to regularly talk to associates in the break room. This will help protect you from accusations that you were only in the break room to spy on pro union associates,” the video says. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/how-amazon-is-fighting-back-... On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode…

There is no faster way to stagnate an industry and destroy innovation than by workers unionizing. Enjoy more outsourcing of jobs than before.

This is a classist argument. Labor, blue collar, lower middle class people have just of much right to better wages, conditions, treatment, as a tech worker or anyone else. In fact bargaining power is the only way employees can have somewhat of a say in any sort of negotiation with their employers, without it it's a completely one sided relationship.

Other than getting packages faster, what innovations are working class warehouse employees producing? The innovation of putting boxes together at blazing speed with no bathroom breaks in a poorly climate controlled environment?

How could outsourcing a horizontally consolidated logistics empire be cheaper than upping conditions by a bit? Unions on average only cost about 10% more than a non-organized operation. That cost could be sent to the consumer or taken from revenue, by selling shares, whatever.

Anything that goes against the status quo of unfettered greed, cold profit is all that matters attitude makes sense for the business. But part of why Americans enjoy such labor safety, higher pay, employer health care, etc is because of organized labor. Class consolidation is the best outcome for the most people and there are laws that facilitate it being broken by Amazon, in firing organizers.

It's not just their warehouse workers they treat like garbage either, they steal successful products on their page and drop the original company from their listings and showing up in search. They charge a kickback just to rank in the search, etc, etc.

Bezos is a very clever successful sociopath in my opinion.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#838

Very difficult to put emotion aside when thinking about these things. I expect to be crucified for even asking this question because the audience here has a bias towards supporting activism. But oh well here goes: If Amazon condone and even enable employee activism, what bad things could that enable? I don’t mean unions. I mean a group of say 20 employees trying to bring about a change they truly believe in. Amazon h…

I understand where you're going for, but imo that's never been a valid argument against self-determination.

I think your argument can be made simpler: why should we trust people to be allowed to decide for themselves? Won't they decide to do stupid and harmful things? Won't they decide to hurt eachother? Won't they decide to steal from eachother, and murder eachother?

No, is the answer, because laws were created somehow, right? We don't trust the government to babysit us - we created the government so we wouldn't have to babysit eachother.

We don't need the board to tell us what we can and can't do - we can figure that well enough on our own. What we don't need is a board that assumes it knows best. It doesn't, it can't possibly, in fact it is existentially unable to do anything but raise shareholder value. So, the more employee self-determination, the better.

I think it's very unlikely that employees will decide they want to have guns at work instead of, say, a security system, or maybe offices in places with low crime, etc. I think it's very unlikely that employees will decide, I dunno, that they want the right to shit on eachother's desk, or whatever other fairly-objectively-negative thing you can think up. The right to paste racial slurs all over the office, maybe? Bigotry, bullying, and hatred are swiftly becoming a minority, and a fair system almost universally causes those minority viewpoints to lose power. They only maintain it in imbalanced systems...

And worse case scenario, if Amazon turns into the kind of office where you have to shoot your way in just to get to your desk, we can have the government intervene and shut the place down (with our labor laws), and maybe someone can set up a better business where you don't have to shoot your way to your desk.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#839
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. When I was in college, all my peers talked about FAANG's in glowing terms. Doesn't help that these companies often recruit heavily from Universities, so you have alum networks that talk about how great the companies are etc. Its quite an evil genius. When people finally do get a job, they often realize its not always the cool shit that they heard about; most often than not its some uncool shit that brings in a…

That's just because 5+ years ago Amazon/Facebook/Google weren't "giant evil shit-lords" so-to-speak. They were cool even among industry folks. It wasn't long ago that having Google on your resume meant something was special about you. Facebook/Google/Amazon aren't really cool in colleges anymore either.

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