221–230 of 310 posts
Using AWS supports abuse? At least for me, I think I can't support Amazon's treatment of people. Is there a way we on HN can have an effect here, and could avoiding AWS be a start? Or is there a better way, or am I wrong to draw such conclusions?
These are last-mile delivery workers. The Information had an excellent article a few weeks back about how dire the conditions are of their long-distance drivers who carry parcels between the warehouses. They have a much higher rate of accidents due to this, with innocent lives mangled and Amazon shielding itself behind the contractor status to dodge liability. (paywalled) https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-d…
It's unfortunately not just judges. Our lawmakers are in on it. Given that we, the voters, are the ones putting them in place, it seems that we largely don't care, either.
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Freelancing just sounds awful for this reason. Yeah some ppl can make a lot but still seems like an awful way to make money if you are an american. Consulting is somewhat different
Freelancing is great if you've built up a network of professional contacts who appreciate your work and will both contract you and recommend you to their network when someone is looking for work done. You typically get paid a far higher hourly rate than if you are working full-time - my contract day rate amounts to nearly double my full-time day rate. And presuming you keep delivering, impressing people, and gaining…
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> corporate gains What about customers? They seem to be happy to ignore how the sausage is made, to have stuff delivered to their doorsteps cheap and fast.
We're not "happy" customers, we see issues with Amazon and AWS, but we wouldn't be competitive from a price standpoint if we rolled out own infra, or hired people to do it.
The budget for one company I worked at's infra -- 4 full racks in two datacenters with power, network, and a dedicated site-to-site between them was $200k over five years plus $3k/mo ongoing costs. The upfront cost was tiny tiny -- they started with a router, two switches and 4 used supermicro blades. That lasted them the first 4 years of their startup. It took two FTEs to manage the full infra and provide a PaaS style thing to the developers.
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> It’s not like there’s a club of past & future delivery company operators that meets regularly Why not? “National Delivery Drivers Union” sounds pretty good to me for a name. If you want to negotiate with leverage against Amazon, you need to actually have the leverage. Why is collective bargaining so weak in this industry?
Amazon fronts the startup afiak and controls who gets to start the business. Unionizing this is a tough nut, what you are witnessing is not a usual labor protest--this is a Management protest. The Independent operators are shuttering in protest rather than keep suckling.
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I truly believe that increasing the minimum wage (at first just to the same as the 1960s, ie about $12.20/hour, and then adjusting for productivity growth since 1969 to about $20/hour), especially if combined with policies to maintain full employment, Will lead to dramatic increases in productivity as companies are finally forced to properly value human labor. The increase in productivity well help pay for minimum wa…
Why do you cherrypick 1969 and not 1955 where the equivalent number would be $5 an hour today?
Heck, I’ll do one better. Why not pick 1890?
“Workers should be paid less today than in 1969” is a sort of crazy thing to say out loud, but here we are.
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> It’s not like there’s a club of past & future delivery company operators that meets regularly Why not? “National Delivery Drivers Union” sounds pretty good to me for a name. If you want to negotiate with leverage against Amazon, you need to actually have the leverage. Why is collective bargaining so weak in this industry?
Presumably for the same reasons that collective bargaining is broken in most US industries; lack of trust between employees, unions, companies, government together with the pervasive belief that only individual success matters. Briefly: lack of solidarity.
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This is basically how shift work in hospitality and service jobs works, and it's terrible. Some people claim it's done intentionally to prevent workers from working other jobs where they might get tired or escape the first job.
Well, part of it might be intentional. The other part might be just the organic result of shoving the complications of varying hourly load and varying worker availability week-to-week onto those willing or desperate to work extra hours. Schedules get jumbled, work hours get fragmented like a garbage collector's memory management without a compaction step.
Much of the "middle" (or upper middle, however you want to label it) class's luxuries are based on goods and services being cheap enough due to the people at the bottom not having a choice but to deal with unsteady income and changing schedules.
I am actually enjoying stores and restaurants closing early because they do not have enough employees, or prices going up so that people cannot constantly afford to eat out. It means there are people that can finally be home with family at dinner time, or if they are working, they are earning a premium for evenings, nights, weekends, etc and perhaps they themselves will be able to enjoy those services.
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Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.
> an average of 3-4 packages per delivery Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.
That’s not always been my experience. Just last week, I had three separate orders, all made on the same day, arrive in three separate packages.