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Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

jacobinmag.com

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Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#31

Post by beckman466 »

sergefaguet wrote: post #28

An extremely efficient and competent corporation doing everything it can to deliver goods cheaper and faster to hundreds of millions of people while creating value for tens of millions of shareholders? And now it has more and more impact running social services too? How dare they do this travesty without democratic oversight. Clearly the best way forward is to regulate them so that they are on a level playing field w…

How dare workers ask to not be treated like shit! /s

You do know Amazon has been caught union busting right? I'm not so sure what your definition of democracy is when workers can't voice their concerns.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#32

Post by christkv »

the-dude wrote: post #10
christkv wrote: post #6

They are doing that here in northern Spain as well with a giant logistics center being built. My YouTube is now full of ads on how great it would be to work in Amazon fulfillment

There is a browser extension for that.

This is a common enough nuisance that someone wrote a plug-in to address it. Amazing

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#33

Post by SigmundA »

sergefaguet wrote: post #28

An extremely efficient and competent corporation doing everything it can to deliver goods cheaper and faster to hundreds of millions of people while creating value for tens of millions of shareholders? And now it has more and more impact running social services too? How dare they do this travesty without democratic oversight. Clearly the best way forward is to regulate them so that they are on a level playing field w…

Sounds just like the East India Company.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#34

Post by fastball »

vortico wrote: post #27

>$15 an hour, Amazon’s starting wage, is below the average for the warehousing industry Where are they getting this information? The average wage in the US is lower, like $13-14. https://www.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Warehouse_Worker/Ho...

Presumably they're being disingenuous and comparing the average salary across the entire industry (including senior positions / management / etc) to Amazon's salary floor, while you are making the appropriate comparison to a warehouse worker.

And even then comparing an average to a minimum would still be disingenuous.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#35

Post by beckman466 »

aga98mtl wrote: post #30
perryizgr8 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the phrase "company town" itself does not signify anything evil. In fact I'm wondering if such a place might be better than the usual government administered cities and towns.

Honestly, I was hoping Amazon was actually making housing for its workers. I think high density housing within walking distance of your job is the realistic solution for lowering co2 emissions.

> I was hoping Amazon was actually making housing for its workers.

In the movie 'Sorry To Bother You' by Boots Riley, they have an Amazon-like entity called 'WorryFree' that does exactly this.

I'm not sure we actually want this (Amazon or other big employers making housing for laborers they employ), especially since these workers are often not labor aristocrats, and therefore will have little bargaining power.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#36

Post by jaclaz »

samizdis wrote: post #16
amelius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19th century? This smells more of medieval style feudalism.

In the UK, there's a great example of a late-19C/early 20C "model village", called Bournville, created by the Cadbury family to house workers for its factory. It was quite visionary in its day, and remains highly desirable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

In Italy, there is Rosignano Solvay, a small town that is actually named after the company (producing essentially sodium bicarbonate):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosignano_Solvay

You'll need to use the italian wikipedia for more details:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosignano_Solvay

The actual "Solvay village", i.e. the Company Town:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villaggio_Solvay

was built in the '20's and '30's.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#37

Post by dalbasal »

I suppose the name of the magazine implies this, but the amount of "concept terms" loaded into each sentence sounds so old timey, or something, to me.

"Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”

The behemoth is here, producing not only profit but people, too. That entails corporate indoctrination, social estrangement, and profound alienation from one’s labor..."

You kind of need to be steeped into the literary culture to "fluent." Reading it, it feels like I'm "looking up" the words in my memory to follow the meaning. I suppose it's not too different from the "tech talk" dialect we're more used to on HN: "disruptive potential of this novel user space paradigm" or whatnot.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#38

Post by rswail »

emteycz wrote: post #22
eganist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article seems to contain nothing that would qualify for the words "Company Town". It appears to boil down "look amazon is big, surely it means that it must be evil!". I guess this is the difference between a literal v. figurative interpretation of the title. The article itself is speaking to Amazon's efforts to sustain its hiring pipeline in the face of colossal churn, describing activities such as sponsoring s…

So what? The EU and other similar institutions require their branding to be present in classes too. I'd rather have obviously absurd corporate branding than slow but sure political indoctrination (e.g. the EU makes it look like the local government is incapable of doing anything on its own, while the fact is that everything worked pretty well before the EU and even today 90%+ of funding is local - but the EU flag mus…

The issue here is that the school is teaching not general knowledge, but knowledge that is only useful in the Amazon context.

It's a "company town" mentality. Amazon needs the workers, so it makes sure that the workers need it.

That's completely different to EU/Government funding. That's a debate between two levels of government about who gets the political benefit of the funding. However, by definition, publicly funded facilities are examples of "Your taxes at work".

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#39

Post by rjsw »

samizdis wrote: post #16
amelius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19th century? This smells more of medieval style feudalism.

In the UK, there's a great example of a late-19C/early 20C "model village", called Bournville, created by the Cadbury family to house workers for its factory. It was quite visionary in its day, and remains highly desirable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

Other one-company model villages in the UK are Saltaire [1] and Port Sunlight [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#40

Post by Frost1x »

vortico wrote: post #27

>$15 an hour, Amazon’s starting wage, is below the average for the warehousing industry Where are they getting this information? The average wage in the US is lower, like $13-14. https://www.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Warehouse_Worker/Ho...

I take data from these sites with a grain of salt because it seems far too easy and tempting to poison the data well for those wishing to see the rates lower than reality. Payscale is a bit closer to what I think reality might be. It's unfortunate how gaming perception and such information is such a potentially successful strategy.

The OOH from DOL puts it closer to $14.66/hr which I put a bit more faith in:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/m...

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