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Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

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Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#211

Post by lrdswrk00 »

birdyrooster wrote: post #109
lrdswrk00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. All your warm fuzzies about yourself are not for me to bother with. I am as beholden to coddling all y’all’s self as you are to making sure people who need it today have cheap insulin. It’s a semantics free market not a financial one. If my efforts undo your wealth, zero fucks. See we get to pick and choose who figuratively exists. Doesn’t have to be Bezos or you. Or me. None of us are gold or glitter. As no…

Good luck with your mental health.

My goal is to make you all feel how I feel reading this forum.

Seems it worked.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#212

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dalbasal wrote: post #175
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. But I haven't seen anyone describe these sorts of concepts in any other terms other than cloying cute folksy-funny stump speeches that tend to obfuscate things as much as they make them more accessible. The relationships between labor and capital are not obvious to the naked eye, and are subject to a lot of different kinds of analysis. Trying to describe them with language from outside the field can end…

I'd say that this type of jargonized writing makes articles extremely unaccessible . It would be pretty hard to understand without some pretty substantial roots in marxist, or social science literature. Ironically, that means most people working at an amazon warehouse wouldn't understand what it's trying to say. Re: The relationships between labor and capital are not obvious. Parts of that relationship are pretty dam…

what language would you use to describe the concept of "alienation from the product of labor" today, here in 2021, if the intended audience is the workforce of an amazon fulfillment center?

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#213

Post by dehrmann »

wincy wrote: post #152
strombofulous wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, how do you injure yourself in an Amazon warehouse? I thought there wasn't any heavy machinery or other dangerous machines. Is it just from too much walking?

A friend of mine working at an Amazon center injured himself because he walks 5+ miles per shift. He also weighs like 350 pounds. He’s lost like 50 pounds already so hopefully he’ll get to a weight where he’s not injuring himself before he ends up having to quit. Amazon isn’t obligated to provide my morbidly obese friend with a job, and he knows that, and he’s doing his best to keep on without destroying his body.

> 5+ miles per shift

This really isn't that much. The average Disneyland visitor probably walks 5 miles per day. A nurse might walk 4 miles in a shift. I'd expect most people who aren't overweight would be able go adapt to 5 miles per day pretty quickly, and 10 is fairly doable.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#214

Post by dehrmann »

salawat wrote: post #84
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a long-time friend who tried to get an Amazon Warehouse job after relocating to a new city for his SO’s career. Given all of the negative press he assumed they’d be desperate for employees and he could walk right into the job. It turns out those jobs are highly competitive in the area because they paid relatively well and had good benefits. The hourly rate alone doesn’t tell the full story. Many more typical w…

>He said a lot of them tried to hire people for less than full time to avoid having to provide benefits. There needs to be naming and shaming of those that perpetuate this practice. I know retailers (Tractor Supply) for cashiers. If you're doing warehouse work, you are part of the logistics backbone, you deserve not to have your chain jerked around. Arguably, no one should be getting their chain jerked around, but I'…

You're complaining that companies don't want to do the job of government.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#215

Post by 0x262d »

friedman23 wrote: post #196
0x262d wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, class (in the marxist sense, everything else is meaningless cultural signifiers) is not about "upper" or "lower", it's about either getting paid for wage labor, ie being working class, or getting paid for other people's use of property you own, ie being capitalist class. this is extremely basic and is the fundamental divide under capitalism.

ah thanks for tankiesplaining

dumb comment. this isn't "tankie" it's basic labor theory of value.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#216

Post by CharlesW »

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...

> The average wage in the US is lower, like $13-14.

Not all sources support that claim: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/warehouse-w...

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#217

Post by hellomyguys »

dehrmann wrote: post #213
wincy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine working at an Amazon center injured himself because he walks 5+ miles per shift. He also weighs like 350 pounds. He’s lost like 50 pounds already so hopefully he’ll get to a weight where he’s not injuring himself before he ends up having to quit. Amazon isn’t obligated to provide my morbidly obese friend with a job, and he knows that, and he’s doing his best to keep on without destroying his body.

> 5+ miles per shift This really isn't that much. The average Disneyland visitor probably walks 5 miles per day. A nurse might walk 4 miles in a shift. I'd expect most people who aren't overweight would be able go adapt to 5 miles per day pretty quickly, and 10 is fairly doable.

> This really isn't that much. The average Disneyland visitor probably walks 5 miles per day.

What a bizarre comparison. Most people are pretty tired after visiting Disneyland. You also don’t do that 300 times a year.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#218

Post by andrepd »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #210
toomuchtodo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon calls their warehouse staff “industrial athletes” in internal docs. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22465357/amazon-industrial... > Amazon tells its warehouse employees to think of themselves not as overworked cogs in an enormous, soul-crushing machine, but as “industrial athletes,” and to prepare their bodies for that experience like someone training for a sporting event, according to a pamphlet obtained by…

Good Lord, that's genuinely dystopian. People often say the '70s was too biased in favour of unions, but I can't help but wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction in the present. Those two paragraphs make me want to retch like a cat puking up a hairball.

>I can't help but wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction

We are full on into an unopposed neoliberal world order. The pendulum has swung so far in this direction that an alternative or an opposition to this philosophy simply does not exist anymore in the public sphere.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#219

Post by dalbasal »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #212
dalbasal wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that this type of jargonized writing makes articles extremely unaccessible . It would be pretty hard to understand without some pretty substantial roots in marxist, or social science literature. Ironically, that means most people working at an amazon warehouse wouldn't understand what it's trying to say. Re: The relationships between labor and capital are not obvious. Parts of that relationship are pretty dam…

what language would you use to describe the concept of "alienation from the product of labor" today, here in 2021, if the intended audience is the workforce of an amazon fulfillment center?

I wouldn't. The idea wasn't abstract in the 1830s. It meant the difference between having a loom in your house and working at a mill. We could debate the importance of this, but we'd be starting by talking about an actual thing that is happening in the world. You could talk to a mill worker about it and it described their life.

You can't think of relevant ways of describing alienation, because the thing you are trying to describe isn't happening now. It happened hundreds of years ago. All that's left is a psycho-economic abstraction and a history lesson.

Say I coin a term to describe the digitisation of workplaces, WFH, and such. Call it "workplace etherealisation." We can use that in "analysis" of labour-capital dynamics. In 200 years, "workplace etherealisation" and our analysis probably won't mean anything anymore. Or rather, it will be a trivial, clunky way of describing the world from the perspective of past people.

That was my initial point. This article isn't written to have meaning to amazon workers, or readers beyond a particular circle. It's written to have meaning "in-theory," deep inside abstract theories that the author is interested in for abstract treasons that have nothing to do with workers. It's mastabatory.

Re: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States

#220

Post by seventytwo »

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...

They said “warehousing industry”, and you looked up “warehouse worker”.

That’s probably the discrepancy, fwiw.

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