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1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

businessinsider.com

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Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#521

Post by ClumsyPilot »

HWR_14 wrote: post #492
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"being a temp for future robots" While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash. I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious. Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires de…

1) I think we can automate the janitor now. We just don't because it's cheaper to pay minimum wage for 25-30 years. 2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.

"I think we can automate the janitor now."

Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush.

Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces?

Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds of little actions, each fairly complex. They require loads of dexterity

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#522

Post by jmrm »

schrectacular wrote: post #490
distances wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, what do you mean by automated garbage disposal? The urban infrastructure of someone taking away your garbage, or the mostly-US device installed in your sinks? The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.

It's a grinder machine that people install just below their drain. Ostensibly so that you don't have to put a strainer in there. In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.

Lots of local and regional governments in Europe encourage people to not use the toilet or the sink as a trash can. The wastewater is usually treated before arriving to rivers and other places, so the cleanest is the water, the easiest is to treat it.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#523

Post by Dylan16807 »

ekianjo wrote: post #474
Dylan16807 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No it doesn't. 2. Even if we assume it's true, "better" does not mean acceptable. Imagine a town with no amazon that only has terrible jobs available. Amazon moves in, some people try working there, the job is so awful that they quit and go back to the other jobs. Those jobs are still terrible. There's very much an issue.

for 2. I am not sure why you would blame Amazon if it seems rather like a general specific employment problem in said area. Amazon is not responsible to fix everytjing around them are they?

It's not their obligation to fix everything around them. But if amazon's work environment is awful, people quitting it doesn't absolve them of anything. It's still an issue, whether people manage to escape to something better or not.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#524

Post by james4k »

dlgeek wrote: post #309
james4k wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is mostly PR. Among all Amazon workers, the median pay is $28,446 a year ($13.68 an hour), a figure the company revealed this year for the first time because of a new regulatory requirement. That’s a worldwide figure that includes full and part-time workers. Glassdoor, an employment site, says average pay at U.S. fulfillment centers has been $13 an hour, according to nearly 900 people who submitted their data to t…

Wait, so they're taking a part time pay for a year in which someone didn't work full time and dividing it by full time hours, even though those aren't worked to calculate an hourly salary below the minimum hourly salary that's actually paid?

Yeah, I wondered about the methodology there, but they provide an additional data point.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#525

Post by Zanneth »

underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

$15/hr, working indoors in an air conditioned building, in relatively safe conditions, is an absolutely amazing deal for low skilled workers in most parts of the country. Not to say we couldn't do better, but it always helps to see from the perspective of those who are less fortunate to understand why they choose to work at places like Amazon.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#526

Post by gruez »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #520
gruez wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because each vehicle at the amazon warehouse delivers to dozens of customers.

With less efficient vehicles. If I order 10 things from Amazon its guaranteed to come in more than one box on more than one trip. If I drive to Target I can buy all of those things in one trip.

>With less efficient vehicles

It's less efficient, but not by much. The most popular passenger vehicle that's not a truck is the toyota rav 4[1], which gets 30 mpg[2]. A ford transit connect gets 22[3]. Using those figures, an amazon van that delivers to at least 2 houses in a suburb probably spends less fuel than those two households driving directly to a store. Even if they make separate deliveries, it will probably be worth it.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#527

Post by ethbr0 »

fzil wrote: post #426
Rd6n6 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chapters/indigo in Canada is like that. Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. They removed all the tables and chairs they had 20 years ago for you to read at. At least they still exist though, all 4 used bookstores (plus one chapters) near where I live have closed down

> Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.

That's the GE-ification of retail.

Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...

... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.

B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#528

Post by nazka »

drorco wrote: post #203
shakezula wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ? The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. It will take massive government action and that's it. There's no other way we can fix this problem. Wages are su…

There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The str…

The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly. I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase.

Cool story about the elevator. :)

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#529

Post by HWR_14 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #521
HWR_14 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I think we can automate the janitor now. We just don't because it's cheaper to pay minimum wage for 25-30 years. 2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.

"I think we can automate the janitor now." Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles? Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush. Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces? Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds…

> Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

I have seen a plunger-bot. I have never seen a commercial plunger-bot. I think I've also seen a mold scrubber bot. I'm not trying to minimize the skill involved. I'm trying to say that the labor it replaces (assuming the time value of money and minimum wage increases cancel out) is worth 362,500 over 25 years. That's a lot of money, but it's also not for a robot that can do all those things assuming it was as efficient as replacing a whole person. And less if the robot has to be replaced more frequently.

If the market supported a robot that cost a few orders of magnitude more than that, I can see a fleet of robots. Not 100% "let 'er rip" L-5 autonomy, but where one person managed a fleet of specialized robots. Mapping out the surfaces ahead of time, etc.

I will say, I was responding to a "janitor" in the office environment doing routine tasks emptying trash. Not a kitchen vent cleaner. There are a lot of deep cleaning actions that would be harder to automate, and given their rareness and extra difficulty are likely the last to go.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#530

Post by giardini »

underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

As I understand it, Amazon is already internally organized in relatively independent groups, each focusing on a particular market. If so, one possibility would be to:

a) break Amazon into many independent companies based on these already-established groups and

b) bar forever (or for some time) these groups from merging with each other.

The initial conditions (terms of the break-up: e.g., how much cash each entity would get) would determine whether, when cast out onto the street, each might survive.

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