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Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

theregister.com

151–160 of 259 posts

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#151
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. No, athletes are paid what they deserve. That wasn't always the case, they got it through collective bargaining and it took strikes to make it happen. The average warehouse worker does not have this option, and the entire government/media/corporate apparatus is designed to make collective bargaining as difficult as possible. The difference betwee…

> The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share. No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite. If warehouses paid NFL wages, nobody would spend like…

Sure, even with a union, warehouse workers won't make millions, but a union is not going to demand that either. With collective bargaining, the salary discrepancy will become a lot less disgraceful.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#152
post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

I agree. It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares. Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and…

>Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people

But why the fuck not? They hold an insane amount of power over people, directly and indirectly. The way for the people to have some power back over them is through unions. The fact that our entire system is set up to block collective bargaining is a huge artificial asymmetry.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#154
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just double-checked with my peers and it turns out it's possible to protest two different things at once, and that petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done.

>petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company. Same goes for the US Government.…

> the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers

Is amazon unique in this because if not, it just feels pointless to complain about it as there is enough competition that if they don't do it, some competitor will and thus the only way you can fix it is through industry wide regulation.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#155
post #85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sources? For what amounts to "approaching this problem two ways is better than approaching it in one way"?

Asking for sources and explanations of completely obvious things is a great way to exhaust people on the internet. Which I assume was the point given the "both sides"iness of the response.

Indeed. I think the term "FUD" has fallen a bit by the wayside but I'd call that comment exemplary.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#156
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share. No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite. If warehouses paid NFL wages, nobody would spend like…

Sure, even with a union, warehouse workers won't make millions, but a union is not going to demand that either. With collective bargaining, the salary discrepancy will become a lot less disgraceful.

I'm all for unions for the warehouse workers but the CEO also controls AWS which is a high margin high pay industry so I don't think it is fair to compare their low margin low pay retail business wages to the CEO of a conglomerate that has a much more profitable high margin high pay business.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if you were to take all $212 million and divvy it up to the nearly 1 million US Amazon employees it wouldn’t go very far.

I see this theme a lot when this topic comes up, and I feel it misses the point. Does the CEO provide 700x the value (based on $21.2M / 2000 hrs = $10600 "hourly rate") of a warehouse worker earning $15/hr? They absolutely provide critical input and decisions at the helm of a large ship, but if you break down their input versus the input of everyone under them...is it actually such a huge disparity of mental and phys…

For a penny an hour by a CEO who performs 400x that of an average Amazon employee, that’s a bargain.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#158
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other…

ICE is the problem, all the heinous shit US defense and intelligence does, whom Amazon is also in bed with, a-ok

ICE is unpopular because they the lower the voting power of blue states via removing illegal immigrants and thus lowering their census numbers, so the US media that is almost entirely Democratic[0] isn't a fan. The FBI[1][2] and CIA[3] aren't targeted because they carry water for the democrats. It has nothing to do with human rights, just politics.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/politics/hillary-clint...

[2]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/13/raid-veritas-okeefe...

[3]https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/intelligence-experts-refuse-to...

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that maybe NFL quarterbacks and public company CEOs are both overpaid, but people just like quarterbacks more? After all, I'm pretty sure Aaron Rodgers never laid off nearly 1000 people via a mass Zoom webinar.

I'd guess that it's also significantly harder to be top handegg player than a software firm ceo.

Yes, but this is the same argument as "Its significantly harder to be CEO of books than warehouse employee"

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#160
post #73

Investors could destroy this company overnight if they sold stock; time to put money where their mouths are?

If everyone clicked "sell amazon" in their brokerage account right now, Amazon would still have millions of people log on to their site and buy stuff tomorrow.
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