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SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

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Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#21
post #12

[flagged]

What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.

For starters, what does this have to do with the Southwest meltdown, which seems to have been caused in large part by a lack of automation?

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#22
post #12

[flagged]

What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.

At restaurants with menus that don't require explanation, manually taking an order is more error-prone and distracts wait staff from providing higher value services.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#23

It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.

As a customer, I support workers unionizing to improve their wage bargaining power. Besides tipping, I can’t do much to help them do that. They’ve gotta organize to do it, and call on the NLRB when there’s (always inevitably) Corporate Fuckery [1]. Luckily, the NLRB received a $25M funding bump in the latest Omnibus spending bill signed into law.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrativ...

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#24

It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.

How does the customer know whether or not a worker is paid properly? It is none of their business, or responsibility.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#25

[flagged]

Since you're quoting the part about QR codes for restaurants:

I have had good experiences at bars and restaurants where I input my orders online whenever I want, perhaps multiple times throughout the meal, and the waitstaff bring them out promptly. I obviously don't have data, but it feels twice as fast since I never have to wave people down just to relay my orders.

This isn't for everyone, and it's not for every situation. But for the right circumstances applications, this is really quite convenient and pleasant.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#26

[flagged]

That's a great passage that you've quoted, and a great example of why we need UBI to keep Americans alive under late-stage-capitalism.

> What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN

This on the other hand is sentence completely devoid of potatoes, let alone meat. Would you care to expand on why you find it ridiculous?

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#27
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.

At restaurants with menus that don't require explanation, manually taking an order is more error-prone and distracts wait staff from providing higher value services.

I prefer ordering from an iPad, but it should result in the food quality and reliability hitting 99%.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.

For starters, what does this have to do with the Southwest meltdown, which seems to have been caused in large part by a lack of automation?

It would be a mistake to suppose that more automation would have resulted in a different outcome. For example, an update to a critical system can also result in operator/interface breakdowns, leading to failures. In fact, according to some accounts, this is exactly what happened and it exacerbated things (some spreadsheet software was updated).

I recommend this paper to everyone: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#29
There is a tension in the article between "the capitalists are pitting the consumers against the front line workers" premise and the "the capitalists are eliminating the front line workers" point made in the article.

Southwest's meltdown was about computer systems that coordinate "offline" based on assumptions instead of online based on passing information back and forth on a regular basis.

Southwest was a very reliable airline, it didn't have some sort of day-to-day understaffing problem, they executed an unorthodox business strategy [0] in the last year or so that has degraded their performance, and bad weather exacerbated the problem.

0: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#30
I agree with the general idea that the insatiable hunger for greater profits comes at the expense of labor. Southwest is just another example of this. Additionally, everything ts treated as a cost center, such as IT systems. And everything is short-term thinking.

But pointing to automation as a problem is misguided. Automation is great. I look forward to a future when we don't subject humans to "time off task" in an Amazon warehouse. We automate a bunch of things now that were horrible for the people who originally did them.

The problem is systemic: how do we distribute the fruits of that labor? The current capitalist organization of the economy exploits labor and concentrates all the wealth in the hands of a small handful of people.

The US has and produces enough wealth such that every citizen could have enough to eat, a house to live in, access to healthcare and otherwise have all their basic needs met. We, as a society, have decided we'd rather have people die in the streets, starve and use state violence in the form of withholding basic healthcare like insulin.

Automation should mean that we only need to work 10-20 hours of work a week. But no. Instead we just cut the amount of workers (to the point of having no redundancy like the railroad companies) and suppress real wage increases in the name of increased profits.

It really doesn't have to be this way.

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