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Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

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Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#301

Post by rayiner »

klipklop wrote: post #199

The amount of class warfare here is hilarious. Will you really parrot elite coined phrases like “laptop class?” What even is the laptop class? It’s a meaningless term created so it’s easier to dehumanize a group of people that have a massive salary range. There are WFH making $50k. They are not all vest and resters. Do we really need to make the conversation be about the upper middle class being “lazy” and completely…

The laptop class’s interests are closely intertwined with those of the billionaires. When billionaires offshored jobs to China, there was an army of laptop class people who helped them do it. And they collectively benefit very much from the economic changes that have fueled billionaires’ fortunes. The top 10% have an annual income of over $6 trillion. The total income of all US billionaires is less than half a trillion dollars. Since 1970, the growth in median income of the upper middle class has vastly outstripped the growth in median income of the rest of the country.

If there’s anything standing in the way of more economically redistributive policies in this country, it’s the laptop class. They would take a huge and material hit in their standard of living in a more equal society such as Canada or Germany. Everyone from programmers to lawyers to HR administrators make a third to half as much as their counterparts in those countries.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#302

Post by Swizec »

avocabros wrote: post #153
Swizec wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive Here's one anecdata: I have never in any job coordinated as much with my team mates and other teams as I have in the past ~3 years of working remotely. The trick wasn't that we're remote or on-site, what increased our level of coordination was how we work. As a team instead of as a random grouping of individuals.

It's worth considering whether that's a positive, or if the extra coordination is required simply because there are fewer and slower information channels available to communicate vs. on-site.

The positive is that we get more done faster with better quality. Hard to compare with on-site comms volume because the on-site stuff goes into a mental black hole and nobody thinks of it as a measurable event.

A 10min chat with a colleague remotely feels like a thing. A 20min chat in the office feels like “yeah of course I was coding this whole time”.

I think this effect is also why people like async meetings via documents. They don’t realize it’s still a meeting and is taking waaaay more of their time than just sitting down synchronously for 10min to hash things out. They’d rather do it in 10x 2min bursts between other things.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#303

Post by rirze »

missedthecue wrote: post #186
WesternWind wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't work from home been shown to improve worker efficiency and happiness too?

I think it's been shown to increase isolation. The number of young people going days without seeing another human being should startle and upset.

It's hard to decouple this phenomenon from the aftereffects of COVID restrictions. We'll be able to figure the isolation from WFH in the next few years.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#304

Post by scott_w »

andsoitis wrote: post #294
scott_w wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those aren’t moral issues, they’re productivity issues. My younger brother used to do his computer job from the office because it was attached to the factory. It meant he could talk directly with the people manufacturing the steel frames he specified in the building dressing to get the right thing built quickly. This was a USP of the company vs other design shops. This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality…

> But those aren’t moral issues According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” > they’re productivity issues Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also in…

> According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.”

Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality.

> Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral.

Therefore it's not an axiom. Most people would only consider it immoral if you chose to be unproductive for the sake of being unproductive. For example, refusing to do your job while expecting to be paid is something many people would consider immoral.

This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive. For example, doing something more slowly but more safely may be less productive but also something many would not consider immoral.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#305

Post by scott_w »

andsoitis wrote: post #293
scott_w wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires own the most widely circulated print media in the U.K. so it doesn’t seem impossible that this agenda is being influenced. Especially when those exact papers spilt a lot of ink telling people to “get back to work” despite the fact those people were always working during the pandemic.

> Billionaires own the most widely circulated print media in the U.K. It seems natural that whoever owns the “most widely circulated print media” would be rich, no?

I'm not sure how that would invalidate anything I wrote.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#306

Post by jensgk »

andsoitis wrote: post #293
scott_w wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires own the most widely circulated print media in the U.K. so it doesn’t seem impossible that this agenda is being influenced. Especially when those exact papers spilt a lot of ink telling people to “get back to work” despite the fact those people were always working during the pandemic.

> Billionaires own the most widely circulated print media in the U.K. It seems natural that whoever owns the “most widely circulated print media” would be rich, no?

Unless it is a co-op or nonprofit.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#307

Post by jrochkind1 »

polka_haunts_us wrote: post #110
kcplate wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s my opinion that people feel like they are more productive at WFH, but it’s a bit of a hard metric to actually measure. I get the sense that the freedom and flexibility might create a feeling of personal productivity to accomplish many things (not just career related) they couldn’t before WFH, but as for job productivity…I bet it’s probably a wash overall. I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—be…

My first job was 40 hours a week in an office, my current job has been full WFH because of covid, transitioning into 3 days in the office. I can tell you factually that the days I'm actually at home in this hybrid setup that I'm way less productive in terms of getting my actual job done than I am days I'm in the office. I think when I was full WFH my at home productivity was actually much higher. However, the days I'…

The first two years of covid pandemic may not be a typical time though. The non-work demands on most people's time and energy, and most people's psychological state, were pretty different than usual. All things that seem like they could effect "productivity" (and/or your perception of productivity) (and hypothetically in either direction), in addition to the factor of whether you were full-time WFH or not.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#308

Post by andsoitis »

scott_w wrote: post #304
andsoitis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But those aren’t moral issues According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” > they’re productivity issues Some would say that choosing being unproductive when you could be productive IS immoral. Not only does Benjamin Franklin jump to mind, but the entire Protestant-informed culture of “the West”. Japan’s culture is also in…

> According to the dictionary, morality is simply “ principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Right/wrong in this case are meant in the sense of "it's wrong to murder people" as opposed to "saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong." The former is a statement of morality, the latter is a statement of correctness. This does not link productivity / morality. > Some would say that choosing…

> This is different from choosing a path you prefer, that happens to be less productive.

In the context of one's life, I agree fully. However, once you choose to work in a collective, choosing to be less productive without a positive tradeoff to the system, harms the ones around you.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#309

Post by jensgk »

dhx wrote: post #265
somethoughts wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents on this is that he is saying "working from home is morally wrong" - for his companies ... but he left out the for his companies part. He owns a car company and a space ship company - both of which have assembly lines with tons of workers. A majority of his employees will need to be working in a factory or with physical equipment/prototypes. Therefore they must be at the office or at the plant. In that en…

"But role XYZ can't work from home therefore no one should work from home" is the silliest of all arguments. It's similar to "Back in my day, we didn't have parental leave and it was very hard, so why is it fair that young people should not have to go through the hardest experience too!". Here's just some of the benefits to on-site workers in role XYZ of other workers being able to WFH: * Quicker commutes (less conge…

Also:

* Larger population to recruit from, because distance to office does not matter.

* More diverse workforce, because people with some physical and/or mental disabilities, will be able to work remote.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#310

Post by Timon3 »

WesternWind wrote: post #156
neom wrote: post #13

I still think out of all the...unique... things Elon has said... work from home is morally wrong has to take the cake. I try to spend time looking at things as radically as I can. I think it's helpful to accept folks views as widely as possible, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OHFt8QyiU I was on a bicycle ride listening to this intervie…

Hasn't work from home been shown to improve worker efficiency and happiness too?

There is no way Elon doesn't know about this. I think for him, poor people should feel unhappy. He feels it immoral for poor people to be happy and content.
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