I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine • Hacker News Board

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#51

Post by neilk » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:44 AM UTC

winestock wrote: post #40

SurfScore wrote: post #12

It always comes down to price. The vast majority of people in the world aren't so self-righteous that they'll pay $10 more for something that was produced "the right way." This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening

"Economists dismiss costs that aren't included in price. For them the cost that matters is the price paid by consumers." - Paul Craig Roberts, Which Is Worse: Regulation Or De-Regulation? Sadly, customers often act the same way as economists on this issue. EDIT: Punctuation

Bad economists maybe. DanI-S's sibling comment to yours points out the costs that this offloads onto the government and health care system.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#52

Post by jfoutz » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:45 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #46

jfoutz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

Let's assume that you would need 1000 machines to have as much throughput as 4000 people. WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k. That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k. Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6…

Labor costs are likely double, if not more, than what i've estimated. overtime + insurance + drug testing + security + all the other crap i'm forgetting.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#53

Post by JohnnyBrown » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:47 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #38

batista wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do wi…

> the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources. Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check. Oh wait, I can do the same thing for…

Another key difference is that the set of thoughts whose public expression could get a person killed, and the actual danger from expressing them, has been much smaller in the US than in those two countries for the past hundred years or so.

We've had our inquisitions here, but I think people tend to recognize them and call them what they are pretty quickly. See Eleanor Roosevelt's very public comments about McCarthyism.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#54

Post by jfoutz » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:49 AM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #47

jfoutz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

you have underestimated both the cost of people and the cost of robots

I'm really curious about the robot costs. The automated shelving systems i've seen look, well, really simple. I'm pretty sure i could get a half assed DIY system working for a few hundred dollars. An industrial version can't be more than 100x the price can they? 50k per mover, on the outside?

edit

Bam. Average $5,000,000 an install. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/18/founder-stories-mick-mountz...

or less than three months labor costs, given my poor estimate. (granted this install might be orders of magnitude larger)

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#55

Post by scarmig » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:51 AM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #47

jfoutz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

you have underestimated both the cost of people and the cost of robots

I'd love to know how much does a robot like that actually costs, to buy, run, and maintain. Anything you can share?

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#56

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:54 AM UTC

batista wrote: post #18

temphn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> costs of corporate capitalism But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers…

But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do wi…

...PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.

Wait, what? Does the US pay less to import oil or steel than Sweden or something?

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#57

Post by winestock » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:59 AM UTC

DanI-S wrote: post #36

tsotha wrote: post #26

I worked at a company developing the warehouse management software. This was back in the mid '90s, but we didn't have a single customer that ran his warehouse like the one in the article. Picking is a crappy job, and everyone knows it, so pickers weren't expected to move too fast. If you showed up to work for a few weeks as a picker you'd get promoted to another position. Most of the people who got hired were ex-cons…

I would guess that the current economic climate provides an incentive for management to push workers harder than before, since there's a greater pool of replacements and a worse fate awaiting those who can't keep up.

Some time ago, a commenter on a blog called Advice Goddess wrote something apropos to what you've written:

"Competition isn't always an impetus to improve. Sometimes it's just impetus to fuck harder."

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#58

Post by ricardobeat » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 2:59 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #37

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a lot of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.

Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#59

Post by b1daly » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 3:01 AM UTC

People are making comments here about how unions diminish competiveness. What about incompetent CEOs who make big decisions that wreck a company and still get paid millions. Why is it always the lowest paid workers who are expected to take a pay cut to make the company viable? I'm thinking of high profile CEOs who brought havoc and failure to theieto company: Stephen Elop, Leo Apotheker, Carol Bartz,Carly Fiorina... But really, the insistence that the peons take the hits, I don't get it.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#60

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 3:02 AM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #16

ericd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Ultimately, in a free society people need to be allowed the right to cooperate. And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights, and that basic human decency demands that we allow non-management employees to have similar rights. Which is not to say that all unions are well-behaved. My time as a Teamster was both instructive and discouraging. They had sec…

And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights...

No, it's illegal for corporations to collectively bargain to set workers wages. On the flip side, if employees unionize, it's illegal for the employer to refuse to do business with them.