Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

motherjones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 209 posts

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

#131

Post by mkramlich »

rabidsnail wrote: post #76
ricardobeat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers? Nobody keeps inventory around for that long. Unless you're speculating on the future supply of a product you're only keeping stuff in stock for the buffer between when a whole palette comes in and when you need another one. So you can rent "fulfillment instances" as you need to order more inventory.

> elastic fulfillment centers?

with the obvious suggestion here that Amazon might be best-poised to get into this

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

#132

Post by mwhite »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #60
bunderbunder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

s/management/middle management

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

#133

Post by mwhite »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #60
bunderbunder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

s/management/middle management

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

#134

Post by intended »

ghshephard wrote: post #127
intended wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you treat people as human machines, remove unionizing ability and what have you, then you can bring yourself to competitive levels with China, which has kinda made a very persuasive point that human robots are cheaper than mechanical ones. The only issue with labor of course is the so called 'managing' aspect of it, which covers things like quality of life. Robots don't have and will never complain about, whi…

Re: " China, which has kinda made the point that human robots are cheaper than mechanical ones." Not for long. "The China Business News on Monday quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying the company planned to use 1 million robots within three years, up from about 10,000 robots in use now and an expected 300,000 next year." http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-...

The point still stands. It may (should) change in the future as people start asserting their rights. (I have seen the article before, its Foxconn currently, but labor prices and further opportunities haven't reached a point where you can safely bleed off the population away from manufacturing just yet.)

At the same time though, it shows that as long as you have people who have no option, you can use them to easily produce more value than robots at similar costs. Which is what the Mother Jones article is basically about.

Also, its worth remembering that those robots are also going to be used for capacity expansion, while keeping cheap tractable labour.

TLDR: Improving standards of living will make robotics more competitive, unless there are sufficient people who have no other option but to compete with machines.

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

#135

Post by intended »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #60
bunderbunder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Individual company's management != collective bargaining by corporations.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

mbell wrote: post #49
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.

Unions are disastrous for many of the same reasons that much of my country's (USA) systems are failing in various ways, political corruption. I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city. It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by intended »

mbell wrote: post #49
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.

Unions are disastrous for many of the same reasons that much of my country's (USA) systems are failing in various ways, political corruption. I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city. It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or…

Or perhaps the union system has merit, but its in great need for a spring cleaning.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #63
mgkimsal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well... it costs them something more than it cost to have it the way it is now, and since they don't have to pay for the effect on the workers working in the non-ergonomic warehouse, what's the point? If they had to pay for the health/welfare of their workers directly, they'd have an incentive to ergonimicize the place.

If they had to pay for the health/welfare of their workers directly... You mean if they had to pay some sort of compensation for work related injuries? Too bad only 50 US states have workers comp laws.

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by intended »

DanI-S wrote: post #41
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

The author mentions that picking 800 items filled 52% of her daily quota. An extra 5c shipping cost per item could thus double her salary, or pay for an entire extra employee. There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.

Or ironically get called dead weight later.

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

#140

Post by simplefish »

savramescu wrote: post #129
yummyfajitas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is whether Sweden pays a higher price for oil (ignoring taxes) than the US, not whether the US attempts to keep oil prices low. None of your links address the question I actually asked. If Iraqi oil is fully exploited, I agree this will result in lower oil prices. But oil prices are set by the global market - the price Sweden pays = global price + shipping cost, same as the US.

This is not about the price of oil. Sweden and the US may pay the same price. But who's extracting it? Who's making the profit in the sale?

It's not about the price of oil? This chain of comments was sparked by yummyfajitas asking "does the US pay less to import oil or steel than Sweden or something?", which seems fairly focused on price. And he was replying to a comment that claimed that American prosperity was due, in part, to "military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources". Which, again, seems awfully focused on price.

Now, you might want to change the subject to talk about oil company profits, but I'm not sure why you'd want to, because that makes even less sense. It's frankly ludicrous to suggest that American prosperity is in some way linked to the fact that ExxonMobil is headquartered in Texas rather than Canada or Europe. It's a publicly traded multinational corporation!

Sure it paid $15 billion in income tax in 2009, but none of it was in the US. Think that number would be higher if they were incorporated offshore? (Hint: No.) Yes, it pays dividends, but it does so regardless of whether those shareholders are citizens of the country it is headquartered in. Think the ratio of dividends paid to Americans versus Swedes would change if ExxonMobil moved offshore? (Hint: No.) And since this "isn't about the price of oil", we don't need to even ask if prices at the pump in the US would change if they moved offshore. (Although, obviously, they wouldn't.)

So I'm curious: The original post was talking about how America is richer than Sweden 'cause the American military is used to do something relating to oil. You say it's not about the price, but about oil company profits. Okay. Even if we accept that the US military has done wonders for the bottom line of ExxonMobil...how does Joe Bloggs become better off because a nominally American oil company is making a higher profit this year? Answer: He doesn't. So maybe we need to look a little further.

(And that's not even touching on the idea that military might is exogenous - this thing that some lucky countries have, and others don't.)

Post reply on HN