I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them • Hacker News Board

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#141

Post by sokoloff » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #135

sokoloff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $14B in SNAP benefits is because Walmart is a significant market share grocer and people who receive SNAP benefits buy food at Walmart with those benefits. I'm not sure how that makes Walmart a villain in the current discussion. Target takes in about $5B revenue from sales under SNAP, Aldi about $4.5B, and Kroger just under $4B. Companies who serve SNAP recipients should be lauded not vilified, IMO. They're serv…

Nobody is upset that Wal-Mart sells food to SNAP beneficiaries. What people are upset over is the fact that so many of Wal-Mart's employees need to go on public assistance because the company refuses to pay them enough to live on. Trying to pretend this is about Wal-Mart selling food, and not the wages they pay is incredibly dishonest.

> Nobody is upset that Wal-Mart sells food to SNAP beneficiaries.

Literally the post to which I replied complained about "simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem". It seems that someone is upset about that.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#142

Post by s73v3r_ » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #129

ElBarto wrote: post #22

"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages." Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here. If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.

But raising minimum wage at what cost? It's already gotten really hard for high school kids to find work. Raising minimum wage will just make that worse.

I'm far less concerned about high school kids than I am about people needing these jobs to survive.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#143

Post by s73v3r_ » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #18

andrewla wrote: post #14

There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target. One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance…

> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be…

No, not at all. It's that, if you are employing someone full time, those people should not need public assistance. If they do, then taxpayers are subsidizing your labor costs. And for a company as big and as rich as Amazon or Wal-Mart, that's completely unacceptable.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#144

Post by Timmah » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

jdpedrie wrote: post #94

ameister14 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and t…

"To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.

It's no more of a travesty when "violence to the rule of law" is done against corporations than when it is committed against poor people.

Also, AMZN built their empire by exploiting interstate sales tax loopholes to undercut brick and mortar competitors. Why shouldn't their representation under the "rule of law" be proportionately undercut?

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#145

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #134

chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly. I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.

The whole point of a union is to protect the rights of people who are doing things that don't take a lot of skill.

[deleted]

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#146

Post by devit » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

dreamache wrote: post #125

devit wrote: post #11

The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hour…

UBI is an absolutely terrible idea by the way. The problems you speak of would only get worse.

Assuming UBI is feasible and denominated in goods (i.e. you get an house, food, clothes, etc. rather than X dollars that may inflate), then I assume most or all people would not choose to work in an Amazon warehouse at the conditions described.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#147

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

Timmah wrote: post #144

jdpedrie wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.

It's no more of a travesty when "violence to the rule of law" is done against corporations than when it is committed against poor people. Also, AMZN built their empire by exploiting interstate sales tax loopholes to undercut brick and mortar competitors. Why shouldn't their representation under the "rule of law" be proportionately undercut?

> It's no more of a travesty when "violence to the rule of law" is done against corporations than when it is committed against poor people.

This seems like a rather blatant false dichotomy.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#148

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

docker_up wrote: post #100

unstatusthequo wrote: post #84

My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses. Then people will complain they lost their jobs...

Full automation is likely impossible. Ask Elon Musk about his problems with trying to fully automate Tesla production.

Full automation is not necessary. That's one of the easiest oversights I've ever seen in the business world.

I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount - because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people, they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people doing manual work.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#149

Post by geezerjay » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

la6470 wrote: post #42

sokoloff wrote: post #36

IMO, it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. If Senator Sanders et al want to target all compani…

While all political parties are sheding alligator tears over this why are they not coming together to Raise the minimum wage?

Minimum wage is simply a constraint that prohibits the creation of some jobs that are available to the most vulnerable members of society in economically depressed regions.

Therefore, making lower-paying jobs illegal just because their salary falls below an arbitrary threshold only stops or hinders those jobs from being created, at the expense of higher unemployment rates.

I'm sure people working on shitty minimum wage jobs would not stay in the same minimum wage job if there were better higher-paying alternatives available to them. If they have no better alternatives than those jobs I don't understand how eliminating them by arbitrarily raising the minimum legal salary limit would leave them better off.

Re: I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

#150

Post by ddingus » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #141

s73v3r_ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is upset that Wal-Mart sells food to SNAP beneficiaries. What people are upset over is the fact that so many of Wal-Mart's employees need to go on public assistance because the company refuses to pay them enough to live on. Trying to pretend this is about Wal-Mart selling food, and not the wages they pay is incredibly dishonest.

> Nobody is upset that Wal-Mart sells food to SNAP beneficiaries. Literally the post to which I replied complained about "simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem". It seems that someone is upset about that.

Look at the root cause of why. Parent comment nailed it.