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

An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

geekwire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 178 posts

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#161

Post by antinitro »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #15

Sounds to me like the work his team was doing, annotating films with meta-data, is a stop gap situation. I presume Amazon is working on an automated system based on Mechanical Turk or crowd sourcing to do the annotating. If this is indeed the case, it would not make sense to hire a full-time team.

I assumed the work he was doing was at a higher level than that - i.e. creating the software which allows the end user to see these annotations. In this case, it would need ongoing maintenance, which would be done best by a full time team who understand the code.

Either way, if he's good at what he does, it would make sense for the company to keep him on even if they move him to another project.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#162

Post by mabbo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #16
mabbo wrote: post #5

Speaking as a developer at Amazon.com, what contractors? I've never met any, and I only have heard of one who left a while ago. Edit later: Developer contractors at least. I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps.

I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps. Obviously people like that don't deserve any kind of job security and should be fired annually. /sarcasm

Valid criticism. I'd prefer to see them as full time, but I think most large companies today use contacted companies for cleaning staff, etc. It's what it is, and that whole problem is bigger than just one company.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#163

Post by Colliwinks »

Filligree wrote: post #154
saalweachter wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the difference between a business and an individual. Individuals pay taxes on incomes. Corporations pay taxes on profits, so they can have arbitrarily large incomes while maintaing zero profits. "Profit" is either "money you haven't spent yet" or "money you need to return to investors". Modern corporations have been telling investors to eat a bag of salted peanuts lately, so they really don't care about returnin…

So.. hold on. If the companies have no profits, and investors get no return. ..why would you want to invest?

Because they get no immediate return from profit (from dividends), but the value of the stock still increases (hopefully moreso if they are reinvesting more of their profit into future growth).

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#164

Post by kalleboo »

pasbesoin wrote: post #8

Ama-Mart Wal-zon Take your pick. I don't care whether you are "online" or off. Treat your workers like shit -- yes, your workers, you wankers; I don't care what shell employment manoeuvring you use -- and run a business model that takes advantage of, if it's not outright predicated upon, the public dole, and I will be disinclined to send my business your way. Other readers here: If you don't like it, vote with your d…

> Other readers here: If you don't like it, vote with your dollars (or whatever currency). It's the only way, in today's world.

If you see shitty management as abuse, I hope you're ready to boycott 90% of everything else in addition to the 90% of manufactured goods you must already be boycotting.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#165

Post by bmelton »

anigbrowl wrote: post #110
bmelton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he was hired on the promise that his contract would only be 11 months, and he knew that up front, I don't see why it's a problem. If he were just randomly fired after 11 months so that they could avoid paying the difference, then I would completely agree with you.

I would be very interested to know just how transparent they were about that. At one extreme I can see some vague handwaving saying 'this is a contract position...you get what that means right? so sign here...' At the other you might get a HR person saying 'yes contract jobs can lead to full-time opportunities' even though that might only happen for one person once a year.

I would too, but I've worked in plenty of situations, as much as two decades ago, where there was a contract, and the potential for future employment. Once you get on site, you start asking the actual employees how serious the potential is, but the contract length is known full well ahead of time.

Again though, I just don't see anything odd or unusual in this setup. It's pretty much the exact same setup that companies like Manpower and Adecco have used for decades. I don't know anything about the wages at Amazon, but I'm far more laissez faire on that than I suspect much of the rest of HN, and that's fine, but clearly Amazon isn't breaking the law here.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#166

Post by jellicle »

barista wrote: post #63
nostromo wrote: post #49

> In this terrible economy, I am grateful for the work Seattle's unemployment rate is 4%, which is basically optimal and near what it was before the recession. https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+unemployment+rate Seattle real-estate has almost completely rebounded. http://www.zillow.com/local-info/WA-Seattle-home-value/r_160... People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over. If Amazon values the work t…

Given the razor thin margins that Amazon runs with, I am not surprised. This is a company that is struggling to make any money even after people bought hundreds of Billions of dollars worth of stuff from them. They are bound to cut corners to stay alive.

Ha! Funny. Actually Amazon makes plenty of money, they're just recording their income in other countries as a tax dodge, like every other megacorp nowadays.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-brit...

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#167

Post by drderidder »

Unethical companies are doing a similar thing with temporary foreign workers in Canada. I want an app with an ethical rating system for companies so I can research easily and buy from companies that aren't jerks. Something based on environmental stewardship, treatment of employees, customer support, etc. As for Amazon, this article made me resolve not to use them, but I'd prefer not to wait until a story blows up to be informed enough to be an ethical consumer.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#168

Post by saalweachter »

Filligree wrote: post #154
saalweachter wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the difference between a business and an individual. Individuals pay taxes on incomes. Corporations pay taxes on profits, so they can have arbitrarily large incomes while maintaing zero profits. "Profit" is either "money you haven't spent yet" or "money you need to return to investors". Modern corporations have been telling investors to eat a bag of salted peanuts lately, so they really don't care about returnin…

So.. hold on. If the companies have no profits, and investors get no return. ..why would you want to invest?

Hypothetically you are betting on future profits.

Historically, business ventures like Amazon have had two phases: a fast growth phase, and a long, stable, profitable phase. You don't expect profits while the business is still growing. You expect them to plow the profits back in to make it grow more. As long as companies can maintain absurd year-over-year growth, investors are willing to pretend that the company needs its giant cash piles to grow more faster. This is actually the rational reason why the stock market shoots a brick whenever one of these tech companies only increases its profits by 23% instead of the projected 27%.

Hypothetically, what Amazon's share price means is that investors believe that it will return more than that many dollars per share to its investors once it switches from its fast growth to its slow-and-steady phase.

Hypothetically; stock also has value because the expectation that it will go up or down creates a class of investor who buys or sells it based on its expected price regardless of its fundamentals, which can affect the price in either direction.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#169

Post by throwaway1979 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #86
bmelton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that would be a fine argument, I suppose, if I'd seen anything in the article about the wages. Like I said though, if that's the case, it's either outside the scope of this article, or I just missed it. Is that indeed the case, that Amazon is paying exploitative wages for these positions?

In this case, it's not the wages, it's the fact that they can't work for more than 11 months and that there's no chance of upward mobility. A person with no experience is given a 'real' job while a temp isn't even considered.

There is a recent book called "End of the Good Life" ... it has one too many stories in there but covers the problems faced by temporary workers (who are typically young workers). I was surprised to learn what a huge problem this is in Europe.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#170

Post by lambersley »

anigbrowl wrote: post #13
lambersley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one organization where I was a manager, our HR policies limited the contractors we hired to 'two terms,' 36 months. If I wanted to keep that person on staff, I would have to wait 12 months before I could bring them back. The result: The really good people I WANTED on my staff could not keep any longer than three years.

Did the HR people ever provide any rationale for this? I mean, I know that hiring people full-time creates a bunch of additional costs and liabilities. But did they ever quantify what those costs would be, so that you could weigh them against the projected benefit of a hire, not to mention the opportunity cost of cutting someone loose and hiring a new person, with the resultant drop in productivity? I mean, it's not…

HR pointed the finger at Procurement for signing a contract with the staffing provider that included those terms. Noone could really justify why that clause existed, and likely to still be the case.
Post reply on HN