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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

#191

Post by somethoughts »

8note wrote: post #189
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…

It seems weird that the office workers are working from the office and not in the production line too, no? Do your meetings while assembling a car, I'd you're worried about the people assembling cars feeling bad

I think that is the preference/ideal scenario that Musk has in his head.

Take a morning standup with your coworkers about supply chain/scrum, head to the factory floor to show the technicians how to flash the latest firmware to the infotainment system, do some heads down work, go home, eat dinner and then take a phone conference late at night with your Tesla China/Berlin counterpart.

Probably impressions matter on the factory floor and when you scale up operations. You don't want a situation where the people on the factory floor just refer to the design team as "corporate" (i.e. "corporate" wants us to do this, guys we have to redo X over again on all 10,000 cars we produced today because "dude in corporate" thinks its not going to work otherwise).

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

#192

Post by ethbr0 »

hamburglar wrote: post #187
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…

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different. But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses.…

> Information workers and factory workers are different.

Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?

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

#193

Post by __turbobrew__ »

viraptor wrote: post #70
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #6

As I said last time "Please remember to turn the servers off when you go on strike".

There's a line between a strike and sabotage. That idea is on the wrong side and either a reason to fire you or sue you. I hope nobody seriously considers it.

When factory workers walk out on strike nothing in the factory gets made. It doesn’t seem insane to me that when engineers walk out the systems they maintain stop working.

It would obviously be career suicide to do something like turn off S3 for an hour, but it would definitely make a point.

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

#194

Post by sacnoradhq »

My neighbor at AWS did WfH pre-pandemic, went to "100% in-office" for about 3 weeks, and I think is at about 50/50% now. There's no real reason to go into the office without coworkers on the same team.

Offices = commute time and expense + noisy distractions - declining perks.

Butt-in-seat mentality (BISM) is antiquated.

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

#195

Post by coliveira »

operatingthetan wrote: post #107
plagiarist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need that rule of thumb here. I believe Elon's very public tantrums on and regarding Twitter have shown that he lacks even basic integrity. The gall that he would discuss what is or is not moral from that position.

It must be some form of gaslighting for an obviously amoral person to make public announcements of moral platitudes. Why people agree with them is beyond me, is there perverse pleasure in being deeply wrong?

Being a billionaire in America transforms the person in some kind of super hero. People are mentally incapable to disagree with them, even on basic topics that everyone knows are wrong. The media exploits this every day.

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

#196

Post by 8note »

dataflow wrote: post #142
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…

Of all the people in the position to claim people are morally obligated to commute to work, a rich billionaire focused on minimizing carbon emissions isn't one.

He's certainly not focused on minimizing carbon emissions - otherwise he wouldn't be making a luxury car company

He exploited tax incentives intended to reduce carbon emissions, sure, but that's not the same thing as focussing on reducing carbon emissions

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

#197

Post by somethoughts »

hamburglar wrote: post #187
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…

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different. But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses.…

I agree from a technological/logical standpoint but from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues. People love to complain/go to press about HR decisions. The press would love to portray Musk as hypocritical about treating production line workers as second class denizens. The headline writes itself.

I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse.

But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.

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

#198

Post by paxys »

TexanFeller wrote: post #52

These protesters are just going to accelerate outsourcing. If companies can't get the benefits of in-office Americans and are forced into having a remote workforce they might as well get them for 1/4 of the price from Central and South America.

If Amazon could replace workers for 1/4 the price then why haven't they done it already?

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

#199

Post by klipklop »

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 ignoring the fact that these RTO orders come from billionaires?

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

#200

Post by neom »

Thorentis wrote: post #170
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…

> when he said it and I literally pulled my bike over and sat for a half hour or so thinking Meta comment, but seriously? A comment from Elon made you pause your commute for 30 minutes? I can't imagine ever being this affected by a podcast.

Yeah seriously! I was riding beside a river (for fun) listening to the interview and it came to that section, he said it and I laughed out loud... thought what a weird perspective. I'd never considered that before and there was a bench over looking the river a ways down so I pulled over, sat on the bench and debated it with myself for a while... let myself agree in one direction... see how I feel, let myself agree in the other direction, see how I feel. Just think it back and forth with myself for a while. As the other reply to this comment said, it's a great deal of fun to do this and I enjoy it a lot!
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