Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The market has no moral compass. If you decide that the market dictates what we should do, then your actions will reflect the morals of the market, i.e., none. Supply and demand is a statement of what "is", not what "should be". To some approximation.
It looks like you’re both arguing for the same thing: a higher federal minimum wage.
Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
211–220 of 419 posts
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a link/name of the wifi power plugs? Sounds intriguing.
TP link one ...also saw some random github-y thing while googleing the model number which hints at some level of hackable/api-able interfacing which made me click the buy button. That's sketchy info though https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GWWRK1C [Please bookmark & make use of smile.amazon.com/co.uk thing...it's amazon's corporate charity thing - free 0.5% donation]
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangentially one thing that I've pondered is the the Amazon Fulfillment Centers are typically on the periphery exurban areas such that they will have the benefits of the minimum wage legislation of the urban area but that wage will go a lot farther and they will have a lot shorter commute then if they were located in the urban area itself as a normal retail job would. That seems smart. For instance, $15 an hour goes…
Poor people generally don't live in suburban or exurban areas. And if they can't afford decent transportation then they will either face very long commutes or move and be stranded with whatever jobs are in the periphery exurban area.
So yes, $15/hour employment in exurban areas is actually good for poor people.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we stop it from happening. It isn’t inevitable. We are all of us making a choice to allow it.
You’re right. We could also make the choice to smash cars, because they take jobs away from the horse and buggy industry. We won’t, because the problem is not humanity’s total productive output growing larger, but how this output is managed and distributed.
Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if there isn't one within the next two centuries.
Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death would be eradicated.
Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)
Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now. We could have stopped it and we still can.
Or we can bury our heads in the sand.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some back of the napkin math: 650,000 Amazon workers. Let's say 600,000 are min(ish) wage and get an increase from $11/hr to $22/hr. That's a 13.2B increase per year. Jeff Bezo's net worth is 165B. Jeff Bezo's Net Worth drops 8% after one year.
Jeff's net worth isn't in cash. It's going to be affected much more strangely than your analysis suggests. If Amazon has to raise its labor costs that much, Wall Street will react in a way that is difficult to predict the magnitude, but easy to predict the direction. Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected o…
First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.
When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.
However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.
If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.
I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Previously yes, since a high number of retail jobs (i.e. stacking shelves, sorting inventory, etc.) were all done in the core part of the urban area (i.e. think Target or BestBuy directly in the downtown area). With Amazon Fulfillment, the "retail-like" jobs (sorting inventory) can be done where the employee actually can relocate to the periphery and have a traffic free commute. And delivery drivers will be returning…
This results in several net negatives for workers though: - Housing in exurban areas is not necessarily cheap. And moving has a nonzero cost. People may not be able to move to the exurbs in the first place. - Downtown is where services are. Generally speaking, suburban support for low-income people is often lacking. And kids have to switch schools, people lose their existing community support networks, etc. - Because…
I think the last one is the strongest - they are stuck if there are no alternative employment options.
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers. And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduc…
You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees. Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be. To pay significantly more…
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put people through. As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that Amazon can easily hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for t…
> It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work. That's about as useful a statement as "Thoughts and prayers." To change the labor market you go after the parties you can affect. Amazon is one. There are many others on the demand side. Retaining the workforce…
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers. And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduc…
You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees. Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be. To pay significantly more…
Re: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a fine plan if you're not the one suffering. Democracy takes time, and you can (and should) use leverage against corporations at the same time when necessary.
This is the point at which the thread swerves into unsubstantiveness and therefore flamewar. I realize it's not always predictable, but please take threads in the opposite direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html