211–220 of 253 posts
Retail has had labor quotas (with serious health/mental consequences) since time immemorial, but i don't see any outrage against Sears, ToysRus, or BedBath. Why ?
"Warehouse Quota Law, which went into effect in 2022 and limits quotas for 'work that must be performed at a specified speed or the worker suffers discipline,' "
So it's not just that Amazon was cracking the whip really hard, Amazon was particularly astray of a particular (and somewhat new) law.
Separately though, Amazon evidently mistreats employees excessively relative to the retailers you mention, e.g. delivery workers would have to pee in bottles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
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A. Amazon's retail margin is nearly zero. B. California is <0.5% of world population; IDK how much of Amazon's worldwide revenue.
I see this parroted around a lot, but Amazon's retail margin is not nearly zero. It's 3-5%, and accounts for over half the profit the company makes. And that's even before you account for the "profit" AWS makes from retail's purchases
Quoting top-line is misleading.
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They’ve been doing this for years. It costs less to pay the fines than the loss in productivity would be, the robots didn’t pan out in the timeframe advertised and driving human labor to subsistence level (“loose labor markets”) is both policy and incidentally the reason why all the polls say “the economy is terrible” and all the pundits say “how do we convince the public that the metrics show they should be happy”.
The pundits say the economy is fine, and that the labor market is still really tight (but slackening gradually). They do note that economic sentiment is really, really bad, and it seems to be for non-economic reasons (residual inflation shock, mostly). Avoiding further inflation is the key reason that policy is leaning on the labor market at all.
It’s a quiet consensus, but few are claiming that Gen Z is just crushing it on home ownership or any other credible proxy for doing as well as the baby boomers.
Cheap consumer electronics are not substantially wealth! High-fructose corn syrup might be cheaper than ever, but anything north of that is rapidly becoming a boutique luxury. A public university education is triple what it was 20 years ago.
Hacker News is in many ways the best thing on the Internet, but people trying to finely parse this and that nitpick under a headline “Amazon Pays The Fines So They Can Continue to Exploit Workers with Impunity” makes me embarrassed to hang out here.
The issue here is that Amazon had productivity quotas for its workers that were kept secret from the workers. It's the keeping a secret part that is illegal. On the one hand, this seems reasonable, but the fact that the law only applies to warehouse workers (the "Warehouse Quota Law") and was passed in 2022 makes me suspicious that this isn't a good faith worker protection law but rather specifically targeted at Amaz…
> If this practice is so bad, why is it allowed for all other industries? Competent lawmakers consider enforceability. Enforcing a law like this requires either the creation and funding of an enforcement agency, or additional funding to an existing agency to enforce it. If your law applies to all industries, that funding is massive and gets struck down--either the law simply isn't passed, or the law is passed but is…
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I like the idea. If you're a startup that's losing money, you can get paid by the government to commit crime?
Maybe proportional to revenue (not profit). Plus standard baseline?
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In Finland, speeding fines are based on your income. Can we have that, but for corporations?
I was told that in Monaco, if you are caught speeding in a supercar, your fine is much more than if you are caught speeding on your moped. I thought that seemed fair to me. Whether it is true or not is something I never looked up as I will never be in the situation of needing to know. If it's not true, then seems like a waste of a good idea that people seem to want to be true.
Adding mass of the vehicle as a component to fines would also be a sensible measure to make the fine reflect the hazard.
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> With ownership, the government also then has the ability to 'peer behind the veil' more easily and make sure management is behaving You want every politician you don’t like in the country having this power? > if a company continues to misbehave the government over time takes ownership and can then replace the board This is expropriation. (It’s also fines with extra steps and ongoing costs.) > think a corporate equi…
If it reduces corporate power enough we might actually be able to get some trustworthy people into office.
Everybody saying slap-on-the-wrist. But does the next time fine consider priors?
$5.9M is not even a rounding error for a $2T corporation.
The crime was also not even a rounding error. The important thing is whether the punishment fits the crime.