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

Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 476 posts

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#251

Post by zeepzeep »

hef19898 wrote: post #248
Firmwarrior wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us, since there isn't really a road between "warehouse worker" and "software engineer", unless someone has the knack for coding (in which case there's a very clear and well-paved road within the company between those roles) I think the best solution is to empower workers via unions or whatever else. It should be impossible for workers to get gro…

Everything at Amazon is a road between software engineers and warehouse workers, because everything SEs at Amazon (with the exception of AWS) are doing is serving its eCommerce business. And that eCommerce business is riding on the back of warehouse workers.

It's weird how the hard working people that don't like their job get paid close to nothing and the software people enjoying their jobs get rich. I'm lucky that I could turn my hobby into a well paying profession, but it's kinda weird...

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#252

Post by nemo44x »

Everyone says that Twitter can limit speech because it’s not the government and 1a isn’t at issue. So why is it different when a private corporation limits speech on their platform?

Do you understand now why we think it’s a bad precedent?

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#253

Post by nemo44x »

jmyeet wrote: post #90

This is incredibly shortsighted and possibly illegal. There are limits to what companies can do to prevent or impede you from forming or joining a union. Amazon will need to tread very carefully here. But why would anyone use the company's messaging app this way anyway? Wouldn't employees be safer just using Signal, Google Talk (or whatever it's called now), FB Messenger, WhatsApp or whatever? If not, won't moves lik…

The middle classes have never been wealthier thanks to a greatly improved upper middle class over the last 40 years and the lower class has shrunk considerably over those years.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#254

Post by wickedsickeune »

attilaperez wrote: post #245
olalonde wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. HN has a large libertarian base who are against regulated unions. They are seen as bad government interference in the free enterprise system. I don't want to start an argument but there's a lot of economics science that supports that belief.

Economics is not a science, it's an art. Believe me.

There is no need for "belief", it is literally not a science, it does not adhere to the scientific method.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#255

Post by k0k0r0 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #238
deltaonefour wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Not only can anyone program. But anyone can do surgery, become a fighter pilot and become a barrister. It's the same thing as how anyone can learn mathematics, algebra, biology and any of the typical subjects you learn at school. You struggle with deep learning only because it's a paradigm shift. It's too different from traditional programming so the initial learning curve makes it seem like you're incapabl…

Your comment is typical of people with an average or high IQ. There are people whose IQ is so low they can't even be legally enlisted in the army (the ASVAB test the Army does correlates with IQ). Some people won't have the same learning ability you have. I also thought that everyone could learn to program and organised bootcamps and education for developers (for free) - it turned out only a fraction of the people I'…

As a mostly private teacher of mathematics with 7 to 10 years experience for both, children at schools and adults at university, and both, individuals and groups, and both, those who struggle and those who do not, I'd like to share my narrow experience and disagree.

Most people I worked with struggled with something entirely different than the actual content they are trying or forced to learn. I am certain the biggest obsticles are stress, fear and and hopelessnes. And often not towards the methematics, but rather something entirely different. E.g. issues in the family, fear of the consequences of bad grades, and no hope regarding their own future, regardless of whether they learn or not.

I expierienced some challenges as ADHD and expierienced them as somewhat orthogonal. And definitely additionally challenging for me as a teacher. I also expierienced people who did struggle a lot, independent of anything I mentioned so far. So I am sure, there is differences among people (you may measure that in IQ or whatever, I prefer not to). But for most people I met they are not the problem.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#256

Post by WalterBright »

grapeskin wrote: post #204
chii wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen. Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). And if programming is valuable, why wouldn't these "low paid" programmers quit and take their skills elsewhere, including start…

> Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). You already provided a real world example of them doing it. So it does happen. And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition. That's only going to expand going further. The automotive industry in…

> And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition

Now? I'm old and have heard that constantly my entire life. It still hasn't happened.

> The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market

I live in Seattle. The local politicians managed to do that all by themselves.

For example, there once was a car tunnel under the city. The city decided to build another tunnel. What to do with the dug out material, what to do ... I know! let's pack it into the existing tunnel! We spend billions and wind up where we started!

(The rationale was the old tunnel was, well, getting old. Nobody was able to explain why boring a new tunnel was cheaper than shoring up the old one.)

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#257

Post by hef19898 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #243
grapeskin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech workers can skip FAANG’s 300k salaries and still do fine with 180k at a more ethical company. Those people are responsible. The people slaving for 50 cents over minimum wage and still being unable to pay rent don’t have much of a choice.

Those people taking 300k salaries and building amazon.com are also contributing to creating value for the customers of amazon.com. Is the value created for the customers of amazon.com less or more significant for society at large than people who can't get a better job than minimum wage, voluntarily working for minimum wage? There is no moral right or wrong. I personally hate amazon and I would never work for them (ev…

If you work at Amazon, as I did, regardless of what you do you are part of the system. And that system, ultimately, creates value for AMZN's shareholders. And first and foremost Jeff Bezos.

The line so is based on how far down the food chain you are. Blue Collar employees, the drivers, warehouse workers and so on, are not part of the problem. White collar employees, pretty much so. I say that as a former White Collar Amazonian. Amazon, so to be fair, is just among the more extreme manifestations of rampant, unregulated capitalism. And it's not that all the other logistics companies are treating their blue collar employees any better. On average, so there are always those exceptions of great employers and great managers everywhere. Unfortunately those are becoming rarer by the day.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#258

Post by notch656a »

ineedasername wrote: post #114
edmundsauto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible analogy and adds nothing to the conversation. We aren't going to make children work in mines, because (as I'm sure you know), adult workers and children are not the same thing. There is a huge chasm between "adult workers making more than a lot of their other opportunities is slightly more cannot unionize as easily using Amazon services" and "put children back in coal mines".

I worked up to 60 hours a week (I'd say avg 50) from the time I was 13 years old making $6 an hour. It was backbreaking, grueling labor. But not a coal mine so no risk of black lung, so I guess everything is okay? Or maybe my parents should have taken advantage of economic opportunities that didn't exist (they looked, constantly, for options). This was in the US. Most of the time I did my homework in school, cramming…

Would your family have been better off if the income from your $6/hr job was lost? I presume this work was beneficial to your family somehow, otherwise you wouldn't have engaged in it.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#259

Post by zorpner »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #217
zaik wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only takes a few seconds to find a keyword in someones comment history: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Why would they search specifically for "cancel culture"? It seems pretty obvious that the individual didn't search but instead took the time to try and find anything they could to make OP look bad.

Because it was immediately obvious from their post that they are engaged in political posturing rather than legitimate debate? It's really not hard to tell.
Post reply on HN