Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#301

Post by blagie » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

bsedlm wrote: post #229

blagie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competi…

It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side. Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't…

I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for people who have worked there, and therefore have better-informed opinions.

I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market.

I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether:

- Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or

- Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor

depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#302

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

Melatonic wrote: post #249

They're known to have such crazy warehouse shifts that people unofficially carry piss bottles with them. They're also known to be a crap place to work at the high end for the educated workforce and the best I have heard is "Get in, get out, pump your resume and leave as fast as you can" Surprise!

[deleted]

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#303

Post by mbostleman » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

esaym wrote: post #187

kzrdude wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line. I am…

>>but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half>>

I don't think this is a situation that applies to the idea of self-regulation. In this case, a distortion of the market is first created by the government subsidy. So the natural behavior of a business would be to leverage it. Just as the natural behavior of the IRS is to go after things like your company's paying for your cell phone and calling it taxable income.

I would suggest that the idea of self-regulation is best applied where there are no market distortions from the government that have already warped the context.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#304

Post by andi999 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #288

abakker wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced h…

i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separat…

Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the staff. The definition is no good.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#305

Post by SR2Z » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #288

abakker wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced h…

i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separat…

It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before.

It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.

"Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#306

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

FFRefresh wrote: post #280

youessayyyaway wrote: post #81

I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/…

>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist. 1. Walmart pays S…

The journalist did their job by offering these statements with all the qualifiers that you used to make your comparison.

Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#307

Post by Hasu » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

surement wrote: post #192

throw0101a wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost […] Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies

While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't b…

> Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour.

One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single employee is responsible for in any real world employment situation.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#308

Post by anotheracctfo » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #288

abakker wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced h…

i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separat…

Or you could band together and collectively withhold your labour. These are solved problems, its how the impoverished and exploited ended the gilded age.

Individualization is heavily pushed because capitalism requires fungible labour. But if you band together then capitalism breaks down, because pure ideology runs into the brick wall of reality.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#309

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #39

IMTDb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers. Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.

Have you considered that those customers and workers are mostly the same people? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See: https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/

[deleted]

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#310

Post by uncomputation » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

madrox wrote: post #282

lisper wrote: post #269

> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting…

This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.

Combine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little stability because you will either get torn down for someone else’s ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any means necessary.