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Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

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Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#331

Post by bbddg »

conanbatt wrote: post #236
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Marx and Engels did accurately identify that a large reserve of under-employed workers, or people who didn't previously participate in the labor force, is what enables the most exploitative jobs. All necessities in life cost money: food, housing, childcare, healthcare; and those in the most precarious social positions are the people most willing to accept abusive employment for reasons directly tied to their su…

Please, the world had 94% extreme poverty in their time, and its down to less than 10%. The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results…

Extreme poverty is defined as someone living on less than $1.25 a day. Do you think that exploitation isn't occurring as long as someone isn't living in extreme poverty?

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#332

Post by skybrian »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #47

My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this. My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are trea…

Thinking about what "owning the robots" might actually look like, the easiest way I can think to solve it would be for the government to buy index funds and use the proceeds to fund basic income.

This wouldn't own any robots from privately-owned companies, though.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#333

Post by piracykills »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #180
piracykills wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, reading real statistics on this kind of thing instead of alarmist and politically slanted headlines paints a very different picture of how the world is doing. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

As global average quality of life trends upward, the American lower and middle class are dying quietly in the streets. https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/21/5720803...

That's a very niche problem in comparison - we're talking hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty across the globe compared to under hundreds of thousands dying of opioid overdoses. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, but I just don't find it that concerning when put into the larger picture.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#334

Post by mnemonicsloth »

dragonwriter wrote: post #318
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. Think of Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. People try to rehabilitate Marxism every so often, but the problem of the murderous regime pops up again and again, for a simple reason: when the state arrogates to itself enough power to remake society according to so…

> The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. That’s the problem with Leninism. The (biggest; there are others but this prevents even useful discussion of those) problem with Marxism is that people (even those who oppose Leninism and disbelieve everything else associated with it) accept Leninism’s propaganda that it is Marxism, rather…

All Lenin did was decide that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be headed by an actual dictator. It's kind of an inevitable conclusion, given where he was starting from and some of the realities of people working in groups.

You are, of course, free to say that the murderous regimes that have popped up again and again are not the true Marxism. But then you have to explain why the false Marxism has appeared so often, and then to explain, given that millions of lives could be at stake, how to prevent a recurrence.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#335

Post by munk-a »

dragonwriter wrote: post #318
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. Think of Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. People try to rehabilitate Marxism every so often, but the problem of the murderous regime pops up again and again, for a simple reason: when the state arrogates to itself enough power to remake society according to so…

> The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. That’s the problem with Leninism. The (biggest; there are others but this prevents even useful discussion of those) problem with Marxism is that people (even those who oppose Leninism and disbelieve everything else associated with it) accept Leninism’s propaganda that it is Marxism, rather…

Ayup, lets remember that the original councils of soviets in Russia were overthrown by the bolsheviks and dissolved when they came to power.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#336

Post by toomuchtodo »

piracykills wrote: post #333
toomuchtodo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As global average quality of life trends upward, the American lower and middle class are dying quietly in the streets. https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/21/5720803...

That's a very niche problem in comparison - we're talking hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty across the globe compared to under hundreds of thousands dying of opioid overdoses. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, but I just don't find it that concerning when put into the larger picture.

Perhaps you not finding it concerning emphasizes the problem. As an American, it greatly concerns me. It’s also why populism and nationalism have taken hold in first world countries.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#337

Post by jimmaswell »

djhartman wrote: post #199
ythn wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AKA have no rights or security as an employee ever anywhere. I get what you are saying, but somehow this attitude also rubs me the wrong way sometimes. It's like "Hey, I'll pay anyone a nickle per piece of trash they pick up in the local forests" Soon: "NiceNature is the worst company ever! They exploit their workers to pick up garbage without proper protection, the employees have no rights or securities and are fo…

This is a ridiculous comparison. How would you be enriching yourself by paying people to pick up trash? Did you get a contract from the government or the owner to pick up the trash? If you did, then yes you should probably take some of that money you made and hire some people to do the work or do it yourself.

> How would you be enriching yourself by paying people to pick up trash?

You get to have nicer forests to walk in?

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#338

Post by blackbagboys »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #309
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #47

My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this. My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are trea…

The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. Think of Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. People try to rehabilitate Marxism every so often, but the problem of the murderous regime pops up again and again, for a simple reason: when the state arrogates to itself enough power to remake society according to so…

If you're going to play that game, you can very easily make a case (and probably a much stronger one) that capitalism's body-count is much, much higher. For starters, you'd have to credit it with the extermination of the Native Americans, the blood-soaked history of 19th century European colonialism, and the First World War.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#339

Post by Retric »

wutbrodo wrote: post #308
vkou wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. No, what accounts for that is access to incredibly cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels and electrification. Energy is what lifted people out of poverty, not any of that other nonsense. Without coal, oil, and hydro power, most of us would still be subsistence peasants, regardless of whether or not we would live in Communism, Feudalism, Capit…

Out of curiosity, what is your model for the dramatic examples of India and China, which were faced with relative stagnation and incredibly dire, largely-intractable poverty for decades after WWII; followed by liberalizing (incrementally) their markets and explosive growth+massive declines in extreme poverty thereafter? I don't know a ton about the economic history of these two countries, but prima facie this seems t…

There are counter examples to India and China that resulted in high standards of living without liberalizing markets, generally from valuable natural resources and low populations. There are zero examples without access to cheap energy.

PS: The China boom looks 'good' mostly due to how terrible the country was run prior to that. Expand the time scale and compare to other countries and things don't look nearly as good.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#340

Post by piracykills »

knieveltech wrote: post #302
piracykills wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, reading real statistics on this kind of thing instead of alarmist and politically slanted headlines paints a very different picture of how the world is doing. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

It is fascinating how frequently modest increases in quality of living in third world countries is wheeled out as justification for the predations of capitalism. If we're going to have a serious conversation about how the world is doing that has to include the fact that the global economy is predicated on continuous growth despite finite natural resources. There is also a few environmental issues that might be releva…

I'd advise reading the article I linked, the increases are far from modest in many cases.

I'll agree with you on the environmental issues, but I think we're well on the way to solving those too and largely via the same mechanisms, Chinese solar is close to pushing coal out of business on price. That's not to say there's no role for regulation in the environmental direction though, I certainly think there probably should be, but how to do so globally and fairly is a bit of a catastrophe.

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