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Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#391

Post by zzzeek »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #372
ciabattabread wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder that too. They been doing this for a while now around the big shopping holidays. And yet, I never hear about any major disruptions. Maybe the union needs to change tactics?

The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage. The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technician…

it's likely not the case here but more powerful unions can block non-union scabs from taking the jobs of striking workers (in that this is usually part of the contract the union has with the employer). at scale, unions have a lot more power to affect things

but the point is it's not about worker skill when unions are at sufficient power levels

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#392

Post by nradov »

mschuster91 wrote: post #340
quickthrowman wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Percentage of US labor force working in agriculture by decade: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso... 1950 was 15.2%, 1970 was 4.7%

Yeah, but manufacturing picked up a lot of the slack... until that went down the drain when China came, so Amazon et al picked up the slack, but now there is nothing left.

The US Navy is rebuilding to fight a war with China. There are jobs available in the shipyards, mostly unionized. It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#393

Post by skeeter2020 »

nine_k wrote: post #371
jedberg wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.

Ordering from a machine actually makes sense, and, crucially, is easy to implement . Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.

this doesn't happen with a literal human flipping burgers replaced with a robot flipping burgers. It's complex drinks made with a button push instead of mixed by hand, more of the delivery chain pushed to the left of the restaurant, like Tim Horton's making all the donuts in factories and "finishing" them in store instead of hiring bakers, shifting traffic to drive through, and gig-delivered take away. Having customers order and queue up, etc. There are way less employees and they are only doing the "hard" work, massively parallelized.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#394

Post by yamazakiwi »

snikeris wrote: post #319
mschuster91 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots. The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no…

I worked for a Walmart store as a young man. It was well run, and they were adamant that you took your breaks throughout the day. I faced no exploitative or abusive conditions and was well paid.

I believe you other than well paid

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#395

Post by skeeter2020 »

irq-1 wrote: post #353
spamizbad wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it. We hear…

(off topic) I was thinking today about how robots should throw packages to each other. It'd be faster and it's all the things robots are great at: hand-eye coordination, weight and holding angle, and group coordination.

think of how you do any similar activity; is the slow part walking a short, line of sight distance?

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#396

Post by nimbius »

RavlaAlvar wrote: post #134

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/1hhips1/amazon_te... Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon

as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR.

I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at least four emails from various sources, everything from "your union is cancelled" to "union declared illegal" and everything in between including offers to work for more pay but no contract. weekends were nearly a dozen phone calls, mostly robo, threatening pay cuts and layoffs and asking to cancel your healthcare and benefits.

we stuck out 19 days and won, and the very same news crews showed up again with no interviews from us, only management praising their great negotiation effort.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#397

Post by Symbiote »

spamizbad wrote: post #301
okokhacker wrote: post #223

I’m not sure why the general sentiment here is that Amazon workers do not deserve a living wage and should be replaced with robots. All the best to the union, I sincerely hope they meet your demands.

What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it. We hear…

There are robot grocery warehouses in England: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE (5 minutes, Tom Scott video).

Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#398

Post by crazygringo »

mckn1ght wrote: post #377
crazygringo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing. You seem to have missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but I'm saying that by your logic, you seem to think it is. You're looking at money like it's some kind of zero-sum thing that ought to be hoarded by every local community. You say: > but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be That is contrary to…

> when communities trade between each other > it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade? Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging…

> When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?

If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs, nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero.

Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas.

Can you really show that Amazon has had a net effect of shifting wealth "out of smaller areas" and into richer ones? Especially when you consider the amount of money it saves people in smaller areas, which makes them more wealthy than they would be otherwise?

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#399

Post by rascul »

snikeris wrote: post #319
mschuster91 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots. The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no…

I worked for a Walmart store as a young man. It was well run, and they were adamant that you took your breaks throughout the day. I faced no exploitative or abusive conditions and was well paid.

This is the same experience a friend of mine had working for Walmart for a couple years, until they moved earlier this year. I suspect each location is going to vary, though, just like any chain store.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#400

Post by mckn1ght »

arkh wrote: post #146
vouaobrasil wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. Both situations are bad because both are predicated on lack of wisdom. A lack of wisdom in a poor place implies brawls and wanton violence. A lack of wisdom in a rich, technological age implies resource destruction and climate change. Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is b…

Ok, let's restrict the technology. What's the end goal? Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun. If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.

I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?

But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.

Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.

I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.

It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.

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