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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

#431

Post by nradov »

mschuster91 wrote: post #418
nradov wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's good for the coastal towns that have shipyards, but useless in the flyover states.

Most of my recent business and personal travel has involved flying to "flyover states". But whatever.

People are allowed to move for work. I have. Shipyards are expanding in the Great Lakes region.

https://maritime-executive.com/article/navy-expands-shipbuil...

The shale gas revolution has created a lot of blue collar jobs. The chemicals industry is booming in Ohio.

https://www.jobsohio.com/news-events/news-press/energy-chemi...

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

#432

Post by jimt1234 »

nimbius wrote: post #396
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 l…

My Boomer Dad was a Teamster. I remember there was a several-weeks-long (might have even been months-long?) strike when I was a kid, probably around the late-70s. Shit was real. One day I saw him loading baseball bats and clubs into the trunk of his Buick before he left the house. I was just a kid; I had no idea what was going on. I asked him about it later in life and he just said, "That's how it was back then. We had to fight for what we wanted." And he was being literal. He talked about people who were even suspected of crossing the line or talking to management would get a severe beatdown. He even said people would harass management and their families. Dudes would sit outside their homes, just to intimidate them. And, he said they rarely got punished because the cops supported their union and would look the other way. Different times.

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

#433

Post by maccard »

vel0city wrote: post #426
maccard wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your solution to the problem is “don’t do the thing you want to do” it’s never going to work. It’s not just shoes, it’s all clothing, lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?), lots of homeware goods. You’re basically saying don’t shop online. If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.

> lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?) No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a r…

Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? They’re absolutely, 100% repacking and reselling what they can.

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

#434

Post by nickff »

mrguyorama wrote: post #430
nickff wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would union supported/enforced comments count as astroturfing as well? I think it’d be interesting to ban pay for picketing & comments, though I’m not sure it’s enforceable.

If the union pays you because you are not working, and you choose to use that time to talk about how much you value unions on the internet, that's not astroturfing. If the union pays you TO post about how good the union is on the internet, that IS astroturfing. At one point, amazon had a literal program where warehouse workers could opt to sit at a desk and post propaganda comments instead of doing their normal manua…

Strike pay (at least often) requires picketing to qualify. Unions also often pay people to post comments online and otherwise present the union’s perspective to media or the public. Sometimes these people are listed as unit leaders, or have other ‘union management’ positions.

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

#435

Post by mrguyorama »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #390
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…

Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.

>It's not all automation

Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:

Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.

Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.

Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.

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

#436

Post by vel0city »

maccard wrote: post #433
vel0city wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?) No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a r…

Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? They’re absolutely, 100% repacking and reselling what they can.

> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock?

For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI

If you're thinking the vast majority of your returns are getting restocked you're woefully uninformed.

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

#437

Post by viraptor »

jedberg wrote: post #364
Dalewyn wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests) While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.

The problem is, since the beginning of time, all the improvements were in mechanical work, allowing humans to shift towards more intellectual work. Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.

Is that really the case? So far all the examples I've seen were closer to "change X caused people to shift to another type of job, or to a new area opened up by X". Very recently some creative work has been impacted by LLMs, but apart from that, are there real stats on the intellectual work being taken over?

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

#438

Post by mrguyorama »

nradov wrote: post #392
mschuster91 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.

My buddy who is a union welder at a shipyard doesn't have to piss in a bottle to make his quota. His job is fucking fantastic, thanks to the union, and the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.

It's predominantly a lot of professional work by tradies, NOT grunt work. Use the proper PPE and you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage. Take your time and follow the rules and you won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors like with the Thresher.

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

#439

Post by euroderf »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #162
euroderf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns local businesses into showrooms for Amazon, and that is a failing business model. I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

That's equivalent to you making 20% less money. Not many people will choose that.

Behold! Neighborhood businesses wither and die.

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

#440

Post by maccard »

vel0city wrote: post #436
maccard wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? They’re absolutely, 100% repacking and reselling what they can.

> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI If you're thinking the vas…

Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.

[0] https://www.office.co.uk/

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