Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by hackable_sand » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 8:54 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #357

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…

> 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.

This is just not true.

Maybe your area suffers from that, but mine doesn't.

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

#452

Post by abduhl » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:03 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #438

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.

>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…

>> the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.

Well, that and using the proper PPE so that you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage and taking your time/following the rules so that you probably won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors or coworkers.

Compare that to putting the wrong shipping label on the package. I'd rather piss in a bottle than be a welder, to be honest.

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

#453

Post by abduhl » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #360

webdood90 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of Americans deserve more money. This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything. I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.

That puts you at odds with the tradition of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence says everyone deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration of Independence doesn't actually say that. It says that everyone is endowed with certain unalienable rights including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.

The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.

What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.

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

#454

Post by vel0city » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #440

vel0city wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales.

And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics.

> Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.

Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again.

Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.

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

#455

Post by nickff » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #421

nickff wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you got down from 7% down to 1.6%. I think you are not counting COGS as an expense, and that's where the error comes from. If your assumptions are otherwise correct, I think you'd get roughly a 7% increase in prices to sustain the 20% bump in wage expense.

I am including COGS in this; that's the retail price minus the markup. The markup is all the rest of Amazon's costs, of which I agree wages for workers are probably somewhere around 30%ish. Are you suggesting the warehouse worker's benefits and pay is really 25-50%+ of the final purchase price of the good?? That'd be an extraordinarily high amount of cost.

Yes, though I am including delivery and support staff with warehouse workers (basically everyone who is working 'on the floor'). More than half of their employees are categorized as "laborers and helpers", and there are a number of other categories that seem similar. https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532... (I only found this after your latest comment).

The largest categories of employees tend to dominate most companies' cost structures. I would like to run some numbers to see what the likely distribution is here, but the annual filings are quite sparse (in terms of income statement details), and I don't have the time to do an extensive analysis.

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

#456

Post by Hikikomori » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

aio2 wrote: post #429

Hikikomori wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you acknowledge that the job should be done but the people doing it deserve to live in squalor even though they work a full time job. Just for corporate profit and your convenience. Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.

Here's my perspective. Not exactly related, but I hope you understand how I think: If I am a small shipping company, and all I need is someone to wrap boxes and store them, and the load isn't much, then should I be paying them full time for the job? Heck, should I pay them a living wage? No. I pay them the value of the job. Obviously, we need a certain minimum wage because nobody deserves to get scammed and make 10 c…

Unless you're the only one selling a product that people need and want to buy you're going to be undercut by your competitors that aren't paying for these things either as that is how it works in America. Quite expected when there's no worker shortage so companies have to compete for workers, but that's not the kind of competition capitalists want.

In most of Europe workers wouldn't have to worry about any of that, everyone enjoys the basic package. So your competitors wouldn't be able to undercut you on price by not providing healthcare and thus force you to do the same.

Is it the best system for startups, corporate profits and the stock market? Obviously not but people are happier.

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

#457

Post by badpun » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

mckn1ght wrote: post #400

arkh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.

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

#458

Post by vel0city » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #455

vel0city wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am including COGS in this; that's the retail price minus the markup. The markup is all the rest of Amazon's costs, of which I agree wages for workers are probably somewhere around 30%ish. Are you suggesting the warehouse worker's benefits and pay is really 25-50%+ of the final purchase price of the good?? That'd be an extraordinarily high amount of cost.

Yes, though I am including delivery and support staff with warehouse workers (basically everyone who is working 'on the floor'). More than half of their employees are categorized as "laborers and helpers", and there are a number of other categories that seem similar. https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532... (I only found this after your latest comment). The largest categories of employees tend…

> Online retail North America booked $65.55bn in sales

> Amazon estimates the price of labour, labour-related productivity costs and cost inflation was $2bn in Q3

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/amazon_q3_2021/

It cost $2b-4b in labor to do ~$65.55b in sales. Their labor cost of revenue was 3-6%. Pretty far from 50%, wouldn't you say?

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

#459

Post by rlupi » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:44 PM UTC

aio2 wrote: post #265

Hikikomori wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start. Then some left over on top after essentials so you aren't living paycheck to paycheck.

Yea no. I understand the sentiment and agree with it, but not exactly feasible for a lot of companies, especially for the type of job they offer

Guys, you have to fix USA!

> Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start.

This is literally the (by-law) standard of living for people with full time jobs with employment contracts[1] where I grew in Italy... that's not Silicon Valley, but one part of Italy that has been depressed for many years. (It's also the second top region in Italy by life expectation, that's between the 6th and 7th place in the world ranking by country) So much that in this very town Amazon is building a new warehouse that opens next year.

[1] Granted, permanent positions are rare; but permanent or temporary positions do offer this stuff by law. Fake contracts (partita IVA) and the gig economy exists there too.

Free college almost... public universities tuition fees are 500-4000 EUR per year, depending on the location and prestige.

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

#460

Post by nielsbot » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 9:47 PM UTC

maxk42 wrote: post #236

WillAdams wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it used to be standard for full-time employees to get a full stock share, but that was bargained away --- anyone know the rationale?

I do not know the rationale, but this is the flip side of collective bargaining: if someone makes a bad deal on my behalf I can no longer deal directly with my employer.

Hard for me to imagine any cases where the union does a worse deal on your behalf than you did yourself. Maybe you're talking about only compensation? Unions bargain for more than just compensation: better healthcare, parental leave, more sick days, caps on hours worked, etc.

In aggregate unions exist to get a bigger share of a company's profits for its workers. (Instead of executives and investors)

But if you have examples, I'd love to read about them.