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

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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?

> Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?

This apparently happened somewhere in a rural area with a small local population. It's obviously not going to happen at a warehouse in, say, New Jersey.

And to the extent that it actually happens somewhere it's not like their response would be hard to predict. Calculate how much they would have to increase local wages to expand the candidate pool enough, see if this is less than it costs to move the warehouse somewhere with a larger pool of workers, if not then move the warehouse.

Notice that Amazon warehouse workers get paid more than minimum wage. This is why. Unskilled workers don't have zero leverage, they just don't have much.

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bargained away? Which union did that and for what company?

When I started at Amazon full-time employees got a stock unit (once vested), when I came back, that was no longer an option.

That’s because of the lack of a union. Companies can’t just remove benefits that are in a union-bargained contract. (Assuming that would have been one.)

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

our local PD was union at the time. we never got any overt support but there were a few kind gestures. on a cold morning an officer dropped a box of chemical hand warmers by the dumpster and made it very clear he was disposing of them because they were "the wrong size" and he wouldnt be back today to check on them. about three days later his supervisor made a trip to the dumpster and left out a box of donuts and a bi…

lol. Bob's donuts in San Francisco has donuts about the size of an apple pie. I wonder if that makes the smaller 3-4 inch ones the wrong size?

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

#494
post #102

I’ve found that the rise of Apply Pay as a payment mechanism on random sites has been helpful in getting me off of Amazon. Often it’s just as easy to order something direct if they have Apple Pay (or ShopPay, but I have other issues with them) and the same price as Amazon. Plus discoverability is awful on Amazon anyways. Still don’t get the Whole Foods return ability when not shopping from Amazon, but not punching in…

I used to do that until I got screwed a couple times.

I bought something for $2k, it was bad, shipped it back, and "we never received it".

UPS had collected signature, went to correct place.

Tried to resolve it amicably, they dragged their feet, and finally I asked amex for a chargeback. and... some deadline was elapsed and they wouldn't refund.

long story short, with amazon, every single problem was resolved, with very little friction.

That said, amazon is horrible for name brands. They have basically pushed value of brands to zero. Everything comes from UPPERCASENONSENSE brand, searches seem to be 99% sponsored results, many 5.0-star reviews seem to be fake. ugh.

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?

Amazon here advertises (and this is several months ago, so not even seasonal) on the radio and local media, without paraphrasing: "Want a job? Can pass a background check? No interview. Apply today, start tomorrow."

They wouldn't pay for ads if they weren't struggling to hire. If you saw a multi media campaign, that was expensive.

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

#496
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or living by yourself or with a spouse, maybe with a kid. Not everywhere is high cost.

Can you please name a single city in the US where you can easily live on $20/hr that isn't stricken with massive poverty? I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.

[deleted]

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

#497
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the idea is: assume sufficient technological advancement to be able to reach or even create countless other essentially exact replicas of earth? Barring that, plenty of ideas have been floated along the lines of extraterrestrial colonization and/or intergenerational spaceships.

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

#498
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or living by yourself or with a spouse, maybe with a kid. Not everywhere is high cost.

Can you please name a single city in the US where you can easily live on $20/hr that isn't stricken with massive poverty? I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.

I find it insulting that you're moving goalposts and attributing things to me that I did not say and do not think.

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

#499
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did America go straight from giving full credit card info to Apple Pay? Chip and pin and card contactless both solve that problem

Yes mostly. The cell phone wallets were the convenience difference that caused merchants to upgrade their POS systems to support contactless. Before that there just wasn't much reason for merchants to change their existing card infrastructure. Now customers feel inconvenienced if they have to use a credit card.

I find it interesting because in my lifetime the UK went from magstripe (falling back to a carbon copy of the card with signature) to chip and pin, to contactless, and now smartphone. A lot of upgrading while the US just skipped it.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the Luigi Mangione case is making more people aware of this type of dynamic.

[flagged]

Either you think the CEO was an undeserving victim, or you think that only billionaires and their enforces deserve a monopoly on lethal force.

So, what's your take on this recent scenario:

Ukraine assassinated a Russian general that authorised plans for chemical attacks that killed civilians. The general never directly murdered anyone in person, never "pulled a trigger", but was ultimately responsible for many deaths.

Was Ukraine morally wrong in this act? Should they just let someone sit comfortably in a Moscow office and sign paperwork to cause suffering and death in Ukraine? Should they bend over and take it?

If not, why not?

If so, why?

Either way, please explain why Americans should or should not "bend over and take it" where "it" is death to the tune of tens of thousands a year -- orders of magnitude more than killed by that Russian general.

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