This seems reasonable and beyond what other major employers are offering, but as is the fashion I'm sure Amazon will be convicted in the court of public interwebs shortly...
I doubt Amazon would provide what it has here without public pressure.
Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
71–80 of 239 posts
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what happened at all. The French imposed very arbitrary guidelines on only delivering "essential" goods and they had to stop all deliveries to address them All these "essential" good definitions are complete nonsense anyways. What one person deems unnecessary can be very, very necessary to someone else.
I do really disagree. This is a source from today : https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/04/24/coronavir...
Which says what I said.
They shut down because they needed to figure out what was meant by the "essential" order. The fine was too large to do anything but pause operations.
> On April 15, the online store preferred to close its six large French warehouses, ensuring that it had no other choice, given the amount of the penalty. "How to precisely define food, hygiene or medical products?" " Asked the business.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same as the 20+ million Americans who are laid off and seeking unemployment?
I'm not sure why that makes it okay to add to that population? Amazon has the resources to temporarily cover paid leave until they can guarantee safe conditions in their warehouses for employees. Regions that have prematurely relaxed their virus controls have seen new outbreaks, the same could happen in warehouses. It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven…
The safety net is by far the better way to address this, it's a drop in the bucket relative to the total cost of the safety net.
> It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven to be safe, which is going to take a bit even after all the appropriate measures are in place.
Amazon appears to think that your "until" condition is here now, per the safety measures they purport to be taking.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that everyone has been tested before returning to work Amazon can't win. If they did that, the newspaper headlines would read "Bezos demands DNA samples of workers as a prerequisite to being paid."
COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?
There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that everyone has been tested before returning to work Amazon can't win. If they did that, the newspaper headlines would read "Bezos demands DNA samples of workers as a prerequisite to being paid."
COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?
> COVID tests aren't DNA tests.
Correct, because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and contains no DNA. But the test does work by detecting the viral RNA and it is hard to find the specific stuff (reagents) to perform the test and that's a big reason why we're all sheltering in place without a proper nationwide testing regime.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not talking about it in absolute terms. How about talking about it in terms of median wage per job title? Putting big numbers in glitzy blog posts only serves to dazzle and obfuscates how easy it would be for Amazon to double or triple that number with basically no dent in the wallet from doing so.
You think Amazon could spend an extra $700 million to $1.4 billion with "basically no dent in the wallet"? I guess I understand why you're frustrated if you think that's the case, but it's just not true.
And this is not an annualized number, they started the pay increase last month. This is a huge figure, especially for a their razor thin margin retail business.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Policies take time to develop as people develop understanding of the situation , then there’s availability and putting policy into practice.
Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable. Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a glob…
As someone reading through this thread, I have some feedback for you. This is partly to test the commonly held view that feedback is desired instead of blindly voting and partly to help you. I piped it through `base64` so that you can ignore it if you don't feel like it:
WW91ciBjb21tZW50cyByZWFkIGxpa2UganVzdCBvdXRyYWdlLiBUaGlzIGlzIG9mIGxvdyBpbmZv cm1hdGlvbiB2YWx1ZSB0byBtZS4gVGhpcyBpcyB3aHkgSSB3aWxsIGRvd24tdm90ZSB5b3VyIGNv bW1lbnRzIGluIGZ1dHVyZS4K
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?
There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.
Never mind the fact that Amazon does 401(k) matching and provides its warehouse workers the same group health insurance plan as their software engineers, which might possibly be the most generous health insurance plan for an entry-level position that requires no college degree.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#79This seems reasonable and beyond what other major employers are offering, but as is the fashion I'm sure Amazon will be convicted in the court of public interwebs shortly...
Disagree. Amazon is doing pretty well due to the quarantine (as they deserve to given the services they provide). Them having to reduce their share of the profits from these extraordinary times is not particularly noble, but rather just average. The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs. Here in SF, multipl…
> The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs.
That isn't true according to the numbers from https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en. Do you have a citation for that? Numbers for new deaths have been hovering between 0 and 5 for the last month in SF, SF has had a total of 22 people dead, due to successful lockdown measures it basically never hit SF.
Re: Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or request leave
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?
There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.
I'm pretty sure they could start paying a minimum wage of $30 an hour and people would be irate that they're making it impossible to hire anyone because Amazon is overpaying. When you're the biggest player there is nowhere to hide.