I think that what you are saying is that these people are so miserable that they have no other choice but to take the rare jobs that they are offered, no matter how terrible. If so, I totally agree with you.
I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
> ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money
That's a very hostile way to describe working a warehouse job.
Offering someone a job is not asking them to break their back. Working for an employer has nothing to do with the extravagantly wealthy. All companies need employees, and companies are valuable because they serve their customers. You could equally say "break their back so random Internet consumers get their products", or "Burger King / WalMart employees break their backs so you get a cheap cheeseburger / grocery product".
Working a job tends to make people better off, and offering someone a job they didn't have before is giving them a new option. We can wish for a world where even better jobs were available, but wishing doesn't make it so. It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
You can wish there were even better opportunities, but are you prepared to provide them yourself? Or is this your position: "I'm not going to do anything about it myself, but I'm going to criticize those who do something positive, even if it's just providing a low value opportunity. Someone should provide a better opportunity than that, but I won't be the one to do it."
> Working for an employer has nothing to do with the extravagantly wealthy.
You're very right about this, it was wrong of me to describe the purpose of the operation as being that of making someone rich. The purpose is to maximise profits for the employer – which can lead to extreme wealth or poverty, depending on your success. Besides, in order to appreciate how shit a situation is for someone it is irrelevant to know whether someone else is profiting from it. So thanks for pointing that out.
> Working a job tends to make people better off [...] It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
I think this is wishful thinking. The article actually points out that this is not true: getting this job actually made the situation worse for a lot of them.
> but are you prepared to provide them yourself?
As a pauper myself, I am not. I don't have the resources to do so.
> to criticize those who do something positive
As I tried to show before, good intentions was not what motivated Amazon to offer jobs to these people. Also, leaving someone worse off than before is not what I would call a positive outcome. So this cannot be my position.
> By demonizing companies that offer jobs to poor people or the homeless,
I definitely did not mean to demonise Amazon. I pointed out in my last comment that this was a feature of our world, not a feature of a particular company. That's the saddest thing of this whole story: Amazon acted completely rationally, and it's easy to see how it almost had no choice but to use up these homeless people and then throw them away. Not because it's evil, but because that's what's required of it as a company. If Amazon stops churning out profits, it won't be a company for much longer.
> you're committing the fallacy called the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics.
Nitpick: what you call the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics is not a fallacy, there's no logic involved here since it relates to people's moral values. It's a phenomenon at best. But once again, the point was not to say that Amazon is evil; the point is to say this world is broken.
> I think that what you are saying is that these people are so miserable that they have no other choice but to take the rare jobs that they are offered, no matter how terrible. If so, I totally agree with you.
I would say they're in such need as they would take any job offered them, misery notwithstanding, but you're 80% with me yes.
> I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
I kind of agree with you here. I don't think Bezos is up in his office masturbating vigorously to camera footage of homeless people walking into Amazon warehouses to work. He's not hiring them because he wants to make money, in all likelihood most of them will need a fair bit more training than regular blue collar workers who are between jobs or people looking to earn some extra money, and I'm also willing to bet that a homeless person would be fairly less reliable in terms of showing up for their shifts on time if only for the fact that they literally have nothing including a car. Amazon probably does want to help, and they want to enough that they're willing to overlook the problems that come with hiring homeless people.
Now we can argue all day about how Amazon could afford to put those people in 5 star hotels for the entire Christmas season and it probably wouldn't hurt them, but that's not the point. They're a company, not a charity. They don't need to hire these people at all if they don't want to (and if they didn't, no one would even be arguing about this in the first place) so forgive me if I'm not willing to throw them under the bus for at least trying to help.
> so forgive me if I'm not willing to throw them under the bus for at least trying to help
It's not Amazon I want to throw under the bus. They did what any rational player would do in their situation. What I want to throw under the bus is the situation itself, aka, how we organise our world.
I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.