Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

First, I don't think this blog should require Javascript to fulfill its function -- convey text to a user. I've tried to read the source markup to get to the essay.

On to addressing points raised in the essay:

"If you have been following Amazon at all, you have probably heard what sounds like code language when we talk about how we get our work done. As I have mentioned before, our work like a kind of short-hand for the types of qualities that make people effective here. And they aren’t just for leaders of organizations, they are for everyone at Amazon. We are all leaders."

No, everyone at Amazon.com is not a "leader". Leaders get to set the terms by which they and others will do some job. Reports of worker exploitation (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html#exploiting for links to relevant stories to back up the claim) make it clear that not everyone has the freedom to determine how their own job should be structured. Even if those changes would result in allowing workers to live in reasonable conditions, earn a living wage, work under conditions that don't make them ill, work without "spout[ing] the ideology of devotion to the company" (as Stallman rightly put it on his personal website linked above), and work a full-length career not a short-stint part-time or "contractor" job that will leave the worker to have to find another way to make ends meet all while delivering goods and services in a reasonable time-frame. I'll give you a hint as to how this could play out for boxing goods at Amazon.com: it's fine if Amazon.com's customers waited an extra day or two in order to let the "pickers" take bathroom breaks, longer working breaks, and avoid on-the-job hazards like constantly hustling and fainting during the working day.

"You may have heard that Jeff Bezos dislikes social cohesion. It’s a detriment to business success because it causes people to stifle ideas and objections for the sake of keeping the peace. I’m the kind of person who can have a concern or objection sidetrack my attention and I need to get it out; at least have it heard."

I doubt many who work under someone else believes this. This is what the manager class tell each other and tries to believe themselves while the worker class (people with the least say in the relationship) knows that stifling one's ideas and objections is conducive to helping them keep their job. This applies at every level in the hierarchy -- mid-level managers suffer from this when talking to their bosses and exploit this when talking to their subordinates. But the largest set of people always exist in the least-empowered class.

Managerial glib puffery PR like this usually downplay or ignore why people work these jobs at all: they live in societies that don't pay enough to give the worker the flexibility of choosing where to work. Capitalism pushes people to trade their skills for sustenance and tries to make it seem like that's a right and proper tradeoff, while capitalism also ridiculously over-rewards a few at the top (most notably in the case of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos). Bezos, who might be the wealthiest person, clearly makes enough money to where he could never work again and be fine (as so could many generations of his children). But Bezos is not alone in this over-reward scheme; the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has ever been and it is accelerating.

It's ironic that any discussion of this kind would be raised in a single-point-of-censorship discussion forum such as this; it's so easy for anonymous users to score someone's post low (which affects whether other readers see the post with difficulty or at all) instead of responding. All scoring systems that affect how others see the posts are censorship, without exception. They work that way because that's precisely what they were designed to do. They are a mechanised way of implementing the reality of talking to the boss and run directly counter to the self-deluding lie of "disagree and commit".




So what's your point?

I read your entire post. Is there a point besides: Amazon = capitalism, capitalism = bad, Amazon = bad?


I think it's more likely you're trying to minimize setting a critical response which clearly focuses on exploiting workers in a context suggesting that caring about worker exploitation is irrelevant or shouldn't be allowed to be raised in the context of some manager going on about abstract management technique (as apparently are those who downscored the post).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: