One quote from it that stands out for me:
"At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."
There was another previous thread on Hacker News where people compared Amazon warehouse workers to Costco workers. I wish Amazon could be more like Costco in regards to their warehouse workers (I don't shop at Amazon any more for that reason).
> "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."
So Amazon is the only employer offering jobs to people who tend to be rejected everywhere else, providing people that have no skills to offer to society a chance at getting a job, learning some skills and maybe getting a better job rather than staying at home and living on welfare, which is lower than Amazon wages and provides no future.
Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.
> Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.
Because taking advantage of desperate people isn't an honorable thing to do. People are willing to put up with all sorts of abuse in order to keep their family afloat, but that doesn't justify anything.
> Because taking advantage of desperate people isn't an honorable thing to do.
They're not. They're offering them a decent job for a decent wage knowing that these people are totally unskilled. The alternative would be living on welfare. The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that they're satisfied with their jobs. Plus, nobody forced them to accept those jobs. And again, what would be the alternative for people with no skills? Unemployment, no opportunity to learn skills etc. No thanks.
>*They're not. They're offering them a decent job for a decent wage knowing that these people are totally unskilled.
That was neither a decent job, nor a decent wage. It was just a job and a wage they were forced to do in order to feed themselves, and under very bad conditions.
If a "totally unskilled" jobless person comes to me for money, I can offer him the chance dance, call me "master" and crawl at my feet and then give him $10.
Something which he might be forced to accept (hunger trumps pride).
That doesn't make my offer "decent" -- even if nobody else was willing to give him $10 anyway.
>Plus, nobody forced them to accept those jobs. And again, what would be the alternative for people with no skills? Unemployment, no opportunity to learn skills etc. No thanks.
So nobody forced them to accept those jobs, yet their only other option is unemployment, no opportunity to learn skills, and other reasons that you yourself find unacceptable?
How would you define "force"? It seems to me that victims of sexual harassment suffer the same choices. I'm assuming you think sexual harassment should be illegal. Is that not "force"?
Libertarians typically neglect the forces imposed by the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy (and by those controlling access to whatever is necessary to meet such needs) because once you start paying attention to those forces the claim that free-market capitalism maximizes individual freedom becomes significantly harder to prove.
EDIT: changed "laughable" to "significantly harder to prove" because I'm not in the mood for a fight today.
By that logic, not only Amazon, but everybody who refuses to hire those workers or pay them more than their work is worth is exerting force. It's absurd.
It might be disappointing that the concept of force/consent doesn't simplify the "which system is best" problem, but I don't see how it's absurd.
If a moral dilemma vanishes when you look at it from a different viewpoint, the most likely scenario is that the new viewpoint is obscuring the crux of the problem rather than miraculously simplifying it.
My neighbor calls up a local employment firm and hires 50 people to harvest his fields with sickles. He pays them minimum wage for this backbreaking work. They go home with blistered hands, crinks in their backs, and barely enough money to afford groceries for the week.
I instead pay another local farmer, one with deeper pockets, to harvest my field with his swanky combine harvester. He sits in his air-conditioned cabin sipping on a bottle of coke, and gets the job done in two days. For his time and machinery, I pay him a few thousand dollars.
How do these two situations compare? My neighbor is arguably "exploiting" workers who are down on their luck. I am paying a single guy with some entrepreneur spirit arguably too much money to get the same job done. On the other hand, I have failed to provide jobs for 50 workers. Had I forsaken mechanization, the increased demand for labor that my farm would have created could have improved the working conditions, or at least pay, for those bottom-tier farm hands. Instead I eliminated those jobs and the money stayed with me and the wealthier farmer.
Is my neighbor abusing the manual laborers? Am I abusing the wealthy combine owning farmer? Am I abusing the manual laborers? Is the wealthy combine owning farmer abusing me? Surely the manual laborers are not abusing the combine owner, but is the combine owner abusing the manual laborers?
Nothing is being obscured here, it is an extraordinary simple situation that actually plays out every day.
Both of your proposals are exploitative and needlessly unjust.
The big problem with the market is that it forces us to choose between the two. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by coupling the "workers starve" outcome to the "workers don't have jobs" outcome. There is no fundamental reason why they need to be coupled. Just because only 80% of people have to work to meet demand doesn't mean the other 20% deserve to starve.
Many systems are possible in which marginal incentives are maintained (the farmer and tractor driver get significantly more money than the out-of-work laborers) but the laborers don't go hungry. I search for my favorite solution among these (I'm a big fan of basic income / negative income tax).
As you note, we are automating away more and more of our economy every day. If we keep our current course, such automation becomes a club used by those who have enabled the automation (or otherwise accumulated capital) to beat down those who have not. I think that's a terrifying idea that at best leads to terrible injustice and at worst leads to violent overthrow of its perpetrators (including myself). We need an economic model that maintains the dignity of the labor force even in the face of shrinking demand for labor.
To be clear, are you saying that the hypothetical farmer "me" in the story is being unjust and exploitative for hiring the combine? Or are you just accusing the societal system, not the hypothetical me, of being unjust and exploitative?
I ask this because I think you are actually getting at the point I was trying to make.
Yes, I'm accusing the societal system (which presents you with two exploitative alternatives), not you. I think we do fundamentally agree and that the confusion might have stemmed from the fact that I answered a question which I thought you were implying rather than your literal question.
You asked "The current system gives choices X,Y. Isn't X>Y?" and I ignored the "Isn't X>Y?" part because I assumed it was mostly a rhetorical device designed to make concrete the first part ("The current system gives choices X,Y") which was more relevant to the philosophical issue being discussed.
My answer was "Yeah, it sucks that X,Y are our choices, because I think that one of M,N,O, or P might be better."
Ultimately one of the big problems we face today is that the various central banks print money and in doing so keep the interest rate artificially low.
That artificially low interest rate makes it possible for this mechanization/automation battle to play out in many sectors of industry that it normally wouldn't.
$1mm for 10 years at 2% interest is $9200 a month, give or take.
$1mm for 10 years and 10% interest is $13200 a month, roughly.
$13200 a month is enough to provide a job, fully loaded including salary, benefits, space, etc for at least a $60k/year job, maybe $80k per year or more depending on fixed vs variable overhead, etc.
$9200 per month would, given the same assumptions, perhaps pay only $30k-$50k again depending on the mix of variable and fixed costs.
So what we've seen is that the automation "horizon" has been pushed lower by the low interest rates. And it's displaced jobs that normally would have been done by low skilled labor that while not fun were at least employment. As the pool of jobs available to low skilled folks shrinks competition gets more fierce and wages drop.
The central banks are massively more damaging than they are generally understood to be.
Then let's not call it "absurd", but "not useful".
For the sake of argument, let's agree that those who do not have their basic needs satisfied are suffering under the collective force of everybody else who could satisfy the need. What makes Amazon so special? Aren't you also exerting force on those who are less fortunate than you?
Everybody is exerting "force" on everyone else, sometimes indirectly. The contract between Amazon and the laborer was signed under the duress of threatened homelessness / lack of healthcare / starvation. Amazon signed the contract under duress because it needs people to ship its boxes. Amazon is not special and neither is the worker.
Any deal we make must exert force on someone (a restatement of "the world isn't perfect" within our framework). So who should be favored? Put quantitatively, there's a scale between the minimum price at which a person will sell their labor and the maximum price Amazon can pay for the labor and still turn a profit -- where should the actual price lie? Market economics looks to supply/demand balance for unskilled labor and slides the "final price" all the way over to the minimum. A libertarian would claim that this is just (both parties "consented") and reject attempts by the government to meddle on the grounds that the market knows best. A philosophy that rejects the notion that both parties "consented" (both were under duress) opens the door to policy adjustments that push prices away from one extreme end of the spectrum, because it sees these as less just. Since Amazon has all the power under the current system, such policy adjustments would favor the worker.
I would prefer that this be implemented IRL using a basic income or negative income tax scheme (ameliorate (!=eliminate) the source of labor's duress at the source) rather than by implementing a minimum wage, but that's beside the point.
You entirely missed the point of the parent comment.
Amazon isn't making anyone's live's worse off. They are better off than they would be if Amazon didn't hire anyone at all and they became unemployed. If Amazon is wrong for hiring them at too low a wage, then every other company in the world is also wrong for not offering them to hire them at all.
Only if you adopt a libertarian's view of the word and concept of "force". On the other hand, if you're willing to accept that life has nuance, it makes a great deal of sense.
This is the entire point of a strike. Their work is worth what it can be purchased for. Striking workers are refusing to sell their labor at its current price.
I think that more specifically they'd say that this should be adressed by volountary charity. Which is nice in theory but ignores how inefficient that tends to be.
Not just inefficient. It's literally "the bystander effect" and "division of responsibility" principles writ large.
Bottom line: if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. No amount of pithy sound bites or quotes from Austrians will change that. If anything it's a wonder charities have been as successful as they have.
At least with a liberal government system, there is a single point of ultimate responsibility for issues like this: the government itself, as the legal embodiment of "the people" at large.
This conversation normally comes up in the context of taxes for #3.
To which I say, if you're willing to allow the government to deport someone who doesn't pay taxes I'd tend to agree with you, but as it stands the balance is actually tipped the other way: Government (usually local) is forced to figure out clean water, last-resort healthcare, schools, etc. simply by people being present, whether they pay taxes or not, yet government has no ability to simply "get rid" of people
I say the libertarians go find a nice area somewhere with a failed state, take it over, prove its supremacy and be a big shining beacon on the hill for libertarians everywhere to finally prove once and for all that it's better, and then I'll care about "taxes as extortion".
> So nobody forced them to accept those jobs, yet their only other option is unemployment
Also, not sure about Germany but it's not uncommon for employment offices to start withholding benefits if you refuse jobs "you're fit for". That would likely include warehouse grunt.
You are right that they have no choice but wrong that it's exclusively amazon's fault. It's also the fault of every other company that won't hire them. If amazon automated it's entire workforce tomorrow and fired everyone, those people would be even worse off, yet no one would be protesting amazon over it.
I don't know about Germany, but in the U.S. it's common that only the union leaders and negotiators get paid their normal salaries during strikes and lockouts. The rank-and-file members get a reduced amount or nothing from the union. (Or sometimes just health benefits.) For example, the recently locked-out American Crystal Sugar workers got a stipend of $100/week and no other benefits. Their normal salaries averaged about $750/week.
It depends on how recently organized the union is, and how secure those members feel and how much of that was afforded by the union. Many members of weaker industrial (not craft) unions are afraid to strike with their brothers.
> The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that they're satisfied with their jobs.
One could use that argument, and the rest of the argumentation, to praise slavery. I mean it provided food, shelter and hardly anyone went on strike, right?
EDIT: I don't mean to downplay slavery. Capitalism with all it's faults is far better than slavery or even just feudalism in most or all aspects. I just think that the argument I responded to is severely flawed: Not going on strike might be a sign of satisfaction but it might as well be a sign of fear and/or a lack of alternatives.
I am not too sure about that. A market economy? Yes. But what I know as Capitalism depends on a completely different organization of labor, namely "free" workers to create a market for labor itself. That was true for non-enslaved/white workers at that time but I don't think it makes sense to say it about a whole society when its not true for such a big percentage of the economy.
Yes, nearly everybody know that. I wrote hours ago that think working conditions in capitalism and slavery are very different, in general far better in the former, but that you could use the argumentation in favor of capitalism the parent used in favor of slavery too.
You realize that you are using a meta version of a meme instead of an actual argument?
The bad thing about "[literally] Hitler!" is that, most of the time, trivializes the Holocaust. In my "labour dispute version" of it that would have meant a trivialization of slavery which I tried to avoid in the sentence prefixed with "EDIT:". If you think I still did it please write it and add some argumentation.
> The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that they're satisfied with their jobs.
What about: they are scared of being fired and their families losing roof over their head and food to eat ? Most people aren't willing to go on strike or take any risks if already bad situation. I mean, the slaves weren't on constant strike either.
Consequences of leaving as a slave: being chased, beaten, maybe killed. Consequences of leaving for Amazon workers (well at least many of them probably most of the ones not on strike): losing roof over your head, family starving, children being denied things.
Slaves had it worse, the argument about it not being voluntarily decision still applies.
Actually Verdi (the union) is also complaining about some of the working conditions as well, which they consider inhumane. It is mainly, but not exclusively about the wages.
> for a decent wage
Amazon is not paying according to the Branchentarifvertrag (industry sector collective agreement) and refuses to even sit down with the union and talk about collective bargaining. They are also actively trying to keep their employees from unionizing.
If you consider the current wages "decent" is up to your point of view, but the union and I'd guess most of the affected workers disagree.
> The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that they're satisfied with their jobs
This proves nothing, in particular not job satisfaction, and is actually also not how things work in Germany and therefore just wrong.
First a union will usually selectively shut down just a few facilities instead of all at once. This is called "Warnstreiks" (warning strikes), and this is what is happening right now. Only later and and only in accordance with German strike/bargaining law - e.g. you have to be unionized and are prohibited to violate the "Friedenspflicht", which regulates when and under what circumstances a unionized strike may happen - it is possible to enter the actual "Streik" where all (unionized) employees stop working.
Plus, amazon employees where often not unionized before this started, so it might take some time and convincing for the union to get employees to join before they enter the "Warnstreiks".
> Plus, nobody forced them to accept those jobs
Well, the "Arbeitsagentur" (job center) can cut either your unemployment pay or later social welfare (Hartz 4) if you refuse to accept the jobs that are offered to you. If you also happen to have a family, and IIRC amazon employs quite a few single mothers for example, then you're "forced" to take the job in a way.
Some people, in particular union folks of course, even accuse amazon of predatory behavior, especially seeking out the weakest members of society for their work force because they are the least likely to fight against inhumane conditions and low wages. I used to think this predatory characterization was sensationalist and unfair, but by now, from what I read about amazon so far in the press and even in their own press statements, I think there might be something to it. But then again, I'm also just one of these Euro-socialists who thinks that everybody should have health insurance and should earn a living wage if working full time.
Amazon more or less takes the same stance as you seem to take: They claim that they are just helping the weakest people. Treating your low-paid work force as if they were industrial robots (one of the complaints by workers and the union, and more or less admitted by amazon to happen as a result of their workplace rules and "processes") and keeping them from effectively complaining about it by keeping them from organizing suggests otherwise.
This. I enjoy working here in Germany for this exact reason, unions and workers rights. It feels so damn great to work in a country where I feel that I am being treated fair and where I know that I can count on my colleagues (not just at my work place but my whole sector) to have my back. The fact is that it is not a lack of income that does not allow bigger wages for the workers at Amazon but an abundance of greed. When your union sees that you could be better off without hurting the place you work at it is going to step in. It is also going to step in when any of your basic rights as a worker is are not met (vacation time, compensated overtime, insurance, workplace safety etc.)
Offering underpaying jobs knowing that benefits will be cut to the person if they refuse is a common tactic used to force people in to jobs they wouldn't otherwise take.
They're essentially forced to take them, and there's a low threshold for the cheap pay recouping the training cost on how to move things around the warehouse.
High turnover doesn't matter if there's a steady supply of people coerced in to accepting and training takes at most 2 days.
Are you defending the Robber Barons of the Industrial Revolution or Amazon? I really can't tell.
In all seriousness, this line of reasoning can be used to rationalize the actions of anyone who takes advantage of the destitute and marginalized to make a profit: pimps, crime lords, sweatshop managers, etc. etc.
Forgive me for not patting Amazon on the back for giving THE WORKERS THEY BASE THEIR ENTIRE ENTERPRISE ON a tiny percentage of the profits. After all, nobody applauds the trash who taunt the homeless with crumbs, even though they are technically feeding them.
Edit: I'm a terrible multi-tasker, edited to clarify some points
I wouldn't say "any work" is better. However, there is a well documented effect called "contra-freeloading", in which individuals will prefer pay for work over pay for no work - within reason. This effect has been found in humans and numerous other species. Except cats ...
It's not a "skill" per se, but demonstrating you will reliably show up on time and do your job has a definite value in the labor market, and could lead to other opportunities.
How about learning how to get along effectively with others? Or given an individual that was interested in operations, how to run a warehouse, principles of Lean, etc?
A job can be a stepping stone to a better future. Perhaps that is true here?
I think you make a very principled distinction between 'de-jure' compulsion, and 'de-facto' compulsion, but in practice, things aren't always so clear cut.
If I were to offer a single mother a large lump sum for one of her kidneys so she could feed her children, without any kind of threat, implied or otherwise, that would still be at the very least ethically problematic, don't you think?
How is entering into a voluntary contract with someone taking advantage of them?
And what is your proposed solution? Amazon raise prices on the goods they sell to their workers and the rest of the population? The government step in and coerce different forms of contracts?
If you do care about this I have a suggestion - create a fund where people who feel as you do can give the money they save from shopping at Amazon (or other earnings) to these people. If you believe they are undervaluing themselves invest in them. Or place blame on companies that through voluntary exchanges are changing the world.
In our society it is very difficult (though not entirely impossible) to survive without money. If you are not in a position to withhold your labour, because you have no money, then you have no bargaining power when determining your wages. In this case, a prospective employer can essentially offer you any wage they like - will that be a truly "voluntary" contract, even though you have no choice other than to accept it?
Simplistic solutions like "just move elsewhere" ignore both the inherent difficulties that moving poses when you are living in poverty, and the situations encountered by many people who take that option. As a new arrival you face the prospect of high initial costs trying to find a place to live and trying to find work, on top of the living costs you would have faced anyway, coupled to the fact that you are likely to have a reduced support network to help you deal with any problems you might face, and help you get on your feet. This is all after the initial expense of actually moving.
You asked your parent for a proposed solution, mine is simply for Amazon to more equitably distribute revenue within the company, to spend more on low-level wages, less on high-level wages, and less on other projects if there is a shortfall. In general I suspect that some kind of employee ownership goes quite far to alleviating many problems of this nature.
As a footnote, the only sense in which a market exchange is voluntary is that all parties agreed to it, which follows from the definition, and is therefore useless: "market exchange" will suffice. It is simply a disingenuous attempt to make the idea of a market exchange sound more humane, and to suggest an absence of coercion, without ever providing evidence that this is the case.
To your first paragraph your point only holds if there is absolutely no competition for workers (which may be the case). And yes, it still is voluntary. I once bought a phone off craigslist. It was a decent phone, worth probably $50 but I got it for $35 because the seller needed cash right away. Just because he was illiquid does not mean it was wrong of me to buy the phone from him. Or was that immoral of me and should I have been required to give him $50?
I agree moving is difficult - but so is creating efficiencies like Bezos has done. If your social views include the view that life should be easy for everyone, no matter their contribution, then we have a fundamental difference in what is realistic. If that is your view though maybe a better solution would be for those with money who share your view to support those without jobs or working with Amazon (or pay them to not work for Amazon). It is very easy to ask Amazon to change their policies, but that's because it isn't your money. (It's also worth noting that Amazon is not even profitable and runs in incredibly competitive industries. And, for every dollar they have to raise in costs they need to raise in profits.)
Your solution might work but has some concerns. Although the market for unskilled work is very heavily weighted towards companies the market for skilled leadership is very competitive. There is a reason top executives at Apple, Google and Amazon are paid well. Paying 10,000 workers $1 an hour more means $20,000,000 less yearly to spend on upper level talent in a highly competitive marketplace for that talent.
I am pointing out the human respecting nature of the market exchange - that it respects human choice (no matter how bad or good an individuals choice may be) rather than implying the idea that someone else knows what is best. Coercion is "the practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats". I have never heard a story of Amazon threatening someone to work for them or using physical force to entice them to take a job. Taxes, military drafts and certain types of crime are coercion - posting on a job board is not.
"If your social views include the view that life should be easy for everyone, ..."
That is a gross mis-characterization of the liberal worldview. The social contract in most modern capitalistic states is that we allow a winner-takes-all economic model as long as we ensure equal opportunity and social mobility. However, wealth and income inequality are at all time highs, and many people on the lower economic and social rungs are stuck in a poverty trap. This isn't about giving people a free lunch, it's about reforming the system to provide more opportunity to those in dire circumstances.
Regarding your craigslist exchange, you took advantage of someone's dire economic situation in order to improve your own. While not illegal, I would argue it is immoral, and this is happening on a much larger scale with Amazon. It is immoral to employ an individual for less than a living wage, regardless of what the market dictates should be the prevailing wage. It might not be Amazon's fault that poverty exists, and no one can blame them for exploiting it to their advantage, but they are benefiting enormously from our capitalistic economic system, and it is entirely reasonable to impose regulations and reforms on the winners in order to restore mobility and opportunity.
> It was a decent phone, worth probably $50 but I got it for $35 because the seller needed cash right away. Just because he was illiquid does not mean it was wrong of me to buy the phone from him. Or was that immoral of me and should I have been required to give him $50?
I was coercive of you: you used the fact that he essentially had no bargaining power to extract value in your favor. Whether or not you want to call that immoral is your business.
> I have never heard a story of Amazon threatening someone to work for them or using physical force to entice them to take a job
Amazon makes job offers which wouldn't be accepted without coercion, and uses the fact that benefits from social programs will be cut if the person uses the job to co-opt government coercion. They effectively threaten your current social program income to get you to accept a job you otherwise wouldn't.
Is that entirely Amazon's fault? No. Is Amazon using a messed up government policy to coerce people to take jobs they otherwise wouldn't? Yes.
> There is a reason top executives at Apple, Google and Amazon are paid well.
Because they're friends with the board of directors which sets their salaries, which are paid for not out of the directors' pockets but from shareholder profits?
Or maybe it's because the board wants the company to look like it's in the big leagues, and gee whiz, we're not in the big leagues unless we pay like we are, regardless of how the executives actually perform.
Everyone's salaries come from shareholder's profits - including the factory worker's.
I don't think either reason holds - and if it does then those companies will fall to the wayside. If you think Google, Amazon and Apple are wasting millions of dollars of year overpaying for talented leaders then share your plan with the world to do better and take them out of business.
I think it's actually because within 10 years a company can be absolutely destroyed if they don't get the right leaders. Look at Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft. All were leaders in their fields ten years ago and now have competitors that are outpacing them (in the case of the two latter ones) or simply erasing them (in the case of Blackberry). If Blackberry discovers multitouch first and puts out an iPhone or if Microsoft makes tablets work in a consumer friendly way by hiring Jony Ive - then the whole landscape changes.
Also in large companies workers making $200k+ aren't usually buddies with the board but there is a highly competitive market for them which allows those salaries to be the norm. It's a skills economy and for people without skills a comfortable, not flashy, life is a good and available option.
Your market-based challenge "share your plan with the world to do better and take them out of business", which seems to be a fairly common retort to anyone who takes issue with the way any particular company is run, is not a valid argument, because it is predicated on the market operating correctly.
If the market does operate correctly, as you suggest, then someone could, indeed, start a company, and "take them (Google) out of business", unless of course their hypothesis about overpaying top earners was faulty, in which case they would be outcompeted. If, instead, the market does not operate correctly, then such an attempt might fail because of other unspecified market failures. There is no way of determining whether a challenger's failure to displace the market leader is caused by (in this case) their false belief that companies are overpaying their top earners, or whether the failure is caused by the market not operating correctly. Unless you can devise a way of distinguishing the two, then this type of argument is inherently uninformative.
On a slightly different note, I agree narrowly with your point that companies need talented leaders, though I am not as convinced that the leaders of the companies you list determined their fate as much as you appear (to me) to suggest. For example, Blackberry couldn't simply "switch" to producing iPhones, for a whole variety of reasons.
Are Google executives paid well? Last time I heard about it, they received $1/year salary, and tons of company stock. That ties their income directly with company performance (through stock price).
Bargaining power is limited both by competition for jobs, and by fundamental necessity, which was more my point. A group of workers who do not have the freedom to engage in competitive tender, because they are forced to address their fundamental needs, are in a much worse bargaining position irrespective of whether or not they have "skills to offer to society".
The wider point is that structure matters: an organisation that is run dictatorially by a small central group is, by my estimation, fundamentally more illiberal than an organisation that is run cooperatively by its members. I fail to understand why those people who are enamoured with free market principles are such staunch defenders of organisations that internally suppress those principles almost absolutely.
I am skeptical of the limited definition of coercion as only persuasion that takes place by force or threat; in my opinion there are many other, more 'polite' ways of influencing people that are just as pernicious. Indeed, I agree with both pyoung and DerpDerpDerp that your craigslist exchange was coercive in the sense that you exploited that person's situation to your own advantage. A basic test for whether or not an exchange is non-coercive is whether or not both parties would happily reverse the exchange. If not, then there was probably some element of coercion involved, even if it was simply an unaddressed asymmetry of information. Remember that perfect market information is one of the assumptions necessary for market Pareto optimality.
>In this case, a prospective employer can essentially offer you any wage they like - will that be a truly "voluntary" contract, even though you have no choice other than to accept it?
"Bargaining power" is misleading because that is not how a market works. It's not two party's haggling over what they think a "fair price" is, it's a lot of parties and prices tend towards supply and demand. Unlike the bargaining model, supply and demand still works even if one party doesn't have a choice.
For example, you have no choice but to buy food. But farmers can't force you to pay extreme prices because you have no choice. They have to compete amongst each other and the price of food falls towards what it costs to produce.
Messing with the supply and demand price can create problems like unemployment. It's too expensive to hire new workers at the minimum wage, or there is a much higher incentive to outsource and automate work, or just not do it at all. To continue the food analogy, if you set a maximum food price, farmers would just stop producing if it cost more than the maximum price.
Your argument seems compelling, but there are several problems I find with it. The first is that it rests on the usual assumptions of a competitive market, and we are discussing situations where this isn't the case: people are looking for work where there is none, or very little - there is no competition for their labour.
The second problem is that your analogy is imperfect, because it switches round to the demand side rather than the supply side. A better analogy, I think, would be if you were a farmer who had produced a sufficient supply of food, but you had to sell it because it was going to spoil. In this case buyers, assuming that they don't strictly need your food, could apply pressure to you to lower your price fairly indiscriminately. This is a much better analogy to the original case: companies (often, and in the case we are talking about) don't need your labour, they will simply be less productive without it, but you do need a wage, or you will starve to death.
>The first is that it rests on the usual assumptions of a competitive market, and we are discussing situations where this isn't the case: people are looking for work where there is none, or very little - there is no competition for their labour.
And this is the root of the problem I am trying to get at. The demand for labor is pretty low. Blaming the few companies that are hiring workers isn't fair, and forcing them to raise wages doesn't fix the problem.
>The second problem is that your analogy is imperfect, because it switches round to the demand side rather than the supply side.
I think that people thinking of supply and demand sides separately is where a lot of people get confused, especially when discussing labor markets. There really isn't any difference and the same economic principles apply to both sides.
>companies (often, and in the case we are talking about) don't need your labour, they will simply be less productive without it, but you do need a wage, or you will starve to death.
Another good point and what I am trying to get at. The problem I think is that people depend on the value of their labor for their income. That's hardly fair to begin with (some people are simply worth more economically than others), but it's especially problematic if some people's labor becomes almost worthless due to automation or whatever. A basic income would be an ideal solution.
> And this is the root of the problem I am trying to get at. The demand for labor is pretty low. Blaming the few companies that are hiring workers isn't fair, and forcing them to raise wages doesn't fix the problem.
I essentially agree with that.
> I think that people thinking of supply and demand sides separately is where a lot of people get confused, especially when discussing labor markets. There really isn't any difference and the same economic principles apply to both sides.
I think that there genuinely is an asymmetry between supply and demand, indeed especially when discussing labour markets. If labour demand is higher than labour supply, then very crudely we can say that wages will go up to the maximum that the wage-payers can afford - but it won't go higher than that, because if it did they would run out of money, go out of business, and demand would go down. For the converse case, when labour demand is lower than labour supply, then, again very crudely, we can say that wages will fall, but there is essentially no lower limit, because there is no feedback (in pricing terms) until so many people have died of starvation that supply starts going down. Obviously both of those 'end game' scenarios are ridiculous, but it demonstrates the asymmetry - excess demand provides a rapid natural cap on price, whereas excess supply doesn't.
> Another good point and what I am trying to get at. The problem I think is that people depend on the value of their labor for their income. That's hardly fair to begin with (some people are simply worth more economically than others), but it's especially problematic if some people's labor becomes almost worthless due to automation or whatever. A basic income would be an ideal solution.
I absolutely agree with this part, and your proposed solution.
The contract is only voluntary if both sides have other reasonable options. This is very important point and the biggest hole in American Libertarian view of the world. There is a reason slavery contracts are illegal as well as there is a reason for worker rights (wouldn't be necessary and could be negotiated for every contract by logic of voluntary contract - workers just wouldn't agree to worse conditions).
Signing an agreement with a gun to your head is not voluntary. This is, after all, the normal complaint of the libertarian regarding the extortion of taxes, no?
Well the same logic applies when the "gun" is not physically a gun: If your set of viable choices has a size of 1 then you cannot be honestly said to have any "voluntary" choice.
As I said, the same is true of food or any other necessity. But we aren't going around claiming farmers are exploiting us.
The problem with the person holding a gun to your head scenario, is that they are abusing your rights in the first place by putting a gun to your head. We don't want people to do that for various reasons. But in this scenario it isn't the employer or farmer holding the gun, it's mother nature. They are just offering assistance from that.
The problem with that is that you see property rights as part of "mother nature". So if one side controls all the resources and can coerce the other to w/e they please you see it as "mother nature" on the other hand when I put a gun to your head it's no longer mother nature it's "abusing rights".
If the contract is voluntary it is advantageous to both or else it wouldn't be entered into.
Take this trade off. I create a system whereby I can make $100 for every hour someone works. I tell you I'll pay you $10 an hour to work. If you are better off working those hours you will take it and I will receive $90 and you $10. If you won't I'm out a lot of money, so I will probably revise my offer upwards.
These workers are individuals capable of making decisions. If they decide working for Amazon for $13 an hour is better than alternatives they should take it - if not they should pursue a more valuable alternative.
I understand the economics. But that doesn't answer my question: why does that rule out the possibility of taking advantage? How do you get from point A to point B?
There is an implicit assumption in your thinking that I'm trying to tease out.
Then I assume you mean that one party is better off and the other party is worse off (taken advantage of). Sure, that can happen. But in the case of Amazon, the workers are better off or they wouldn't work there.
You could be "better off", but still have been screwed out of being "even more better off". That's still being taken advantage of. Consider the legendary story about how Steve Jobs screwed the Woz.
Either definition works. You can take advantage of (exploit) someone at their expense, or your can take advantage of (leverage) their capabilities to mutual gain.
Frank took advantage of Amazon's 2-day shipping to do his last-minute Christmas shopping
The only assumption is that people will make the decision that is in their best interest. Amazon can only attract workers if it is the best option those workers have.
You have a nice life. Someone comes up to you and holds a gun to your head. You are now about to die. They say "I won't shoot you if you give me all your money".
Suddenly, giving away all your money is in your best interest. Therefore it's voluntary, and by your argument, fair and reasonable and nobody is being taken advantage of because it's all by choice and in best interests. Right?
That is incorrect. By holding a gun, that person has initiated force against you. Initiation of force is a proactive action that requires volition on part of the perpetrator.
Amazon is not initiating force against anyone. If they provide higher than market wages for the workers, they will be violating the rights of their shareholders who will lose money and will be worse off due to the deal. In an industry with as tight margins as Amazon, it can result in flight of capital, loss of shareholder value and layoffs.
comments I haven't verified state that the people had a welfare state income keeping them alive, and that by merely extending an offer of work - at any salary - Amazon causes that to be revoked.
This isn't literally "initiating force" but if it is true then it is very similar in effect to the mugging scenario, and having the mugger use unseen but still present power to "make an offer you can't refuse" is still not a fair and ethical way to egg people to voluntarily enter into contracts.
You're both assuming that offering someone the best option they have rules out the conclusion that you're taking advantage of that person. But that does not necessarily follow.
Then yes, everyone is taking advantage of everyone. My cell phone provider is taking advantage of me because they make profit off of me. I'm taking advantage of them because they spent $1,000,000,000 building the infrastructure so I can use that cell phone. Apple is taking advantage of me by making a profit off of their cell phone. I am taking advantage of Apple by using that phone which they put millions of dollars of research into and shipped to my door.
So we both gain an advantage.
Jack gets a job with Amazon - he is able to afford a color TV and internet at home. Amazon hires Jack - they get their orders shipped to homes on time for Christmas.
Everyone is getting an advantage in all of these situations. No one would ever make an agreement that doesn't provide an advantage.
I assume you're asserting there is a power difference between Amazon and Jack that makes Amazon get more advantage from Jack. This may be true. Amazon, however, has a power difference with customers who ultimately decide whether the billions of dollars worth of infrastructure they are building is worth it or whether competitors will win.
Is it wrong if I decide to not buy from Amazon? Am I taking advantage of them by buying if their product is $10 but not buying if their product is $12?
"Taking advantage" does not mean "getting an economic benefit out of a transaction with someone." It's a moral judgment, defined in terms of conformance with social norms and expectations.
You forget that in Germany, unemployment insurance requires you to not bypass any offers (and you're required to seek work as well).
By "choosing" not to be employed by Amazon, if that's offered to the worker and happens to be their only choice, they "choose" to lose unemployment benefits.
> If the contract is voluntary it is advantageous to both or else it wouldn't be entered into.
If your grandfather gave all of his money willingly and right away to his physician, don't you feel the physician acted unethically? And don't you feel your grandfather might be impacted negatively by that decision?
If the contract is voluntary it is advantageous to both or else it wouldn't be entered into.
I think the fundamental disconnect here, is the people you are debating with believe that Amazon should have made it more advantageous for the workers, because as the workers have no other options it would be the nice thing to do.
If the equilibrium wage is $9/hour, so be it, but that doesn't justify not treating people like human beings. Telling them to show up early but not paying them for that time, micromanagement of bathroom breaks, unsafe or uncomfortable work conditions, not paying for being on call, etc. These aren't justified by labor market dynamics--it's indecent treatment of workers just because they have no other options.
From the linked article: "Though out of work, Rodriguez is surprisingly upbeat. 'The warehouses aren’t bad,' he tells me. 'If they treat people better and pay us what we’re owed, the work could be very good. It is honest work.'"
These better work conditions would come at a cost. The money has to come from somewhere. You can't just complain that Amazon doesn't treat their employees well enough without explaining where you would get the money to improve their work conditions.
Sounds like a good reason to publicly shame amazon, thus damaging their brand value. If the damage to their brand is high enough, decent working conditions pay of. People start to be proud to claim that they "stopped to use Amazon".
Or what about some tighter regulation of their working conditions? Sounds uncomfortable - might be cheaper to just improve the situation of the workers ...
The unions are just doing their work with Amazon, and they are doing it very well.
If society decides that even low-paid workers should be treated with a modicum of respect (e.g. actually getting paid for the time they work, not being treated like automatons), it's the employer's problem to figure out how to pay for work conditions that meet the standard.
From their bottom line. Maybe the prices they charge are too low. If they can't afford to do business by the law, they shouldn't be in business. Someone who actually complies with the law will fill the void.
You can't just complain that Amazon doesn't treat their employees well enough without explaining where you would get the money to improve their work conditions.
You can't just complain that homeopathy doesn't cure cancer well enough without explaining how you would cure cancer.
So why not create a charity, with everyone paying 10 cents (or more!) and donate it to Amazon workers? Or to anyone else who has entered into a voluntary agreement, who someone else thinks is wronged?
Do we shed a tear for the coal-fired plant operator now forced to pay for scrubbers? No. As such, we shan't cry over Amazon's costs rising ever so slightly to internalize the previously externalized cost of marginalizing their warehouse employees.
When an employer doesn't pay an employee a fair wage, they're being subsidized, either by the government (Walmart is an excellent example; their literature specifically instructs their associates on how to collect government benefits due to them not paying a living wage) or by society as a whole.
From an economics perspective, would you not prefer consumers be responsible for the full cost of the good/services they're receiving?
No one's blaming Amazon for the particular facts you mention. They're blaming them for exploiting their advantage as the only employer offering such jobs.
And even if they weren't being exploitative, why on earth would a company hiring people deserve praise? It's not like they're doing it out of charity - they need work done, they hire people.
> They're blaming them for exploiting their advantage as the only employer offering such jobs.
The very reason they are hiring unskilled people is because they don't have to pay them a lot. Don't you understand? If Amazon was forced to pay them a lot, they'd prefer better skilled people and those very people you're trying to help would be unemployed thanks to you. I think they're doing fine without your unhelpful concerns.
> It's not like they're doing it out of charity - they need work done, they hire people.
By that logic, why blame them either even if they were exploiting the workers. They're just hiring people because they need work done and to be profitable like any other companies.
> I think they're doing fine without your unhelpful concerns.
Oh, they're fine? Is that why they're fucking striking? I assure you I did not force them to strike, my learnëd friend. This might be shocking to you, but even poor people can think for themselves.
> why blame them either even if they were exploiting the workers.
............because they're fucking exploiting them? Did you think "exploit" means "pat on the back" or something?
>Oh, they're fine? Is that why they're fucking striking?
They are also not primarily striking because of the working conditions as you apparently seem to think.
They are striking for more money. Plain and simple.
And here comes the kicker you also apparently don't seem to know/grasp. They are being paid what they currently earn not because Amazon willingly pays them slave wages just because, they are being paid what is normal in the logistics industry! The union says the workers are working in the retail industry and should therefore earn more. THAT'S why they are striking.
They are in disagreement over what industry the workers should belong to which will directly affect their pay. Amazon does not choose how much or how little they pay their workers. They pay what the tariff dictates. The current question right now is what tariff shall be used.
And that is the outrageous thing about this whole deal. That has not been the first strike about this very topic nor will it apparently have been the last. Instead of finally getting a judge to answer the question, once and for all, to what industry the workers belong to, they pull one strike after another with the customer getting the short end.
Both sides should finally quit their antics and get the official ruling and then all this hoopla about pay can stop. And once they stage their next strike solely because of working conditions, then you are allowed to come back and white knight for the workers all you want.
Not that I agree with Amazon's employment tactics regarding warehouse workers, but the definition of exploit is not negative in connotation. I would expect any employer to fully 'exploit' their workforce.
exploit (v) - make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)
If your argument comes down to you arguing semantics, you've missed the point.
There are various reasons for Amazon to pay the wages they do and keep the conditions they do, there are also reasons for the workers to want better wages/conditions.
There isn't one universal morality you can judge the situation with, and you shouldn't try to. In the end it's a financial transaction between the employees and their employer. It makes great economic sense for the employer to try to maximize it's income, and it has the side effect of worsening the lives of the employees, who, in good sense, come to the conclusion they need more than they currently have, and proceed to negotiate with Amazon. Amazon doesn't want to pay them more because it would cut into their income, so they try to dismiss it. The workers proceed to strike to force Amazon into a bad position. I would say neither are at fault.
There is no morality to be shone upon the situation, different parties have different interests to protect.
> If your argument comes down to you arguing semantics, you've missed the point.
My argument doesn't come down to semantics. @lsaferite brought up definitions and so I responded to that.
Weird how you use words like "force" when talking about the workers' actions, but not Amazon's. Funny how it's "great economic sense" for Amazon to maximize their income, but not for the workers to maximize theirs.
Also:
> There isn't one universal morality you can judge the situation with
I have no idea what the fuck you could mean by this. Also pretty sure you're making moral judgments anyway after lecturing us all against it. There's a word for that.
Your definition of exploit differed from his and you tried to disprove his...
The workers are forcing Amazon to change the contract, it has negative connotations but that is what's happening
> have no idea what the fuck you could mean by this. Also pretty sure you're making moral judgments anyway after lecturing us all against it. There's a word for that.
There is no one "right" party in the situation, and trying to determine one is foolish. And I suppose it could be called a moral judgement, in regards to discourse regarding morals, but that isn't the "situation".
You can't "disprove" a definition for a word. "Exploit" can mean simply "make productive use of", or it can have sinister connotations. Since I was the one to first use it (in this thread at least), I was merely pointing out that my usage was valid. @lsaferite made the semantic point and I responded to it, but your implication that the word's definition is the crux of my argument is inane.
> trying to determine one is foolish
You can go ahead and keep saying this over and over and over (and, if you wish, over), but that doesn't make it true. You think you're above the responsibility of moral judgment, but what you're actually doing is placing your moral judgment somewhere in between the two parties. This is still a moral judgment. Just because your determination is that both parties are somewhat aggrieved doesn't mean you're being fair or above it all. You think your judgment is special and enlightened because it's centrist? It's not. You're just a schmuck with an opinion like the rest of us.
Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice. Now take away that assumption and see if your opinion still hold weight.
Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons?
> Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice.
Not at all. I wrote that the alternative would be living on welfare with no prospects and no opportunities to learn skills. Amazon is offering a real job instead.
> Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons?
Yes, they are. They offer wages way higher than the medium salary in China. Why do you think everybody wants to work for them? Nobody is being forced to work there. The alternative would be having no jobs at all. Socialists want to impose very high minimum wages, but the reality is that very high minimum wages imposed by law just creates more unemployment and more misery, the very thing socialists are supposed to oppose but keep creating everywhere they get power.
I would wager you have no idea what it means to be in a situation where the employer has all the cards and they will offer you a wage that is just high enough to keep you alive so you can come in the next day.
Amazon is a great business but a shitty employer. Not to mention it's almost impossible for a unskilled worker to learn some skills that would make him a more valuable employee. They are reluctant to even hire them permanently not to mention giving them a chance to progress.
It's easy to say that in your position, you have options, not everybody does and may or may not have anything to do with the skill that person has.
I come from a place where it's impossible to get a decent wage whatever your skill level the only way to survive is to do shady stuff or open your own business which more likely then not will have to do some shady accounting in order to survive.
it's almost impossible for a unskilled worker to learn some skills that would make him a more valuable employee.
Any job experience is a step up from none. By keeping your eyes and ears open you can learn a lot and if you can demonstrate that by having a coherent conversation about warehouse operations or shipping logistics with another employer you might find yourself with better job prospects eventually.
That's where you're wrong. There's one thing that amazon and socialist governments have in common.
They don't give a st about the people.
The government doesn't need to be socialist either it can be a perfectly democratic government that doesn't do anything for its citizens interest and the result would be the same.
Agree with you - they don't give a st about people. But a major difference is that with Amazon (or any company) you have a choice - don't shop with them, don't work for them, convince others to do the same, document their bad-behavior etc.
With a government, there is no alternative choice. And typically socialist governments tend to swing towards totalitarianism as well, depriving their citizens of many other rights and freedoms.
I wrote that the alternative would be living on welfare with no prospects and no opportunities to learn skills.
Sounds pretty good.
Amazon is offering a real job instead.
As compared to what, a fake job? What does "real" add in this context, except dragging in a needless comparison to posturing sentences like "a real man never calls an ambulance". "Real" translating to hard work for low pay?
So the workers took on these low wage jobs instead of staying at home and living on welfare. They are using their legal right to strike as a way to increase their compensation and thereby improving the lives of their families.
They applied for these jobs and Amazon hired them. No one forced Amazon to take on these unskilled workers.
Please, remind me why these workers should be blamed for this and not praised?
Germany's economy sounds like the United States economy
years ago. I don't hear American workers complaining
about working in warehouses. Why--? Because in America
we don't have the luxury of complaining anymore. As to
"staying at home and living on welfare"; there's no
welfare Dude, besides food stamps and section 8(which is
next to impossible to relocate). So yes Dude--America has
more than a few problems. Be careful what you regurgitate;
Today you might be in a cube looking at a screen. I have a
feeling those days are numbered, and unless you have a
highly technical, regulated profession -- you are dispensable. Computer Programing is something that crosses
borders. It will eventually go to the lowest bidder. Welcome to "The world of crappy jobs". And America doesn't
need a higher minimum wage?
That's the sort of thing an employer or some government official would say to give it a positive spin. If Amazon wanted to be praised, they would make the work environment more comparative to other local employers and get a good reputation.
>Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.
The fact that they would have been left to starve does not make the person who, exploting their need, had them work like shit for shitty money in exchange any better.
Similarly, the fact that a person gives $20 for a crack addicted woman to do him "favors", does not make him a benefactor compared to those who had nothing to offer her.
There's no inalienable right to a starvation disciplined pool of cheap labor. If Amazon can't make its business work while paying employees a living wage, there's no sound economic reason it should be allowed to operate.
Well, there is nothing stopping Germany bringing in a minimum wage which is set at a higher level than this Amazon pay. Otherwise Amazon has every right to pay at this level.
If you require employers to pay an employee more than his work earns the company, that employer will go out of business or move operations or hire fewer employees.
What if it's Amazon's position of power that forces people out of work and into the cold embrace of Amazon in the first place?
When I first moved to London 10 years ago I watched as Starbucks moved aggressively into the area of London in which I was working. They decimated smaller outlets and put people out of work. I literally saw people who had previously worked at other establishments working at Starbucks - almost certainly for for less pay.
As a thought experiment, imagine that it's taken to it's full conclusion. Amazon is all that is left, all other shops and distributors are shut down. Now you have a large mass of incredibly unhappy people who have been forced into the position of working for minimum wage by power structures outside of their control. People with barely the means to survive. They don't enjoy any of the luxuries many of us have today. There's no way out for them, and there's probably no way out for their children. What happens when something triggers that group of individuals to revolt? It wouldn't be the first time that's happened in England [0].
Don't get me wrong, I think Amazon are an incredible operation. Possibly the finest logistics organisation that's ever existed - physically and increasingly virtually too.
The question is, what is the cost to society, especially in lower socio-economic areas? I think we need to look very critically on anything that clearly widens the wealth divide. Even more so when unethical means are used to shift money from broader society to those organisations in the first place [1].
In a world without Amazon maybe many of these "people who tend to be rejected everywhere else" would have gainful employment and the rest of us would just have to pay and extra few quid for the tat that we don't even need in the first place.
But what is stopping someone from opening competing operations to Amazon, compete with Amazon in the marketplace, provide more choice to workers, thus driving their salaries up?
What is stopping the workers from learning some useful skill and bringing more economic worth to their jobs as opposed to a skill that will be automated 5 years down the line?
> But what is stopping someone from opening competing operations to Amazon, compete with Amazon in the marketplace, provide more choice to workers, thus driving their salaries up?
Well it's a nice hypothetical, but has very little support historically. In fact the trend is completely opposite; Amazon swoops in and other businesses fold.
The theoretical thing stopping it is simply the initial capital costs and (more importantly) the embodied body of knowledge, gained over a long period of time of "how best to win at logistics".
One does not simply hang their tile and beat Amazon at <price, service, convenience>, there's a lot of effort that goes into making Amazon as efficient as it is that cannot be simply duplicated by a random VC-backed startup. It is for that reason that the old libertarian trope about "just wait for some entrepreneur to start a better competitor" is so out-of-touch... people are going to be waiting a long time, but they need to eat today.
You have a point - getting to where Amazon is now is hard. That should make us appreciate the perseverance, acumen and sheer willpower of Bezos. And I am not even mentioning the tremendous risks he took. So yes, duplicating Amazon is not easy, but then doing anything worthwhile is not going to easy and quick.
But then, the "competitor" or "job provider" need not be in the same space as Amazon. They can be restaurents, transportation companies, anything.
However, you will quickly realize that running a business of any sort is hard, full of unpredictable variables and very risky. The people who do it, as well as the people who invest in such companies should not be penalized by legislating a solution that would transfer wealth.
Eventually, if the cost of the employee is more than the value that the employee is providing, then the economy will move towards automating such jobs. And Amazon-type jobs are going to be very easy to automate.
... and the later Amazon seams not to care very much about when setting up their working places/conditions and contracts, all of which when embedded in the real world right now "try" to establish new standards which ignore the damages. Other parts of the society have quite different ideas about the future of work even if it is low-skill-work.
If you sincerely believe this I think you are morally bankrupt. Since this is HN also have a think about the value of human labour and the current wealth of nations.
I have friends who have worked at the Amazon UK packing werehouse Peterborough. They tell me it was a truly horrid, literally back breaking experience.
First note of caution was the hiring test. For them english is a second language but they found the test alarmingly easy, something you would give a 2nd grader in social skills test. I suppose the test weeds out those who have no ability to follow any direction.
After that the repetitive work started, within months both had developed repetitive stress injuries in the back and arms. The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months.
It seems there was little or no thought left for ergonomics of any kind.
They both were already pretty skinny, but both lost a substantial amount of weight while on the job.
There are plenty of people and some evidence to suggest that people are considered a disposable resource. Burn 'em out and chuck them back on the unemployment pile.
My view on this is if you want to be paid better, work somewhere else. Or encourage an environment where there are more alternative employers. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to take a job there. (And yes, I know that Europe has a different view of unions than the US)
Unless that's the only job you can actually find. Not a nice position to be, but it always happens to someone, since there are more people that jobs in many parts of the world.
Or would it be better those people "choose" not to have any job just because they find their current one is shitty? If everyone had that attitude in 19th century, we would still work 16 hours a day, without fighting for change.
I appreciate your thoughts. I still think it's better to spend time and energy on education and increasing corporate creation initiatives, than strong arming companies.
Let's take your example further... Yes, unions (especially in the auto industry) had a lot of success. This was alongside efforts by Henry Ford to increase pay. But where did it lead? The unions kept winning, and look at where Detroit is now. The unions won victory after victory, only to wind up with companies so hollowed out that they can't afford their hard won pensions.
I'm not talking about this specific case right now. The problem of lack of jobs is systemic, and applies to all professions, with a strong tendency to be even more pressing. Due to automation, software and other things the number of jobs, especially low skilled ones is shrinking. Yes, you can educate yourself, and anyone can/should, but in the end, one quarter of the people will be undereducated just because the bar is higher, and will still not be able to find a better job. We, as a mankind, have to seriously consider radical solutions to this problem, and not focus short term on any specific industry.
Should be start decreasing working hours due to productivity increase, or just invent bullshit jobs just to keep people employed? Or to progress to Star Trek economy where people will be provided with all basic needs and work only on what they would like to? I know what I would like to happen, but I also fear what would happen. Talking only about unions, Detroit or any specific industry or place is not going to "fix" the global problem, and that is that the need for jobs is decreasing, and number of people is rising. We should tackle that problem instead.
Sorry for rambling, it might only be tangentially relevant to the article and discussion, but what I see in all this cases is just this problem. Ok, I might be overgeneralizing, since I'm software engineer, but not to much.
Two paragraphs isn't rambling. I appreciate your thoughts.
I would certainly like to work 30 hours a week too. :-) And I share a concern that the middle class is getting squeezed, so that it's not a bottom 25% that struggle, it's a bottom 50-75%.
That said, I still believe the solution is creating more opportunities for potential job providers, and encouraging them to compete for talent. I think this helps everyone. When there's collusion on the part of labor or capital, everyone suffers.
To personalize the situation, as individuals in technology, we have the most job opportunities when there are many firms competing for our talent. (Like 1998, or now) The best thing we can do is encourage this for ourselves. Similarly, a pro-job-creator agenda on a country-wide basis will help pull up everyone.
In Detroit it also crippled the auto industry, leaving companies unable to afford their pensions and health care promises. It destroyed a city, that is now is unable to honor retiree obligations.
Threatening a firm at it's busiest point of the year may give you more of the pie, but it also shrinks the total size of the pie. In Detroit's case it destroyed the pie.
The automakers, airlines and schools all have had their share of managerial blunders too. That said, can you point to a heavily unionized industry in the United States that is a world leader? (Forgive the US blinders, but I don't want to wander any further into speculation - at least any further than I've already gone.)
The "world leaders" in the US rely on highly skilled labor and pay top dollar for it. There is no need for Google employees to unionize because they're doing really well.
They're not crippled because they're unionized, they're non-union because highly skilled workers are in short supply.
When our "everyone should learn to code" and "if you're not a STEM major you don't deserve to exist" initiatives gain more traction and Google/Apple/Facebook are drowning in highly qualified candidates, that could easily turn around.
This doesn't even make any sense. Unions have nothing to do with turning companies into world leaders. That's management's responsibility. You just brushed off the parent commenter's argument that management was responsible for designing shitty cars that nobody wanted to buy because it doesn't fit your narrative.
> Unions have nothing to do with turning companies into world leaders.
No, but the fact that there are no unionized companies in the U.S. that are world leaders in their market segment wiggles its eyes suggestively at the idea that the problem might have something to do with unionization.
As pointed out by another poster, Hollywood is a "world leader" in movie production and is heavily unionized. Another heavily unionized high tech industry in the US is the aerospace industry (Boeing) as is its competitor in the EU (Airbus).
I do stand corrected on movies. Even though a lot of filming now happens abroad, this does seem like the major example
I don't view Boeing and Airbus as shining examples of success. Both get large government subsidies. Both have had their share of problems over the years, perhaps more Airbus lately. And there are just 2 of them. It's not a competitive industry. When you're splitting oligopoly profits, there is more room for unions. This actually is also the instance where I do think unions have the most standing. If there's no place else to go work, you kind of need a union. In addition to "the only mine in town" I think this also applies to fire and police departments. I don't think it applies to schools - I'd much rather see more choices (charters, etc) - but that's a much longer post.
Another problem with your question is that it focuses just on the United States where most jobs aren't even unionised. BMW, Mercedes Benz, and Volvo are all unionised in their country of origin. 95% of all schools in Finland are unionised and they churn out the best students in the world.
Furthermore, nobody here knows what qualifies as a world leading company to you. That's your opinion. General Electric, UPS, all of America's major professional sports teams, Safeway, Budweiser, Coors Brewing Company, Carhartt, are unionised. You don't consider Boeing a shining example of success because they take government subsidies. But that's really besides the point because they make great planes for countries all across the world where they do have to compete. They're a world leader. Non-unionised companies have to compete with companies that are unionised when it comes to a worker's pay and benefits to get the best workers.
But like I said before, the premise of your question is ridiculous.
Union intransigence has led to situations where management is constrained by not being able to fire bad workers and reward good ones reducing competitiveness and ultimately leading to inefficiencies and bad products.
The entertainment industry (film, television, and professional sports) are all heavily unionized.
Plus, it's not like the Japanese auto-workers at the companies that are Detroit's lunch weren't unionized. Wasn't the fall of the American auto industry because of competition and market forces instead of big bad unions?
In what way is the scenario the responsibility of the hiring company? You're arguing that the company should impoverish itself to save the worker from poverty. There is no magic bag of infinite money at the company.
I'm a strong believer in the idea that a society can be judged by how it treats those weakest and least able to defend themselves. I do agree that encouraging alternative employment is necessary, but if you read the article you will see that often the reality is that there is no other option. Therefore these people at the bottom of the employment pole are taken advantage of because they can be. I do not think this is a state of affairs that we should encourage, or that needs to exist, and companies like Costco show otherwise. I hope that those of us with the means will spend our money in as conscionable a way as we can (ie. not at companies encouraging this).
Wouldn't it seem reasonable that it's better to give people better access to more jobs (through education or improving the environment for new business creation) than strong-arming existing employers?
The former assumes that the pie can be grown. The latter assume we're fighting over a limited pie, which actually winds up shrinking it.
Education in Germany is mostly free except a (unfortunate) selection process after 4th grade (most states). So people have access to education, and Germany made some great steps forward towards easy business creation (new limited company types, standard contracts, lower costs, ...) in the last 10 years [1].
So what's next?
[1] That said the common idea is in school and on television since around the 70s: The coolest guy is the one with the worst grades - every celebrity boosts how bad they were at school. And living on welfare has become a verb ("harzen") and is the live goal (perspective?) of many young people.
Universities are not free anymore in most states of Germany. And the selection after 4th grade is very much determined by the area you live in because you have to send your kids to the public school where you live.
Tuition was common for a while, but it isn't anymore. Lower Saxony is the only state where you still have to pay it and they're abolishing next year [1].
There is no such thing as "free" so when discussing these sorts of issues it would be much more illuminating to describe the mechanism of funding, as it relates to one alternative to another.
I think one important point is that Germany currently doesn't have a minimum wage. It is the job of the union to negotiate a reasonable salary for the workers in a given field.
In many European countries unions and employers have historically been able to work together and reach agreements that have been better for both parties, compared having a law impossed by the government. Amazon is ruining that, and I don't believe that the rules that will follow from the governments will be as good as an agreement reach between an employers and the people who work for him.
Germany has minimum wages, but not for every industry. The government standpoint was up to now that minimum wage needs to be negotiated between employers and employees and it's not the government job to set the level of the minumum wage.
The minimum wages in Germany, if I understand it correctly, are set by the union and employers, not the government. So there's no legal requirement to pay a minimum wage. Or is that not how it works?
The current government promised a 8,50EUR minumum wage.
Fun fact: The leftist German news paper TAZ who was fighting for minumum wage for quite some time, argued against the minumum wage for it's intern as "not possible".
[1] e.g. when you are below some wage, the government pays you some money for the "gap"
I fully agree that it's best to be in an environment where people and companies come to agreements on wages that is best. My thought is about what happens when you don't agree - in that case, go work for someone else. And as a society, we're better off encouraging the creation of new companies, and educating people to get better jobs.
Not everyone are meant to start a business and while education is important, it's not always the answer either.
Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon. Regardless of how highly educated a society is or how many new companies we start, there's still someone who has to do the manual picking in the warehouse. Someday that job may be automated away, but until then, we need to ensure that the people taking these jobs are treated decently and paid a wage that will sustain them.
Amazon can move their warehouse to Poland, and pay a little less and still provide a decent salary. The behavior however should be the same regardless of which country they operate in.
We often forget that there are bad/boring/hard/dirty jobs and that they actually need to be done. Education won't make these jobs go away. Just as often we forget that there are people who enjoy them and have no desire to educate themselves further. Regardless of our feeling towards the lack of education or dislike of the job fulfilled by the people "at the bottom of society", we should be respectful of their choices in life and help them should they feel exploited.
Just for the record I work for a online shop and are on occasion asked to help in the warehouse. It's physical hard work, boring and you're on a strict schedule to ensure that everything is ready then the delivery companies arrive to pick up orders. We pay a lot better than Amazon, almost double it seems and your not given a fixed time in which to complete the picking of an order, so there's hopefully less stress. So I have no reason to believe that Amazon couldn't a nice place to work as well, and still make a profit.
As a matter of fact, Amazon is opening large centre in Poland. It's not clear to me how much of Germany's workload will it pick up, but it wouldn't surprise me if it played a major role in bargaining with the unions in Germany.
Also, regarding "paying a little less and still providing a decent salary", given that the government social safety net in Poland is minimal, my guess is they'll be paying around or below bare substistence levels (2 - 2.5 eur/h) and still get workers.
First - I very much respect your point of view, since you're working for a similar firm.
I don't believe that everyone needs a Phd, and not everyone needs to start their own business. My point is that if we create an environment where enough businesses are competing for our labor, all of us (even the non-entrepreneurs) benefit.
> Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon
There may be a fairly short time horizon on "currently"- Amazon bought Kiva, a warehouse automation/robotics company, a few years ago, and it wasn't because they thought it looked cool.
They kind of do, because if you've been unemployed for some amount of time you have to take every job they offer you, otherwise you don't get any unemployment money at all, then you can't pay your rent and have to start stealing food, etc.
Not everybody is fortune enough to be born into such an environment where he/she is able to get a reasonable education so he/she can chose where he/she would like to work.
My great grandfather spent most of his money to get to America (from Germany) by boat, didn't speak English, arrived in New Orleans and worked his way to the Midwest where he toiled as a grocery store worker for years before starting his own store in another town.
No education, no money, no connections and he spoke broken english throughout his life. He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have. Hard work and willingness to learn leads to success and then the ability to choose work.
There is a spectrum that underlies this issue. On one side is the freedom of individuals to contract with other individuals and on one side is government setting contract policies. If freedom and respect for individuality are strong values (which I think they are post-enlightenment) policies and views should be closer to the former.
Also note that any change to labor laws affects small business far more than large business. Amazon can create robots to do the jobs of sorting where smaller firms cannot. The more regulation on labor in industries and companies the more important capital is and the more valuable size is. The financial industry in America (and in many other countries) is a key example of this.
"My great grandfather won the lottery, therefore anyone who tries can". And by implication, anyone who doesn't wasn't trying.
For every story of your great grandfather, how many people spent all their money to get to America but it was actually a con and the boat trip they bought wasn't real? How many arrived in New Orleans and couldn't toil as a worker because they couldn't get a job? How many bought into a different idea and went to France to seek a new start and got killed in the War? Or Russia? Or Japan? How many arrived in New Orleans, toiled as a grocery store worker for years before being fired and left unemployed? How many toiled for years before injury left them helpless? How many tried to learn a foreign language but didn't have the mental ability to do it? How many tried to start a store in another town but picked a shitty town and went bankrupt? Or picked an industry with a ruthless competitor who put them out of business with illegal means?
How many of the German population tried to do something like the above? And how many of those hit on good things to try and good ways to go about them? And how many of those were successful?
That fraction of a percent is your model for how everyone should live?
If you only consider that "successful people worked hard" and conclude "hard work leads to success" then you are misunderstanding the nature of the world.
Hard work leads towards success but success, however it's normally defined, is a filter that excludes most people trying for it.
> He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have
And most of the top 5% Americans and Germans back than lived in fear of militant strikes, riots and revolutionary workers in general. They would have envied the social peace of modern western societies.
And I don't know when your Great grandfather migrated but one hand you can't draw conclusions from a single persons experiences and on the other hand stories like this have a lot to do with the specific economic situation in his new homeland at that time
He migrated in the early 1900s before the war was forming.
What can we draw conclusions based on? Right now in America every single person has access to the internet where they can access an incredible number of educational materials through libraries. Most college campuses are open and allow for sit ins and, at least in certain states, there are plenty of job opportunities. Not to mention almost all families in poverty today have air conditioning, refrigerators and access to more varieties of food than anyone did 50 years ago.
The economic environment today is incredibly favorable towards those who are willing to work hard and opportunities are boundless for anyone with intelligence willing to seek them. There are strong social factors holding groups and individuals back but social issues cannot be fixed with economic or political action.
> ... for anyone with intelligence willing to seek them ...
As I said:
> Not everybody is fortune enough to be born into such an environment where he/she is able to get a reasonable education ...
And it is not even only about intelligence. If nobody showed you how to learn, you will not be able to just know how to do that on your own at the library or on your computer at home. You will not know where to start or who to ask for help. I also assume that this is why children of academics study at the university while working class children don't. Their parents don't know how to teach their children to learn.
You can make excuses for anyone and everyone in any situation :) But then if the assumption is that no one can learn unless taught, then our ancestors should never have made any progress and inventions....since, who was there to teach them?
You get social welfare money if you have no job. There is a discussion if it is enough or not, but the state pays your rent in Germany and noone needs to die because of hunger [1].
[1] There are quite some people living on the street though - especially in larger cities - who for various reasons can't or won't claim their social welfare money.
Jeena is right. If you do not take every job they offer you you can be blocked from receiving that money in part or fully. Then you have no money or not enough to get by.
Stating that people only live on the street (and freeze to death during winter) because they won't claim their welfare money is a gross simplification. Did you talk to all/any of them?
I spent enough time looking at Detroit. :-) The US is by no means perfect, but I think encouraging entrepreneurship is a better solution than organized labor.
But the reality is, if Amazon is so bad, folks should just go work somewhere else.
Organized labor had an overwhelmingly positive impact on Western workers that you also benefit from in terms of work hours, weekends, holidays, and so on. But because there are some cases where unions contributed in part to financial problems (which have quite a bit to do with government corruption and corporate greed as well), they are now an antiquated artifact of the past?
> Folks should just go work somewhere else.
This is really tone deaf to the realities of the people who must accept jobs like these, though.
First - thanks for jumping in to a contentious debate.
In terms of being tone deaf, isn't that more for politicians and corporate heads? Here we're arguing ideas, like should we support unions that strike during peak periods, and what should Amazon's response be?
While I have a general dislike for unions in some places, it is specifically their company-harming tactics that bother me the most. This can be striking during the holidays (which is the situation mentioned) and can also be protesting in front of hotels, scaring away customers. This is an attitude of, "If you don't see if my way, I'll destroy the company."
While unions have made some strides, some improvements have also been a result of unilateral action by employers. Take the Henry Ford example, of shortening days and raising wages. [1]
As a broader society, we can help those who "must accept jobs like these" by encouraging entrepreneurs to create companies that could hire people like them. Employees get better treatment when there are more people fighting to hire them.
If you want to get your message across, you have to cause discomfort to the organization you want to listen. Workers asking nicely won't change anything. Businesses (and shareholders) care about one thing: profits. So the only way to get your message across is by affecting the one thing they care about.
Here's an illustrative passage from Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky:
> Recently the head of a corporation showed me the blueprint of a new plant and pointed to a large ground-floor area: “Boy, have we got an architect who is with it!” he chuckled. “See that big hall? That’s our sit-in room! When the sit-inners come they’ll be shown in and there will be coffee, T.V., and good toilet facilities — they can sit here until hell freezes over.[1][2]
Their goal was to eliminate the pain their business experienced so there was no pressure to change behavior.
As to your second example, Ford raised wages because he had a problem with high turnover, because working conditions were bad.[3]
I understand the down voting because it was essentially devoid of meaty content, but considering the GP's point of view is unpopular in HN, I thought sharing my agreement was enough reason to post. In that way it is deeper than the normal "me too" or +1 post.
+1 for supporting Costco. I also find that there is no guesswork: I've been happy with every Costco purchase, their return and replace policies are extremely friendly, and, while they don't cover all niche items, all of the products they sell are good to excellent quality. I suspect, if they really tried, they could eat Amazon's lunch in the space
Of course, many of the workers you interact with on a typical trip to Costco are not Costco employees. Costco chooses not to hire their own "sample servers" and instead contracts out those jobs to firms which don't offer particularly good wages or benefits:
Choosing Costco over Amazon seems like a rather pointless moral stand to make. What about the people who work in the logging, fishing, and mining industries? You probably use their products every day and they risk life and limb for similar salaries. What about everything made in a factory in a third world country? I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China.
>I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China.
Are we to drag ourselves down to the lowest common denominator for our citizens, in countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights?
In countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights there are laws in place to ensure workers' rights don't regress. Amazon isn't breaking any laws. The working conditions are safe, the employees are paid above minimum wage, and the employees are not working 80 hour weeks. The worst possible (legal) working conditions in these countries are far better than working conditions in third world countries. No matter what shopping choices you make, workers' rights in these countries will never regress to those of a third world country.
> workers' rights in these countries will never regress to those of a third world country.
Except if enough people follow those "It's fine here, you are protected by the law and it's much much worse elsewhere, be happy with what get"-argumentation. Then the will probably regress because companies have a strong interest to produce cheaper than those in places where there are less regulations but they loose any interest in workers rights if there's no protesting working class. And companies interest, trough lobbying and so on, quickly becomes the governments interest.
> What is the replacement for that employee safeguard then?
Interestingly, as in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland don't have minimum wages either), collective bargaining agreements consensually worked on by labor unions, employers and local governments. There tends to be base sector-, industry- or trade-specific agreements. Other comments[0] indicate Amazon apparently does not care for any of these.
From wikipedia: "The law states that paying a worker an "immoral wage" is illegal. There is no general consensus what constitutes 'immoral' payment. One judge at a court in Krefeld, Germany, ruled that a cashier at a supermarket has to earn the equivalent of approximately 7USD per hour. The federal courts in Germany ruled that any wage lower than 75% of the average wage or salary for a specific occupation constitutes illegal payment. However, since there is no well defined legal minimum wage as of February 2013, courts are usually the ones who have the final say and will only rule for individual cases."
> I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China.
"Better than those of every factory in China" does not necessarily mean "Acceptable for the civilized world". Whenever I have the choice to not buy from a company where the working conditions are not acceptable for the civilized world, I try to make that choice.
Yes, sadly, it's not always possible. This isn't a reason to just not care.
You make good points. A few years ago I was converted to the idea of ethical spending - not sure if that is a term? As much as I can I do not buy items that I believe contribute to these issues. It is not always possible but for every purchase (groceries, toys, clothes etc.) I look for items not made in factories in China, that are created by companies with good employment policies and made with materials that are sustainable etc. etc. I prefer this (sometimes half measure) to just giving up altogether. I also find that these days it is easier and there is more information out there to help.
Gosh, good point! You can't fix everything, so why not just embrace all the moral failings of our culture? No point in making marginal progress! Fuck self-examination! Don't question it!
It's roughly on par with farming or driving a taxi.
Oil and gas workers face more danger than other miners (I guess this is mostly because of the decline of mining in general and tendency for open pit mines over other types of operations).
Fishing and logging are still tremendously dangerous, but, for instance, fisherman in Alaska average more than $20,000 a year from their off-season non fishing jobs.
Nice derailing, as this is clearly not the topic of the argument here.
The replacing will happen in due time - be it with amazon, be it with every other big warehouse. But that does not allow amazon till then to pay his warehouse-workers way under the trade-agreement, that is binding for this kind of industry in Germany.
Amazon says it does not have to pay the trade-agreement-wages from the mail order business, as it is just a logistics company. And that is the whole reason of the strikes. So the union is pushing for strike, to bring amazon in line with the other mail-order-businesses in Germany. So that its workers might one day earn the same amount of money, that every other worker in this industry earns already.
An intermediate stage would likely be an increase in the percentage of goods drop-shipped from China (I've already received several Amazon items this way in the US)
The type of work in a costco warehouse vs amazon warehouse I am guessing is hard to compare. One is the moving of entire pallets, the other is picking and packing hundreds of individual items a day (probably thousands).
It's also a strategic decision by Costco to treat their employees better. Why not allow them this type of strategic advantage? If Amazon doesn't want to follow suit, let them lag.
"The Amazon system is characterized by low wages, permanent performance pressure and short-term contracts" - one of the union board members
For me, this sentence captured the entire article. Of course the wages are low-- the jobs require no skills and have been largely automated by Kiva et al.
It's hard to argue that performance pressure is a bad thing -- logistics is an industry where performance matters. And again, the competition is robots.
Complaining that contracts are short term does have some legitimacy. That said, it's clearly a seasonal business; do the unions honestly expect them to hire people year round when they just aren't needed?
I really want to be on the side of the people, but I'm afraid that asking for more money/longer contracts/etc. is just a way to make the automation even more compelling.
It would clearly be more human to automatize a task that is characterized by low wages, permanent performance pressure and short term contracts.
A few years ago while discussing with a cashier about the automated cash registers they had just installed:
-Dont you fear losing your job?
-You call that a job?
-...
That type of work is demoralizing to one's soul. I couldn't imagine having to do that as a 9-5. However, I'm going to guess within a decade or so there will have to be a 3-4 day work week instituted as the norm, since there simply won't be enough jobs for people to support themselves with.
Mandating a 30-hour-limit on the work-week with firm controls on overtime would get a lot of people back into the workforce and would give a lot of people some work-life balance back.
But it would also be politically unpalateable to the conservative/libertarian wings of just about every country.
The alternative is Basic Income. But yes, countries need to decide how distribute work in the future (automatic cars will destroy a lot of low level jobs, taxies, logistics, ...)
That's not really how it could possibly work because labor isn't fungible. You think that instead of having some engineers working 50 hour weeks and some warehouse workers working 0 hour weeks you'd convert the warehouse workers to engineers and have everyone work 25 hour weeks? If they could have become engineers they would have already done so.
"In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week." ...
Suggesting that future developments will make these jobs obsolete is a weak argument against improving their conditions today. Also, if improving the quality of life for their human employees rapidly advances automation developments then why hold back progress in two places?
I'd even go as far as say that people are hired on a temp basis because Amazon's somewhere working on fully automating the picking job. I can see a setup where people are only needed to load the machines with products, where the machines are item dispensers of sorts that can contain a buffer of products.
I agree with what you say, but whAt if amazon treated employees as customers instead of servants? Maybe the pay wouldn't be better, but the could listen to employe grievances better.
Do they go out of there way to foster relationships among employees? Encourage out of work get togethers like Friday happy hour, light team sports? Groups to visit the local zoo or Japanese Gardens, group outings to a new movie, organize a hobbit marathon, a real marathon or maybe just a 5k? Groups for board game enthusiasts? Clans on WoW?
The work may be mndane and shitty, but slogging through with friends makes it a million times better.
I guess this is my first personal comment on hn, but boy are you out of touch with the world.
This is low to minimum wage work. The employee benefits are that you are employed. Your work is a commodity and they make you feel it and they have all the reasons in the world to make you feel grateful for having that job...
Group Visits? On whose time? The employer won't pay for the time, since he is trying to get the work done as cheap as possible and the employee won't want to use his private time for it, for the obvious reason of having so little of it...
Get out there and work for 6€/hour before you go about imagining how things could be improved for people in these jobs.
"Do they go out of there way to foster relationships among employees? Encourage out of work get togethers like Friday happy hour, light team sports? Groups to visit the local zoo or Japanese Gardens, group outings to a new movie, organize a hobbit marathon, a real marathon or maybe just a 5k? Groups for board game enthusiasts? Clans on WoW?"
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here? It seems like you're saying it's OK to pay people low wages and per-week contracts as long as you have a company WoW guild?
(I'm quite opposed to unions in general and I'm not on the 'Amazon is evil' bandwagon, but you comments doesn't make much sense to me).
Hmmm, I think the point is, they treat the staff like shit. The suggestion is that treating them like employees in a higher status job may help (though personally I am sure most would prefer to see the wages directly, rather than a new movie trip).
I think you pay people exactly what they will accept. The fact is the jobs aren't worth much, but there are ways for a company to make life better that aren't costly.
I've worked for a company that did those types of things and I found it awful. On top of the work, you had to negotiate strained, forced, Corporate Fun. After 10 hours working, the last thing I wanted was to be told by the company that was exploiting me that I should smile and be grateful and give it my all in the Company Nintendo Wii Bowling Tournament.
> The work may be mndane and shitty, but slogging through with friends makes it a million times better.
You make it sound like school and as though the workers are children. People don't want to be infantilized at work. They want to feel as though they are valuable -- that the work they are doing has some impact in the world -- and they want to be compensated fairly for it.
Well I wasn't suggesting they were to be infantilized. I was suggesting there jobs aren't worth very much and certainly aren't fun, and that the company can offer ways to make life better that aren't costly.
If someone wants to feel their work is valuable, the should probably find some work that is valuable.
Btw, I didn't suggest the company sponser or track any of this.
The parent comment implied that their workers have a de facto monopoly on filling boxes.
Which is indeed the case in the short term. However, quitting your job means not making your rent payment for a quarter of America, so the analogy still holds.
Management bargains collectively - why can't their employees do likewise?
Perhaps I misused the word 'collectively' - but notice that this is a strike by Amazon workers in Germany, as opposed to all warehouse workers in Germany.
Inside the company, management's position is highly collective. Owners expend significant resources to get the best possible deal on what they have to pay their employees - resources that are beyond the reach of an individual employee. For jobs like this, it imposes pay grades across the entire warehouse floor - as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
It only makes sense that employees should organize their own advocacy groups.
That's very typical for unions. This is also the time of year for hotel unions to act against their employer and customers in order to demand more. In San Fran the hotel union employees will conduct noisy picketing demonstrations at 6 a.m. I guess it's a universal tactic for unions. The BART union held the Bay Area hostage twice this year.
This sounds like you're advocating a free market approach in this case, where BART employee wages should rise until their employer can no longer operate.
As in other markets, the sticky part is switching costs; one big reason employees have leverage in situations like this is that the employer can't practically fire everyone and have equally trained workers the next day. The employer then has to weigh the cost of increased wages vs. the economic harm that would be done if the business were to shut down while they found and trained new workers.
For unspecialized positions, a worker's leverage is proportional to that economic harm, not that worker's skill, or length of service, or particular suitability to the job vs. someone else. The economic harm is proportional to the economic value which was created by others, often including the public at large (e.g., power plants and transportation systems exist by laws and permits that essentially divide up natural resources owned by everyone). A moral opposition to leveraging the efforts and resources of others to enrich your own bargaining position ('hostage-taking' in anti-union parlance) is the counterargument to 'perhaps they should get paid more if the BART is so important'.
Obviously there's some middle ground here between abusive behavior on either side of a labor dispute. One idea to reach it is for both sides to have more alternatives/lower switching costs (make it more socially acceptable for workers to look for contingency jobs while already employed, and for employers to train backup workers while the positions are already nominally filled).
Well, I would say the unions try to do their Job as effectively as possible. It has nothing to do with holding somebody hostage, it just makes sense to protest at a time where your employer is forced to pay attention if it was not possible to get a consensual solution. If it's moral for Amazon to pay as low wages as they can why should it not be moral for unions to be as annoying to their employer as the can?
Automating these jobs is excellent, and I'm looking forward to it. I do wish that the benefits of automation would be shared more widely though - although the average poster on HN is paid very well, and has an intellectually challenging and satisfying job, what should people who weren't educated actually do?
Do you assume most posters are from the States? I work in Spain. I would say I am paid comfortably for living, without enough to save comfortably for the future.
This strike is so ridiculous.
I agree that warehouse work isn't the easiest work(physically), but that's part of not being skilled.
If you take a look at the wages Amazon pays (10€ for the first year, 11,77€ in the third year) and take a look at other jobs for the unskilled (McDonalds, DPD, Hermes), you can clearly see that this is actually a decent wage. Especially in the Area of eastern Germany, wich is still economically much weaker than western Germany.
I worked part-time in a large themepark for 4 years and none of their regular workers got paid that much. Also they we're mostly unemployed in offseason.
Also consider that there are only about 15% of their workers striking.
The Store is drawn much bigger than it actually is.
Also the Union VerDi is just a big Joke. They're not about fair treatment of workers but their own advantage. They're just giving these workers a runaround.
Id actually be interested if something like this happens in the US as well in this form ?
Amazon Germany defends itself by saying they already pay above average (for the logistics sector) salaries but ive heard the average is pretty miserable.
Overall i think the logistics workers cant win this, as the work they do is pretty expendable, its just a matter of quantity and they will probably find enough people to work for less.
As a german i have always had the feeling that these unions are way to aggressive and often times prefer short term goals (more money yay people are happy) over long term goals (successful business, stable jobs).
This is about the only political instrument the workers have. And unions are important to provide the infrastructure to allow for strikes. What constitutes the aggressiveness you speak of?
"As a german" I see that the political opinion in this country got a bit too streamlined to the view that the vast number of low-paid jobs in this country guarantee "long term goals". Yes, business is successful. After all, Germany has a big sector for low-paid work, and reworked the former restrictions on fixed-term and part-time jobs. "Stable jobs" is a bit too general, then this comes at a price where I would dispute the view that they are "stable". They don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore. Yes, Germany as a nation is economically doing fine. The low-paid job sector is booming - and the price for that will be paid by a lot of people struggling to finance their daily needs.
"They don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore."
German pension payment are compulsory, so even if you work one of these jobs for 40 years, you still get a pension. Unless I didn't understand what you were saying.
Yes, but his point was that the pensions which will be payed out to those workers are so small that they are essentially working their way into poverty.
It's interesting to see the negativity towards the strikers in this topic. Why shouldn't workers be allowed to get together and act as a collective? What's so frightening about the workers having more power?
Markets set efficient prices through competition. When I have just one vendor to buy from and have to pay whatever they demand or go without, it's recognized as an abusive monopoly and market failure. Why is it suddenly okay for a bunch of vendors (of labor) to openly form a cartel, declare all competing vendors off limits through intimidation and violence, and extort whatever they can? Why don't unions have to compete for contracts and thereby set sane terms?
I actually worked at Amazon's Milton Keyne's fulfilment centre for a while. It was tough, I almost always came home with blisters on my feet. Picking is THE WORST. The targets they set were absolutely ridiculous, I don't think I reached them once during the two months I worked there.
Amazon has already made a decision to move some logistics to cheaper countries in Eastern Europe, so next year they'll have a nice excuse to fire all 'troublemakers' in Germany.
One of the main points why Amazon moved to Leipzig/Germany in the first place is, that it is only 25km / 15 miles to the next airport. This airport is also one of three global DHL hubs and the only global DHL hub in Europe. I would suspect they don't want to give up this position.
I'm waiting for the day Amazon takes out the logistics middlemen and has it's own long-distance delivery fleets (trucks and planes). I think it is inevitable at the scale they operate under. If/when that happens, it will be interesting to see where the locate their warehouses.
I don't know. Right now they commoditize delivery (the customer doesn't pick who delivers the package, just the delivery terms) so they can take advantage of the best rates for any individual package. It will be hard to compete with that internally.
They could have done it at first place, but cheaper eastern europe countries dont have germany's infranstructures.
That's bad press for Amazon anyway, call me naive, but I think customers do care, I do.
But the whole amazon scandal really started when journalists discovered they were hiring "neo nazi" security contractors.
That is one of the reasons I don't buy a book at Amzaon.de or any other Amazon anymore. I use Amazon tho find a book, see preview pages and ratings, and then order the actual book by one of the, preferably local, bookstores, like wittwer, hugendubel or similar.
One thing not covered in the article: Amazon.de is also used in other parts of Europe, e.g. I'm in The Netherlands and frequently order from there (or amazon.co.uk).
So I wonder to what extent this'll also impact secondary markets in the countries that surround Germany.
I've stopped buying products from Amazon due to them previously hiring nazi security guards and Richard Stallmans stand on them. It's simply not worth saving a few cents for workers not having proper rights.
"... 1,115 staff had joined the strike at three sites, but there had been no delays to deliveries."
I laughed out loud when I read this. It sounds like Amazon is the only company who's giving jobs out to the slackers. Then the slackers are expected to work hard, can't meet those expectations, so they go on strike. Meanwhile Amazon is unaffected. Amazing.
A handheld device beeps at you, tells you where to go to get the next item in the cart, you have 15 seconds... and then it repeats all over again... and if you're slow it starts flashing, beeping and you get warnings about not hitting your targets. It's like trying to work but with someone over your shoulder all the time. Terrible.
What part of that is objectionable? I worked logistics at a big box retailer 10-ish years ago, and that kind of thing was completely standard. The feeling was that, yes, the beeps were annoying when you were helping a customer, getting an occasional drink of water, etc., but your (human) supervisors ultimately used their discretion in how they interpreted the efficiency numbers, and could take all that into account. If your supervisor punishes you for taking a bathroom break, that's a separate issue in my book.
What's the alternative? Should companies not measure efficiency, or not care what it is, as some sort of gift to their employees? The time for humanity is in interpreting what the machine tells you and hearing the worker's side of the story.
Likewise, a beep and a statement of fact on a screen ("target has been missed") is a far cry from screaming.
If the work can fundamentally be measured on 15 second intervals, what is the rational basis for not doing so? If your issue is with giving the picker instant feedback on how they are doing with respect to their performance goals, what interval would be more satisfactory, and why?
I understand that, emotionally, it is preferable to receive negative feedback less frequently than more frequently if given the choice, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the unease with the scanners on HN is the result of projecting best practices in one's own field (software development or some other form of creative knowledge work) onto another. We can all agree that beeping at a software developer if they don't type X characters every 15 seconds would be absurd, but we don't scoff at test-driven development, spell-checkers, and other instant performance feedback mechanisms. Most of us don't interpret a red squiggly line in Word as emotional abuse; what makes the scanner beep so much worse?
And if you can find a way to measure joint stress and wear through the day, we can optimize the workers to pick the heaviest parcels each can lift such that it only damages them a bit but not more over the course of a week than nights and weekends of rest can cope for, that would be great too, thanks.
And dim the warehouse lights, they can have individual torches. No sense lighting parts of the room people aren't looking at. Oh hang on, batteries - better make them hand cranked torches, then the power comes from their lunch, ha ha!
The issue isn't with instant-feedback, it's with degradation and treating humans like industrial farm animals. The question isn't "is this effective", but "is this ok?" and "can anyone come up with something less dystopian but still workable? - please?".
One thing that struck me watching that was that the timer counted down from 15 to 0.
Since "gamification" is so popular amongst management and business theory these days, I was surprised it didn't go the other way and count up, which would mean the worker gets a time to try to beat in the next pickup.
Don't get me wrong: it would still be unbearably grim. Maybe even more so.
Who knows -- maybe Amazon has tried both methods and has stacks of data that shows counting down is better for productivity, all in neat SQL tables and thrown up on PowerPoint slides.
I can't help but think that society itself is to blame for things like this. We, as consumers, always demand lower prices while the pool of resources continues to deplete. Businesses are forced to contend with this, and hence, they try to reduce their costs. They pay staff less, economize on quality, and eventually, when that fails to yeild the appropriate dividends, they move their venture elsewhere - and so the cycle begins again.
You seam to forget that actual humans make up an businesses. There is ALWAYS an actual human being deciding what and if measures are undertaken to satisfy the public "demands".
Those humans are to blame.
It has to get personal. We need to prevent humans from hiding behind corporation-walls when living their destructive phantasies.
Mr. Joseph Stiglitz called for similar measures when discussing the finance-disasters and their legal "consequences" on the court floors...
"Phantasies" like treating their workers like their actual "mechanical turks" they help to enable on aws for others...
which btw. should have been a warning to all: this IS the technocratic nightmarish model they apply to their "workforce".
Obviously customers should make use their money to vote... it could be their employers are learning from amazon just right now.
There is nothing wrong with demanding low prices. And paying high prices in no way guarantee fair treatment of workers. That Bangladeshi factory that collapsed used to make some relatively high priced clothes.
What we need is legislation that guarantees fair treatment of employees. Then you can still seek the lowest prices but you will not need to feel guilty about it. We are supposed to have such legislation, but Amazon have found some loopholes, unfortunately.
Verdi (the union) is quite a strange animal. As many other unions in Germany they have been losing members for years now but are still a political force (or at least perceive themselves as such). The "American capitalist" Amazon is thus a perfect "enemy" to target, fight - even if just to show off - and improve their own standing in the public arena.
As far as I have understood it, the pay and working conditions aren't actually that bad at Amazon, at least for people who can't get any other job.
What makes these workers so miserable is that the work they are doing is sucking your heart dry, and it must be almost as bad as cleaning toilets all day (which pays less, by the way).
Actually, famed anarchist David Graeber has hypothesized that the capitalist class figured this one out a long time ago, and in fact designed the current neoliberal system to enable them to profit off cheap, indebted labor in preference to mechanizing, which (according to Marxian analyses, at least) could reduce their rate of profit.
Thus, the fight for labor rights becomes an important way of forcing the capitalists to mechanize and increase productivity.
Certainly if you look at some simple economics, it makes sense, as a hypothesis: a higher price of labor means a greater comparative advantage for machines, a lower price of labor makes massive sums of heavily exploited manpower easier to pay for than expensive mechanization infrastructure.
One may note also that one of the main driving forces of technology has been a relatively high cost of labor--it is theorized that one of the reasons Europeans had such an advantage against the Chinese and Indians in the 1800s, for example, was that they had developed systems not requiring large numbers of people.
I absolutely love shopping on amazon but the stories like this that have been coming out in the last couple years are about to make me stop shopping there. I've heard stories from people as well. I'll give them a year or two max to improve and then I will stop.
The complete lack of basic economic understanding displayed by the posters in this thread is astonishing for a site like HN that is largely devoted to technology entrepreneurship.
When I was living in Gdansk, Poland a few years ago this was a standard service offered by a few grocery chains. I ordered in the morning from my office and scheduled delivery in the evening. The groceries were delivered by the courier on the same day.
Then I moved to Germany and was shocked that such service doesn't exist here. I miss it. :(
One quote from it that stands out for me: "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."
There was another previous thread on Hacker News where people compared Amazon warehouse workers to Costco workers. I wish Amazon could be more like Costco in regards to their warehouse workers (I don't shop at Amazon any more for that reason).