> . It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for
Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you...think about that.
While I voted you up for the general point, I also think that perhaps cutting off the parent quote where you did is a little unfair:
> rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place people are willing to work.
It's appropriate to "demonize" Amazon, but isn't that observation also correct? Amazon's taking advantage of desperate people, and no matter the job market conditions, it's unethical for them to do so. But doesn't the fact that they can treat workers this way and still have workers suggest they're taking advantage of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed?
Not if people only have so much time+energy+motivation to protest things. Attempting to get people angry at one thing is implicitly an attempt to "spend" the limited currency of their motivation-to-make-the-world-a-better-place.
Righteous indignation works similarly to the "warm fuzzies" that cause people to donate to charity. Each person craves some set amount of these resources; once they have enough, they're satisfied, and they stop bothering to do things whose only reward is more of that resource.
I think you might be missing out on two important points here. As an amazon worker making ~$15 an hour, what avenue would you suggest to go about "demonizing" market conditions? What does that mean from their perspective? What does that mean at all, to demonize a condition? On the other hand, the people making those decisions have names, faces, addresses, and we can apply pressure on them where they personally feel it.
Secondly, a strike that's limited in scope or duration can help build solidarity among workers which can be drawn on again and again for more elaborate and risky actions. Think about it -- would the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you at work put his livelihood on the line for you? What if he didn't have to because every single worker on your floor would do so at the same time? This is all a process of transferring power from the C-suite to the workers where it belongs, and I think we need to evaluate the results of such actions based on those broader goals.
One of the easiest and best forms of protest is to stop spending money with Amazon, Walmart or <<insert some company here>>
Sometimes it is difficult - if Comcast is the only game in our area, then we don't have a choice. Otherwise, this hits these companies where it matters most - their profits.
I think it's correct that doing that is the most effective direct action, but the problem is that one person doing this is totally ineffective, it's the "drop of water" problem.
Raising a ruckus, strikes, etc are useful because they trigger people to become aware and concerned that this is a problem, causing more people to stop giving the company money. The ruckus is essential.
The problem is that workers in this position are getting squeezed by opposing forces.
On the top you have automation. They have jobs because they cost less than robots. But every wage increase or company benefit or break that reduces worker productivity is a step closer to cost parity with automation, and therefore the unemployment line.
On the other side, they can move away from that line by accepting lower pay or worse working conditions. And there is a trade off between the two as well -- if the job sucks more in a way that allows the business to hire fewer people then they can each get paid more without crossing the line where the jobs get automated.
Blaming Amazon for this is like blaming the local power company for world energy prices. They're just providing one corner of the triangle -- you can work there and have a hard job but better pay than most other unskilled work. If you want an easier unskilled job, those exist too, and they don't pay as much.
But the option to do easy unskilled work for high compensation isn't there. That's the corner of the triangle where the humans cost more than the robots. And maybe that's for the best, but the workers don't need Amazon to actually do that to get the same outcome from their perspective -- they can just quit.
It’s more like blaming the local power company for local energy prices. Nobody is blaming Amazon for wages worldwide. They’re blaming Amazon for the wages of their own workers.
And why not? “The market” isn’t a magic answer here. The market provides a floor on wages, not a ceiling. If Amazon pays below market wages, they won’t get enough workers. If Amazon pays above market wages, nothing bad happens aside from reduced profits.
When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”
> When you say “you can’t blame Amazon, they’re just paying market wages” what you’re saying is “profit is the only thing that could possibly matter.”
You put your finger on the thing that bothers me most about the free-market critique of labor conditions. They all hand-wave away the responsibility that corporations have as entities run by (presumably) empathetic humans. Amazon does not have to automate away jobs instead of giving workers fairer conditions and wages. In fact, they may find that the boost in productivity that comes from happier, more rested, more focused workers more than makes up for the marginal decrease that comes from less pressure in the workplace.
The point is that we don't have to accept that corporations are, and should be, perfectly "rational" economic actors. They don't have to pursue profits at every conceivable avenue unless the market tells them otherwise.
True, but I bet there would be at least a small percentage of people who would still not buy from you because you don't treat your workers well. Most people would still shop with you, as their own wages are crap and they are looking for cheapest places to shop. But if they were paid well, they will at least consider shopping with ethically sound companies.
It is like a circle - lower wages lead to lower purchasing power, so companies pay their workers low to lower prices to sell to low earning customers, and so on...
Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the USA, behind the military.
It's fairly obvious how the above "draconian" conditions benefit customers. Employees that take long breaks or pick items slowly leads to delayed deliveries, having to employee more staff per delivery, having to raise prices or reduce range to cover this cost.
This is really the flip side of "customer obsessed", when you are focused on customers you don't particularly care about any individual employee (all the way up the chain).
For a counterexample, google and facebook mostly treat their employees well (with the exception of some contractors). However customers don't trust them as much, because they know they are profit/employee focused.
Why don’t you do that now? Amazon takes in billions in profit, meaning that their prices are substantially higher than they could be. Why aren’t you (or some other competitor) taking advantage of this?
It’s funny how this sort of argument never comes up in the context of taking profits.
Amazon profit from non AWS biz is in small billions and less, while it may be large in absolute, it is not high as percentage of revenue or by employee. Only way to beat Amazon in profit is have ridiculously high efficiency which is very difficult, or have a different business model which is normally a niche and will not be amazon scale.
Competitors do take advantage of this! There is vicious price competition for most of the kinds of goods that amazon ships from its warehouses. This competition has pushed profit margins into the single digits (probably low single digits). There's really not any room for prices to fall further with given technology.
Again, profit margins for this sort of work are tiny. Adding significant wage costs would almost certainly consume a huge percentage of profits at which point the suppliers of capital will invest their money elsewhere.
If you are going to make such a strong claim, you probably need to back it up with data.
Google Amazon profit ($11 billion and change last year), workforce size (650,000ish) and divide. That gives you a lower bound for the worst case where all Amazon employees are warehouse workers.
Amazon earns a lot of money from quite a few things that have nothing to do with warehouse workers. In particular I have read that half their profits come from AWS. I don't think that is enough data to support your claim.
A better set of numbers to look at might be Walmarts (more of a pure retail company). They make maybe 10B in profit per year (it varies a little) with 2M workers. That's $5,000 per worker which isn't much wiggle room.
Money is fungible. Amazon can afford to pay better. The only data you need to know that is what I gave.
You’re giving a reason why they might not want to. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that they want to. If they wanted to, they would be doing it already.
They only make $5000 per worker per year or so, given that the stock market has consistent returns of about 7% lately it's getting to the point that it would be better to put that money there was opposed to paying workers with it for such small returns.
$11 billion divided by 650,000 workers isn’t $5,000.
In any case, the point is that they can pay more. You can quibble over the amount. You can argue about whether or not they should. But they can, in the same way that I can buy an entire truck full of peaches if I decided that would be a good idea.
We are back at run the warehouses at a loss. The profits from AWS have nothing to do with the guys packing boxes and moving the profits from there to them is running it at a loss.
That analysis is wrong because it ignores two facts (1) Retail is a highly competitive, low margin business; and (2) Economic systems are dynamic, not static. Amazon’s profit margins are in low single digit percent. If Amazon pays above market wages and keeps prices the same, that creates an opportunity for Wal-Mart to come in and lower prices by using lower cost labor. Customers will go to Wal-Mart instead, because the Internet and things like Google Shopping make it trivial for consumers to chase marginal savings. As a result, Amazon’s workers are out of a job.
Note, by the way, that the minimum wage in our competitor countries (France, Germany, UK) is about $11.50 per hour adjusted for cost of living. That’s much lower than what Amazon is laying.
They could indeed use their other businesses to fund running their retail/fulfillment business at a loss. But at that point it would be just as rational to jettison those businesses (by spinning them off into another company), and now we're a step behind square one: they lose whatever economies they get from being a single company, their cost basis gets worse, and they're in an even poorer position to pay more.
These are descriptive, not normative, observations.
It's also a descriptive observation that they can afford to pay more without destroying the company. Whether they should is a separate question I haven't even attempted to address.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, only that it doesn't follow from the economics of their retail/fulfillment business (to which those employees belong) that they rationally can.
Paying someone materially above market value creates a precarious situation for the employee in which they are operating with an income they can’t hope to replace if the employer leaves. It happened where I live with an auto assembly plant. There are deleterious effects on the local job market as well, in which lical companies can’t pay enough to compete.
All told it’s probably better to put the money in the hands of an employee, but there are certainly negative consequences that can arise.
If we want unskilled laborers to have more money, it's much more economically efficient for governments do this through taxation and transfer payments then for individual companies that happen to employ people in this category to pay above market wages.
If society does it through taxation, it's everyone's responsibility.
If only certain companies are responsible, then only a portion of the population is responsible.
I completely agree. If Amazon pays their workers better, that won’t fix the millions of other workers stuck with bad pay and abusive jobs.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the individual companies. Certainly, our energies should be focused on bigger societal changes. But it’s not misplaced ore to also mention the fact that some companies could already do better, and choose not to.
I completely agree. If Amazon pays their workers better, that won’t fix the millions of other workers stuck with bad pay and abusive jobs.
That's not what I meant by "more efficient." If every company employing low skilled labor suddenly raised pay above market wages it might help all those workers. But it would mean that prices for things produced by unskilled laborers were artificially high and prices produced by higher skilled laborers would be artificially low. This would cause the market to produce the wrong mix of goods and services and we would all be worse off for the difference.
I don’t understand, how is that different from taxing and giving workers money that way? They should have the same effect in terms of economic efficiency. The only reason we use taxes for this sort of thing is because it’s harder to cheat.
You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees.
Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be.
To pay significantly more they would have to raise prices, which they can't do because they're in competition with Walmart and everyone else.
For context: if Amazon were to use all of its profits from FY18 (~$11B) to pay its ~650K workers more, it would come out to just under $17,000 per worker.
Did you actually try doing the math? $11 billion divided over 650k employees is roughly $17k which amounts to $75 per day assuming the employee works around 225 days a year which in turn amounts to less than $10 an hour assuming the employee works for 8 hours a day.
So you’re saying they could afford to give their workers a $5/hour raise and still retain a healthy profit? Why the snide question at the beginning, then?
I try to tip well. If you think I should tip better, make your case. If I disagree, I’ll make my case. I can guarantee you that if that happens, my argument won’t be that I’m tipping the market rate.
Waitresses make less than minimum wage, don't they deserve healthcare, to raise a family, to live in the center of some of the most expensive real estate in the world and have at least two weeks paid vacation per year? If you were to tip say $50 to $100 each time you ate out this could be a reality. How much would $50 be compared to your net worth, less than 1%? Greedy capitalist.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It leads to degraded discussion, we're trying for a bit better than that, and I'm sure you can make your substantive points without it.
Doesn't matter, like Amazon it doesn't matter that everyone else pays much less than you (market rate) instead you are personally responsible for the lives of anyone you pay for a service. If the amount you are willing to pay doesn't result in a great standard of living then you are at fault.
>Doesn’t matter if your claim is actually correct or not? That’s a hell of an argument.
If you eat out once in a lifetime or every day an effective wage can still be calculated. In NY or CA you are talking something like 30 - 50 dollars a meal[0], even more if you want to provide healthcare and all the rest. Its likely you aren't leaving $20 - $50 bills on the table for your morning coffee so why don't you think baristas deserve a living wage? It would be such a small percentage of your net worth.
I dont think the point was missed at all. In fact, I think it was effectively rebutted. I think he's pointing out that not being able to urinate without the risk of being fired is incredibly dehumanizing no matter how much you pay.
Pissing in a bottle between stock aisles is a "market condition". The market rewards those participants who do not have interrupted labor due to bladder events.
India went through a socialist phase where for decades people “emphasize[d] with the poor” and implemented public policy. And where did that lead? Decades of economic malaise. In 1991, the World Bank and IMF required economic liberalization as part of a bail out, and starting in 2000 growth accelerated dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As someone from that part of the world, yes, your mode of thinking “bothers” me. When my family left Bangladesh in 1989, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Since that time, real GDP per capita has grown by a factor of 6. To put that in relative terms, it’s like going from Guatemala to Germany in one generation. Capitalism is a fricking miracle. There are of course such things as market failures which require regulation. But those can be articulated without emotional appeals to “empathy.” Making policies based on “empathy” and notions of power relationships between workers and companies is destructive and perpetuates poverty.
I didn't advocate socialism, and I could not care less about what an Asian country did or didn't try for decades. Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries on earth so I think that's irrelevant to a debate about the ethical ramifications of actions perpetrated by the most profitable corporation in the wealthiest country.
Oh dear no. Capitalism is a miracle for people who are on the winning side, of the equation, it's awful for people who are not and are mostly trapped on the wrong side of that divide. As environmental degradation encroaches, that latter group will gradually swallow more and more people.
It's not a matter of empathy vs rationality as you suggest, but of under what conditions empathic strategies are efficient and self-sustaining. You assume the world (including society) as objective and rewarding unempathic rationality, but many social relations are wholly arbitrary and are optimized to reward particular strategies.
Evidence from statistical mechanics points to the evolutionary stability of self-organizing decentralized peer-sensitive strategies.
You know, I was reading the other day about Jeff Bezos being worth $118 billion. What is so great about maximizing such a quantity? Jeff Bezos doesn't know what to do with his spare money besides spending it on rockets. Would be really be functionally 'poorer' if he woke up tomorrow to find himself worth 'only' $18 billion, and the other $100 billion evenly distributed across the population (everyone in the world better off by $14), the US population (everyone in the US better off by $300), or the population of Amazon employees (everyone better off by approximately $180,000).
Supposedly it's more 'efficient' for Jeff Bezos to be in charge of all this money, but Jeff Bezos' wealth depends to a large degree on his ability to keep labor prices just above those of other employers hiring from the same pool in any given market. You're maximizing the extraction of value from the combination of capital and labor, but in a parasitical fashion that leaves Jeff Bezos with an (almost) unimaginably vast surplus and many of his employees with no surplus at all. You might argue that such workers should increase their economic value so as to command a higher wage, but in reality most of them are already working near the envelope of their physical capacity while being too tired and time-poor to undertake independent or institutional study to significantly improve their earning potential.
Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few. It’s true that inequality has increased over the last 30 years: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/bangladesh/income-distribut.... The income share of the top 10% has grown from 22% to 28%. And the share of the bottom 20% has dropped from 10% to 8%. But 8% of a number that’s 6x bigger is way better than 10% of a number that’s 1/6 the size.
Focusing at the bottom end, a 20% wealth hit is a really big problem for poor people. And just because they're well-off compared to other countries or previous periods in history is meaningless if they have solvency issues in the present. Being flat broke in our advanced technological society is a serious hardship and can not be measured in simplistic absolutes.
It’s not a 20% reduction in wealth. It’s an 8% share of an income pool that’s six times bigger versus a 10% share of an income pool that’s much smaller.
As if the effects of that fall in income won't compound, and as if you were factoring in purchasing power parity and negative as well as positive externalities. Stop with the baby arguments Rayiner.
There's also a Rawls-esque thought experiment, which is "What rough archetype of a person/family would be better served by being teleported back to pre-capitalism if they got their ~current status in the old order, and everything that comes with it?"
This is a really brutally difficult game to play in a developing nation because one of capitalism's achievements is "Half your children don't die." (In the last 30 years in Bangladesh early childhood mortality is down ~14% to 3%.)
> Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few.
Capitalism has had demonstrably terrible effects for many people all over the world without the luck of being born in a country or even a social class with enough economic clout to dictate favourable terms in trade agreements.
The conflict and genocide in East Timor was driven by capitalist Indonesia (a US ally) and colonial greed. Of course this conflict was ignored at the time because it was more important to focus on the Khmer Rouge, so the US and its brand of capitalism could save face:
These are just three examples. There are countless other examples of the destruction and death caused by capitalist policies all over the world. This kind of greed, corruption and harm is not limited to totalitarian states, they're just less reported on by western media. Deliberately so.
Calling it a 'miracle for everyone' is an obscenely narrow-minded claim.
Your examples are terrible. East Timor is a classic case of conflict based on language and religion (Indonesia is Muslim, East Timor is Portuguese-speaking and Catholic.) Your water example involves a private company being forced to raise rates to pay for a dam that it was forced to build as part of a government I funded mandate.
The "language and religion" bit bugs me: How do you know if any collection of individuals' prejudices has ever caused war when it could be the invisible hand of capitalist economics? It's invisible.
If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in parallel to justify and perpetuate the profit. Where do we draw the line for which conflicts we can say definitely starts with the moral flaw of a person/group, and which starts with the forces of economic incentive?
Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalism by definition requires voluntary exchanges, which don’t happen in master-slave relationships. Again, slavery and serfdom predate capitalism by thousands of years. This is a definitional aspect of capitalism. Indeed, Adam Smith’s wealth of nations was expressly a critique of the then-prevalent system of mercantilism.)
My point was that lot of leftists/anarchists will say that economic forces, including before the capitalist market economies, can create situations where ideological extremist groups will gain power. They will appear out of nowhere and anyone can say "this looks like social animus just happened to win here", but the underlying cause was some group's will to extract resources from a place or population.
I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"
Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the back of the rank and closer to being fired? That bothers you...think about that.