They already did. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-essential-goods...
(with thanks to dril: https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762)
See https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/amazon-begins-running-temp...
> Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.
From https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo...
> Zapolsky’s notes imply the company’s attempts to purchase N95 masks from China fell through. “China has deemed N95 masks as ‘strategic,’” Zapolsky wrote. “They’re keeping them for optionality. They also want to use them for ‘diplomacy.’ The masks in China that we thought we had probably got redirected by profiteers.”
And https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-essential-goods... for changes to stock essential goods.
> “We are seeing increased online shopping, and as a result some products such as household staples and medical supplies are out of stock,” reads an announcement on Amazon’s official forum for sellers. “With this in mind, we are temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so that we can more quickly receive, restock, and deliver these products to customers.”
And https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/update-from-amazon...
> To date, we’ve made over 150 significant process changes to ensure the health and safety of our teams. We’ve shared details on the safety precautions we’ve taken to date on the Day One Blog, and today, I want to give an update.
> Disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer are already standard across our network, and the procurement teams have worked tirelessly to create new sources of supply to keep these critical items flowing. The millions of masks we ordered weeks ago are now arriving, and we’re distributing them to our teams as quickly as possible. Masks will be available as soon as today in some locations and in all locations by early next week. Any N-95 masks we receive we are either donating to healthcare workers on the front lines or making them available through Amazon Business to healthcare and government organizations at cost.
> We’re conducting daily audits of the new health and safety measures we’ve put into place. We’ve shared some of the photos of these measures here. We also assigned some of our top machine learning technologists to capture opportunities to improve social distancing in our buildings using our internal camera systems. With over 1,000 sites around the world, and so many measures and precautions rapidly rolled out over the past several weeks, there may be instances where we don’t get it perfect, but I can assure you that’s just what they’ll be—exceptions.
> Finally, I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate our teams for serving their communities. If someone would rather not come to work, we are supporting them in their time off. If someone is diagnosed or comes to us who is presumptively diagnosed (but unable to get a test), we are giving them extra paid time off. In addition, we are also contacting people who have been in close contact with a diagnosed individual and giving them time off as well, for 14 days, to stay home with pay.
There's even more that Amazon has done in response to COVID-19 at https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to.... I really don't get what all the outrage is about. It seems like a manufactured crisis, amplified by a series of biased news outlets, in order to push a narrative against big corporations, presumably in favor of unionization.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
> One of the messages from Amazon employees concerned wearing masks in warehouses. According to the man who wrote to us, employees are prohibited from using them. Why? - Not to spread panic - he explains in an interview with Onet. - These are the top-down guidelines. The exception is a lady from a medical point, she alone can have a mask.
> Onet's interlocutor also said that until two weeks ago Amazon workers were also forbidden to wear gloves. - It has now been lifted. People can work in gloves, but only material ones, not rubber one. Why is it like that? I have no idea - says an Amazon employee.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oregons-coronavirus-education-l...
The Oregon teachers union is blocking student transfers to online charter schools for fear that the students will remain in the charter schools and won't return to public school next year.
It would be much better if we instead broke down the barriers to moving between jobs like portable healthcare benefits so companies have no leverage to keep employees around and employees can easily change employers if the employer doesn't treat employees fairly.
I don't how one could see the phrase "planned economy" and not think the OP meant something other than "planned economy". One can criticize profit motive and not promote a planned economy. The OP is literally a self-professed Trotskyist[0].
> And you know what? This crisis is uncovering a lot of areas where less laissez faire and more government intervention would have been "concretely in the public interest."
Please do tell.
> The market system is an imperfect means to an end, not an end itself.
No one said it was an end unto itself.
I am arguing against 0x262d's actual, explicit, literal Marxism.
> Please do tell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
> Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators....
> Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.
> And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators....
> The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis....
> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business....
> In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
That's just something I read recently.
There's also the general fact that capitalists love efficiency and hate excess capacity, which means they tend to sacrifice resiliency. There's no profit today in maintaining capability to handle a disruption in a socially beneficial way, so they specialize for their hothouse environment. Heck, if some apologists for price-gouging had their way, such a firm could even profit handsomely from a crisis they failed to prepare for.
The original Bolsheviks predicted this and had no hope of success without socialism being achieved in a rich country and coming to their aid; Russia did not have the economic basis for socialism. As Trotsky put it, "When there is little bread, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy."
Capitalism is hurtling towards revolutionary crisis and stopping it is impossible, but if we achieve socialism on a better basis than Russia did, I'm optimistic we can overcome their specific problems. This has to be dramatically more democratic than Russia but the comparison point is, right now, nurses are fired if they wear masks in many hospitals (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/kaiser-permanente-nurses...). We have the economic basis to transcend this, we just have to do it.
I'm just quoting your own words[0].
I get the impression that many people are used to seeing more moderate, mainstream progressive positions slurred with the label "Communist" (with a capital C), and sought to cast your position in a more moderate light. I don't see anything inaccurate in characterize you as a Communist (of which Trotskyists are a flavor). You're certainly welcome to own and defend that position, but it is undeniably an extreme position (even on the Internet).
I can also understand if some want to distinguish socialism (or their own variant of it) from the strain(s) that produced the USSR, perhaps in order to avoid the stigma, no such distinction is possible in your case. Any such association is something you have to deal with directly.
> I have one comment here which is that soviet is just the Russian word for council and originally meant bottom-up, democratic structures of workers and soldiers that eventually took power because they and only they were willing to end WWI, give land to the peasants, and break the power of the capitalist class.
There are other interpretations that paint the revolution in a somewhat dimmer light[1].
> Then, due mostly to Russia's extreme backwardness as well as attack by literally 28 capitalist countries including all the previous belligerents of WW1, the USSR degenerated into a bureaucratic monstrosity that fetishized the word "soviet".
> The original Bolsheviks predicted this and had no hope of success without socialism being achieved in a rich country and coming to their aid; Russia did not have the economic basis for socialism. As Trotsky put it, "When there is little bread, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy."
"I was brutal to my own people because my enemies were mean" is a terrible justification the atrocities committed by the USSR, both at the beginning and throughout the decades of it's reign of terror.
> Capitalism is hurtling towards revolutionary crisis and stopping it is impossible, but if we achieve socialism on a better basis than Russia did, I'm optimistic we can overcome their specific problems.
In principle I think it's reasonable to discuss why the Russian revolution failed to achieve it's objectives, and whether we could achieve them ourselves. Whitewashing the crimes does not lead me to think it will be a fruitful discussion in this context.
> This has to be dramatically more democratic than Russia but the comparison point is, right now, nurses are fired if they wear masks in many hospitals (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/kaiser-permanente-nurses...).
Saying that (the lack of) democratic planning of the economy or the healthcare system has anything to do with nurses being fired for wearing masks (which is truly a terrible tragedy) is illogical. All it takes to deal with that problem is the willingness to put the truth above controlling public perception, something which the USSR[2] and it's Western[3] sympathizers were not especially good at.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698823 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty