Glad to see some people sticking up for each other in these times especially.
It’s Amazon’s internal network, and Amazon’s email system, so they have the full right to control what happens on their resources.
At the same time, I find that deleting the an email after it has been sent by the sender unknown to the sender to be a kind of gaslighting, and dystopian. Having a policy to not organize using work resources might be harsh, but at least it is more transparent as in the proverbial line is drawn in the proverbial sand.
If everyone had your sentiment, instead of the courage to do things like this, people would still be working 7 days a week, alongside their children.
I agree that the pandemic cuts both ways though!
It's against Amazon's interests to have this organization happen in a parallel, side channel instead. But they seem to be pushing this action in that direction.
Especially in the world we live in right now - email and other work-hosted communications platforms are not a resource provided by work, they are the WORKPLACE.
Obviously warehouse work isn't glamorous and they are under a lot of pressure and there's nothing wrong with increased scrutiny on how they are treated, but it's also getting exhausting when people act like Amazon FC workers are treated like slaves.
So they need to nut up and shut up. If you can't be trusted to let your laborer's organize in good faith, they have no ground on which to stand when the bill comes for a second labor specific communication network comes due.
All that waste they could avoid by just being decent disinterested network operators. Sad really.
Amazon was able to hire over 100k employees in the last month. They did that by providing the best possible choice for those people -- the people wanted to work there.
Sure, all for transparency, but let's be real. This job is a lot better than flipping burgers or mowing a road ditch. People are still lining up to work at Amazon.
It's easy to be like, "Hey look at the big evil company!" but the truth of the matter is Amazon is one of the best places for low-skilled workers to find employment.
Small outlets rely on distributors that rely on warehouse workers and pickers.
Just about everything people use, eat, ride, drive, or wear relies on warehouse workers.
Most non-Amazon warehouse workers are treated worse and paid less than Amazon employees.
If you hate Amazon so be it, but hating them for the way they treat their warehouse workers and pickers is not rational unless you hate just about every modern business equally.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say it's getting exhausting. There is an incredible amount of misinformation/hyperbole going around about how these employees are treated. Again, warehouse work isn't glamorous and they're definitely not in as good of a situation as your average SWE sitting at home sipping beer while Zooming, but if you read past the clickbait headlines, Amazon is doing all of the things you just accused them of not doing.
Try saying that when you're the one who's not even given time to attend to bodily functions during the workday.
I think I disagree. This is exactly the role of the government to adjudicate. I would suggest a standard something like "everything is allowed, unless the company can prove significant harm". So instead of the gov saying "email is ok!" you just get to use email, and then the company has to go to the gov and prove that you using email is a drain on their resources in order to fire you.
Is there a way in which a high unemployment rate gives the employees leverage? I can see walkouts happening right now because Amazon employees know the company is under scrutiny and therefore less likely to fire them. But I doubt many people will 'put their money where their mouth is' and actually resign when the economy is doing poorly and there are very few jobs (and lots of job seekers).
Where were/are you when discussing about nurses, truck drivers, waiters, mom&pop stores earning below minimum (or nothing these days), uber drivers and gazillions of other examples. Plus various the other warehouses as well. Or chinese factory workers, manufacturing your branded clothing, iphones and whatnot 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. I could go on and on for quite some time.
Everybody likes to kick Amazon these days, such an easy target, almost fashionable. Did you ever order anything from them, thus supporting the business? Ebay/aliexpress?
They are not saints, its a brutal capitalism and race to the bottom... just like every other successful company out there. Folks work there because other options they have are worse, if there are any. Don't like exploitation like that? Well try to change labor laws in your country instead of cherry-picking single target.
As for covid measures, other poster described them well enough, no point adding anything.
And the "good wages for low qualifications" argument is equally exhausting. Money shouldn't be some universal justification for overlooking poor workplace conditions and unethical treatment of human beings.
On the second note, accurate but worth noting this will be overturned again when makeup of NLRB changes again (whenever that ends up happening).
That said, even if it is detectible, I think that employees should be allowed to drain some small amount of a company's resources to organize. I am allowed to use company resources for emails like "who wants to go for beers after work?" why should I not be allowed to send "who wants to go organize collective action after work?"
I also do not believe that there were no changes made at Amazon's warehouses in response to the coronavirus. Their blog mentions many of these changes and the seem reasonable and practical: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/how-amazon-priorit.... Obviously, there are limits to what a company can do with a physical operation like this. There are limits to the distancing that can be practiced. Equipment like PPEs are facing huge shortages right now and so obviously it isn't reasonable to expect that Amazon magically can summon up hundreds of thousands of N95 masks that should likely be going to healthcare workers first.
Ultimately, if people don't want to take the risk of working during this time, that's up to them - they are free to leave voluntarily. All this outrage seems falsely amplified, and it comes off as opportunistic activism to leverage this crisis to push a nakedly leftist political agenda.
This is similar to the Google walkout, what difference does it make if you leave work for one day, when everyone knows you're going to be at work the following day?
If you do work at one of these companies, I would love to hear from you, I don't mean to be snarky/rude, but I sincerely don't see how walking out is helpful to anyone.
I personally think email is equivalent to an office bulletin board. What NLRB has said about that is you simply can't be DISCRIMINATORY on non-work issues. So if you can post on a bulletin board about sponsoring you in a Charity Fun Run, then you can post about union activity. If the employer only allows work-related things, then it's fine for them to not allow union activity.
I do a lot of work with AWS, and I care where my money goes, so I spend a lot of time researching this whenever an article accusing Amazon comes up. I have not seen anything outside a few edge cases that qualifies as "unethical treatment". This is exactly what I'm referring to in my original comment. A story about an FC worker peeing in a bottle doesn't mean they're being treated unethically. I've seen stories about Google SWEs peeing in bottles and sleeping under their desk because they were under a tight deadline, and yet I don't see people boycotting Google over their treatment of SWEs (coincidentally, one of the ways I do see people justifying these tight deadlines for SWEs is that they make lots of money, so it seems at least some people do think that good wages is justification for tough working conditions).
If you want a better manual labor comparison, oilfield workers work in grueling conditions, are forced to sleep in tiny bunks, and sometimes come out of the job with a missing limb, but I don't see posts on HN every day about how we should boycott oil companies over their treatment of workers (and again, lot's of people justify the grueling conditions of oilfield workers by pointing out they make a lot of money, so...).
I only have a certain amount of processing power in my brain and can only be outraged at so many things at any given time. If Amazon workers truly were being treated terribly, I would care. But a handful of workers (out of nearly 1 million) saying that they got stressed out at work because their boss asked them to work faster just doesn't make the cut for me. Could it be better? Sure, and with my nearly-unlimited supply of online social media slacktivism, I'll advocate for things to be better. But in the real world where resources aren't unlimited, there are many companies that I'll boycott over working conditions before Amazon.
The plot centers around artificial flesh and bone life (the robots) which "lack nothing but a soul" used as a forced labor class with outcomes you might imagine.
Given the origin, really "robots, not slaves!" doesn't hold up as a particularly strong argument.
It was a fantastic job relative to my other options. I got paid 2x minimum wage and lots of overtime. The job rocked compared to the retail jobs that were my other option.
It's pretty easy to shit on a job like that, and the pay, when you're making well into 6 figures and have a comfy office job with free snacks.
When it comes down to it nobody can put the pressure on a software engineer to do that kind of every second counts work which forces people to go beyond their limits and ruin their bodies because they need to put food on the table and have few other options.
Edit: The related word Robotnik (like the villain in Sonic) means something like "serf" though
And even if I did take all of these at face value and was outraged at them, an average of 3 complaints per month from a workforce of nearly 1 million is... well... makes it seem like Amazon is doing a stellar job treating its employees well if there are so few complaints. Of course in reality this website only captures a subset of employees, but just based on this site alone, my opinion has not changed.
People aren’t shitting on the jobs themselves or the people doing them. They don’t like how Amazon, the company, is treating these workers and the HQ employees acting in solidarity with them.
[1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/16/coronavirus-worker-at...
This is unequivocally false. I speak both Czech ans Slovak, with the word robota being Czech in origin. Robota either means work in general, or manual labour specifically. It does not, nor has it ever, meant slavery. The word for that would be otroctvo in Slovak or otroctví in Czech.
You don't, though, which is the other person's point. Unless you've radically changed your consumption habits to only buy directly from producers (and ecommerce is ruled out, since you're not okay with the typical conditions of logistics employment). In reality, you've singled out Amazon. Which is fine! But at least admit that. It's a political statement, you haven't achieved labor rights veganism.
That may be true, though I suspect it's equally plausible that this outrage is indicative of a nakedly capitalistic agenda promoted by Amazon's competitors via proxies. I don't see any reason why it can't be both.
Edit: To clarify, I should have ended my statement with "...why it can't be both, in addition to legitimate concerns."
Off course, it is totally fine to participate in things and also criticise them, as that is how things improve. But if everyone obsess on a company not in the bottom of bad behaviour, this simply gives more power to companies behaving worse. One can off course claim that their criticism depends on the PR perception of the company,but I guess that's not fashionable.
I don't think the argument is everyone else does it. The argument is Amazon is paying much higher than many other companies for the same job, and still being focused over, while companies paying less get a free pass.
Edit: or maybe not.
Interesting concept when you consider how deep the supply chain is for all the raw materials. The provenance on lithium and silicon would be critical I'd think.
I love when people tell me they didnt get my email, that means it worked!
It's not like these people would walk out if an email would make their point just as well.
Incidentally paid sick leave, which warehouse workers don't have and this protest is in favor of, is estimated to actually save money, not cost it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5649342/
As best I can tell, there's evidence that everything these workers are advocating for would have no effect on or better for the company long term through people liking the brand more reducing hiring and training costs by increasing worker retention, reducing the lost of productivity associated with sick workers getting other workers sick, etc.
https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-sic...
But I guess some people think well paid executives always know better then regular employees.
Personally if I had a say at Amazon, I'd suggest given the 47.3B they had in cash on hand as of nov of last year and how they've been raking it in since people have begun sheltering in place that they at least could afford to experiment.
Obviously most businesses cannot realize fully automated picking yet, but even those who can't: preventing employees from drinking water is a human right violation.
It's the other way around. People won't do tough things without higher pay. It's always been that way.
The classism of the managerial tech class is always on pure display in these discussions, because contrary to developers who can pick and choose their workplace in some free competitive market, unqualified blue collar workers are often more or less forced to work under these conditions if they even want healthcare or be able to send their kids to a decent school.
If healthcare and education was free like it is in other developed countries and not employer bound you could make the argument that they're free to work another job instead. In the US it's a facetious point.
Until the end of April, when the $2 per hour "bonus" goes away.
>I also do not believe that there were no changes made at Amazon's warehouses in response to the coronavirus.
It does appear that employees are not being punished for things like adequately washing their hands or getting sick for the time being. They were being punished for these things at the start of the year, and that blog makes it sound like they will be punished for them again when the pandemic is over.
There isn't really any ambiguity to it and I have never seen the word used as some sort of analogy or synonym for slavery (certainly not in common parlance, though I'm sure it has been used that way somewhere, sometime). If someone wishes to talk about slavery, they will use the appropriate word.
Meanwhile all the essential workers are like. Cool. Where is the money though. A "thanks" gives you a warm feeling, but doesn't pay the bills.
> they need to put food on the table and have few other options.
how does that make any sense? how are people being taken advantage of when they "have few other options", are "desperate for work", and "need to put food on the table"? amazon should pay less and make the job easier? then theyd just be another of the bad options.
so, your argument is amazon simply has an obligation to pay workers more (after theyre already a good option) because... why?
Some political overlap is inevitable [1], but political battle will soon take the site over if we allow it to, so we don't allow it to. The reference to fire in the word 'flamewar' is not by accident. These things consume and destroy an internet forum the way that fire does.
It isn't that the issues you're posting about aren't important. On the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets discussed here, like someone's basketball hoop side project, for example, currently on the front page [2].
The issue is the kind of site Hacker News is trying to be. We're trying to be a site for intellectual curiosity [3]. That means a place where smaller, more obscure, more delicate topics get a chance to flourish. It's not possible to be both that and a forum where people bash their enemies about current affairs.
If you want further explanation about how we handle this on HN and why, I've written about it extensively—see [1] and [4]. In the meantime, you're contributing (unintentionally, I realize) to destroying this place for its intended purpose, and we need you to stop doing that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
p.s. I flagged your comment for a different reason: the first sentence breaks the site guideline against name-calling: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Other of your recent comments have been devolving into the flamewar style also. That tends to be what happens when people use the site primarily to fight political battles.
Then move. It's not hard. I've moved for better work five times in my life with nothing but what fit in two suitcases four of those five times. This includes moving from one country to another twice. In two of these five cases I knew nobody where I was moving to, In one I knew exactly one person and in two I knew just a single family. Both my parents did the same when they came to the US. They came alone and knew nobody in the US when they moved here.
Intellectual curiosity depends on how repetitive a topic is. The more repetitive it is, the less curious—curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When there's a major ongoing topic (MOT), HN gets flooded with many follow-up submissions about that overall story. The test we apply in such cases is to ask whether a submission contains significant new information (SNI): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
When a follow-up story doesn't contain significant new information, it falls on the repetitive side and tends to produce repetitive, generic discussions. Those are worse for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Worse, repetitive and generic discussions tend to devolve into flamewars. It's as if the mind resorts to conflict to amuse itself when there isn't any material for curiosity to play with: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The key thing is whether the comments in such a thread are about interesting new information contained in the new article, or whether they could be copy/pasted from any other recent thread about the topic. HN thrives on diffs: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Basically the question is: where's the SNI?
All: if any reasoning here is wrong or unclear, have a look at the above links. Then if there's still some question that hasn't been answered, I'd love to know what it is. These principles have built up over many years of operating Hacker News. The same situations and questions come up repeatedly; you'll notice that as we've posted explanations over the years, the answers have slowly been converging. That's I link so often to past explanations: in addition to giving more information, it lets readers see how the answers have developed and why they are the way they are.
The question of how to treat politics on HN is a hard puzzle. It has constraints that make a solution nearly impossible. Worse, without a solution, the site will destroy itself. My answer here (plus the links) is our best attempt at a solution. If anyone thinks they have a better solution, I'd love to hear what it is—but please familiarize yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just leave the threads alone", I've answered many times already why that won't work.
p.s. If anyone doubts that the current topic is a MOT, I pasted a dozen links to major recent threads here: >>22902685 . Look through them and you'll find plenty of generic discussion.
When your workforce consists of people taking the only job they can find, you worsen working conditions until just above where people would rather starve than work for you.
The issue isn't pay, it's employment practices and on-the-job pressures. There are very believable stories out there of the working conditions.
This "race to the bottom" argument is so tired. The only way you can make that argument is if you don't consider the welfare of all 7.6 billion people on this planet as worth improving.
Generally people live more comfortable leisurely lives now than at any point in human history. This is largely thanks to capitalism. I understand that not everyone's life is great yet, but for the most part the number of people in poverty or extreme poverty keeps decreasing.
For the most part, the overwhelming majority of people's whose lives are worse today than in the past, it is because they are competing with others who are willing to do it for less because even doing it for less, it's a lot better than their alternatives. Those who are worse off now are almost invariably still better off than those that were at the bottom of the barrel that are now doing better.
Basically capitalism is a rising tide that has for the most part raised all boats. That is far from a race towards the bottom.
"As the geographical pattern of work has shifted, so has that of wages. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of an urban wage premium: workers in more densely populated places earn more, in part because of the productivity benefits of crowding together that nurture urban growth in the first place. This pay premium used to hold across the range of skills. In 1970 workers without any college education could expect to get a boost to their earnings when they moved to a big city, just as better-educated workers did (see chart). Since then the urban wage advantage for well-educated workers has become more pronounced, even as that for less-educated workers has all but disappeared.
[...]
Most jobs in the first two of these categories are located in cities, open mainly to holders of college degrees and decently paid (frontier work is particularly lucrative). Only the last-mile jobs are occupied disproportionately by workers without a college education. They are better than nothing, but only just. Both wages and the quality of such jobs are typically low, which is just as well, since they are unlikely to avoid the creeping tide of automation for very long."
Bifucration of the economy, automation and the shift towards ever increasing knowledge sector and endemic housing shortages have largely destroyed the benefits of moving towards economic clusters for uneducated workers. This is not a solution in this day and age, it's a romanticised fiction. It may have worked for mom and pop who came to the US with nothing else but their clothes, but this is history. The world today is a different one, and it has largely left this segment of the population behind.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/t...
I can’t help but wonder if it will someday implode from the terrible, unsustainable conditions their workers seem to be facing — even prior to the pandemic, but exacerbated by it — and Amazon’s complete dismissal of it.
And this isn’t even including the increasingly poor state of consumer trust in reviews, third party resellers, counterfeit products, and the myriad of ways resellers can game the system. All of which Amazon also seems to continue to dismiss as if it’s immune to the long-term impacts.
I knew many expats there with no college education, teaching for a mere 16 hours a week. They were given housing as part of their contracts and they earned enough to eat out every meal of the weeks if they so desired.
With just 16 hours of work per week, you have plenty of time to learn a new skill and better yourself.
Being a native English speaker is one of the greatest privileges one can have in this world. It's usually a foundational skill for succeeding in many of the best jobs in the World.
Amazing considering the backlash against Uber for sexual harassment of female upper-middle to upper class white collar workers. Almost destroyed the company in the US. But the persistent abuse of thousands of working people - NOTHING!
It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that the businesses we rely on exploit workers and abuse them. It is far more comfortable to "stay asleep" and preoccupy the mind with quirky intellectual diversions and fascinating little rabbit holes. In these times of economic crises, these sorts of pro-worker articles and sentiments increase dramatically. I support the author of this article despite the comforting detractors who would rather rationalize their treatment. The prevailing argument in this discussion is that the warehouse workers are ungrateful and too critical of their corporate masters, and this I find frankly to be disgusting.
HN is either a site for intellectual curiosity or a site for political battle. It can't be both, for the same reason that you can't have a tank battle in a flower garden or a museum.
I do not mean this as a dismissal of the issue! It's an important issue that workers be treated fairly. The question I'm talking about is much narrower: what do we do on Hacker News with MOTs (major ongoing topics) like this one? They will dominate the site entirely if allowed to (along with indignation-inducing posts generally). We can't simply let them go unmoderated—that would turn HN into a completely different kind of site, and not the kind that people currently come here for.
Amazon employees plan ‘online walkout’ to protest treatment of warehouse workers - >>22900119 - April 2020 (135 comments)
Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions - >>22868054 - April 2020 (380 comments)
Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus - >>22770092 - April 2020 (132 comments)
Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer - >>22763057 - April 2020 (131 comments)
Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses - >>22759575 - April 2020 (213 comments)
Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus - >>22738592 - March 2020 (345 comments)
Amazon warehouse workers are walking out and Whole Foods workers are striking - >>22736512 - March 2020 (76 comments)
Amazon fires warehouse worker who led strike for more coronavirus protection - >>22733938 - March 2020 (9 comments)
Amazon, Instacart delivery workers strike for coronavirus protection and pay - >>22729819 - March 2020 (276 comments)
Amazon raises overtime pay for warehouse workers - >>22647605 - March 2020 (226 comments)
Amazon to hire 100k warehouse and delivery workers - >>22597200 - March 2020 (318 comments)
Hundreds of workers defy Amazon rules to protest company's climate failures - >>22167858 - Jan 2020 (65 comments)
Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking out on climate, workers say - >>21939451 - Jan 2020 (87 comments)
The warehouse I worked in doesn't sounds that different. I worked the night shift, so had the joy of working in temperatures of 100F because the tar roof would radiate heat all night and there was minimal ventilation. Dust gets everywhere so you have a nice coating of sweat and dirt after a shift. Once time the warehouse was flood, but product needed to go out, so it was 100F and 90% humidity.
Still a better job than the alternatives I had!
And for the German market for example there is book delivery from thalia.de which can deliver via mail or to a book shop. (And momox.de for used book buy/sell - I stopped selling books on Amazon years ago because it's just too much effort, Momox has a simple bulk preparation)
There are a lot of short sellers around and not all news pieces are factual.
Look for amazon job applications sites to see the reality vs other companies and then make up your mind.
I've worked in a couple warehouses and have a lot of friends and colleagues who have, too (I never worked for Amazon, but a lot of said friends and colleagues did). The consensus is that Amazon's treatment of its warehouse workers is about as bad as it gets. There are plenty of warehouses that take employee safety seriously, that pay well with decent benefits, that allow their employees to take restroom breaks instead of forcing them to resort to pissing in bottles at their pack stations (seriously, Amazon, what the hell?), that put at least some semblance into temperature control (as difficult as it may be to do in a large building like a warehouse) and that overall treat their employees like human beings instead of machines.
It's good to be skeptical of the treatment of workers as a rule, but there are definitely different circles of Fulfillment Hell, and working for Amazon's pretty damn close to the inner-most of those circles. Amazon does pay better than average, but there are apparently few companies that treat their workers worse (at least in the US).
But I mean when there is no other alternative, it would probably be exaggerated to not buy at Amazon in the current situation...
You also seem to be applying black-and-white thinking to problems of right and wrong. Some things are more wrong than others.
On a scale from "single mother cheating on her taxes so she can feed her kids" to "cold-blooded murder," Amazon is (in my opinion) beating puppies with sticks. When someone does something not just wrong, but inexcusable, and is unapologetic, I don't say to myself, "well, lots of other people have done/do bad things." I doubt you do either.
I did a lot of research about the 'picker industry' for that case. What a nightmare job. I can't imagine having to work somewhere like that with all the rules, quotas, bully leadership, favoritism, etc., worse than the Army.