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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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!