Why don’t their employees quit then and work somewhere better if they have the opportunity? If they don’t have a better opportunity than seems like Amazon is providing a valuable opportunity. Not to mention we seem to be in a worker-favorable economy.
Say you’re a father. You need to support your family, and there’s an Amazon Fulfillment Center in town. It pays a whole dollar an hour better than the local fruit packing warehouse, which is a huge difference. Amazon is providing me a valuable opportunity!
Except now, I’m working myself to the bone trying to fulfill my package counts, peeing in bottles, shitting in bags, constantly stressed about if I can not only meet my quotas, but beat everyone else on the floor with me so that I can get more hours next time. I get back from work miserable, stressed, and probably angry from the constant competition needed to just survive. But this is a valuable opportunity, surely, except for the fact that I’m constantly stressed about work, and now I can’t even complain about how I’m stressed about work because Amazon won’t allow me to have my phone on the floor or say the word “restroom” in their internal chat app.
Oh but right, as you say, it’s a worker-favorable economy! Let me go to packing warehouse and try and get even fifty cents closer to Amazon with the leverage I obviously have. I’m sure the guy there is gonna say no problem, here’s a raise.
This is the lesson that we already learned in the 1800s with monopolies; they distort reality. It’s useless to argue “if you don’t want to work for them, don’t” because they often pay just better than your local alternatives, but by virtue of their economy bending power, they will exert an insane amount of control and influence until they are either regulated or there is no competition left and I don’t even have the fruit packing warehouse anymore, but the Amazon Oranges Fulfillment Center.
These working conditions should simply be illegal in the U.S. (and the countries it is not already).
There is no way around that. If society doesn't demand that then good luck to all of us. I am simply surprised again and again people haven't "broken" and keep putting up with this.
Yes, it should be illegal. Some of them were once upon a time. But businesses keep lobbying saying that conditions like these are hurting their ability to retain profits, and the laws tend to get clawed back under the pretense of "job creation". Amazon fights tooth and nail to not have to pay the externalities of their terrible working conditions, and stop people organizing to make their workplace better.
"businesses keep lobbying saying that conditions like these are hurting their ability to retain profits"
There are also plenty of ideologues in Washington who bristle at the mention of regulation, unions, and anything they don't deem as being "pro business".
(General question, I agree with your statement above.)
How is it pro business to ensure that employees -- a major stakeholder in businesses don't want to stay there? This historically, doesn't end well, right?
This is beyond splitting profits; it's driving back to Victorian era, and that did not end well for businesses. Increase in unemployment is just a sign.
If the conditions are that bad, are they really worth the extra dollar per hour? Seems like the fruit packing warehouse is a better choice for most people. Worse employment conditions will always come with a pay premium under competition.
Some people don't really have a choice; that extra dollar each hour might mean housing or food security. And, say, a parent in a household might think that's the trade off they have to make: they're horrifyingly miserable, but their spouse and kids get to be better off.
But that's a trade off no one should have to make: it's messed up that we as a society allow this state of affairs to exist in the first place.
And yet here I am, not canceling my Prime membership, because I suck. But hell, if Prime cost 2x what it currently does, and that got the workers involved good working conditions, I would still pay it. Not sure how many people would, though.
> And yet here I am, not canceling my Prime membership, because I suck.
I genuinely don’t understand. You have already argued that despite shitty conditions at Amazon, some people are desperate enough for money that the alternative (making less with better working conditions) is even worse. So if enough people cancelled their Amazon subscriptions that they had to scale back operations, wouldn’t those people be worse off than they are now?
I worked lots of minimum wage jobs. None of my co-workers would have peed in bottles / shit in bags / stress themselves out for 1 more dollar / hour. Me neither.
Your first hand experience here doesn't matter. You must listen to and believe the stories repeated by wealthy techies, who do not know a single person who ever worked an Amazon warehouse job, and likely don't know a person who worked a minimum wage job either.
Like the person above you mentioned: "we seem to be in a worker-favorable economy". Nobody would do what you said for another dollar per hour. I worked lots of minimum wage jobs and none of my co-workers would have shit in bags, pee in bottle for another dollar / hour. Please keep the conversation at an intelligent level.
>This is the lesson that we already learned in the 1800s with monopolies; they distort reality. It’s useless to argue “if you don’t want to work for them, don’t” because they often pay just better than your local alternatives, but by virtue of their economy bending power, they will exert an insane amount of control and influence until they are either regulated or there is no competition left and I don’t even have the fruit packing warehouse anymore, but the Amazon Oranges Fulfillment Center.
Amazon is nowhere near a monopoly (or monopsony), at least when it comes to employers.
Even as a homeless person showing up with drug addicts while waking up from a ditch, I found opportunities less demeaning than Amazon. If my only option was truly amazon, as a father, I would send my family to go live in the 3rd world and remit enough for them to live on while I live under a tarp rather than work full time at amazon again.
Amazon is 10% of retail and retail is only a slice of the economy. If you can't find an alternative to amazon, you aren't looking.
This is a terrible analogy and adds nothing to the conversation.
We aren't going to make children work in mines, because (as I'm sure you know), adult workers and children are not the same thing. There is a huge chasm between "adult workers making more than a lot of their other opportunities is slightly more cannot unionize as easily using Amazon services" and "put children back in coal mines".
I disagree. I think it’s a good reminder that if we do not regulate labor, businesses like Amazon will grow more and more nefarious. They already confiscate phones, have a built-in PIP revolving door, use their own employees to vouch for them on Twitter, recruit aggressively to have a never-ending stream of labor, and explicitly violate existing labor laws by setting up a system so competitive their own employees cannot take bathroom breaks and meet quotas, in essence giving them no breaks. You seem to be under the impression that companies have an inherent disdain for child labor, which historically is not true. I think actually society has proven that, as long as we don’t see it, we’re fine with the cost.
Also, do you know what stopped children in coal mines? Labor unions.
This is FinNerd's argumentation taken to it's logical conclusion - he is happy to sacrafice employee protections because X is the best employment avaliable.
They or you have not outlined where does this slippery slope stop, or ankowledged nessesity of employee protections.
I think you are still not seeing it, because the only protest from your 'but they are children!' - so if we exploit adults with a down's syndome, that's okay? Oh, so disabilities are protected, what if we spesifically target people who need money to pay for cancer treatment, and make them sign a waiver on safety equipment? I mean, they aren't gonna live long either way, it's a win-win!
I worked up to 60 hours a week (I'd say avg 50) from the time I was 13 years old making $6 an hour. It was backbreaking, grueling labor. But not a coal mine so no risk of black lung, so I guess everything is okay? Or maybe my parents should have taken advantage of economic opportunities that didn't exist (they looked, constantly, for options).
This was in the US. Most of the time I did my homework in school, cramming in assignments for second period during first period, then 3rd period hw during second period, etc. Child labor isn't dead, and if you truly think that everyone has the economic opportunities to avoid these circumstance then you don't have the scope of experience needed to accurately assess the state of society.
(And no, it wasn't a case of "well if you can't support children you shouldn't have them" The circumstances of the above situation came about long after I was born, though before I was 13)
Would your family have been better off if the income from your $6/hr job was lost? I presume this work was beneficial to your family somehow, otherwise you wouldn't have engaged in it.
Is "better off [economically]" you're guide on ethical labor practices? I don't want to read too much into your comment, but that is the implication, in which case any labor practice can be justified so long as someone is willing to do it. That's a rather extreme view.
Answer my question and I'll be happy to answer yours in kind. Please note 'economically' was added by you. I genuinely wondered if you and your family would be better off in general, not just economically. Usually economic effects have greater effects on the family outside of the economic outlook. It would be strange indeed if you toiled for years doing something to create a net hurt to your family.
I will say if you engaged in some unethical labor practices to help your family while earning those $6, I personally could look past them to some extent. I assume you did this to help your family survive so anything unethical you did was out of necessity. Personally I withhold judgement.
I can't give a full answer to your question without revealing things I don't want to put online. The best I can do is say I don't know. It's hard to judge what would have happened otherwise, what opportunities I might have pursued.
So, I answered as best I can. But even if, under yours or anyone's definition, we were better off, what does that say? An economic system or society (can't really full disentangle the two) where a family is either unable to survive or do more than barely survive unless their kids work in this way... That does not seem like a society optimized for for its own best outcomes as a whole or for many individuals either. I also don't have any magic answer that would fix things either, but acknowledging the problem is a necessary step along the way. Asking if my family was better off is just asking if a shitty situation would have been any shittier otherwise. I prefer to think we should work towards less shitty circumstances overall, and the entrenched systems aren't it.
>Is "better off [economically]" you're guide on ethical labor practices?
No. But live in reality. I know people have to make hard decisions. If the choice is "Family starves to death" or "Child labor results in survival of family", I would never try to stop this family from having that opportunity to survive. Whether it is better to ban the job so the family starves to death? My inclination is to say no. Clearly some better alternatives would be superior, but in the end you work with the options you have available and not the ones you wish you had. If superior alternative exists, we don't even need to ban child labor because the hand of free will will go towards the superior option.
I've also seen a number of circumstances where child labor is just genuinely what works for a family. Our neighborhood chinese restaraunt, even the 6 and 7 y/o or so work EVERY NIGHT for HOURS, basically when they get home from school until bed. These children are so young, they can barely enunciate clearly most of the time. They do their homework while taking phone orders and even ring you up at the cash register. I'm not even sure they get weekends off. Is it ethical? I don't know, but that family made the calculus it's right for their family and indeed I think it would be unethical for me to stop them. Who knows, their family may be better off for it and it may even be saving them from bankruptcy and losing health insurance and eventually even their lives (especially depending on their immigration status). Maybe the children will end up successful businesspeople as a result of their child labor and donate billions so 1000 other children DON'T have to work.
At the end of the day your situation may have been more iffy (you don't know whether it was actually beneficial). That indicates to me you weren't going to starve to death or anything if you didn't work, because if you were you'd have said right away you were better off than not earning any money. You may have a different outlook if it wasn't so iffy, like if the alternative was much worse.
I live there, grew up with a strong dose of it, but I take your point and understand. I'm not ideological on the issue except that I think we can do better, so a viewpoint rooted in (for me, cynical) practicality is easy for me to relate to. It's different than an ideological one, which is what was the question I was trying to understand from your statement. It's harder to have productive conversation on matters of ideology.
At the end of the day your situation may have been more iffy (you don't know whether it was actually beneficial). That indicates to me you weren't going to starve to death
Eh, yes and no. Again, personal details involved. But, mostly, not about extreme food security problems. A parent worked in food service as a second job, which helped. (No theft, just generous owners)
In general I find child labor laws to be deeply ironic in a Kafka-esque way for the reasons you touch on. Out socioeconomic system produces situations that all but require such labor, but then it is outlawed. Like so many other laws, it doesn't solve the problem that leads to the bad thing in the first place.
Better to have an extremely strong safety net w/ a strong job training & job placement system. It's often a catch 22 though. In my state unemployed people can go to community college for free, and there are even 1-year full time programs for in-demand jobs that have okay pay. The problem is, how do you love during that the new period? That's one gap. Another one are people who are employed but don't make enough money-- no free college for them, so they're stuck in their economic niche. And if they lost the job they'd still face the first issue of living while they learn. Another gap is the job market: fix the above issues and the college programs I referenced would be flooded beyond their capacity and wages in the job market kept low by a higher labor supply.
I think we could chip away at some of these issues, but the most common political solution, probably because it seems quick and easy, is to raise the floor on minimum wage. There's a little elasticity there, but I don't think it can be raised enough to solve these problems. Low-margin businesses (supermarkets!) especially will have to raise prices, which will then eat into the cost of living. The idea that minimum wage can be doubled without inflation always strikes me as wishful thinking.
>We aren't going to make children work in mines, because (as I'm sure you know), adult workers and children are not the same thing.
once upon a time, this was not obvious. this modern moral axiom is a result of of hard-won labor organizing over the 19th century. all kinds of exploitative practices were justified with the exact same "the workers are being given an opportunity so they shouldn't complain" argument. it's not an analogy.
taking advantage of people because they don't have any other options is the definition of exploitation.
Fast food joints are not safe. You can get seriously injured working a fryer or grill, and a 16 year old is less likely to be able to operate those things safely. Keep in mind also that a 16 year old is almost certainly going to school, so they will be working while already tired.
I say this as someone who started working at age 14: Children should not be allowed to work most jobs until they are much older than that.
These same arguments can be applied to other activities, like driving a car. I do support treating teenagers with more agency than children, so while I don't support letting 5 years olds work in McDonalds, I honestly don't see a problem with 16 year olds doing it.
Yes, the risk is higher than for a 25 y.o., but as someone who started working at age 15 - there are also rewards in experience, money, and figuring your own shit out. Nothing taught me about life like working.
No, I don't think the next step is passing laws to enslave children in coal mines. I am not advocating for child labor at all - just discussing the topic at hand, which in GP's comment was saying this link provided an example of children being made to work in coal mines. It was explicitly not.
I do not advocate for children's labor, but I also do not advocate for taking things to extremes in order to make a point. If you feel it's problematic for children to be allowed (not forced - allowed) to work in fast food, we can have that discussion. But talking about it as the missing link for returning to 19th century slave labor conditions, or the conditions currently in China is misleading and not worthy of a conversation.
"just quit and get another job" -- this is frictionless-plane-in-a-vacuum thinking. people have all kinds of life circumstances that means they can't act like perfectly rational economic agents, especially when they are poor.
turn it around: why doesn't amazon just respect its worker's basic human dignity?
> why doesn't amazon just respect its worker's basic human dignity?
Because that directly conflicts with making the highest profit possible (still legally).
What’s sad in these discussions is that it’s both true that Amazon is a terrible employer and that it often pays more than alternatives for many workers. This seems like a failure of policy (ex. Enforcing living wage standards) and American business well-being at least as much as a failure of Amazon to “do the right thing.”
Edit: Cracks me up that I got downvoted for telling the truth about capitalism.
I don't understand why we expect Amazon to do the right thing vs we should expect in this case all retailers to do the right thing? Unfortunately as consumers we are always looking for the best deal or the lowest price on everything. Which means retailers need to cut costs every way possible which in turn leads to sucking every ounce out of workers.
Let's assume that Amazon did end up making things way better for their workers. That means higher costs and hence higher prices. This will allow other retailers to win markets by setting the best prices.
I think we need regulation that applies to all retailers in this case or all industries that hire manual labor vs constantly targeting Amazon for being the bad guy.
It's funny that this logic is rarely applied to executive compensation or stock buybacks. Apparently it only hurts competitiveness to increase wages for the low-level workers. Any of the other ways that money gets wasted in a major retail corporation is fine.
And then there are the counterexamples, like Costco, that manage to pay well and be wildly competitive.
Let's do some math for fun. Amazon now employs about a million workers in the US. Let's naively assume 3/4 of them work in warehouses and delivery as opposed to corporate. Let's also assume they work, on average, 2000 hours a year (roughly full-time). For Amazon to raise those wages by $1/hr (or lower efficiency demands by ~7%) it would cost them around $1.5B every year.
Now, you're probably thinking that's chump change compared to Amazon's profits, but fun fact: Amazon's online sales segment doesn't make much profit. In fact, it lost $200M in Q4 [1]. So you basically want Amazon to either go deeply in the red, or else they have to raise prices on products to also raise worker wages.
Amazon doesn’t lose money with what you’re saying. They are moving money around. We need to stop trusting wildly rich and powerful people and corporations so much.
Rich man reasonable, but the idea Amazon sales are gross-margin-negative is borderline retarded. Margins on sales are going into other things, like re-investment in the business instead of wages. The loss is engineered to increase future revenue. That may create more jobs in the long run and make Amazon more competitive, but lets call a spade a spade.
Negotiations exist between two parties in a contractual relationship. Employment isn't a take it or leave it deal, it's give and take between two parties where terms of employment are decided by negotiations between both of them.
You mean like how I freely negotiate and accept the contract that describes CPUs backdoors (Intel Management Engine) in one of two computer CPU manufacturers in the world?
Or your cellphone contract, or apartment lease, or the terms of use for every web site, or End User License Agreements. They're all totally "meeting of the minds" mutually agreed upon between parties of equal power, open to negotiation by skilled end-users... LOL! Most contracts/agreements that end users are subjected to are far from freely negotiable. They are take-it-or-leave-it rule-making written by some company's legal counsel and enforced by the courts. Agree or don't do business with.
I've never been presented with an employment agreement where any of the terms could be negotiated. Salary and benefits? Yes, sometimes. But other terms? No way. I always try, but in every case, you get a stern message from corporate legal basically saying "Sign it unmodified or GTFO." I don't know who these HN Captains of Industry are who negotiate the terms of their employment, but that's the exception, not the rule. Maybe at the VP+ level, these things are negotiable (parties are more equal in power), but at the "5th grunt from the left" level, no way.
This is the point of unions, because atomized workers don't have much leverage by themselves to negotiate with an entities that have already consolidated their interests and power in the form of corporations. Unions help workers consolidate their interests and power in order to leverage them against the consolidated interests and power of their employers and negotiate better terms of employment.
Negotiations exist between a single employee and an international team of Amazon lawyers and professional negotiators. Whether that should really count as "two parties" negotiating on equal terms is up for argument.
