Bray didn't quit over the conditions in the warehouses, he quit over Amazon's brazen and dishonest firings of organizers.
It's possible that if every Amazon warehouse were run as well, those organizers would not have arisen, but it's Amazon nastiness toward them that's most alarming.
Even the best run un-unionized factories have unions trying to get workers to organize.
To pretend that unions (leadership) haven't become just as obsessed with growth and power as corporations are, misses a huge part of the various incentives at play here.
Have you considered the possibility that Amazon actually treats their workers okay and that it's the organizers are dishonest? Why does the presumption of evil only go in one direction?
Well Amazon has a history of mistreating workers. So, why do we think they are likely mistreating workers? It's because they have a long & well-document track record of doing so.
It goes on to give tips to managers for spotting union activity.“Make it a point to regularly talk to associates in the break room. This will help protect you from accusations that you were only in the break room to spy on pro union associates,” the video says.
On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode viewed, Amazon white-collar workers expressed dismay over a report from Vice News that the company’s top lawyer had referred to a recently fired warehouse worker as “not smart, or articulate” and implied that executives should use that to help squelch worker unionization efforts.
At risk at piling on to something that's already being downvoted, this is an extremely facile take. Nothing in the article you linked was "mocking" tech workers for being worried in mid-February. The word you are looking for is "reporting" on that situation, and also including in that report that officials at that time, in mid-February, said that while there was "always a risk" that these fears were likely overblown. Dragging Vox for accurately reporting what many experts said at the time is dragging them for not being prescient enough to know that the experts were wrong. And to top it all off, that's something that Vox is actively concerned about, given that the last episode of the Ezra Klein Show was a conversation with NYT writer Charlie Warzel about the media's response to the pandemic and how difficult it is to handle this sort of situation.
You literally are the reason why poor publications like Vox get a free pass. Here, if you don't believe me, read this thread and check yourself (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447944287932416?s=20). And don't tell me now that Balaji is not trustworthy. He is 100x more trustworthy than a random HN user like you.
I've watched you comment similarly around here - what if salaries in the US matched the EU? What if quality of life equalized across the globe?
Well, so what? Would we outsource jobs if the entire world was unionized? Doesn't it make sense to promote worker's rights for everyone? If I was a blue collar American worker adopting your position, here is the most rational actions I should take to support it:
> As a blue collar American worker, my not unionizing ensures my company doesn't have to worry about diminishing their massively outsized bargaining position in my labor conditions. The better the labor conditions of my competition, that being laborers in China and India, the less likely my job will be outsourced to those countries. I should either take actions that increase the labor conditions of laborers in other countries, or, take actions to decrease my labor conditions so they stay below those of laborers in other countries.
Do you see how nonsensical, illogical, and perhaps insane that position is?
This is a classist argument. Labor, blue collar, lower middle class people have just of much right to better wages, conditions, treatment, as a tech worker or anyone else. In fact bargaining power is the only way employees can have somewhat of a say in any sort of negotiation with their employers, without it it's a completely one sided relationship.
Other than getting packages faster, what innovations are working class warehouse employees producing? The innovation of putting boxes together at blazing speed with no bathroom breaks in a poorly climate controlled environment?
How could outsourcing a horizontally consolidated logistics empire be cheaper than upping conditions by a bit? Unions on average only cost about 10% more than a non-organized operation. That cost could be sent to the consumer or taken from revenue, by selling shares, whatever.
Anything that goes against the status quo of unfettered greed, cold profit is all that matters attitude makes sense for the business. But part of why Americans enjoy such labor safety, higher pay, employer health care, etc is because of organized labor. Class consolidation is the best outcome for the most people and there are laws that facilitate it being broken by Amazon, in firing organizers.
It's not just their warehouse workers they treat like garbage either, they steal successful products on their page and drop the original company from their listings and showing up in search. They charge a kickback just to rank in the search, etc, etc.
Bezos is a very clever successful sociopath in my opinion.
> In fact bargaining power is the only way employees can have somewhat of a say in any sort of negotiation with their employers, without it it's a completely one sided relationship.
I truly don't understand this position. Unless we're talking about a company town, every single employee has the option of going to work somewhere else. That they don't means that they find value in the relationship with their employer.
> It's not just their warehouse workers they treat like garbage either, they steal successful products on their page and drop the original company from their listings and showing up in search. They charge a kickback just to rank in the search, etc, etc.
None of this is unethical. Not in the least. Nobody has a right to have their products sold on Amazon.com. Amazon is not the government. Other private parties have no inherent claim to be involved in anything Amazon does.
That's the classic conservative response, well you have a choice to go work somewhere else. That's not really the point.
You conveniently ignore that these workers have a right to organize, and it's illegal for Amazon to say they can't. Just like they have a choice to go work somewhere else, they should also have the ability to organize. Sounds like the free market at work to me, if they would have treated them better maybe they wouldn't have organized.
Also sounds like a cynical position to take given the company's strategy of opening warehouses in poorer southern cities like Memphis.
Also anti-trust law does deem what they do with search unethical.
Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Amazon's not there yet, but it's certainly where they want to be. I buy stuff from them, but I don't hold any illusions about them.
Their practice of forcing warehouse workers to submit to searches without compensating them for their time spent in line does bother me, for example, but not quite enough to get me to shop somewhere else. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this does make me a bad person.)
Why would the workers organize and risk their careers without just cause?
He mentions petitions with thousands of signatures. Are all of those people just…I mean, what?
If they were lying, then Amazon could easily come out and say, "They're asking for regular breaks every four hours and we literally give them that. They ask for PPE and every employee is given X, Y, Z. They want us to reduce our carbon footprint by 10%, here is an independent audit showing 12% reduction." (etc.)
In situations of extreme power imbalance, it's not unreasonable to default trust the person not in power who is taking far greater risk.
Sometimes you'll be wrong! But the burden of proof is on people in power.
>why would the workers organize and risk their careers without just cause
Warehouse stocking is not a career. Most of these people are hourly workers with little to lose. You can't apply the same standards to white, blue, and no collar workers because the nature of both the work, the people, and the culture are totally different.
If that statement shocks or offends you, I encourage you to take a temporary job at a place like Walmart or visit an oil rig and experience the differences yourself.
How on Earth can you think that low-skill hourly workers in America have "little to lose" by jeopardizing their livelihoods? That's precisely what ensures that they have so much to lose. Maybe you or I can lose our jobs, survive on savings for a good while, and easily find another role; they can't.
That depends on whether or not their individual state is effectively processing both regular unemployment and the federal side effectively and whether or not the state side is being contested. Also, that ends in July currently whereas there have been complaints about Amazon warehouses (and other jobs) well before the pandemic.
As I understand it, the 8000 people that signed the petition of support to organize were not hourly workers but corporate white collar workers with high pay that have issues with climate response and worker protections for blue collar workers. Like Tim, the guy who wrote this essay.
Very interesting. Hard data on all this would be much more valuable than anecdotes and presumption that those with power are always the evil ones.
Corporations are at least some kind of good. Otherwise, we would need to all form our own little businesses, and have everyone redo a whole lot of common tasks. Corporations are the economy's approach to DRY.
Thanks! It does substantiate the point these are mostly white collar workers complaining about their environment agenda. I saw a single bullet about work conditions, and this was couched in a context about not docking pay if there are big storms that wipe out operations.
Definitely not a corporation mistreating its employees. I don't know why this is portrayed as such. If employees want to force their employer to follow some agenda the employer does not agree with, I don't see a problem with the corporation firing the employees.
Meat packing and agriculture jobs in the US are presently incredibly dangerous, under-regulated (wink-wink regulated large corporations who have immense political power through lobbyists and trade PACs), and often done by undocumented persons who cannot get compensation if they are maimed or killed. Interestingly, these industries often advertise wages in Central and South American countries' newspaper to encourage migration, legal and otherwise.
Nobody just deserve it, everyone has to find one and keep it. You never get anything in life because "you deserve it and the Universe has to give it to you", not in this Universe.
It's true that nobody gets something from the universe just because they deserve it. Which is why for several thousand years humans have grouped up into civilized societies where we can construct environments that better match how we think things should work. So that people can get what they deserve.
Since we're not talking about somebody adrift in interstellar space, your argument makes less sense. Instead you have to argue some variant on a) not everybody deserves a reasonably safe job, or b) people do deserve that but we as a society can't afford it.
(I don't think either of those is true, but at least they'd make sense.)
You just served a false dilemma. There are also options c and d and more.
Even having a society does not make wonders: we don't have a cure for cancer, we don't have a vaccine for Covid, having a functional society does not mean you can obtain everything, including safe jobs and decent lives, especially when the definitions of safe and decent are moving targets: versus 200 years ago we are living an utopia of safe jobs and decent lives. Just think logical, not only emotional.
If there are options c, d, and following, I'd like to hear them. But your second paragraph is pure option b, the notion that we can't afford it.
I think that's wrong. We of course can't afford everything, and I never said otherwise. But what we're talking about is "a safe (as possible) job". There's no particular reason to think that if Amazon takes proper worker safety precautions, suddenly they'll be out of business. Might Bezos be marginally less rich? Sure. Might Amazon customers pay a smidgen more? Sure. Will society collapse? No. Will some other workers suddenly not have a safe workplace? Also no.
If "we can afford it" then please explain why 90% of the manufactured goods purchased in USA are made in China; is it because competition and lower wages in China? We can afford to pay more the USA workers to produce it locally, but we don't. Why?
I don't care about how rich is Bezos, it is not my problem (or, more exactly, not a problem for me), but the blanket statements like "everyone deserves X" and "we can afford Y" are a problem: we don't simply deserve and we cannot afford most things.
"The society" is a generic term to hide behind; the society does not provide jobs, businesses do (or self-employment). Nobody provides a "dignified life", that is another vague and non-measurable term to hide behind.
problem with your utopia is that in order to provide the vagaries of a "dignified life" you are compelling people to labor for others. We have not yet achieved post scarcity and there is never a guarantee that enough people in your society will participate in good faith to sustain those who are, for whatever reason, less productive.
That's not an argument against a safety net, just the opposing force that makes the correct (and possible) solution somewhere in between [UBI, euthanization), and different for each grouping of people.
we seem to have enough people participating to sustain large scale warfare operations around the globe, bail out entire industries, and pay politicians above average salaries. imagine what we could do for society if not for spending so much money on these pursuits which large swaths of our population find immoral.
Just compare the incentives for both parts to be dishonest and you have your answer. What would workers gain from being dishonest except the risk of being fired or retaliated upon?
And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions?
Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight?
Does Amazon really need your support, or are the workers one paycheck away from homelessness in need of it?
Union representation and improved compensation and employment benefits.
Not to say either party is being honest or being dishonest. But it's clear there's plenty to gain on both sides by, on the one hand, painting organizers ad bad employees, and on the other hand, painting working conditions as worse than they are.
Because 'good' is relative and conditions can always be better.
Software engineers at Google were fired (allegedly) for attempting to unionize (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/06/ex-goog...). Google jobs are some of the best jobs in the industry, in terms of benefits, base salary, and stock compensation.
Unionization isn't always about jobs being good enough. It's also about being able to set up a collective front for the workers to negotiate their arrangement with company owners. That's something every employee can want and can benefit from.
> Union representation and improved compensation and employment benefits.
Getting union representation requires, in jurisdictions I'm familiar with, at least a 50% buy-in from other employees. You're not going to get that by lying to them about their own working conditions. This kind of dishonesty can attract some fist-shakers on the internet, but they don't get a vote.
> Just compare the incentives for both parts to be dishonest and you have your answer. What would workers gain from being dishonest except the risk of being fired or retaliated upon?
Pay raises, more time off, better benefits. A newly hired employee has very little to lose by supporting unionization.
>And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions?
Because when Amazon shows good conditions, everyone says that it's a manufactured scenario or just an anecdote.
>Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight?
Which is precisely what organizers want to exploit with publicity that could very easily be taking things out of context. A union organizer has almost nothing to lose by massively exaggerating.
>Does Amazon really need your support, or are the workers one paycheck away from homelessness in need of it?
Depends on whether or not you care about being manipulated into supporting something that could be a lie. It's not even "support" of Amazon, it's just questioning of the accounting of one side of a debate.
I'm not against these things for warehouse workers at all, but just to answer your question, potential downsides include:
1. The money has to come from somewhere. Since Amazon keeps fairly small profit, this would likely come from passing costs on to consumers, and reducing Amazon's investment in future growth, which ultimately costs their future consumers. This increases cost of living for non-Amazon workers, and since Amazon is a good source of cheap items, it may disproportionately burden poorer people.
2. Where I am, Indeed.com says Amazon warehouse workers are paid slightly above average ($16/hour). If they were paid significantly above average, it can make it hard for small businesses to keep their workers.
Many workers experience monopsony for their labor for reasons that might not make sense to you (switching costs, rational risk aversion, fallible human psychology). A union on their side just levels the playing field. Empirically, societies that support monopoly bargaining by unions (and structurally encourage creative thinking and incentive alignment between unions and employers) have become much better places for their worst-off cohorts. Possibly not better if you're a smart and talented entrepreneur or highly skilled technologist; parts of the US are clearly great for that. But you may have to step over homeless people to get to work.
> Many workers experience monopsony for their labor for reasons that might not make sense to you (switching costs, rational risk aversion, fallible human psychology)
Both sides face similar issues related to terminating their mutually agreed to relationship.
Stop ordering from Amazon if you really feel so strongly about this. No point making all this grand-stands while on the other hand, you will just goto Amazon for your needs. That is the real way to hurt them.
True, but alone I can't make a difference. We must unite, in the workplace and as consumers. That's why it's as important to be vocal about it and convince other people to stop ordering from Amazon.
> Have you considered the possibility that Amazon actually treats their workers okay and that it's the organizers are dishonest? Why does the presumption of evil only go in one direction?
Yes.
As an example:
> We’re already seeing devastating climate impacts: unprecedented flooding in India and Mozambique, dry water wells in Africa, coastal displacement in Asia, wildfires and floods in North America, and crop failure in Latin America
That is so far removed from a company that provides web hosting and handles shipping logistics.
What does transporting a cardboard box have anything to do with flooding in Mozambique?
While it's unfortunate catastrophes happen. Let's be generous and assume those events are due to lax environmental regulations (0.001% to 90%).
Amazon is just 1% of whatever that is. So, if these activists wish came true - and ultimately a drop in the bucket.
A competitor without the hindrance could likely make up for any pollution they don't create.
If you want to shape ecology, you do it through regulations (statutes). And all countries need to be on board with it.
I'm going to have to go with management on this one - the exaggeration of Amazon's impact on the issue really hurts their credibility. Nothing wrong with climate change - but really against disrupting organizations needlessly.
> What does transporting a cardboard box have anything to do with flooding in Mozambique?
25% of the US's carbon emissions are from transportation.
> Amazon is just 1% of whatever that is.
Everybody works somewhere. Workers have more power over their own companies than they do over others. It's great that Amazon workers are trying to use that power for good.
> If you want to shape ecology, you do it through regulations (statutes).
That's one place to push. And you know who'd be good at pushing for regulatory change? Organized workers. Large companies that have decided to minimize ecological impact. Industry organizations made up of those companies.
But that's not the only way change happens. It's a big problem with many fronts. If you think you can best use your time and money by calling up your reps, go to it. However, these people have decided differently. I'm willing to trust that they know best how to achieve their goals.
1% is huge. You do the world a disservice by ignoring incremental change. If I tasked you wish improving the speed of a processor and you came back with "This 1% improvement is a drop in the bucket so i deleted it" you would not last long. It can start with Amazon and end with more.
Nothing wrong with incremental change. But there's no justification it'd work in this context, and be worth the disruption.
And the burden of proof rests on the organizers to prove why this is worthy of prioritization above other problems.
While I like the sentiment and aesthetic of being courteous, I don't see anything demonstrating a binding rule or contract could come out of it. And what's the benefit again? If Amazon followed through, would the flooding and droughts cited in the original post stop?
The problem is - it just seems contradictory to me. I can't put my finger on why. I think supporter's heart is in the right place. But people are struggling a lot in life and this world in various ways, is this really the most optimal way to alleviate suffering?
Why not save the pay check and put it into lobbying, or NGO type stuff to advocate the cause? Or maybe even into studies or stuff more urgent that climate. For climate stuff to work, people in society have to have more harmony / generosity / collectivism universally.
Until people start getting along and addressing universal human needs and fixing those, it's really hard to do cooperative endeavors like this at scale. Just my opinion! :)
Read the article, please. Author said nice things about his workplace & its leadership (AWS). But he could not bear to see unfair treatment and so he quit.
What would the organisers have to gain from lying about bad conditions in their warehouses? It’s very obvious what Amazon gains in the reverse. The organisers are putting their livelihoods on the line, you’d have to imagine they have a good reason for doing so.
You're poking holes in people's comments in this thread for generalizing while making wild generalizations yourself about HN membership? Why pick this hill to die on?
No one is dying here. It is a general observation about what is going on with HN users. And if you can't see the overtly anti-corporation nature of the users here, I can't say much.
Well your comments been flagged now so I can't read it again. My point was that you made a low effort generalization about the economic and geographic situation of HN readers while calling out others for doing the same thing.
It's possible that if every Amazon warehouse were run as well, those organizers would not have arisen, but it's Amazon nastiness toward them that's most alarming.