19 ms·

There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers wanting to work for Amazon.

by crikeyjoe 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lc9er 4y ago
There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.
- IMTDb 4y ago
  > There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers. Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    Have you considered that those customers and workers are mostly the same people? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See: https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/ https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/
    - corrral 4y ago
      Exactly—it's entirely infeasible to live in the modern world and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use, even if the information were readily available, which it very much is not. It's not even close to being possible. That's what laws setting floors on how shitty product-safety/work-conditions/worker-pay/et c. can get, are for. Doesn't work so hot in a world where we grant MFN (or whatever it's called now) trade status to authoritarian states with weak worker, consumer, and environmental protections, though.
      - scollet 4y ago
        > and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use So okay. The onus is never on the individual. It's on the collective. Businesses owe us. Business owners owe us. They can pay or they can burn. That is the deal.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mc32 4y ago
    True. Same can be said of unions. Unions were supposed to protect workers, at least in theory, but they were more than happy to off-shore manufacturing and allow layoffs in the US --as long as they got to keep their union boss jobs. Cesar Chavez understood this. This is why he did not want just anybody to be able to work in the fields. It's all related. You wanna pay less by offshoring labor? You got it! But one day that off-shoring is going to come get you and your job will evaporate and you will be happy with service sector jobs. And don't complain, you didn't want to pay $70 for a shirt and instead went to buy a $20 shirt and "saved" money but "sold" your job or the underemployed person's job now driving a clunker.
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    > "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." This is just wrong. First, Amazon’s prices and their wages for warehouse workers aren’t directly connected. If they were, amazon wouldn’t have posted 200B in profit in 2021. Given the 1.6mil employees, that’s $125k per employee of profit. Amazon could pay MUCH more, and still hold the same prices. Second, the hunger for cheap stuff is driven at least in part BY LOW WAGES. If you’re making minimum wage - you’re going to buy the cheapest things you can find. edit: i'm getting beat up in the comments because I used gross profits rather than $YOUR_FAV_PROFIT_METRIC I stand by using that number. If you think I am actually suggesting they distribute 100% of their profits to every employee you're straw-manning my point. I'm suggesting cutting a slice off profits, exec pay, and stock grants, and giving that to the lowest paid employees - since the company would not make that money without their labor.
    - sophacles 4y ago
      It's simple, just apply modern capitalism. In this case the rule is: Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product. Anyone else who makes that realization is a dirty commie.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? Factoring in margins you need each dollar paid to your workers to generate $6.66 dollars worth of sales for you for it to break even.
        kps 4y ago
        > In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone else's workers can also spend on the products your company makes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
azemetre 4y ago
It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse). You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article mentions this): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter, reddit, or even hackernews about hire to fire, stack ranking/pip, and even just general mental abuse. I mean just read this excerpt from the article about a working needing to go see a dentist about an infected tooth: > The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated. At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency? [1] [1] https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigation...
- mtnGoat 4y ago
  Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand the hate aside from lazy people that have no work ethic complaining they are being asked to actually work, and work hard, consistently. If it was as terrible as some articles make it sound, I’d doubt they’d have so many employees.
  - alangibson 4y ago
    And he'll think that until one day they can him for missing work due to a health issue. This is why I find a lack of solidarity between working people to be somewhere between selfish and disgusting.
allenrb 4y ago
Working at an Amazon warehouse sounds terrible in every way, but… did you see those spiral package slides in the background? Might give up my sweet tech job just to ride on those.
zwieback 4y ago
Not really what the article says - Amazon's enforced-churn policy leads to workers that want to continue working there being fired for no good reason.
- mtnGoat 4y ago
  You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Needing to see a doctor suddenly means you're a poor worker?
    - anonymousab 4y ago
      For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah. For as long as they are (seen as) trivially replaceable, an employee that sees a doctor, or has health concerns, or uses benefits of any kind, or really has any slip in their productivity even to the slightest degree is a poorer worker than one that doesn't. This stops working if you run out of people to hire, or if the cost of hiring increases past a certain threshold. It is the most rational way for the dominant corporation in the current economic system to act, if they can get away with it.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        > For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah. I don't think worker attrition is cost effective. It is just less work and lower skill requirement for the managers to rule by fear and overwork. Isn't Amazon paying abit higher wages than the competition? They need to pay the bullshit fee to the workers.
    - cduzz 4y ago
      Needing to urinate while on shift also makes you a poor worker. I see bottles of sun tea piled up in various places around town where delivery trucks pause for red lights. Those are good workers, committed to the job.
RobertDeNiro 4y ago
Its a shortage at a given salary. Up the salary and the shortage is not present. So really it is self imposed.
slenk 4y ago
Just have to reply to recruiters saying you don't want to work for a company with forced attrition and they shut up. They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it anymore, they just cease communication. Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as forced attrition
kube-system 4y ago
There are only 9 employers on planet earth with more employees than Amazon.

There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers wanting to work for Amazon.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lc9er 4y ago

There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.

IMTDb 4y ago
> There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers. Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  Have you considered that those customers and workers are mostly the same people? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See: https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/ https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/
  - corrral 4y ago
    Exactly—it's entirely infeasible to live in the modern world and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use, even if the information were readily available, which it very much is not. It's not even close to being possible. That's what laws setting floors on how shitty product-safety/work-conditions/worker-pay/et c. can get, are for. Doesn't work so hot in a world where we grant MFN (or whatever it's called now) trade status to authoritarian states with weak worker, consumer, and environmental protections, though.
    - scollet 4y ago
      > and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use So okay. The onus is never on the individual. It's on the collective. Businesses owe us. Business owners owe us. They can pay or they can burn. That is the deal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mc32 4y ago
  True. Same can be said of unions. Unions were supposed to protect workers, at least in theory, but they were more than happy to off-shore manufacturing and allow layoffs in the US --as long as they got to keep their union boss jobs. Cesar Chavez understood this. This is why he did not want just anybody to be able to work in the fields. It's all related. You wanna pay less by offshoring labor? You got it! But one day that off-shoring is going to come get you and your job will evaporate and you will be happy with service sector jobs. And don't complain, you didn't want to pay $70 for a shirt and instead went to buy a $20 shirt and "saved" money but "sold" your job or the underemployed person's job now driving a clunker.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  > "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." This is just wrong. First, Amazon’s prices and their wages for warehouse workers aren’t directly connected. If they were, amazon wouldn’t have posted 200B in profit in 2021. Given the 1.6mil employees, that’s $125k per employee of profit. Amazon could pay MUCH more, and still hold the same prices. Second, the hunger for cheap stuff is driven at least in part BY LOW WAGES. If you’re making minimum wage - you’re going to buy the cheapest things you can find. edit: i'm getting beat up in the comments because I used gross profits rather than $YOUR_FAV_PROFIT_METRIC I stand by using that number. If you think I am actually suggesting they distribute 100% of their profits to every employee you're straw-manning my point. I'm suggesting cutting a slice off profits, exec pay, and stock grants, and giving that to the lowest paid employees - since the company would not make that money without their labor.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    It's simple, just apply modern capitalism. In this case the rule is: Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product. Anyone else who makes that realization is a dirty commie.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? Factoring in margins you need each dollar paid to your workers to generate $6.66 dollars worth of sales for you for it to break even.
      - kps 4y ago
        > In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone else's workers can also spend on the products your company makes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

azemetre 4y ago

It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse). You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article mentions this): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter, reddit, or even hackernews about hire to fire, stack ranking/pip, and even just general mental abuse. I mean just read this excerpt from the article about a working needing to go see a dentist about an infected tooth: > The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated. At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency? [1] [1] https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigation...

mtnGoat 4y ago
Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand the hate aside from lazy people that have no work ethic complaining they are being asked to actually work, and work hard, consistently. If it was as terrible as some articles make it sound, I’d doubt they’d have so many employees.
- alangibson 4y ago
  And he'll think that until one day they can him for missing work due to a health issue. This is why I find a lack of solidarity between working people to be somewhere between selfish and disgusting.

allenrb 4y ago

Working at an Amazon warehouse sounds terrible in every way, but… did you see those spiral package slides in the background? Might give up my sweet tech job just to ride on those.

zwieback 4y ago

Not really what the article says - Amazon's enforced-churn policy leads to workers that want to continue working there being fired for no good reason.

mtnGoat 4y ago
You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough.
- azemetre 4y ago
  Needing to see a doctor suddenly means you're a poor worker?
  - anonymousab 4y ago
    For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah. For as long as they are (seen as) trivially replaceable, an employee that sees a doctor, or has health concerns, or uses benefits of any kind, or really has any slip in their productivity even to the slightest degree is a poorer worker than one that doesn't. This stops working if you run out of people to hire, or if the cost of hiring increases past a certain threshold. It is the most rational way for the dominant corporation in the current economic system to act, if they can get away with it.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      > For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah. I don't think worker attrition is cost effective. It is just less work and lower skill requirement for the managers to rule by fear and overwork. Isn't Amazon paying abit higher wages than the competition? They need to pay the bullshit fee to the workers.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    Needing to urinate while on shift also makes you a poor worker. I see bottles of sun tea piled up in various places around town where delivery trucks pause for red lights. Those are good workers, committed to the job.

RobertDeNiro 4y ago

Its a shortage at a given salary. Up the salary and the shortage is not present. So really it is self imposed.

slenk 4y ago

Just have to reply to recruiters saying you don't want to work for a company with forced attrition and they shut up. They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it anymore, they just cease communication. Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as forced attrition

kube-system 4y ago

There are only 9 employers on planet earth with more employees than Amazon.