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Yes, yes, very good. But seriously, if you are paying your employees below minimum wage, then one of the following must be true: -Your business doesn't make eno

Yes, yes, very good. But seriously, if you are paying your employees below minimum wage, then one of the following must be true: -Your business doesn't make enough income, possibly a sign of a bad business model; or -You are intentionally paying your employees as little as possible, which I see as profiteering. Perhaps there are other reasons?

afarrell 11y ago
Do you feel the same way about Goodwill?
- vkou 11y ago
  Goodwill's a non-profit. Despite their earning statements, Amazon is only a 'non-profit' on paper.
  - jonah 11y ago
    Goodwill may technically be a "non-profit" but they're hardly altruistic.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit. I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)
    - bduerst 11y ago
      >paradox/error There is none. The ends don't justify the means (Kantian ethics). There are network effects of a giant for-profit organization exploiting the jobless, vs a non-profit that is regulated to be aligned with the jobless. If you're using rational beings as a means to your ends, they need to be part of the ends, which is why Amazon is being criticized.
      - Pyxl101 11y ago
        > exploiting the jobless You're committing the fallacy described by the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics". http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi... First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before. Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do. (Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)
        Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        >Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.) All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.
    - vacri 11y ago
      > two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew. A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen. The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".
      - SilasX 11y ago
        >A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen. Did you read my second paragraph?
        vacri 11y ago
        Yes, it sounded like you were explaining it away, to turn it back into "X people got N jobs at $rate". For example, what entity is going to do this "tighter oversight" that you suggest? How is that going to work? And so until this entity that does tighter oversight comes along, why should companies get a pass on screwing their workers? "Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      >Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit. I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them. What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.
normand1 11y ago
No company is paying people below minimum wage... it's literally the minimum wage.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Isn't the whole point of outsourcing paying below minimum wage? (Also I guess more lenient pollution laws)
  - RijilV 11y ago
    These positions were in Western Washington outside of Seattle. Standard minimum wages apply and Amazon has a history of paying above min wage.
  - Arnt 11y ago
    No, the main point is to get labour at a lower total cost, even though you can't predict very well how much you'll need. Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?" Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.
- belorn 11y ago
  To make the term "minimum wage" useful, it must have a bunch of qualifier like "minimum wage as set by the law for a set amount of work hours, under the condition that they don't earn other wages". Otherwise special conditions like symbolic wages will ruin the term for everyone.
- specialist 11y ago
  There are plenty of exceptions to minimum wage. Training, interns, students, restaurant servers, etc. YMMV per jurisdiction. Not to mention wage theft, not paying overtime, pretending your workers are not employees, etc.
- 11y ago
rebootthesystem 11y ago
Sure: Minimum wage is too high and the market should set it, not government. BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage. The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.
gambiting 11y ago
So how about using prison labour, where people are paid 10 cents(or however much, it's an example not a solid number) an hour? The only difference between homeless people and prisoners in that case is that homeless people are not in prison. But the job they do serves the same purpose - offers them something to break the cycle of what they are doing currently.

afarrell 11y ago

Do you feel the same way about Goodwill?

vkou 11y ago
Goodwill's a non-profit. Despite their earning statements, Amazon is only a 'non-profit' on paper.
- jonah 11y ago
  Goodwill may technically be a "non-profit" but they're hardly altruistic.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit. I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)
  - bduerst 11y ago
    >paradox/error There is none. The ends don't justify the means (Kantian ethics). There are network effects of a giant for-profit organization exploiting the jobless, vs a non-profit that is regulated to be aligned with the jobless. If you're using rational beings as a means to your ends, they need to be part of the ends, which is why Amazon is being criticized.
    - Pyxl101 11y ago
      > exploiting the jobless You're committing the fallacy described by the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics". http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi... First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before. Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do. (Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        >Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.) All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew. A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen. The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".
    - SilasX 11y ago
      >A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen. Did you read my second paragraph?
      - vacri 11y ago
        Yes, it sounded like you were explaining it away, to turn it back into "X people got N jobs at $rate". For example, what entity is going to do this "tighter oversight" that you suggest? How is that going to work? And so until this entity that does tighter oversight comes along, why should companies get a pass on screwing their workers? "Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit. I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them. What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.

normand1 11y ago

No company is paying people below minimum wage... it's literally the minimum wage.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
Isn't the whole point of outsourcing paying below minimum wage? (Also I guess more lenient pollution laws)
- RijilV 11y ago
  These positions were in Western Washington outside of Seattle. Standard minimum wages apply and Amazon has a history of paying above min wage.
- Arnt 11y ago
  No, the main point is to get labour at a lower total cost, even though you can't predict very well how much you'll need. Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?" Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.
belorn 11y ago
To make the term "minimum wage" useful, it must have a bunch of qualifier like "minimum wage as set by the law for a set amount of work hours, under the condition that they don't earn other wages". Otherwise special conditions like symbolic wages will ruin the term for everyone.
specialist 11y ago
There are plenty of exceptions to minimum wage. Training, interns, students, restaurant servers, etc. YMMV per jurisdiction. Not to mention wage theft, not paying overtime, pretending your workers are not employees, etc.
11y ago

rebootthesystem 11y ago

Sure: Minimum wage is too high and the market should set it, not government. BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage. The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.

gambiting 11y ago

So how about using prison labour, where people are paid 10 cents(or however much, it's an example not a solid number) an hour? The only difference between homeless people and prisoners in that case is that homeless people are not in prison. But the job they do serves the same purpose - offers them something to break the cycle of what they are doing currently.