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If you run a company then everything is your business. He might not directly participate in the management of warehouse workers, but if the are being treated b

If you run a company then everything is your business. He might not directly participate in the management of warehouse workers, but if the are being treated badly then it is his responsibility to fix it. It is his job to set the direction of the company and to hire people (who hire people, and so on) that will do the right thing. He is the one who has set a culture of competition among his developers and hard conditions for his warehouse workers. Bezos clearly follows the news. He must have read articles mentioning the poor working conditions of his employees. That he hasn't fixed it- and doesn't appear to be trying to fix it- says that he doesn't think that taking care of his people is worth the cost. From a business perspective, I get it. Amazon has thin margins as a computing, logistics and retail company. It's competing against Google and Wal-Mart. From a human perspective, it sucks.

Applejinx 9y ago
In a more abstract sense, if you say 'warehouse workers are being treated badly' it implies Bezos himself both seeks and has a more cushy, nurturing job: and therefore, is responsible for treating others as he would wish to be treated himself. Hence, a moral failing on his part, that works to his benefit. I don't think it's a simple as that. Being a Bezos is sort of self-selecting: as the 'apex predator' he must motivate a whole corporation that functions on this ruthless moral model. I'm not sure how many miles he runs each day, but as far as people dropping dead of stress I think it's mostly the guy's extensive resources that stop him being one of the dead bodies left behind. In other words, the CEO is crazy and driving himself impossibly hard. The CEO in turn expects everybody else to push just as hard. But the warehouse guys can't have a team of masseuses attending upon them after (or during) THEIR jobs, nor do they have journalists and celebrities fawning over them for being so hardcore: Bezos wishes to build a company that from top to bottom is ultra-hardcore and driven, but most people participating in the exercise get NONE of the benefits he gets out of coaching a giant corporation to develop that kind of killer instinct. The behavior is in fact the way to make the corporation kill and defeat other corporations, but most of the people working for Amazon get only very intangible benefits from doing this. Unless they can be like 'yay team!' and personally identify themselves with, say, their CEO and his attitude, they're just chewed up and spat out. It's interesting to follow the logic of it. By definition, Amazon can NEVER suck up fat margins and benefit its employees and rest on its laurels, because by definition if it does another Amazon will outperform it (at rather pedestrian tasks that are nonetheless valuable). So there must always be the worst possible working conditions attainable by law, from the bottom right up to the CEO. But the CEO gets a lot of side benefits and intangibles that the other workers don't. It would be closer to fair if people treated Bezos with contempt, knowing that anytime he keeled over or lost his nerve, some other hard charger would jump in and become Bezos in his stead. Bezos could stop being Bezos at any time, but he's the richest guy in the world because he seems like he can't. He is more likely to stroke out in some meeting than to retire. He can only be replaced by someone else who is that ruthless or more ruthless… depends on whether society considers his attitude criminally harmful, and that depends on how he goes about being Bezos. See Kalanick and Uber as a counterexample, where the guy fully embraces ruthlessness but is far less interested in self-abuse and is more easily painted as an exploiter.

Applejinx 9y ago

In a more abstract sense, if you say 'warehouse workers are being treated badly' it implies Bezos himself both seeks and has a more cushy, nurturing job: and therefore, is responsible for treating others as he would wish to be treated himself. Hence, a moral failing on his part, that works to his benefit. I don't think it's a simple as that. Being a Bezos is sort of self-selecting: as the 'apex predator' he must motivate a whole corporation that functions on this ruthless moral model. I'm not sure how many miles he runs each day, but as far as people dropping dead of stress I think it's mostly the guy's extensive resources that stop him being one of the dead bodies left behind. In other words, the CEO is crazy and driving himself impossibly hard. The CEO in turn expects everybody else to push just as hard. But the warehouse guys can't have a team of masseuses attending upon them after (or during) THEIR jobs, nor do they have journalists and celebrities fawning over them for being so hardcore: Bezos wishes to build a company that from top to bottom is ultra-hardcore and driven, but most people participating in the exercise get NONE of the benefits he gets out of coaching a giant corporation to develop that kind of killer instinct. The behavior is in fact the way to make the corporation kill and defeat other corporations, but most of the people working for Amazon get only very intangible benefits from doing this. Unless they can be like 'yay team!' and personally identify themselves with, say, their CEO and his attitude, they're just chewed up and spat out. It's interesting to follow the logic of it. By definition, Amazon can NEVER suck up fat margins and benefit its employees and rest on its laurels, because by definition if it does another Amazon will outperform it (at rather pedestrian tasks that are nonetheless valuable). So there must always be the worst possible working conditions attainable by law, from the bottom right up to the CEO. But the CEO gets a lot of side benefits and intangibles that the other workers don't. It would be closer to fair if people treated Bezos with contempt, knowing that anytime he keeled over or lost his nerve, some other hard charger would jump in and become Bezos in his stead. Bezos could stop being Bezos at any time, but he's the richest guy in the world because he seems like he can't. He is more likely to stroke out in some meeting than to retire. He can only be replaced by someone else who is that ruthless or more ruthless… depends on whether society considers his attitude criminally harmful, and that depends on how he goes about being Bezos. See Kalanick and Uber as a counterexample, where the guy fully embraces ruthlessness but is far less interested in self-abuse and is more easily painted as an exploiter.