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What Amazon Does to Poor Cities

75 points by clebio 9y ago

mrgreenfur 9y ago
Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.
- usaphp 9y ago
  Customer is paying for a service that was promised to him and it’s reasonable to complain that the service was not provided.
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    Yeah when I order atheist books they are beat up with no padding in the box half the time. Replace those humans with robots please.
  - MrFoof 9y ago
    This. This is what customer service is about -- taking care of the customer when things go badly. In the span of five weeks, Amazon had A) "lost" two packages (in reality, they were shipped to the wrong distribution center and weren't rerouted), B) were two days later on one, C) four days late on another, and D) EIGHT days late on the fifth. For every single one, I contacted customer support and complained. As performance got worse, I actually got on the phone. * The first time I was comped a month of prime. $8. * The second time I was comped $20 in Amazon credit, and they reshipped the package ($55 in goods). I was told if the other one showed up, to keep both. The other one showed up the next week. * Third time I was comped a month of prime ($8) and package was reshipped. This was $160 in electronics. I was told if the other showed up, to keep both. The second one showed up 2 weeks later. * The fourth time I called I asked why I was paying for prime. After 10 minutes, the rep agreed. They refunded my entire year of prime ($100). * Fifth time they didn't care. They admitted their performance was awful, and were confused how their logistics operation was doing so poorly, but if I didn't like the service I should go elsewhere. To their credit, I was compensated $351 for five failures in five weeks, all of which were not in peak season (this was 60 days in advance of Holiday shopping season).
- sildur 9y ago
  They should replace workers with robots. That would remove the human cost.
  - kbos87 9y ago
    The robots will come for you sooner or later too.
    - sildur 9y ago
      Nice, I have a big pile of clothes to iron. They couldn't come soon enough.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Why do you feel these workers are not entitled to basic human dignity and respect? Why is it that any time the workers try to get some piece of the massive prosperity that they've contributed to building, they get threatened with automation? Why should they not share in the rewards for the company they helped to make prosperous?
- clebio 9y ago
  I posted this article, and I purchase from Amazon often. I'm not blissful, nor unaware. But it's sort of all-or-none, right? Like the workers in these towns who either work for Amazon (or its contractors), or don't work at all, I can't order anything from Amazon at all without aiding this system. What I mean is, there isn't some sort of ethical slow-lane when I go to checkout on amazon.com, right? There _is_ slow, free (non-prime) shipping, but anecdotally, that's not serviced via a separate pipeline anymore. I don't _mind_ waiting 5-8 days, I don't _complain_ about the shipping delays. But choosing free shipping also isn't any sort of boon to social justice. I could certainly just stop shopping from amazon.com, and buy locally (though still from big box stores, often, since that's locally the only options left). But I don't harbor illusions that my conscientious abstention will register on Bezos' balance sheets. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a fix. Certainly not an obvious one, nor easy. As the article discusses, cities _need_ the business, at least for the initial few years. And people _need_ jobs. Structurally, though, what are we as simultaneously consumers, citizens (voters), and people in the workforce going to do? The article discusses attempts to unionize. It discusses cities' attempts to lure Amazon business. It discusses what hard-working people with families do, and think, about the situation on the ground. It even gives responses from Amazon PR. The solutions are subtle, hard to enact, and slow to take effect.
refurb 9y ago
Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  I almost consider it clickbait. The writer even states that there's no other option than Amazon in these regions, and obviously the lack of other employers offering more simply means that the real problem is lack of demand for the types of work that the people in these communities can demand a living wage for.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dj-wonk 9y ago
    A serious issue lacking a clear solution does not clickbait make. (There are plenty of other pieces of content that deserve the clickbait title.)
- krapp 9y ago
  There is a middle ground between "barely subsistence wages" and "high-paying, middle class wages" that Amazon could meet, and still be profitable.
  - gbacon 9y ago
    The beauty of the market is a legitimate complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. Think: Target versus Walmart.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Then consumers will switch to purchasing from Walmart.com at a lower price. Voluntarily paying people more is not a long term solution. The long term solution is to invest in education and help foster environments where people are investing in themselves and are able to be creative and increase the size of the economic pie. But that would require policies that help provide a stable home, and worst of all, redistribution of resources.
Mitchhhs 9y ago
I feel like journalists are just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment. Crazy how fast things can change from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia. Theres way too much noise in every aspect of information these days to help society focus on the problems that actually matter.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  I think the tech companies themselves are doing a fine job of creating anti-tech sentiment on their own.
  - cbHXBY1D 9y ago
    Public sentiment has turned at this point. Tech companies are no longer the intrepid, utopic little guy fighting the good fight -- they are the incumbents. I would bet serious money that one of the hallmarks of the next presidential election is regulation of big tech. The backlash is building. That wave will have some mainstream politicians calling to break up big tech.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia Uber's sexual harassmentpalooza together with Twitter and Facebook's arrogant performances at their respective Congressional hearings did most of the work.
- dj-wonk 9y ago
  You say that journalists are "just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment". You are implying motive here, it appears. On what basis? I view it from this lens: journalists have both a professional code and a desire to have people read what they write. As a result, many journalists want to surprise and even shock people. It doesn't mean what they write is pleasant or what you want to read. There are many other factors in play. For example, cities across the US are scrambling to offer (quite dubious, in my opinion) incentives to Amazon. I really value different perspectives that show the kinds of jobs that Amazon creates. Lastly, I read your last sentence as getting it backwards. It is precisely because of noise that we have to focus on what matters. What you call noise may be someone else's signal. Noise makes it harder to sort through information, that's nothing new. Asking for less journalism in order to get less noise seems backwards. Journalism, to the degree to which it investigates, analyzes, interviews, helps offer different ways of viewing the world. To do so is hardly what I would call noise; rather, good journalism shows researched, sometimes novel perspectives on reality.
dj-wonk 9y ago
Yes, intensively competitive companies like Amazon sometimes press workers hard. Without endorsing nor assigning blame to the company (which faces pressures from globalization and shareholders), there are many potential approaches to the problems: 1. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits. 2. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs. 3. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions) 4. Consumers can vote with their dollars. 5. Investors can vote with their dollars. There are many more variations on these themes. If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.
- gbacon 9y ago
  Consumers’ votes with our dollars is what drives it all and certainly what attracts (5). Consider the effect of (2), (3), and (4) upon the worker at the margin: they will all constrict the number of jobs relative to what it is today. Great for the lucky fewer who get in, but the economist must consider both the seen (higher wages for some) and the unseen (unemployment for others). As to (1), Amazon is at the Walmart end of the market and are driving up affordability; the two go hand-in-hand. Does sufficient demand for a Target or Costco exist? An anecdote, for what it’s worth: the people I knew who drove their trucks several years ago had the opposite view of how they were treated, particularly about being chronically shortchanged on retirement contributions, leave balances, and other accounting matters. Maybe things have changed since then.
- _rpd 9y ago
  Amazon is already working to fully automate these warehouses. Actions that increase the cost of labor will simply accelerate this process.
  - 9y ago
saosebastiao 9y ago
It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis. They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway. At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying double their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Article stated that Amazon warehouse pay was higher than non-warehouse jobs, but lower than comparable warehouse jobs with other companies (at least in the Inland Empire of California). But all the other warehouses already have enough employees to meet their needs, and Amazon is the only one actually hiring. I'm sure all those other warehouses love how Amazon is training up so many employees that can be poached at will.
- titanomachy 9y ago
  Interesting perspective, thanks! I had assumed that this was a deliberate strategy, but maybe it's simple incompetence. With just a touch of malice/avarice to round things out.
deleted 9y ago
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AlexandrB 9y ago
It frequently seems to be the case that when tech companies interact with unskilled labor, the unskilled labor gets a worse deal than they would before the tech economy. See Uber, Amazon, Blue Apron, and many others. In me this inspires a high-level of cynicism. Now when I hear a startup wanting to "change the world" I'm always curious whose underpaid labor is going to subsidize that change. Underneath all the Silicon Valley virtue signalling about improving the state of mankind you see the same gears and levers of labor exploitation as old-school sweatshop manufacturers like Nike. And make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to make the "knowledge workers" at these companies just as expendable.
- crpatino 9y ago
  Right. When we set out to "change the world", we rarely stop and think whose world we'd be changing.
- amarkov 9y ago
  Does Amazon offer a significantly worse deal to its warehouse staff than Walmart? My impression is that it doesn't, so I don't think this is a problem with tech companies specifically.
  - AlexandrB 9y ago
    Probably not [1]. But shouldn't we reach for something better? Really, I'm just upset about my own disillusionment. As a little kid I thought Silicon Valley was going to usher in a new era of technology and plenty. Something like Star Trek's utopian ideal of a society where scarcity is a thing of the past. What I see instead is the same old corporate bullshit of maximum exploitation for maximum profit. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers-fired_n_3787659 http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers...
    - ars 9y ago
      It did. Sort of. Even someone poor has a magic device in his pocket that can show almost any video ever, can talk to anyone, and give directions. People today have never been better off. A poor person today lives better than a king of old. Except that people always compare to each other. And that's never going to change.
deleted 9y ago
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mhneu 9y ago
These Amazon jobs are most useful to think about by comparison. Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week. Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  I think the biggest ones are cheaper transportation to and from areas of the world with lower production costs and drastic increases in automation, both which lower the demand for human labor in the USA (and other developed countries). You can regulate all you want, but it would be better to focus on getting as much of the population ahead of the curve as possible as opposed to leaving them behind. At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, much of the automobile assembly workers, etc.
  - crpatino 9y ago
    I know it is anathema to current globalist ideology, but that is why you want tarifs for. Do Foreighn Ruthless International (FRI) wants to sell his trinkets produced with near-slave labor? Sure, just slap it a 100% tax to it and make it play level with your very own Beautifully Crafted Trinkets, Inc. (BCT) Then, if you are a really enlightened despot, use the extra cash from FRI taxes to build better infrastructure locally, so that BCT can save other costs rather than labor.
  - groby_b 9y ago
    > At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, We keep telling ourselves that, but it's a story. (Presumably so we can feel good about income inequality) A good secretary, or a good travel agent, are amazing. I'd pay good money to have either one available, and so would many other people. All we've done is put that work on people who already have another job, the people who used to be customers of that secretary/travel agent. In the process introducing a middle man who makes money off redistributing work. Yes, that middle man is slightly more efficient - but it can only be more efficient because the hard parts of the work are outsourced to you. The difficult part of booking travel isn't making a flight reservation, it's finding just the right thing. A travel agent was a tremendous help there - you're now doing that yourself. Expedia, Orbitz, etc. are completely useless in that department.
marsrover 9y ago
> “It’s a step back from where we were,” said Pat Morris, the former mayor, about the jobs that Amazon offers. “But it’s a lot better than where we would otherwise be,” he said. That makes complete sense. /s It sounds like where you were was a city without jobs. > San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job? Yes, if you don't have a job then any job is a good job. Sentiments like this article is why people are "too good to work for McDonalds." > The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived. Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? These are meaningless stats. I didn't read the rest.
- danans 9y ago
  > Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? Sure, but probably a very particular type of inflation: housing cost. Wages for unskilled labor haven't increased at a rate to account for rising housing costs, exacerbated further by insufficient housing supply, and demand for housing has gone up due the increased number of jobs. Median household income in San Bernardino is 39k/yr (pretax) [1]. Median rent is 16k/yr [2]. So the median household spends nearly 42% of their pretax income on housing. The other necessary expenses of life (especially if you are far below median income and have dependents) will quickly eat through the rest. There is a dynamic at play in which several factors, including the increase in lower paid jobs and population, is increasing poverty rates. [1] http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernardino http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernar... [2] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/san-bernardino-county/san-bernardino/ https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa... EDIT: found a more conservative median rent citation and updated the figures based on that.
wehadfun 9y ago
I think the best people for jobs like this are those that just want supplemental income. Teenagers, College Kids, Part-time or temp workers.
- _rpd 9y ago
  I think it is pretty clear that we should automate box packing as soon as possible. It is a waste of human talent to have people doing this.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    The problem is, those people need to have jobs.
    - _rpd 9y ago
      Even moving them to quality control or edge case handling is a win. No one is going to miss box packing.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        It's only a win if they don't get laid off or have their paychecks cut. And I'm pretty sure that the people who do it for their job, if they aren't able to find another one, would miss it. Automation can be good, but we can't forget that these are actual people, with rent payments, food bills, and possibly families, that are currently doing these jobs. Blindly following the "Automation is great" mantra, while forgetting about them, is going to be disastrous.
garybro 9y ago
A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech. Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water. I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.
- ianferrel 9y ago
  I worked some hard-labor jobs when I was in college, too. I think a major difference you're overlooking is that in your late teens and early 20s, you can do pretty hard labor without much effect. I'm only in my mid 30s now and when I do a hard day's physical labor, I feel it a lot more. Someone in their 40s or 50s or 60s is going to have a much harder time doing that kind of stuff every day.
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    Right - hard labor is hard. It doesn't paint the full picture to say this is a problem with Amazon or UPS or whatever... The problem really seems to be lack of additional opportunity for people who are unable or unwilling (or not in good enough health) to perform hard labor. The same kind of applies to other low-skilled minimum-wage jobs like food-service. There's not much opportunity, so you find mid-career people doing jobs that only require (and pay) at levels that are appropriate for highschool or college kids. (Not criticizing your comment here just providing my own conclusion to your point)
wehadfun 9y ago
I think the issue may be with poor cities. If a city is poor it should have cheap housing, low utility cost, low taxes. I can't speak to San Bernardino, but one of the issues in Detroit is that they are taxing people like the city is rich
travbrack 9y ago
the time is ripe for the proletariat revolution, comrades.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Your substantive comments have been fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tzs 9y ago
About another company's warehouse: > Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed. I wonder if it would be possible for a group of workers to pay another group of workers to slow down, thus lowering the average speed so that the first group ends up in the rewards group without having to raise their speed?
lerie82 9y ago
San Bernadino is not a poor city.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
I think its time that instead of reporting "what percentage of a made up number of people have jobs", and instead report "salary percentiles". 5% unemployment isn't that great if 50% of the people have a $24k/year job, and if that number is 5% of only 40% of the population because everyone else gave up.
danjoc 9y ago
Amazon Fulfillment centers are cold calling cell phones with employment advertising. That's a $1,500 fine _per call_ under the TCPA. These poor people shouldn't apply to work for pay, they should contact a lawyer and get paid. Amazon is flagrantly breaking the law. Easy money.
RestlessMind 9y ago
Amazon (and other companies) should just leave these ungrateful areas. I mean, San Bernardino should be thanking Amazon but instead they are complaining. Once the big companies threaten to leave and ignite a race to the bottom, these cities will come back crawling on their knees begging for jobs, any jobs. It's not like worker are going to politically unite and retaliate. All (both) the political parties are controlled by 1%. Any popular movement is either squashed (Bernie) or appropriated (Trump) by this moneyed elite. Unions too are successfully stigmatized and restricted legislatively ("right to work"). </s>
aaavl2821 9y ago
I wish the article talked more about what Amazon and other companies can do to better invest in their communities and employees: how they can train employees for advancement, how they can proactively recognize and nurture talent instead of churning and burning through workers, how they support the community to attract better jobs and help more people, etc. it presents unionization as the only solution. I worry that unionization might increase the cost of labor and just push jobs elsewhere. Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?
southphillyman 9y ago
I couldn't help but to think about basic income while reading this article. It seems like the vast majority of people in these Amazon warehouse stories hate working there but really have no other options at the moment. Basic income would allow these individuals to perhaps work at lower paying companies that prioritize worker morale over profitability.
stuaxo 9y ago
You can do one line summaries without reading the article - without reading it the answer will be along the lines of "fucks them".

75 points by clebio 9y ago

Most folks I know seem blissfully unaware or uninterested in these realities behind their next day delivery. Even supremely liberal folks in boston and new york seem to think that complaining that their prime delivery being a day late or poorly packed is reasonable to gripe about, totally ignoring the human cost behind such offerings.

usaphp 9y ago
Customer is paying for a service that was promised to him and it’s reasonable to complain that the service was not provided.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  Yeah when I order atheist books they are beat up with no padding in the box half the time. Replace those humans with robots please.
- MrFoof 9y ago
  This. This is what customer service is about -- taking care of the customer when things go badly. In the span of five weeks, Amazon had A) "lost" two packages (in reality, they were shipped to the wrong distribution center and weren't rerouted), B) were two days later on one, C) four days late on another, and D) EIGHT days late on the fifth. For every single one, I contacted customer support and complained. As performance got worse, I actually got on the phone. * The first time I was comped a month of prime. $8. * The second time I was comped $20 in Amazon credit, and they reshipped the package ($55 in goods). I was told if the other one showed up, to keep both. The other one showed up the next week. * Third time I was comped a month of prime ($8) and package was reshipped. This was $160 in electronics. I was told if the other showed up, to keep both. The second one showed up 2 weeks later. * The fourth time I called I asked why I was paying for prime. After 10 minutes, the rep agreed. They refunded my entire year of prime ($100). * Fifth time they didn't care. They admitted their performance was awful, and were confused how their logistics operation was doing so poorly, but if I didn't like the service I should go elsewhere. To their credit, I was compensated $351 for five failures in five weeks, all of which were not in peak season (this was 60 days in advance of Holiday shopping season).
sildur 9y ago
They should replace workers with robots. That would remove the human cost.
- kbos87 9y ago
  The robots will come for you sooner or later too.
  - sildur 9y ago
    Nice, I have a big pile of clothes to iron. They couldn't come soon enough.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Why do you feel these workers are not entitled to basic human dignity and respect? Why is it that any time the workers try to get some piece of the massive prosperity that they've contributed to building, they get threatened with automation? Why should they not share in the rewards for the company they helped to make prosperous?
clebio 9y ago
I posted this article, and I purchase from Amazon often. I'm not blissful, nor unaware. But it's sort of all-or-none, right? Like the workers in these towns who either work for Amazon (or its contractors), or don't work at all, I can't order anything from Amazon at all without aiding this system. What I mean is, there isn't some sort of ethical slow-lane when I go to checkout on amazon.com, right? There _is_ slow, free (non-prime) shipping, but anecdotally, that's not serviced via a separate pipeline anymore. I don't _mind_ waiting 5-8 days, I don't _complain_ about the shipping delays. But choosing free shipping also isn't any sort of boon to social justice. I could certainly just stop shopping from amazon.com, and buy locally (though still from big box stores, often, since that's locally the only options left). But I don't harbor illusions that my conscientious abstention will register on Bezos' balance sheets. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a fix. Certainly not an obvious one, nor easy. As the article discusses, cities _need_ the business, at least for the initial few years. And people _need_ jobs. Structurally, though, what are we as simultaneously consumers, citizens (voters), and people in the workforce going to do? The article discusses attempts to unionize. It discusses cities' attempts to lure Amazon business. It discusses what hard-working people with families do, and think, about the situation on the ground. It even gives responses from Amazon PR. The solutions are subtle, hard to enact, and slow to take effect.

refurb 9y ago

Sure, Amazon fulfillment center jobs might not be high-paying, middle class jobs, but what's the alternative for these areas? High unemployment and stagnation?

lotsofpulp 9y ago
I almost consider it clickbait. The writer even states that there's no other option than Amazon in these regions, and obviously the lack of other employers offering more simply means that the real problem is lack of demand for the types of work that the people in these communities can demand a living wage for.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dj-wonk 9y ago
  A serious issue lacking a clear solution does not clickbait make. (There are plenty of other pieces of content that deserve the clickbait title.)
krapp 9y ago
There is a middle ground between "barely subsistence wages" and "high-paying, middle class wages" that Amazon could meet, and still be profitable.
- gbacon 9y ago
  The beauty of the market is a legitimate complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. Think: Target versus Walmart.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Then consumers will switch to purchasing from Walmart.com at a lower price. Voluntarily paying people more is not a long term solution. The long term solution is to invest in education and help foster environments where people are investing in themselves and are able to be creative and increase the size of the economic pie. But that would require policies that help provide a stable home, and worst of all, redistribution of resources.

Mitchhhs 9y ago

I feel like journalists are just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment. Crazy how fast things can change from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia. Theres way too much noise in every aspect of information these days to help society focus on the problems that actually matter.

nkrisc 9y ago
I think the tech companies themselves are doing a fine job of creating anti-tech sentiment on their own.
- cbHXBY1D 9y ago
  Public sentiment has turned at this point. Tech companies are no longer the intrepid, utopic little guy fighting the good fight -- they are the incumbents. I would bet serious money that one of the hallmarks of the next presidential election is regulation of big tech. The backlash is building. That wave will have some mainstream politicians calling to break up big tech.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> from all hail the tech titans to oh these tech companies are creating a dystopia Uber's sexual harassmentpalooza together with Twitter and Facebook's arrogant performances at their respective Congressional hearings did most of the work.
dj-wonk 9y ago
You say that journalists are "just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment". You are implying motive here, it appears. On what basis? I view it from this lens: journalists have both a professional code and a desire to have people read what they write. As a result, many journalists want to surprise and even shock people. It doesn't mean what they write is pleasant or what you want to read. There are many other factors in play. For example, cities across the US are scrambling to offer (quite dubious, in my opinion) incentives to Amazon. I really value different perspectives that show the kinds of jobs that Amazon creates. Lastly, I read your last sentence as getting it backwards. It is precisely because of noise that we have to focus on what matters. What you call noise may be someone else's signal. Noise makes it harder to sort through information, that's nothing new. Asking for less journalism in order to get less noise seems backwards. Journalism, to the degree to which it investigates, analyzes, interviews, helps offer different ways of viewing the world. To do so is hardly what I would call noise; rather, good journalism shows researched, sometimes novel perspectives on reality.

dj-wonk 9y ago

Yes, intensively competitive companies like Amazon sometimes press workers hard. Without endorsing nor assigning blame to the company (which faces pressures from globalization and shareholders), there are many potential approaches to the problems: 1. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits. 2. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs. 3. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions) 4. Consumers can vote with their dollars. 5. Investors can vote with their dollars. There are many more variations on these themes. If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.

gbacon 9y ago
Consumers’ votes with our dollars is what drives it all and certainly what attracts (5). Consider the effect of (2), (3), and (4) upon the worker at the margin: they will all constrict the number of jobs relative to what it is today. Great for the lucky fewer who get in, but the economist must consider both the seen (higher wages for some) and the unseen (unemployment for others). As to (1), Amazon is at the Walmart end of the market and are driving up affordability; the two go hand-in-hand. Does sufficient demand for a Target or Costco exist? An anecdote, for what it’s worth: the people I knew who drove their trucks several years ago had the opposite view of how they were treated, particularly about being chronically shortchanged on retirement contributions, leave balances, and other accounting matters. Maybe things have changed since then.
_rpd 9y ago
Amazon is already working to fully automate these warehouses. Actions that increase the cost of labor will simply accelerate this process.
- 9y ago

saosebastiao 9y ago

It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis. They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway. At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying double their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Article stated that Amazon warehouse pay was higher than non-warehouse jobs, but lower than comparable warehouse jobs with other companies (at least in the Inland Empire of California). But all the other warehouses already have enough employees to meet their needs, and Amazon is the only one actually hiring. I'm sure all those other warehouses love how Amazon is training up so many employees that can be poached at will.
titanomachy 9y ago
Interesting perspective, thanks! I had assumed that this was a deliberate strategy, but maybe it's simple incompetence. With just a touch of malice/avarice to round things out.

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AlexandrB 9y ago

It frequently seems to be the case that when tech companies interact with unskilled labor, the unskilled labor gets a worse deal than they would before the tech economy. See Uber, Amazon, Blue Apron, and many others. In me this inspires a high-level of cynicism. Now when I hear a startup wanting to "change the world" I'm always curious whose underpaid labor is going to subsidize that change. Underneath all the Silicon Valley virtue signalling about improving the state of mankind you see the same gears and levers of labor exploitation as old-school sweatshop manufacturers like Nike. And make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to make the "knowledge workers" at these companies just as expendable.

crpatino 9y ago
Right. When we set out to "change the world", we rarely stop and think whose world we'd be changing.
amarkov 9y ago
Does Amazon offer a significantly worse deal to its warehouse staff than Walmart? My impression is that it doesn't, so I don't think this is a problem with tech companies specifically.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  Probably not [1]. But shouldn't we reach for something better? Really, I'm just upset about my own disillusionment. As a little kid I thought Silicon Valley was going to usher in a new era of technology and plenty. Something like Star Trek's utopian ideal of a society where scarcity is a thing of the past. What I see instead is the same old corporate bullshit of maximum exploitation for maximum profit. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers-fired_n_3787659 http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers...
  - ars 9y ago
    It did. Sort of. Even someone poor has a magic device in his pocket that can show almost any video ever, can talk to anyone, and give directions. People today have never been better off. A poor person today lives better than a king of old. Except that people always compare to each other. And that's never going to change.

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mhneu 9y ago

These Amazon jobs are most useful to think about by comparison. Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week. Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.

lotsofpulp 9y ago
I think the biggest ones are cheaper transportation to and from areas of the world with lower production costs and drastic increases in automation, both which lower the demand for human labor in the USA (and other developed countries). You can regulate all you want, but it would be better to focus on getting as much of the population ahead of the curve as possible as opposed to leaving them behind. At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, much of the automobile assembly workers, etc.
- crpatino 9y ago
  I know it is anathema to current globalist ideology, but that is why you want tarifs for. Do Foreighn Ruthless International (FRI) wants to sell his trinkets produced with near-slave labor? Sure, just slap it a 100% tax to it and make it play level with your very own Beautifully Crafted Trinkets, Inc. (BCT) Then, if you are a really enlightened despot, use the extra cash from FRI taxes to build better infrastructure locally, so that BCT can save other costs rather than labor.
- groby_b 9y ago
  > At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, We keep telling ourselves that, but it's a story. (Presumably so we can feel good about income inequality) A good secretary, or a good travel agent, are amazing. I'd pay good money to have either one available, and so would many other people. All we've done is put that work on people who already have another job, the people who used to be customers of that secretary/travel agent. In the process introducing a middle man who makes money off redistributing work. Yes, that middle man is slightly more efficient - but it can only be more efficient because the hard parts of the work are outsourced to you. The difficult part of booking travel isn't making a flight reservation, it's finding just the right thing. A travel agent was a tremendous help there - you're now doing that yourself. Expedia, Orbitz, etc. are completely useless in that department.

marsrover 9y ago

> “It’s a step back from where we were,” said Pat Morris, the former mayor, about the jobs that Amazon offers. “But it’s a lot better than where we would otherwise be,” he said. That makes complete sense. /s It sounds like where you were was a city without jobs. > San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job? Yes, if you don't have a job then any job is a good job. Sentiments like this article is why people are "too good to work for McDonalds." > The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived. Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? These are meaningless stats. I didn't read the rest.

danans 9y ago
> Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? Sure, but probably a very particular type of inflation: housing cost. Wages for unskilled labor haven't increased at a rate to account for rising housing costs, exacerbated further by insufficient housing supply, and demand for housing has gone up due the increased number of jobs. Median household income in San Bernardino is 39k/yr (pretax) [1]. Median rent is 16k/yr [2]. So the median household spends nearly 42% of their pretax income on housing. The other necessary expenses of life (especially if you are far below median income and have dependents) will quickly eat through the rest. There is a dynamic at play in which several factors, including the increase in lower paid jobs and population, is increasing poverty rates. [1] http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernardino http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernar... [2] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/san-bernardino-county/san-bernardino/ https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa... EDIT: found a more conservative median rent citation and updated the figures based on that.

wehadfun 9y ago

I think the best people for jobs like this are those that just want supplemental income. Teenagers, College Kids, Part-time or temp workers.

_rpd 9y ago
I think it is pretty clear that we should automate box packing as soon as possible. It is a waste of human talent to have people doing this.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  The problem is, those people need to have jobs.
  - _rpd 9y ago
    Even moving them to quality control or edge case handling is a win. No one is going to miss box packing.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      It's only a win if they don't get laid off or have their paychecks cut. And I'm pretty sure that the people who do it for their job, if they aren't able to find another one, would miss it. Automation can be good, but we can't forget that these are actual people, with rent payments, food bills, and possibly families, that are currently doing these jobs. Blindly following the "Automation is great" mantra, while forgetting about them, is going to be disastrous.

garybro 9y ago

A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech. Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water. I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.

ianferrel 9y ago
I worked some hard-labor jobs when I was in college, too. I think a major difference you're overlooking is that in your late teens and early 20s, you can do pretty hard labor without much effect. I'm only in my mid 30s now and when I do a hard day's physical labor, I feel it a lot more. Someone in their 40s or 50s or 60s is going to have a much harder time doing that kind of stuff every day.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  Right - hard labor is hard. It doesn't paint the full picture to say this is a problem with Amazon or UPS or whatever... The problem really seems to be lack of additional opportunity for people who are unable or unwilling (or not in good enough health) to perform hard labor. The same kind of applies to other low-skilled minimum-wage jobs like food-service. There's not much opportunity, so you find mid-career people doing jobs that only require (and pay) at levels that are appropriate for highschool or college kids. (Not criticizing your comment here just providing my own conclusion to your point)

wehadfun 9y ago

I think the issue may be with poor cities. If a city is poor it should have cheap housing, low utility cost, low taxes. I can't speak to San Bernardino, but one of the issues in Detroit is that they are taxing people like the city is rich

travbrack 9y ago

the time is ripe for the proletariat revolution, comrades.

dang 9y ago
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Your substantive comments have been fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tzs 9y ago

About another company's warehouse: > Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed. I wonder if it would be possible for a group of workers to pay another group of workers to slow down, thus lowering the average speed so that the first group ends up in the rewards group without having to raise their speed?

lerie82 9y ago

San Bernadino is not a poor city.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

I think its time that instead of reporting "what percentage of a made up number of people have jobs", and instead report "salary percentiles". 5% unemployment isn't that great if 50% of the people have a $24k/year job, and if that number is 5% of only 40% of the population because everyone else gave up.

danjoc 9y ago

Amazon Fulfillment centers are cold calling cell phones with employment advertising. That's a $1,500 fine _per call_ under the TCPA. These poor people shouldn't apply to work for pay, they should contact a lawyer and get paid. Amazon is flagrantly breaking the law. Easy money.

RestlessMind 9y ago

Amazon (and other companies) should just leave these ungrateful areas. I mean, San Bernardino should be thanking Amazon but instead they are complaining. Once the big companies threaten to leave and ignite a race to the bottom, these cities will come back crawling on their knees begging for jobs, any jobs. It's not like worker are going to politically unite and retaliate. All (both) the political parties are controlled by 1%. Any popular movement is either squashed (Bernie) or appropriated (Trump) by this moneyed elite. Unions too are successfully stigmatized and restricted legislatively ("right to work"). </s>

aaavl2821 9y ago

I wish the article talked more about what Amazon and other companies can do to better invest in their communities and employees: how they can train employees for advancement, how they can proactively recognize and nurture talent instead of churning and burning through workers, how they support the community to attract better jobs and help more people, etc. it presents unionization as the only solution. I worry that unionization might increase the cost of labor and just push jobs elsewhere. Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?

southphillyman 9y ago

I couldn't help but to think about basic income while reading this article. It seems like the vast majority of people in these Amazon warehouse stories hate working there but really have no other options at the moment. Basic income would allow these individuals to perhaps work at lower paying companies that prioritize worker morale over profitability.

stuaxo 9y ago

You can do one line summaries without reading the article - without reading it the answer will be along the lines of "fucks them".