7 ms·

Boycotting Amazon

87 points by phelm 8y ago

arbitrage 8y ago
There's a big difference between boycotting Nike, and boycotting Amazon. In the case of Nike, there were more than enough substitute goods to fill the gap for a consumer choosing to not purchase athletic gear from Nike. How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?
- ernesth 8y ago
  > Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. I find Amazon to be very bad on ease of the process/quickness of delivery/price: Their dark patterns to sell prime subscription. Their hiding the delivery cost. Their asking and storing credit card before telling you the final price. Their 8 (yes eight) screens buying process! Any other web-merchant is better than Amazon if you are not already an Amazon client.
- MrLeap 8y ago
  Wont/cant are indistinguishable when you really don't want to do something. I'm no moral crusader, but I very rarely use Amazon. In the last 12 months I've ordered 2 things, a jeweler kit and a charger. If I were trying to affect a boycott I could have last year easily! I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who has tethered their life to an online shopping experience. Maybe THAT is who buy Amazon Echos.
  - deegles 8y ago
    >I very rarely use Amazon It's interesting to think about... the extreme would be to stop visiting websites hosted on AWS.
    - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
      Precisely. I would probably have a much easier time avoiding Amazon.com than I would, say, IMDB (owned by Amazon) or The Washington post (owned by Bezos).
- davidhyde 8y ago
  The thing that worked for me was to not renew my Prime membership. It then became much easier to force myself to use something like eBay. It's really difficult to wait those 5 extra days for shipping but makes me feel a little better nonetheless. For cloud I use Azure.
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    And if you absolutely need something within two days, USPS Priority mail comes within that time frame (though may be prohibitively expensive for large packages).
  - HillaryBriss 8y ago
    Also, for those who have one: cancel the Amazon Rewards credit card.
- Jacqued 8y ago
  Most of the time you can just buy the same thing in another place. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Europe I don't find Amazon better or faster than any random e-commerce website, so it's pretty trivial to boycott them. In fact, I do avoid buying from them as I don't like the way they treat their employees.
  - Fifer82 8y ago
    I get the impression Amazon are much "bigger" in the states. Size, reach, marketing? Not sure. I don't particularly find Amazon UK very user friendly and very rarely if ever do they have the cheapest price so I don't find myself there often. I also consider them a bit dirty for the same reason as you as I know employees and they are treated like garbage. Maybe not in head office, but certainly in distribution.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Nearly always Amazon is more expensive for whatever I want to buy. Yet nearly everyone I meet assures me amazon is usually cheapest. I feel like the general population never checks Ebay or Aliexpress.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that? Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death! You can choose to boycott these companies and potentially suffer certain inconveniences that, ultimately, are not much of a big deal.
- nkrisc 8y ago
  I've stopped buying from Amazon because of counterfeit goods being commingled with legitimate inventory. Their process used to be uniquely easy and fast, but that's no longer the case. Buying from nearly any large online retailer is just as easy and fast these days. Believe it or not, my life did not collapse when I stopped buying from Amazon.
  - megaman22 8y ago
    People complain about this constantly, but I look at my experiences with Amazon, and I have to wonder what they are buying that they have things that can be counterfeited so easily. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon, and have never received anything fake.
    - nkrisc 8y ago
      It can be anything, really. Look at the reviews for items. Sometimes you'll notice an item has great, 5-star reviews and about 10% are terrible 1-star reviews. If you read through those 1-star reviews you might notice that sometimes there's a trend of the reviewer discovering they received a fake. How widespread is the problem in reality? I have no idea. But given that I can simply shop elsewhere, get a similar experience, and feel more certain that I'm not receiving a counterfeit, I'll do just that. I'm a consumer, not an analyst. If I think that I might receive a counterfeit from Amazon I'll just shop elsewhere, I have bigger things to worry about.
amelius 8y ago
Everybody is talking about a decentralized Facebook alternative, but can't we build "federated shopping", where independent shop owners join in an Amazon-like shopping experience (for the customer), with reviews based on proof-of-purchase, using smart contracts/blockchain technology?
- TsomArp 8y ago
  Isn't that a little like ebay or aliexpress?
  - amelius 8y ago
    Those are companies. This is about a federated/decentralized approach. Amazon uses a lot of third-party sellers, so in a way Amazon is more like EBay.
- ebiester 8y ago
  What does blockchain add to this?
  - ameen 8y ago
    Investor interest.
  - jamra 8y ago
    You can prove that your reviewer is the same person as the person who paid with blockchain. I'm just not sure how to do so if the customer pays with traditional means.
    - ebiester 8y ago
      That has an interesting side effect. If someone writes enough bad reviews, will people stop selling to them? We saw VE electronics refuse to sell anything else to anyone who gave them a bad review on any product. Would vendors band together on this?
cryptoz 8y ago
Why does an article about boycotting Amazon try to convince you to share their content directly to Amazon's servers? Seems to me like the author does not believe in this mission one bit and is just writing clickbait. Author, if you're reading this, you ought to live by your words and reduce at least your Amazon supporting activities in the very article you are complaining about their doninance in. Remove that Reddit share icon and everything eles that sends data to Amazon, or we'll all assume you don't care about this, you're just in it for the money and the fame and the clicks. With that Reddit share button, you make it clear you want us to use Amazon a lot to spread your content far and wide. Can't have it both ways.
- MrLeap 8y ago
  Oskar Schindler is the only Nazi buried on top of Mount Zion. What happened in the 73 years since ww2 that now prevents us from having it both ways?
- jhasse 8y ago
  I guess not the whole team at thenextweb.com shares this author's opinion.
- TomAnthony 8y ago
  TNW is a well respected and well established tech news site with a large team [0]. The author likely doesn't have direct control over the sharing buttons. I take your point, but on the other hand it is probably quite difficult to be aware of all sites that use AWS, especially if they sit behind a CDN. I didn't know Reddit use AWS. [0] https://thenextweb.com/team/ https://thenextweb.com/team/
falcolas 8y ago
So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size. Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue. Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for poor working conditions in another section of the company.
- whistlerbrk 8y ago
  > AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    Inaccurate wording on my part. AWS is amazon's primary source of "operational income" (i.e. raw revenue minus operational costs) these days. $1.17 billion for AWS vs. $0.35 billion for Amazon as a whole, for Q3 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-2017.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-...
    - whistlerbrk 8y ago
      I see, I see. Thank you for clarifying.
  - lcampbell 8y ago
    Just pulled up their filings[1], and I'm almost certainly misreading it, but in Q3 2017: NA Retail Revenue: $25,446M NA Retail Profit: $ 112M AWS Revenue: $ 4,584M AWS Profit: $ 1,171M Pedantically, it seems like AWS is not Amazon's primary source of revenue, but is the primary source of profit. -- [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417000135/amzn-20170930x10q.htm#s9803893EE6E85280BF90A9096FC1D468 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...
auntad 8y ago
"The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their breath. Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide." While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship. Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?
- kobrad 8y ago
  I'd say slavery is not a new problem. It's nice that we have different names for it, and nice rationalizations, but the problem is really old.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > slavery Hyperbole much? Note that the article is talking about the UK, a country with very extensive (and expensive) social benefits system - so if these workers didn't want to work, they could simply choose not to, and still survive just fine. That's in no way comparable to slavery.
    - chimprich 8y ago
      You can't just choose not to work in the UK. If you resign from a job without good reason, you can have benefits stopped for 6 months. You probably can't survive for 6 months without food. In practice you might be able to get reduced some form of benefits but I don't think it's guaranteed. The term "slavery" might be hyperbole (you are paid, after all) but you might not have much choice about working.
      - tomp 8y ago
        The article implies it's easy to get fired, so no need to resign...
c2h5oh 8y ago
No, it's time to have labour laws making what's happening in Amazon warehouses too costly due to fines to continue.
- reacweb 8y ago
  We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a deterministic algorithm.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable No, that's not evidence of malfunction. If the outcome is predictable, there is no reason to have a trial, and you'd expect a settlement without trial, which is exactly what happens in most cases, civil or criminal. The only reason for the cost and expense of a trial is an unpredictable outcome.
  - notyourwork 8y ago
    I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt. It's like software, in that incremental changes are safer and ground-up rewrites are usually disastrous failures engineered by people who failed to fully understand the complexity of the application domain. OTOH, I'm not sure a “refactor” is a meaningful concept for the legal system. Oh, sure, you can hold requirements and expected outcomes the same and change the details, structure, and organization of legal code. “Refactors” of that kind happen all the time. They aren't as significant in impact as with software, because the code isn't imperative and doesn't run on dumb machines, so refactors are mostly about readability, and don't (e.g.) improve runtime resource usage significantly.
mcfrankline 8y ago
Well I guess anytime the Internet has a problem these days, we are either going to delete the problem or boycott it into oblivion. If you look deeply into any giant Corp or business serving millions of people you’re going to find faults and deficiencies like this every time. Follow the production Chain of Apple, Google, Tesla etc etc you’re going to find someone at the deep end bearing the entire cost of their success. So what happens now ? Assuming everyone boycotted Amazon and the unlikely event occurred and it shut down. What next? Tens of thousands of those works go home to what? Does the editor then start another campaign to employ all the people laid off? Think they’d be working there if they had a lot more options? How about trying to fix the problem or at least fix as much as humanly possible? How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? How about the government? Isn’t that what they’re there for? Do we have to resort to Social justice for everything now ? Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. See Equifax, See Facebook ?
- ukulele 8y ago
  > How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians. > Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line, which is what they ultimately care about.
  - didibus 8y ago
    Did Nike stop employing child labor for real? I thought people just stopped talking about it.
  - not_kurt_godel 8y ago
    > I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians. Relying on politicians is hard in the short term, but regulatory policy fixes the problem more or less permanently in an accountable, democratic, and globally applicable (in a national context) way. If we as a society believe what Amazon is doing is fundamentally wrong, why not prohibit legally rather than rely on an ad-hoc solution that will probably be circumvented once attention fades away?
discreditable 8y ago
This isn't just an Amazon problem. I've got a friend who worked at Wal-mart for a while. They give points against you for taking sick days no matter how bad it is. One time she got sent home for having some poison ivy on her arms and was still punished for it. Workers who have high points, but not so many to get fired get their schedules screwed with until they quit.
- test6554 8y ago
  I mean if you are in the top 90th percentile nationally for taking sick days, then working you into the schedule would probably be a nightmare for managers. By reducing your hours, they are reducing the scheduling work that managers need to do. Also, It's likely expected that every employee has some points, but taking way more than everyone else is what this type of system is likely designed to catch.
  - discreditable 8y ago
    It's not just reducing hours. For example you might start getting rotated around different shifts. They'll make your schedule as irregular as possible to encourage you to accrue points or quit. My friend saw this happen to several coworkers in her two years there. Towards the end her direct manager even asked her why she hadn't quit yet.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
Even without a boycott movement, we may already have reached peak Amazon. This year, the Supreme Court may create a revolution in the ability of US states to tax consumer purchases from online retailers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#...). This could erode Amazon's online retail profitability enough to seriously slow its ever-increasing sales volume and give the competition enough breathing room to survive and even grow a bit. And Trump keeps complaining about the prices the USPS receives to deliver Amazon. Whether or not there's any merit in Trump's complaint, as a convenient piece of political theater, this cause could easily be picked up by the next president and renegotiated. It would be a crowd pleaser for someone like Elizabeth Warren. Perhaps the playing field will be tilted just enough to slow the whole Amazon machine.
- ikeboy 8y ago
  Amazon already charges tax on all 1p purchases, changes in that law wouldn't hurt them much.
  - HillaryBriss 8y ago
    But what about all the small retailers that do business under the Amazon umbrella? Somehow, a lot of those little businesses still do not charge sales tax. A significant fraction of Amazon's sales are those little retailers.
- dwyerm 8y ago
  Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor. Collecting taxes is difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of variables depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying. Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World. There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.
  - portmanteaufu 8y ago
sigsergv 8y ago
Boycott isn't a solution, proper media coverage is. Nike was damaged not by boycott campaign but by a massive media outbreak. Just image effect of good documentary film created by some famous talented director. It's much much worse for reputation than disorganized boycott campaign.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Boycotts are, among other things, tactics to get media (and thereby public) attention. Saying a result. wasn't produced by a boycott because it required media attention which was in significant part drawn by the boycott, which had drawing such attention as a goal, is, well, missing the point of active protest entirely.
drinchev 8y ago
I always wondered why Amazon doesn't have some labor union which at least negotiates normal working conditions. Boycotting usually doesn't have the same effect as a 2-days strike.
- danirod 8y ago
  They seem to have an union at least here in Spain, and maybe in other countries as well. Last month, workers at a local Amazon ware house in Madrid did a 2-day strike, which was pushed by a national workers union as a complain on the working conditions [1]. I've been out of the loop on news so I don't know how things are going since then. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-amazon-workers-call-two-day-strike-over-wages-rights-idUSKCN1GP13L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-a...
apple4ever 8y ago
No

87 points by phelm 8y ago

There's a big difference between boycotting Nike, and boycotting Amazon. In the case of Nike, there were more than enough substitute goods to fill the gap for a consumer choosing to not purchase athletic gear from Nike. How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?

ernesth 8y ago
> Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. I find Amazon to be very bad on ease of the process/quickness of delivery/price: Their dark patterns to sell prime subscription. Their hiding the delivery cost. Their asking and storing credit card before telling you the final price. Their 8 (yes eight) screens buying process! Any other web-merchant is better than Amazon if you are not already an Amazon client.
MrLeap 8y ago
Wont/cant are indistinguishable when you really don't want to do something. I'm no moral crusader, but I very rarely use Amazon. In the last 12 months I've ordered 2 things, a jeweler kit and a charger. If I were trying to affect a boycott I could have last year easily! I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who has tethered their life to an online shopping experience. Maybe THAT is who buy Amazon Echos.
- deegles 8y ago
  >I very rarely use Amazon It's interesting to think about... the extreme would be to stop visiting websites hosted on AWS.
  - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
    Precisely. I would probably have a much easier time avoiding Amazon.com than I would, say, IMDB (owned by Amazon) or The Washington post (owned by Bezos).
davidhyde 8y ago
The thing that worked for me was to not renew my Prime membership. It then became much easier to force myself to use something like eBay. It's really difficult to wait those 5 extra days for shipping but makes me feel a little better nonetheless. For cloud I use Azure.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  And if you absolutely need something within two days, USPS Priority mail comes within that time frame (though may be prohibitively expensive for large packages).
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  Also, for those who have one: cancel the Amazon Rewards credit card.
Jacqued 8y ago
Most of the time you can just buy the same thing in another place. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Europe I don't find Amazon better or faster than any random e-commerce website, so it's pretty trivial to boycott them. In fact, I do avoid buying from them as I don't like the way they treat their employees.
- Fifer82 8y ago
  I get the impression Amazon are much "bigger" in the states. Size, reach, marketing? Not sure. I don't particularly find Amazon UK very user friendly and very rarely if ever do they have the cheapest price so I don't find myself there often. I also consider them a bit dirty for the same reason as you as I know employees and they are treated like garbage. Maybe not in head office, but certainly in distribution.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Nearly always Amazon is more expensive for whatever I want to buy. Yet nearly everyone I meet assures me amazon is usually cheapest. I feel like the general population never checks Ebay or Aliexpress.
mieseratte 8y ago
> How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that? Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death! You can choose to boycott these companies and potentially suffer certain inconveniences that, ultimately, are not much of a big deal.
nkrisc 8y ago
I've stopped buying from Amazon because of counterfeit goods being commingled with legitimate inventory. Their process used to be uniquely easy and fast, but that's no longer the case. Buying from nearly any large online retailer is just as easy and fast these days. Believe it or not, my life did not collapse when I stopped buying from Amazon.
- megaman22 8y ago
  People complain about this constantly, but I look at my experiences with Amazon, and I have to wonder what they are buying that they have things that can be counterfeited so easily. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon, and have never received anything fake.
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    It can be anything, really. Look at the reviews for items. Sometimes you'll notice an item has great, 5-star reviews and about 10% are terrible 1-star reviews. If you read through those 1-star reviews you might notice that sometimes there's a trend of the reviewer discovering they received a fake. How widespread is the problem in reality? I have no idea. But given that I can simply shop elsewhere, get a similar experience, and feel more certain that I'm not receiving a counterfeit, I'll do just that. I'm a consumer, not an analyst. If I think that I might receive a counterfeit from Amazon I'll just shop elsewhere, I have bigger things to worry about.

amelius 8y ago

Everybody is talking about a decentralized Facebook alternative, but can't we build "federated shopping", where independent shop owners join in an Amazon-like shopping experience (for the customer), with reviews based on proof-of-purchase, using smart contracts/blockchain technology?

TsomArp 8y ago
Isn't that a little like ebay or aliexpress?
- amelius 8y ago
  Those are companies. This is about a federated/decentralized approach. Amazon uses a lot of third-party sellers, so in a way Amazon is more like EBay.
ebiester 8y ago
What does blockchain add to this?
- ameen 8y ago
  Investor interest.
- jamra 8y ago
  You can prove that your reviewer is the same person as the person who paid with blockchain. I'm just not sure how to do so if the customer pays with traditional means.
  - ebiester 8y ago
    That has an interesting side effect. If someone writes enough bad reviews, will people stop selling to them? We saw VE electronics refuse to sell anything else to anyone who gave them a bad review on any product. Would vendors band together on this?

cryptoz 8y ago

Why does an article about boycotting Amazon try to convince you to share their content directly to Amazon's servers? Seems to me like the author does not believe in this mission one bit and is just writing clickbait. Author, if you're reading this, you ought to live by your words and reduce at least your Amazon supporting activities in the very article you are complaining about their doninance in. Remove that Reddit share icon and everything eles that sends data to Amazon, or we'll all assume you don't care about this, you're just in it for the money and the fame and the clicks. With that Reddit share button, you make it clear you want us to use Amazon a lot to spread your content far and wide. Can't have it both ways.

MrLeap 8y ago
Oskar Schindler is the only Nazi buried on top of Mount Zion. What happened in the 73 years since ww2 that now prevents us from having it both ways?
jhasse 8y ago
I guess not the whole team at thenextweb.com shares this author's opinion.
TomAnthony 8y ago
TNW is a well respected and well established tech news site with a large team [0]. The author likely doesn't have direct control over the sharing buttons. I take your point, but on the other hand it is probably quite difficult to be aware of all sites that use AWS, especially if they sit behind a CDN. I didn't know Reddit use AWS. [0] https://thenextweb.com/team/ https://thenextweb.com/team/

falcolas 8y ago

So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size. Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue. Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for poor working conditions in another section of the company.

whistlerbrk 8y ago
> AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.
- falcolas 8y ago
  Inaccurate wording on my part. AWS is amazon's primary source of "operational income" (i.e. raw revenue minus operational costs) these days. $1.17 billion for AWS vs. $0.35 billion for Amazon as a whole, for Q3 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-2017.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-...
  - whistlerbrk 8y ago
    I see, I see. Thank you for clarifying.
- lcampbell 8y ago
  Just pulled up their filings[1], and I'm almost certainly misreading it, but in Q3 2017: NA Retail Revenue: $25,446M NA Retail Profit: $ 112M AWS Revenue: $ 4,584M AWS Profit: $ 1,171M Pedantically, it seems like AWS is not Amazon's primary source of revenue, but is the primary source of profit. -- [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417000135/amzn-20170930x10q.htm#s9803893EE6E85280BF90A9096FC1D468 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...

auntad 8y ago

"The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their breath. Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide." While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship. Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?

kobrad 8y ago
I'd say slavery is not a new problem. It's nice that we have different names for it, and nice rationalizations, but the problem is really old.
- tomp 8y ago
  > slavery Hyperbole much? Note that the article is talking about the UK, a country with very extensive (and expensive) social benefits system - so if these workers didn't want to work, they could simply choose not to, and still survive just fine. That's in no way comparable to slavery.
  - chimprich 8y ago
    You can't just choose not to work in the UK. If you resign from a job without good reason, you can have benefits stopped for 6 months. You probably can't survive for 6 months without food. In practice you might be able to get reduced some form of benefits but I don't think it's guaranteed. The term "slavery" might be hyperbole (you are paid, after all) but you might not have much choice about working.
    - tomp 8y ago
      The article implies it's easy to get fired, so no need to resign...

c2h5oh 8y ago

No, it's time to have labour laws making what's happening in Amazon warehouses too costly due to fines to continue.

reacweb 8y ago
We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a deterministic algorithm.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable No, that's not evidence of malfunction. If the outcome is predictable, there is no reason to have a trial, and you'd expect a settlement without trial, which is exactly what happens in most cases, civil or criminal. The only reason for the cost and expense of a trial is an unpredictable outcome.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt. It's like software, in that incremental changes are safer and ground-up rewrites are usually disastrous failures engineered by people who failed to fully understand the complexity of the application domain. OTOH, I'm not sure a “refactor” is a meaningful concept for the legal system. Oh, sure, you can hold requirements and expected outcomes the same and change the details, structure, and organization of legal code. “Refactors” of that kind happen all the time. They aren't as significant in impact as with software, because the code isn't imperative and doesn't run on dumb machines, so refactors are mostly about readability, and don't (e.g.) improve runtime resource usage significantly.

mcfrankline 8y ago

Well I guess anytime the Internet has a problem these days, we are either going to delete the problem or boycott it into oblivion. If you look deeply into any giant Corp or business serving millions of people you’re going to find faults and deficiencies like this every time. Follow the production Chain of Apple, Google, Tesla etc etc you’re going to find someone at the deep end bearing the entire cost of their success. So what happens now ? Assuming everyone boycotted Amazon and the unlikely event occurred and it shut down. What next? Tens of thousands of those works go home to what? Does the editor then start another campaign to employ all the people laid off? Think they’d be working there if they had a lot more options? How about trying to fix the problem or at least fix as much as humanly possible? How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? How about the government? Isn’t that what they’re there for? Do we have to resort to Social justice for everything now ? Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. See Equifax, See Facebook ?

ukulele 8y ago
> How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians. > Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line, which is what they ultimately care about.
- didibus 8y ago
  Did Nike stop employing child labor for real? I thought people just stopped talking about it.
- not_kurt_godel 8y ago
  > I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians. Relying on politicians is hard in the short term, but regulatory policy fixes the problem more or less permanently in an accountable, democratic, and globally applicable (in a national context) way. If we as a society believe what Amazon is doing is fundamentally wrong, why not prohibit legally rather than rely on an ad-hoc solution that will probably be circumvented once attention fades away?

discreditable 8y ago

This isn't just an Amazon problem. I've got a friend who worked at Wal-mart for a while. They give points against you for taking sick days no matter how bad it is. One time she got sent home for having some poison ivy on her arms and was still punished for it. Workers who have high points, but not so many to get fired get their schedules screwed with until they quit.

test6554 8y ago
I mean if you are in the top 90th percentile nationally for taking sick days, then working you into the schedule would probably be a nightmare for managers. By reducing your hours, they are reducing the scheduling work that managers need to do. Also, It's likely expected that every employee has some points, but taking way more than everyone else is what this type of system is likely designed to catch.
- discreditable 8y ago
  It's not just reducing hours. For example you might start getting rotated around different shifts. They'll make your schedule as irregular as possible to encourage you to accrue points or quit. My friend saw this happen to several coworkers in her two years there. Towards the end her direct manager even asked her why she hadn't quit yet.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

Even without a boycott movement, we may already have reached peak Amazon. This year, the Supreme Court may create a revolution in the ability of US states to tax consumer purchases from online retailers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#...). This could erode Amazon's online retail profitability enough to seriously slow its ever-increasing sales volume and give the competition enough breathing room to survive and even grow a bit. And Trump keeps complaining about the prices the USPS receives to deliver Amazon. Whether or not there's any merit in Trump's complaint, as a convenient piece of political theater, this cause could easily be picked up by the next president and renegotiated. It would be a crowd pleaser for someone like Elizabeth Warren. Perhaps the playing field will be tilted just enough to slow the whole Amazon machine.

ikeboy 8y ago
Amazon already charges tax on all 1p purchases, changes in that law wouldn't hurt them much.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  But what about all the small retailers that do business under the Amazon umbrella? Somehow, a lot of those little businesses still do not charge sales tax. A significant fraction of Amazon's sales are those little retailers.
dwyerm 8y ago
Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor. Collecting taxes is difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of variables depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying. Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World. There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.
- portmanteaufu 8y ago

sigsergv 8y ago

Boycott isn't a solution, proper media coverage is. Nike was damaged not by boycott campaign but by a massive media outbreak. Just image effect of good documentary film created by some famous talented director. It's much much worse for reputation than disorganized boycott campaign.

dragonwriter 8y ago
Boycotts are, among other things, tactics to get media (and thereby public) attention. Saying a result. wasn't produced by a boycott because it required media attention which was in significant part drawn by the boycott, which had drawing such attention as a goal, is, well, missing the point of active protest entirely.

drinchev 8y ago

I always wondered why Amazon doesn't have some labor union which at least negotiates normal working conditions. Boycotting usually doesn't have the same effect as a 2-days strike.

danirod 8y ago
They seem to have an union at least here in Spain, and maybe in other countries as well. Last month, workers at a local Amazon ware house in Madrid did a 2-day strike, which was pushed by a national workers union as a complain on the working conditions [1]. I've been out of the loop on news so I don't know how things are going since then. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-amazon-workers-call-two-day-strike-over-wages-rights-idUSKCN1GP13L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-a...

apple4ever 8y ago