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It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda. I felt my own opinion on Amazon Fullfilment Centers change as I read the article. One thing

It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda. I felt my own opinion on Amazon Fullfilment Centers change as I read the article. One thing that makes propaganda like this so effective is that journalists generally do not bother to verify any propaganda claims (eg. does Amazon really pay 30% more?), so even if they write articles making fun of you they still repeat your message.

jancsika 8y ago
Can you explain a little about what you felt changing in your opinion here? What I got out of it was that Amazon had previously been dehumanizing their workers to the point that the PR drones have to now overtly brag about complying with OSHA laws.
- adventured 8y ago
  The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon employees are being tortured horrifically on a daily basis and paid absolute bottom tier wages across the board. Those articles and opinions have, to one degree or another, tilted my opinion of Amazon in a negative manner. Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I'd think better of Amazon if they were.
  - FC_Associate 8y ago
    I'm not exactly sure how much better Amazon pays, if at all better, here in SoCal starting pay is around $12-$14 per hour for L1 associates, but anecdotally I feel like this is on the higher end when compared to similar jobs, at least compared to the jobs I've held. I can't speak to the insurance coverage provided since I'm a part time worker but from what I've heard, while pay isn't great, the insurance seems to be pretty good once you're eligible. I will say that from what I've seen my station managers take safety very seriously. Some of this must extend up the corporate ladder because I had a friend who was injured on the job here and Amazon did a very good job of making sure he got the care he required. He actually wanted to come back to work much earlier than Amazon would allow, he missed his coworkers, but they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things. He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me. I also really appreciated how straight forward the hiring process was. I was unemployed and homeless, I actually lived on an empty lot behind our warehouse for a while, when I was hired and out of all the jobs I applied to Amazon had the most streamlined hiring process. This might not seem like a huge deal but when you're already struggling it was nice to not have too many hoops to jump through to try and land a job. Obviously due to my background I'm probably viewing my work overly positively, it feels pretty great to finally have a little bit of savings, I've saved up around $1500 over the past year and this is the most money I've had in my entire life, but overall I've enjoyed my time at Amazon. But again, from the reporting I've seen there are still some pretty glaring systemic problems within the company. Edit: I saw a poster comment under this post asserting that I was being paid to post here in defense of Amazon, the post has since been deleted after receiving some downvotes, for the record I did not downvote the poster, but I will address their concerns. I can certainly understand why my post might raise suspicions. To give some background I have another account on HN that I've been active on for approximately three years and have a bit over 2000 karma. I post a few times a month, and by post I mean I usually just ask tons of questions about topics I have a limited understanding of and the kind people here try their best to explain things to me. I wanted to keep this account separate form that one since I don't post anything Amazon related using my normal account. I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bachbach 8y ago
      I think a lot of people have forgotten or never experience the satisfaction of doing work - especially after being out of work for a while. Keep it up! :) On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat workers poorly - but my instinct is skeptical of media because it's difficult not to notice some Californians are notorious for drama development. I've done a lot of not-by-the-book stuff on building sites - we just didn't keep records and convert them into issues because we used common sense to be safe and it's good work but we could have easily made it sound dire and hit our employer with all sorts of costs that ultimately would have made us less valuable.
      - ams6110 8y ago
        Right, for someone who sits behind a keyboard all day, working on your feet in a warehouse packing boxes, in a kitchen cooking burgers, or outside hauling lumber around a construction site in the rain, sounds like horrible work. If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I'm sure people get hurt, it's physical work. It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and out of shape. Not just in California but media today dramatize everything to get readers. The goal of almost any news story is to "go viral" to get clicks/views.
        gldalmaso 8y ago
        > If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I don't know how the conditions at Amazon warehouses truly are, but this statement doesn't sound correct to me. I can think of countless examples of workers that accept from sub-optimal conditions to outright modern slavery simply because they can't find an exit to the system of cheap labor exploitation. Maybe this can be scoped down to some developed countries or some cities in developed countries, but certainly doesn't hold true for most developing countries and certainly not for past history in basically anywhere.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    I would certainly question that line about paying 30% more. Without more details, it could easily be a distortion… For instance, comparing labor wages in an urban market like Seattle to a national average that includes places like rural Nebraska. Next I would wonder, why would Amazon pay so much more than their competitors? Would their shareholders accept that as fiscally responsible?
  - jancsika 8y ago
    > Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved? Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the bathroom outside of breaks. And the same article mentions that the workers have to sign NDAs[1]. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-afraid-to-take-bathroom-breaks-inside-amazons-fast-paced-warehouse-world/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-...
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      I think it was an observation of their mental process at work, in which we tend to remember things we read as facts even if we do not know they are true (or even if we know they are not true at the time of reading). In other words: the change of opinion was not necessarily rational, why is why they said "It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda."
    - snowwrestler 8y ago
      Because the very act of storing information in your brain gives it credence, even if you don't go through the extra effort to verify whether it is correct. With repeated exposure it can become a belief, even a belief so strong that you will hold onto it in the face of evidence it is false. This can happen to anyone; it's a fundamental feature of how our memory works. It works especially well for information that does not affect you personally, because you're less likely to go through the extra effort to verify whether something is true. If your boss tells you that your salary is $100k/year, you're going to check that on your paycheck! If your boss tells you that garbage collectors make $100k a year, you might not believe it, but you might also not bother to put in the effort to check. But if you remember it later on, the very act of bringing it out of your memory will reinforce it to you. And if you don't go specifically check on the accuracy, you're also more likely to rely on social signals like, who is telling me this? Is this a person who I identify with? Does it seem like a person or an institution I should trust? In this case, you are reading a news article from TechCrunch, a well-known, successful, and long-running news site. Any information you read there comes wrapped in however much trust you associate with TechCrunch. So if a claim is passed on in an article, it comes with some level of default trust. And even if you don't like TechCrunch, the default level of trust is affected just by the act of reading the article. By default we tend to trust ourselves, so when we do something (like read an article), the default trust is pushed above zero, just because we're the one who read it! This effect is why most people think they are above average drivers, for example. So: reading an article about an ad campaign, that contains the ad and its claims, can affect how you feel about the advertised product... even though you know it's an article about an ad campaign! In marketing this is called "earned media" and it is valuable because it hijacks your trust for the media source to support the ad claim. A spectacular example was the "Swift Boat Truth" ad against John Kerry, which barely ran on late night TV, but was widely covered by the news media. It had a huge impact on Kerry's campaign for president.
RodericDay 8y ago
^ this is the real propaganda right here
nickthemagicman 8y ago
It's a gish gallop. No one has time/energy to verify it all and they're not providing any proof.
- Y_Y 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop I wish I had a debating technique named after me.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    In school I was interested in debate until I learned some of the rules, then I lost all interest. I expected to find a contest to effectively communicate and apply facts, but I found the opposite - a contest to be better at twisting, denying, or just ignoring facts. An effective debater is more likely to deceive me, not educate me. I've not looked into it since high school, so I sometimes wonder if I misjudged, but links like that wikipedia one make me think I correctly avoided it.
    - nickthemagicman 8y ago
      I've been debating with a lot of alt-right people lately on Facebook and have been studying their debating tactics and how they apply them to support q-anon, and pizzagate, and Trump. It's really fastinating to see all of these strategies played out in the real world. I use these strategies to identify what they are doing and cut through the sophistry and attempt to reach the truth. The nice thing about online debating is that you have time to think about and analyze the others argument vs on the spot debate where emotions get involved.
Papirola 8y ago
there are the real meme wars
enolan 8y ago
Note the tweet says they pay 30% more than "traditional retail stores". I don't think that's the right comparison. Pick & pack in a warehouse is much more physically demanding than being on the floor at Best Buy. The better question is do they pay more than UPS, or for that matter, picking strawberries?
spwmoni 8y ago
Gizmodo did, in fact, verify that 30% claim: https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882 https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882 > The amounts associates reported receiving in VCP [Variable Compensation Pay] were underwhelming. One claimed his highest monthly payout was $48. Another averaged around $60. The only reason these paltry bonuses are relevant at all is that Amazon itself uses them to arrive at the over $15 per hour figure it estimates as its average Fulfillment Center worker’s pay. “Hourly pay rates are competitive and we offer great benefits – we encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers,” Amazon told Gizmodo in a statement for this piece. Glassdoor lists average warehouse pay for Amazon at $12.33, less at, Home Depot ($12.96), Costco ($13.43), and Target ($14.57). Even stacked against Walmart, its main competition and a business with its own set of unsavory practices, Amazon still comes up twenty cents short on hourly pay.
xg15 8y ago
I feel this particular mind trick may be restricted to members of the HN community - who might already be very willing to give Amazon the benefit of doubt in the first place. Note that, as you say, the information may be completely fabricated (or it may be "technically true", but attached to a lot of catches and conditions that the "ambassadors" conveniently didn't mention) Also, while the article didn't research the claims, it did put them next to the (vastly better verified) claims of the ex-workers who reported absolutely undesirable working conditions. Even if they beat the pay for industry average, would that matter so much if they in turn offer vastly below-average working conditions?

jancsika 8y ago

Can you explain a little about what you felt changing in your opinion here? What I got out of it was that Amazon had previously been dehumanizing their workers to the point that the PR drones have to now overtly brag about complying with OSHA laws.

adventured 8y ago
The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon employees are being tortured horrifically on a daily basis and paid absolute bottom tier wages across the board. Those articles and opinions have, to one degree or another, tilted my opinion of Amazon in a negative manner. Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I'd think better of Amazon if they were.
- FC_Associate 8y ago
  I'm not exactly sure how much better Amazon pays, if at all better, here in SoCal starting pay is around $12-$14 per hour for L1 associates, but anecdotally I feel like this is on the higher end when compared to similar jobs, at least compared to the jobs I've held. I can't speak to the insurance coverage provided since I'm a part time worker but from what I've heard, while pay isn't great, the insurance seems to be pretty good once you're eligible. I will say that from what I've seen my station managers take safety very seriously. Some of this must extend up the corporate ladder because I had a friend who was injured on the job here and Amazon did a very good job of making sure he got the care he required. He actually wanted to come back to work much earlier than Amazon would allow, he missed his coworkers, but they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things. He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me. I also really appreciated how straight forward the hiring process was. I was unemployed and homeless, I actually lived on an empty lot behind our warehouse for a while, when I was hired and out of all the jobs I applied to Amazon had the most streamlined hiring process. This might not seem like a huge deal but when you're already struggling it was nice to not have too many hoops to jump through to try and land a job. Obviously due to my background I'm probably viewing my work overly positively, it feels pretty great to finally have a little bit of savings, I've saved up around $1500 over the past year and this is the most money I've had in my entire life, but overall I've enjoyed my time at Amazon. But again, from the reporting I've seen there are still some pretty glaring systemic problems within the company. Edit: I saw a poster comment under this post asserting that I was being paid to post here in defense of Amazon, the post has since been deleted after receiving some downvotes, for the record I did not downvote the poster, but I will address their concerns. I can certainly understand why my post might raise suspicions. To give some background I have another account on HN that I've been active on for approximately three years and have a bit over 2000 karma. I post a few times a month, and by post I mean I usually just ask tons of questions about topics I have a limited understanding of and the kind people here try their best to explain things to me. I wanted to keep this account separate form that one since I don't post anything Amazon related using my normal account. I hope I don't sound like too much of a shill but I'm somewhat excited to finally be able to contribute to a topic I have some understanding of.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bachbach 8y ago
    I think a lot of people have forgotten or never experience the satisfaction of doing work - especially after being out of work for a while. Keep it up! :) On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat workers poorly - but my instinct is skeptical of media because it's difficult not to notice some Californians are notorious for drama development. I've done a lot of not-by-the-book stuff on building sites - we just didn't keep records and convert them into issues because we used common sense to be safe and it's good work but we could have easily made it sound dire and hit our employer with all sorts of costs that ultimately would have made us less valuable.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Right, for someone who sits behind a keyboard all day, working on your feet in a warehouse packing boxes, in a kitchen cooking burgers, or outside hauling lumber around a construction site in the rain, sounds like horrible work. If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I'm sure people get hurt, it's physical work. It's not a job you're going to enjoy if, like most adults, you are overweight and out of shape. Not just in California but media today dramatize everything to get readers. The goal of almost any news story is to "go viral" to get clicks/views.
      - gldalmaso 8y ago
        > If Amazon warehouses were that bad, people wouldn't work there. I don't know how the conditions at Amazon warehouses truly are, but this statement doesn't sound correct to me. I can think of countless examples of workers that accept from sub-optimal conditions to outright modern slavery simply because they can't find an exit to the system of cheap labor exploitation. Maybe this can be scoped down to some developed countries or some cities in developed countries, but certainly doesn't hold true for most developing countries and certainly not for past history in basically anywhere.
- code_duck 8y ago
  I would certainly question that line about paying 30% more. Without more details, it could easily be a distortion… For instance, comparing labor wages in an urban market like Seattle to a national average that includes places like rural Nebraska. Next I would wonder, why would Amazon pay so much more than their competitors? Would their shareholders accept that as fiscally responsible?
- jancsika 8y ago
  > Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved? Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the bathroom outside of breaks. And the same article mentions that the workers have to sign NDAs[1]. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-afraid-to-take-bathroom-breaks-inside-amazons-fast-paced-warehouse-world/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-...
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I think it was an observation of their mental process at work, in which we tend to remember things we read as facts even if we do not know they are true (or even if we know they are not true at the time of reading). In other words: the change of opinion was not necessarily rational, why is why they said "It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda."
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    Because the very act of storing information in your brain gives it credence, even if you don't go through the extra effort to verify whether it is correct. With repeated exposure it can become a belief, even a belief so strong that you will hold onto it in the face of evidence it is false. This can happen to anyone; it's a fundamental feature of how our memory works. It works especially well for information that does not affect you personally, because you're less likely to go through the extra effort to verify whether something is true. If your boss tells you that your salary is $100k/year, you're going to check that on your paycheck! If your boss tells you that garbage collectors make $100k a year, you might not believe it, but you might also not bother to put in the effort to check. But if you remember it later on, the very act of bringing it out of your memory will reinforce it to you. And if you don't go specifically check on the accuracy, you're also more likely to rely on social signals like, who is telling me this? Is this a person who I identify with? Does it seem like a person or an institution I should trust? In this case, you are reading a news article from TechCrunch, a well-known, successful, and long-running news site. Any information you read there comes wrapped in however much trust you associate with TechCrunch. So if a claim is passed on in an article, it comes with some level of default trust. And even if you don't like TechCrunch, the default level of trust is affected just by the act of reading the article. By default we tend to trust ourselves, so when we do something (like read an article), the default trust is pushed above zero, just because we're the one who read it! This effect is why most people think they are above average drivers, for example. So: reading an article about an ad campaign, that contains the ad and its claims, can affect how you feel about the advertised product... even though you know it's an article about an ad campaign! In marketing this is called "earned media" and it is valuable because it hijacks your trust for the media source to support the ad claim. A spectacular example was the "Swift Boat Truth" ad against John Kerry, which barely ran on late night TV, but was widely covered by the news media. It had a huge impact on Kerry's campaign for president.

RodericDay 8y ago

^ this is the real propaganda right here

nickthemagicman 8y ago

It's a gish gallop. No one has time/energy to verify it all and they're not providing any proof.

Y_Y 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop I wish I had a debating technique named after me.
- ergothus 8y ago
  In school I was interested in debate until I learned some of the rules, then I lost all interest. I expected to find a contest to effectively communicate and apply facts, but I found the opposite - a contest to be better at twisting, denying, or just ignoring facts. An effective debater is more likely to deceive me, not educate me. I've not looked into it since high school, so I sometimes wonder if I misjudged, but links like that wikipedia one make me think I correctly avoided it.
  - nickthemagicman 8y ago
    I've been debating with a lot of alt-right people lately on Facebook and have been studying their debating tactics and how they apply them to support q-anon, and pizzagate, and Trump. It's really fastinating to see all of these strategies played out in the real world. I use these strategies to identify what they are doing and cut through the sophistry and attempt to reach the truth. The nice thing about online debating is that you have time to think about and analyze the others argument vs on the spot debate where emotions get involved.

Papirola 8y ago

there are the real meme wars

enolan 8y ago

Note the tweet says they pay 30% more than "traditional retail stores". I don't think that's the right comparison. Pick & pack in a warehouse is much more physically demanding than being on the floor at Best Buy. The better question is do they pay more than UPS, or for that matter, picking strawberries?

spwmoni 8y ago

Gizmodo did, in fact, verify that 30% claim: https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882 https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882 > The amounts associates reported receiving in VCP [Variable Compensation Pay] were underwhelming. One claimed his highest monthly payout was $48. Another averaged around $60. The only reason these paltry bonuses are relevant at all is that Amazon itself uses them to arrive at the over $15 per hour figure it estimates as its average Fulfillment Center worker’s pay. “Hourly pay rates are competitive and we offer great benefits – we encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers,” Amazon told Gizmodo in a statement for this piece. Glassdoor lists average warehouse pay for Amazon at $12.33, less at, Home Depot ($12.96), Costco ($13.43), and Target ($14.57). Even stacked against Walmart, its main competition and a business with its own set of unsavory practices, Amazon still comes up twenty cents short on hourly pay.

xg15 8y ago

I feel this particular mind trick may be restricted to members of the HN community - who might already be very willing to give Amazon the benefit of doubt in the first place. Note that, as you say, the information may be completely fabricated (or it may be "technically true", but attached to a lot of catches and conditions that the "ambassadors" conveniently didn't mention) Also, while the article didn't research the claims, it did put them next to the (vastly better verified) claims of the ex-workers who reported absolutely undesirable working conditions. Even if they beat the pay for industry average, would that matter so much if they in turn offer vastly below-average working conditions?