10 ms·

I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

242 points by kanelbullar 8y ago

nemo44x 8y ago
The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think. This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.
- baxtr 8y ago
  They are in some countries as far as I know. For example here in Germany there were strikes by amazon warehouse workers. It would be interesting to see a comparison of working conditions between the different countries.
- free652 8y ago
  Amazon can afford to close warehouses where workers are trying to unionize. Walmart does the same: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-activism/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...
  - FullMetalBitch 8y ago
    How are the conditions through Europe? I know they went on strike or were about to in Spain, any news from other countries?
    - apexalpha 8y ago
      Germany did as well. I wish Bezos the best of luck if he thinks the EU unions are as easy to beat as the American ones.
      - xyzzyz 8y ago
        That’s why Amazon already operates a handful, and opening new warehouses in Poland. Amazon doesn’t even sell in Poland, everything sorted and packed in Poland is shipped back to Germany. Beating EU unions is very easy, you simply move to the next town over the border.
- beat 8y ago
  Yes, it's definitely ripe for some old-fashioned unionizing. As for automation, though... large parts are already automated, and they're constantly automating anything that can be automated. Humans are really the "last mile" here.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Right to work, baby. It makes divide and conquer pretty easy. Between that and the use of contractors, unionization is very difficult to achieve.
- 2-m3m3n70 8y ago
  Apparently Walmart forces workers to watch anti-union videos and will entirely shut down a store at the first hint of union activity (and then later re-open it few months later with new staff). Amazon likely does the same with the anti-union propaganda and can also afford to shut down factories or fire the entire staff.
- honkycat 8y ago
  The federal government and these huge corps REALLY do not want unions to form, and they will do anything in their power to prevent it from happening. It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly. I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.
  - war1025 8y ago
    The whole point of a union is to protect the rights of people who are doing things that don't take a lot of skill.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      I know that’s the point - I can’t understand how they hope to achieve it as they have no leverage.
      - war1025 8y ago
        I don't know that I disagree with you regarding their lack of leverage, but I think it is more due to their inability to disrupt production because of Amazon's large size and ability to reroute order fulfillment.
- Gatsky 8y ago
  There are many problems with unions. But, every time there is no union, the company screws workers. Screws them to within an inch of common decency. This just seems to be a basic law of human interaction - those that can be exploited will be exploited. With the right legislative environment, unions can be very effective, especially for logistics industries where down time is very costly for the company. Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.
- camtarn 8y ago
  Agreed. But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at least treated like humans. The atmosphere at some of these Amazon warehouses serves to dehumanize the workers. You are not a person, you are an object that is expected to obey very strict rules like a dog. The management at these warehouses is even worse, because it's often very abusive people who wind up in those positions.
- grecy 8y ago
  So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this treatment is legal? Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.
  - LitFan 8y ago
    As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years. The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people. Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and that's what's happening here. Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to maximize profits. If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected.
    - chii 8y ago
      > most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected. which is why taxation needs to be progressive. The rich who have their wealth created by using other people needs to pay a larger proportion of the tax burden to make society more comfortable for everybody. The idea is that with added infrastructure and education and healthcare paid for by the higher taxes, the poor will eventually not be forced into the position of having to slave away.
la6470 8y ago
TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn’t it? Why is minimum wage still so low and why are all political parties not coming together to raise it?
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Just because you don't like it it does not mean this is not true.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    That’s just a jab with zero informational content. It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author’s book on low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so. I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the warehouses, but it’s really hard to find a neutral source who doesn’t either have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind. I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog-piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.
- newshorts 8y ago
  Easy to reduce things to at will employment or “free country!” Harder to find solutions when you look at the complexity of a person’s life situation (I.e. medical bills, debt obligations, children, etc).
devit 8y ago
The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun). Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.
  - devit 8y ago
    I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others. The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion). That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.
    - wetpaws 8y ago
      Yikes, that does not sound like a good society to live in.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      >the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)
andrewla 8y ago
There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target. One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions. The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for. Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend. [1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states... [2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-enrollees-647x1024.png https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.
archi42 8y ago
That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.
- LitFan 8y ago
  Why is this downvoted? The only way to make this change is for people to boycott the service.
  - swarnie_ 8y ago
    I'm not even sure why people work there. The warehouses are universally known to be shitty places but people sign up anyway. Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?
    - 394549 8y ago
      > Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics? Your mistake was assuming that this is something that could be understood solely with "basic economics." "Basic economics" is a horribly limited intellectual tool-set that will mislead you if you rely on it too heavily.
      - vixen99 8y ago
        I wouldn't give too much credit to the advanced economics tool set either given the welter of failed predictions made from on high over the years.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      They will hire anyone. That’s why. If you need a job and you will show up on time all the time and perform to the standard they ask you’ll keep the job too. It’s a crap job but for a lot of people it beats being unemployed.
paulus_magnus2 8y ago
FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top down opression.
- camtarn 8y ago
  From all the stories I've heard, it seems to be a combination of the two: most of the really inhumane stuff comes from local managers rather than global policy. However, those managers are just acting to meet unrealistic targets of their own, and when they're reported, nobody above them in the hierarchy seems to care.
ElBarto 8y ago
"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages." Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here. If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.
- QuotedForTruth 8y ago
  "If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians." If by "politicians" here you mean the one politician the article is discussing, Sen Sanders, you should know that he is for increasing the minimum wage. [1] Of course he needs other politicians and/or their voters to agree. This corporate welfare angle he is currently attacking is just an attempt to point out the problem with a different argument. An argument that some people may be more receptive to. We've already agreed that we as a society will pay to support poor people. Corporations take advantage of this to lower their payroll costs. Whether they foot the bill for the government costs via corporate taxes or just pay a living wage in the first place is worth arguing about once we fisrst decide to stop letting them take advantage of people. [1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-living-wage/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-living-wage/
  - dennisgorelik 8y ago
    > Corporations take advantage of this to lower their payroll costs. ... which is a very good thing for low-wage workers. Because if corporations would not benefit from these "no benefits" savings, then these corporations will be more likely to fire these low-wage workers.
- xamuel 8y ago
  Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps. Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them? This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.
llamataboot 8y ago
You get the society that your systems incentivize. There may very well be a perfect version of capitalism and a free market that allows for free movement of employees between firms and a virtuous circle. Instead, we see a vicious spiral of incentivizing externalities (including treating workers like a never-ending powerless resource you can run into the ground and break and then find new ones) and a person with more money than most of his laborers put together. Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this. (Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  What's funny is that the system encourages this society and those who are able to take full advantage of it become so rich they are able to completely opt out. The goal of capitalism, of supply and demand, labour and capital, is to have so much that all goods and services are within your grasp for no effort or time.
- newshorts 8y ago
  Ordoliberalism seems to work pretty well
sokoloff 8y ago
IMO, it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for. When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.
- ameister14 8y ago
  >it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.
  - jdpedrie 8y ago
    "To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.
    - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
      Enforcing any law inherently does violence to people. Do you wish to pedestal law above people? And if not, do you want them on equal footing? I personally would like to work toward a culture that doesn't require law and, barring that, law that peacefully respects a person's decision to revoke consent to be governed at any moment's notice. Blanket consent for government isn't realistic or sustainable. And even if it were, it isn't consent without being free to revoke it.
ousta 8y ago
I guess people just realized that blue collar jobs were horrible? Guess what it is same for many other of those jobs , construction, healthcare, army,...
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  It's significantly more difficult in some cases. I grew up (and have moved back to) a very poor area. I've always been a nerd, but had some mental health issues after high school that led to the loss of my college scholarship and I spent several years afterward working traditional blue collar jobs - stocking, loading and unloading trucks, farm labor, construction, electrical, etc. It was a rough time in my life, but I can honestly say I'm thankful for it. It played a big part in making me who I am, and it's always somewhat shocking to see how much the perception of those around me now who have never experienced such things differs from the reality of most of the country. I can only assume that my own conception of how things are elsewhere in the world is similarly incorrect. I look forward to getting to the point in my my family and financial life where I can spend some time traveling and seeing how others live first-hand.
0xmohit 8y ago
Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished people for being ill. “It’s what Amazon have always done,” he replied blandly.
gagege 8y ago
Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain. The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc." Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company." So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.
- zippzom 8y ago
  The issue is not that the employee is being underpaid (although that is a problem), it's that the underpayment is only possible because the government (i.e. taxpayers) is also giving money to that employee. If that safety net weren't in place then Amazon wouldn't be able to employee these people at these rates since it wouldn't be enough for people to survive on. Essentially, the government is subsidizing Amazon. Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise. And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.
  - gagege 8y ago
    I think your first paragraph is saying the same thing I said. Amazon-like companies can pay less because of the safety-nets. I get what you're saying in the rest of your comment and I can confirm that it's easy to take less pay because of time constraints. Maybe "fair" isn't the right word exactly, but I will stand by it being voluntary.
geggam 8y ago
If you have a business in a country and cannot afford to pay your workers high enough wages that they can afford to live without society subsidizing them. Then you cannot afford to run your business and are stealing money from the society you are in. This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums. If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.
- jnordwick 8y ago
  It isn't the businesses fault that people don't have high margin skills. There effort should be on improving workforce skill and productive. Not villianising those who employ them.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    It is entirely the business's fault that they are not paying their workers enough to live on.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    You are assuming they don’t have the skills and that hiring is a perfect, fair process. This is not so. There is clear evidence that even something as simple as being black might prevent someone being rejected over a less skilled white applicant.
jnordwick 8y ago
Umm... None of his complaints are about pay, which is what Stop BEZOS act's largest piece. The article is a massive non-sequitor.
unstatusthequo 8y ago
My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses. Then people will complain they lost their jobs...
- docker_up 8y ago
  Full automation is likely impossible. Ask Elon Musk about his problems with trying to fully automate Tesla production.
  - y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
    Full automation is not necessary. That's one of the easiest oversights I've ever seen in the business world. I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount - because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people, they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people doing manual work.
- michael_h 8y ago
  If the Amazon warehouses become fully automated and a big group of people lose their jobs and there's no safety net, the warehouses will be burned to the ground within 24 hours.
  - LyndsySimon 8y ago
    Well, that'll certainly solve the problem of housing and feeding those people.
    - michael_h 8y ago
      It definitely won't of course, and I'm not saying it's right, but people who think that a mass people-to-automaton transition is going to go smoothly without a plan in place for the 'people' may lack perspective.
_zachs 8y ago
"Stop Bezos Act"...are you kidding me? If you support a bill dedicated to targeting a single company...please get out of government.
dreamache 8y ago
Do you want to pay more for Amazon products? Because that's what you'll get if Mr. Socialist Sanders has his way.
perfunctory 8y ago
How can anyone be so naive as to believe the bill would target a single company.
hulton 8y ago
"Bernie Sanders" and "is right" shouldn't be in the same sentence.
bensonn 8y ago
A few unrelated points- 1. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book. 2. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc. 3. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay. 4. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me. 5. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things. Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.) $1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.

242 points by kanelbullar 8y ago

The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think. This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.

baxtr 8y ago
They are in some countries as far as I know. For example here in Germany there were strikes by amazon warehouse workers. It would be interesting to see a comparison of working conditions between the different countries.
free652 8y ago
Amazon can afford to close warehouses where workers are trying to unionize. Walmart does the same: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-activism/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...
- FullMetalBitch 8y ago
  How are the conditions through Europe? I know they went on strike or were about to in Spain, any news from other countries?
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    Germany did as well. I wish Bezos the best of luck if he thinks the EU unions are as easy to beat as the American ones.
    - xyzzyz 8y ago
      That’s why Amazon already operates a handful, and opening new warehouses in Poland. Amazon doesn’t even sell in Poland, everything sorted and packed in Poland is shipped back to Germany. Beating EU unions is very easy, you simply move to the next town over the border.
beat 8y ago
Yes, it's definitely ripe for some old-fashioned unionizing. As for automation, though... large parts are already automated, and they're constantly automating anything that can be automated. Humans are really the "last mile" here.
Spooky23 8y ago
Right to work, baby. It makes divide and conquer pretty easy. Between that and the use of contractors, unionization is very difficult to achieve.
2-m3m3n70 8y ago
Apparently Walmart forces workers to watch anti-union videos and will entirely shut down a store at the first hint of union activity (and then later re-open it few months later with new staff). Amazon likely does the same with the anti-union propaganda and can also afford to shut down factories or fire the entire staff.
honkycat 8y ago
The federal government and these huge corps REALLY do not want unions to form, and they will do anything in their power to prevent it from happening. It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.
chrisseaton 8y ago
After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly. I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.
- war1025 8y ago
  The whole point of a union is to protect the rights of people who are doing things that don't take a lot of skill.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I know that’s the point - I can’t understand how they hope to achieve it as they have no leverage.
    - war1025 8y ago
      I don't know that I disagree with you regarding their lack of leverage, but I think it is more due to their inability to disrupt production because of Amazon's large size and ability to reroute order fulfillment.
Gatsky 8y ago
There are many problems with unions. But, every time there is no union, the company screws workers. Screws them to within an inch of common decency. This just seems to be a basic law of human interaction - those that can be exploited will be exploited. With the right legislative environment, unions can be very effective, especially for logistics industries where down time is very costly for the company. Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.
camtarn 8y ago
Agreed. But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at least treated like humans. The atmosphere at some of these Amazon warehouses serves to dehumanize the workers. You are not a person, you are an object that is expected to obey very strict rules like a dog. The management at these warehouses is even worse, because it's often very abusive people who wind up in those positions.

grecy 8y ago
So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this treatment is legal? Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.
- LitFan 8y ago
  As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years. The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people. Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and that's what's happening here. Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to maximize profits. If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected.
  - chii 8y ago
    > most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected. which is why taxation needs to be progressive. The rich who have their wealth created by using other people needs to pay a larger proportion of the tax burden to make society more comfortable for everybody. The idea is that with added infrastructure and education and healthcare paid for by the higher taxes, the poor will eventually not be forced into the position of having to slave away.

la6470 8y ago

TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn’t it? Why is minimum wage still so low and why are all political parties not coming together to raise it?

wetpaws 8y ago
Just because you don't like it it does not mean this is not true.
- zaroth 8y ago
  That’s just a jab with zero informational content. It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author’s book on low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so. I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the warehouses, but it’s really hard to find a neutral source who doesn’t either have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind. I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog-piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.
newshorts 8y ago
Easy to reduce things to at will employment or “free country!” Harder to find solutions when you look at the complexity of a person’s life situation (I.e. medical bills, debt obligations, children, etc).

devit 8y ago

The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun). Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?

EpicEng 8y ago
>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment. Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.
- devit 8y ago
  I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others. The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion). That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    Yikes, that does not sound like a good society to live in.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)

andrewla 8y ago

There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target. One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions. The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for. Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend. [1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states... [2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-enrollees-647x1024.png https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...

dragonwriter 8y ago
> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it. You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.

archi42 8y ago

That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.

LitFan 8y ago
Why is this downvoted? The only way to make this change is for people to boycott the service.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  I'm not even sure why people work there. The warehouses are universally known to be shitty places but people sign up anyway. Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?
  - 394549 8y ago
    > Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics? Your mistake was assuming that this is something that could be understood solely with "basic economics." "Basic economics" is a horribly limited intellectual tool-set that will mislead you if you rely on it too heavily.
    - vixen99 8y ago
      I wouldn't give too much credit to the advanced economics tool set either given the welter of failed predictions made from on high over the years.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    They will hire anyone. That’s why. If you need a job and you will show up on time all the time and perform to the standard they ask you’ll keep the job too. It’s a crap job but for a lot of people it beats being unemployed.

paulus_magnus2 8y ago

FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top down opression.

camtarn 8y ago
From all the stories I've heard, it seems to be a combination of the two: most of the really inhumane stuff comes from local managers rather than global policy. However, those managers are just acting to meet unrealistic targets of their own, and when they're reported, nobody above them in the hierarchy seems to care.

ElBarto 8y ago

"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages." Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here. If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.

QuotedForTruth 8y ago
"If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians." If by "politicians" here you mean the one politician the article is discussing, Sen Sanders, you should know that he is for increasing the minimum wage. [1] Of course he needs other politicians and/or their voters to agree. This corporate welfare angle he is currently attacking is just an attempt to point out the problem with a different argument. An argument that some people may be more receptive to. We've already agreed that we as a society will pay to support poor people. Corporations take advantage of this to lower their payroll costs. Whether they foot the bill for the government costs via corporate taxes or just pay a living wage in the first place is worth arguing about once we fisrst decide to stop letting them take advantage of people. [1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-living-wage/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-living-wage/
- dennisgorelik 8y ago
  > Corporations take advantage of this to lower their payroll costs. ... which is a very good thing for low-wage workers. Because if corporations would not benefit from these "no benefits" savings, then these corporations will be more likely to fire these low-wage workers.
xamuel 8y ago
Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps. Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them? This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.

llamataboot 8y ago

You get the society that your systems incentivize. There may very well be a perfect version of capitalism and a free market that allows for free movement of employees between firms and a virtuous circle. Instead, we see a vicious spiral of incentivizing externalities (including treating workers like a never-ending powerless resource you can run into the ground and break and then find new ones) and a person with more money than most of his laborers put together. Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this. (Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
What's funny is that the system encourages this society and those who are able to take full advantage of it become so rich they are able to completely opt out. The goal of capitalism, of supply and demand, labour and capital, is to have so much that all goods and services are within your grasp for no effort or time.
newshorts 8y ago
Ordoliberalism seems to work pretty well

sokoloff 8y ago

IMO, it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for. When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.

ameister14 8y ago
>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO. I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.
- jdpedrie 8y ago
  "To the benefit of the people" and "does violence to the rule of law" are not mutually exclusive, at least in the short term.
  - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
    Enforcing any law inherently does violence to people. Do you wish to pedestal law above people? And if not, do you want them on equal footing? I personally would like to work toward a culture that doesn't require law and, barring that, law that peacefully respects a person's decision to revoke consent to be governed at any moment's notice. Blanket consent for government isn't realistic or sustainable. And even if it were, it isn't consent without being free to revoke it.

ousta 8y ago

I guess people just realized that blue collar jobs were horrible? Guess what it is same for many other of those jobs , construction, healthcare, army,...

LyndsySimon 8y ago
It's significantly more difficult in some cases. I grew up (and have moved back to) a very poor area. I've always been a nerd, but had some mental health issues after high school that led to the loss of my college scholarship and I spent several years afterward working traditional blue collar jobs - stocking, loading and unloading trucks, farm labor, construction, electrical, etc. It was a rough time in my life, but I can honestly say I'm thankful for it. It played a big part in making me who I am, and it's always somewhat shocking to see how much the perception of those around me now who have never experienced such things differs from the reality of most of the country. I can only assume that my own conception of how things are elsewhere in the world is similarly incorrect. I look forward to getting to the point in my my family and financial life where I can spend some time traveling and seeing how others live first-hand.

0xmohit 8y ago

Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished people for being ill. “It’s what Amazon have always done,” he replied blandly.

gagege 8y ago

Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain. The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc." Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company." So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.

zippzom 8y ago
The issue is not that the employee is being underpaid (although that is a problem), it's that the underpayment is only possible because the government (i.e. taxpayers) is also giving money to that employee. If that safety net weren't in place then Amazon wouldn't be able to employee these people at these rates since it wouldn't be enough for people to survive on. Essentially, the government is subsidizing Amazon. Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise. And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.
- gagege 8y ago
  I think your first paragraph is saying the same thing I said. Amazon-like companies can pay less because of the safety-nets. I get what you're saying in the rest of your comment and I can confirm that it's easy to take less pay because of time constraints. Maybe "fair" isn't the right word exactly, but I will stand by it being voluntary.

geggam 8y ago

If you have a business in a country and cannot afford to pay your workers high enough wages that they can afford to live without society subsidizing them. Then you cannot afford to run your business and are stealing money from the society you are in. This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums. If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.

jnordwick 8y ago
It isn't the businesses fault that people don't have high margin skills. There effort should be on improving workforce skill and productive. Not villianising those who employ them.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  It is entirely the business's fault that they are not paying their workers enough to live on.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  You are assuming they don’t have the skills and that hiring is a perfect, fair process. This is not so. There is clear evidence that even something as simple as being black might prevent someone being rejected over a less skilled white applicant.

jnordwick 8y ago

Umm... None of his complaints are about pay, which is what Stop BEZOS act's largest piece. The article is a massive non-sequitor.

unstatusthequo 8y ago

My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses. Then people will complain they lost their jobs...

docker_up 8y ago
Full automation is likely impossible. Ask Elon Musk about his problems with trying to fully automate Tesla production.
- y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
  Full automation is not necessary. That's one of the easiest oversights I've ever seen in the business world. I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount - because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people, they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people doing manual work.
michael_h 8y ago
If the Amazon warehouses become fully automated and a big group of people lose their jobs and there's no safety net, the warehouses will be burned to the ground within 24 hours.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  Well, that'll certainly solve the problem of housing and feeding those people.
  - michael_h 8y ago
    It definitely won't of course, and I'm not saying it's right, but people who think that a mass people-to-automaton transition is going to go smoothly without a plan in place for the 'people' may lack perspective.

_zachs 8y ago

"Stop Bezos Act"...are you kidding me? If you support a bill dedicated to targeting a single company...please get out of government.

dreamache 8y ago

Do you want to pay more for Amazon products? Because that's what you'll get if Mr. Socialist Sanders has his way.

perfunctory 8y ago

How can anyone be so naive as to believe the bill would target a single company.

hulton 8y ago

"Bernie Sanders" and "is right" shouldn't be in the same sentence.

bensonn 8y ago

A few unrelated points- 1. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book. 2. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc. 3. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay. 4. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me. 5. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things. Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.) $1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.