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> they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. That's because they treat their workers terrible. They

> they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. That's because they treat their workers terrible. They're a huge company with a lot of profit and how people at the bottom of the chain are treated is maddening. They're seen as an example of how not to treat workers (and for good reason). They definitely should not be lauded for this: They did some calculations and projections which showed that raising the minimum wage brings more benefits (PR stunt, not being the target of new legislation anymore, etc) than downsides (now having to pay X more to some people). I refuse to believe Bezos woke up this morning with a new moral sense to change the ship around.

i_cant_speel 8y ago
That's why any company treats any of their employees well. Google isn't giving their employees all these perks out of the goodness of their heart. They give them to attract the best talent to make the most money. Amazon is doing the same thing.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  that's the whole point of the job market. The dysfunction displayed by Amazon is evidence of a supply/demand imbalance in the job market for warehousing roles, because if people have an option to move to another company that does not treat them badly they generally will do. As it stands I'm guessing the ratio of Amazon applicants to positions is way too high meaning they can afford a high turnover rate and focus solely on increasing profit per head by squeezing their people for productivity and cutting costs spent on benefits. It's basically the same as those call centers that employ and mistreat students.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    I worked in a call center and I used to always wonder why they'd accept such extreme turnover, given that there were a few weeks of training before they could put you on (the fact that there was a course in touch-typing as part of that training probably gives you an idea where the bar was for hiring). But I'd read some analysis that suggested that in some ways the employers running these systems found that desirable, because it was hard to unionize a workplace where people didn't stick around for a whole year on average.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      it makes sense, because unionisation will decrease the company's competitiveness, leading to their clients shifting to another (non-unionised) call centre and everyone getting fired. Thus companies in sectors like this end up trying to squeeze every drop out of their employees before they quit, because they are expendable.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        We were directly employed by the company for whom we were providing service rather than being a third-party call center.
        beaconstudios 8y ago
        even in that case, companies are aware of the cost-increasing effect of unionisation so the action is the same, but via direct company action rather than market attrition.
    - RankingMember 8y ago
      You have to imagine that the quality of service people are providing isn't that high either if they're miserable. I think about peoples' quality of life in a call center whenever I'm stuck on hold with Verizon or some other faceless corporation.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        People pretty regularly just told customers whatever they wanted to hear to get them off the phone. The more scrupulous among us wouldn't say anything false or break any rules but would deliberately upset customers to get them to ask for a supervisor (call length was a major metric which affected your pay substantially, so if you couldn't really do anything for them this was the best strategy).
        beaconstudios 8y ago
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - fixermark 8y ago
    As Amazon is in the retail shipping business, essentially, their market is also seasonal and accustom to hiring and firing. It's seen as a bit more of a stain on a software company's reputation to have high turnover in software engineers; much less so in warehouse workers, where the whole infrastructure is designed to staff up for the December holiday rush and then let most of those people go.
- liveoneggs 8y ago
  does google employ or contract-out many lower-paid employees?
  - bena 8y ago
    If they do, I'd imagine it would be for the things that are necessary for what they want to provide but aren't necessary for what they want to do. They want a nice, clean work environment for their employees. So you need janitors. Want to provide catered lunch? You need food service workers. And the bar for "good enough" at those levels are much lower. You don't need a 5-star lunch every day. You need a decent lunch that's better than going out. And things can only get so clean.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Yes. All of their warehouse workers are employees of Integrity Staffing, not Amazon. Presumably Amazon is directing Integrity to bump up its wage.
    - johnqpub 8y ago
      This is simply 100% false. What do you think the 500,000 employees of Amazon are doing if not working in a warehouse? They're not programming.
      - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        The press lumps Integrity's headcount as "Amazon". It is to Amazon's benefit that this falsehood goes unnoticed.
        johnqpub 8y ago
        Go look at the last quarterly filing. https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-second-quarter-sales-39-529-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail... Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors & temporary personnel): 575,700 As dang said, if you're going to make a big claim, at least attempt to be right.
emodendroket 8y ago
> I refuse to believe Bezos woke up this morning with a new moral sense to change the ship around. No, of course not, but it's a victory that the pressure on them was enough they felt they had to make a concession.
- askmike 8y ago
  True. So the people who have been saying things should be lauded, not Amazon.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Sure. Ultimately I think the question of whether Bezos is good or bad is almost beside the point.
ams6110 8y ago
Amazon's profit is not what I would call "a lot." As recently as 2015 they had some negative quarters. This quarter last year less than 1%. 2018 has been higher but not more than about 4%. Compare the top 20 or so corporations average profitability of about 15%, and Apple's over 20%. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin
- nebulous1 8y ago
  Isn't that due to their currently loss-making Amazon Studios though?
  - austenallred 8y ago
    It’s due to the fact that any ounce of profit they would have they instead re-invest into the business. Which, by the way, is (part of) why they’re so dominant.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Another chart showing what Amazon has been doing: https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_4298_amazons_long_term_growth_n.jpg https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_4298_a... Net income doesn’t do that naturally or by accident.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Agree, and in any other situation we'd be praising this. They're investing in the future, looking beyond the next quarter, etc.
      - ionised 8y ago
        Investing in the future is great. Doing so while exploiting workers and dubious tax arrangements is not.
alttab 8y ago
There's no winning, is there?
fixermark 8y ago
Possibly worth observing: they bring in a ton of gross cash, but their revenue is smaller than a lot of Internet operations because their out-lay is high: physical storage, transportation, etc. are all expenses that Internet companies with similar profits don't have to shoulder. In 2016, they made a profit of $857 million on a revenue of $30.1 billion--- i.e. profit margin of 2%, compared to Alphabet's 9.7% or Facebook's 36%(!!!). It's the number that investors care about, because it tells them how likely they are to get money back out of a business when the invest money into it. It's also a number the company cares about, because it tells them how much of a shock to their fixed costs they could stomach without suddenly finding themselves spending more than they make to keep the doors open. Amazon's (relatively) razor-thin margins are what make the company so paranoid about costs like wages and benefits; they've seen America's history of burning hulks of older companies wrecked by making pension promises when profits were high that they couldn't honor when profits tailed off.
- dollar 8y ago
  Amazon has never cared about net profit, they care about compounded growth through reinvestment of profits. It took Wall Street about 15 years to figure out they should leave Bezos alone.
- t0mbstone 8y ago
  Profits don't tell the whole story though. Imagine if you are Amazon. Do you take the extra billion dollars you earned this month and throw it into another warehouse and more growth opportunities? Or do you keep your size the same and use that money to raise wages? It's more of question of how they are allocating funds. Either way, the "profit" stays the same. Amazon has been focused on growth at all costs, and that meant keeping wages razor slim and reinvesting every spare penny. The real question is: Will slowing their growth investments and paying their employees a fair wage actually help their growth in the long run?
  - fixermark 8y ago
    That's the strategy that makes a company more flexible to market shocks. If your revenue is tied up in new buildings, you can react to market shock by decreasing your growth rate. If your revenue is tied up in wages, you can't react to market shock by slashing your wage budget, for (obvious) psychological reasons that half-constructed warehouses are utterly immune to. ;)
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
Why is it so shitty to congratulate someone for making a good change even if that change may have been in their best interest?
- badcede 8y ago
  Because it feels bad to concede anything at all. Which is a form of greed in its own right.
munificent 8y ago
> They did some calculations and projections which showed that raising the minimum wage brings more benefits (PR stunt, not being the target of new legislation anymore, etc) than downsides (now having to pay X more to some people). This may be true, but it doesn't nullify the fact that the workers are actually receiving a benefit from this, and it's a good thing that's worth pointing out.
JPGalt 8y ago
I have friends that work there. This was not a gift, the took benefits from the workers to pay for this raise. In fact they pulled all of the bonuses from the lower level employees as well as their share of stock in the company. This is a dog and pony show, nothing more.

i_cant_speel 8y ago

That's why any company treats any of their employees well. Google isn't giving their employees all these perks out of the goodness of their heart. They give them to attract the best talent to make the most money. Amazon is doing the same thing.

beaconstudios 8y ago
that's the whole point of the job market. The dysfunction displayed by Amazon is evidence of a supply/demand imbalance in the job market for warehousing roles, because if people have an option to move to another company that does not treat them badly they generally will do. As it stands I'm guessing the ratio of Amazon applicants to positions is way too high meaning they can afford a high turnover rate and focus solely on increasing profit per head by squeezing their people for productivity and cutting costs spent on benefits. It's basically the same as those call centers that employ and mistreat students.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I worked in a call center and I used to always wonder why they'd accept such extreme turnover, given that there were a few weeks of training before they could put you on (the fact that there was a course in touch-typing as part of that training probably gives you an idea where the bar was for hiring). But I'd read some analysis that suggested that in some ways the employers running these systems found that desirable, because it was hard to unionize a workplace where people didn't stick around for a whole year on average.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    it makes sense, because unionisation will decrease the company's competitiveness, leading to their clients shifting to another (non-unionised) call centre and everyone getting fired. Thus companies in sectors like this end up trying to squeeze every drop out of their employees before they quit, because they are expendable.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      We were directly employed by the company for whom we were providing service rather than being a third-party call center.
      - beaconstudios 8y ago
        even in that case, companies are aware of the cost-increasing effect of unionisation so the action is the same, but via direct company action rather than market attrition.
  - RankingMember 8y ago
    You have to imagine that the quality of service people are providing isn't that high either if they're miserable. I think about peoples' quality of life in a call center whenever I'm stuck on hold with Verizon or some other faceless corporation.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      People pretty regularly just told customers whatever they wanted to hear to get them off the phone. The more scrupulous among us wouldn't say anything false or break any rules but would deliberately upset customers to get them to ask for a supervisor (call length was a major metric which affected your pay substantially, so if you couldn't really do anything for them this was the best strategy).
      - beaconstudios 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fixermark 8y ago
  As Amazon is in the retail shipping business, essentially, their market is also seasonal and accustom to hiring and firing. It's seen as a bit more of a stain on a software company's reputation to have high turnover in software engineers; much less so in warehouse workers, where the whole infrastructure is designed to staff up for the December holiday rush and then let most of those people go.
liveoneggs 8y ago
does google employ or contract-out many lower-paid employees?
- bena 8y ago
  If they do, I'd imagine it would be for the things that are necessary for what they want to provide but aren't necessary for what they want to do. They want a nice, clean work environment for their employees. So you need janitors. Want to provide catered lunch? You need food service workers. And the bar for "good enough" at those levels are much lower. You don't need a 5-star lunch every day. You need a decent lunch that's better than going out. And things can only get so clean.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Yes. All of their warehouse workers are employees of Integrity Staffing, not Amazon. Presumably Amazon is directing Integrity to bump up its wage.
  - johnqpub 8y ago
    This is simply 100% false. What do you think the 500,000 employees of Amazon are doing if not working in a warehouse? They're not programming.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      The press lumps Integrity's headcount as "Amazon". It is to Amazon's benefit that this falsehood goes unnoticed.
      - johnqpub 8y ago
        Go look at the last quarterly filing. https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-second-quarter-sales-39-529-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail... Employees (full-time and part-time; excludes contractors & temporary personnel): 575,700 As dang said, if you're going to make a big claim, at least attempt to be right.

emodendroket 8y ago

> I refuse to believe Bezos woke up this morning with a new moral sense to change the ship around. No, of course not, but it's a victory that the pressure on them was enough they felt they had to make a concession.

askmike 8y ago
True. So the people who have been saying things should be lauded, not Amazon.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Sure. Ultimately I think the question of whether Bezos is good or bad is almost beside the point.

ams6110 8y ago

Amazon's profit is not what I would call "a lot." As recently as 2015 they had some negative quarters. This quarter last year less than 1%. 2018 has been higher but not more than about 4%. Compare the top 20 or so corporations average profitability of about 15%, and Apple's over 20%. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin

nebulous1 8y ago
Isn't that due to their currently loss-making Amazon Studios though?
- austenallred 8y ago
  It’s due to the fact that any ounce of profit they would have they instead re-invest into the business. Which, by the way, is (part of) why they’re so dominant.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Another chart showing what Amazon has been doing: https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_4298_amazons_long_term_growth_n.jpg https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_4298_a... Net income doesn’t do that naturally or by accident.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Agree, and in any other situation we'd be praising this. They're investing in the future, looking beyond the next quarter, etc.
    - ionised 8y ago
      Investing in the future is great. Doing so while exploiting workers and dubious tax arrangements is not.

alttab 8y ago

There's no winning, is there?

fixermark 8y ago

Possibly worth observing: they bring in a ton of gross cash, but their revenue is smaller than a lot of Internet operations because their out-lay is high: physical storage, transportation, etc. are all expenses that Internet companies with similar profits don't have to shoulder. In 2016, they made a profit of $857 million on a revenue of $30.1 billion--- i.e. profit margin of 2%, compared to Alphabet's 9.7% or Facebook's 36%(!!!). It's the number that investors care about, because it tells them how likely they are to get money back out of a business when the invest money into it. It's also a number the company cares about, because it tells them how much of a shock to their fixed costs they could stomach without suddenly finding themselves spending more than they make to keep the doors open. Amazon's (relatively) razor-thin margins are what make the company so paranoid about costs like wages and benefits; they've seen America's history of burning hulks of older companies wrecked by making pension promises when profits were high that they couldn't honor when profits tailed off.

dollar 8y ago
Amazon has never cared about net profit, they care about compounded growth through reinvestment of profits. It took Wall Street about 15 years to figure out they should leave Bezos alone.
t0mbstone 8y ago
Profits don't tell the whole story though. Imagine if you are Amazon. Do you take the extra billion dollars you earned this month and throw it into another warehouse and more growth opportunities? Or do you keep your size the same and use that money to raise wages? It's more of question of how they are allocating funds. Either way, the "profit" stays the same. Amazon has been focused on growth at all costs, and that meant keeping wages razor slim and reinvesting every spare penny. The real question is: Will slowing their growth investments and paying their employees a fair wage actually help their growth in the long run?
- fixermark 8y ago
  That's the strategy that makes a company more flexible to market shocks. If your revenue is tied up in new buildings, you can react to market shock by decreasing your growth rate. If your revenue is tied up in wages, you can't react to market shock by slashing your wage budget, for (obvious) psychological reasons that half-constructed warehouses are utterly immune to. ;)

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago

Why is it so shitty to congratulate someone for making a good change even if that change may have been in their best interest?

badcede 8y ago
Because it feels bad to concede anything at all. Which is a form of greed in its own right.

munificent 8y ago

> They did some calculations and projections which showed that raising the minimum wage brings more benefits (PR stunt, not being the target of new legislation anymore, etc) than downsides (now having to pay X more to some people). This may be true, but it doesn't nullify the fact that the workers are actually receiving a benefit from this, and it's a good thing that's worth pointing out.

JPGalt 8y ago

I have friends that work there. This was not a gift, the took benefits from the workers to pay for this raise. In fact they pulled all of the bonuses from the lower level employees as well as their share of stock in the company. This is a dog and pony show, nothing more.