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Employees at Amazon's New NYC Warehouse Launch Unionization Push

273 points by aaronbrethorst 8y ago

sascha_sl 8y ago
If any company needs a strong union to push back against working conditions, it's Amazon. Or Tesla.
- alecco 8y ago
  I disagree. There is low unemployment and some companies need extra work to be competitive. They should be paying higher than market rates and before joining you should be aware of where are you getting into. Years ago I declined Amazon mid way into the interview process after reaching out to ex-amazon workers from that same office. On the other hand, I know Amazon workers in a different country who love their jobs. Unions are needed if you don't have options.
  - sascha_sl 8y ago
    If you can't be competitive and ensure your employees have a livable wage, die. Amazon could start by stopping the free banana handouts (in a city so gentrified nobody who lives there needs a free banana) and instead paying their workers in that area more.
    - alecco 8y ago
      Competitive with whom? The mall? No, China would wise up and take over the Amazon market from outside USA. They can just do the just-in-time shipping from Mexico or Canada, with robots or something.
      - sascha_sl 8y ago
        Then maybe you should globalize workers rights before you globalize the economy. Nobody likes protectionism but maybe it's justified in this case. But your president is doing great work there from what I gathered :^)
        huyzz 8y ago
        Exactly what we need, more globalisation. Thanks.
    - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
      >If you can't be competitive and ensure your employees have a livable wage, die. This livable wage argument is insane. If you think the livable wage argument is $19/hr, vote to change the minimum wage (and please don't do it nationally, San Francisco hardly has the same cost of living as anywhere in West Virginia for example). Stop trying to shame companies into it, that's not how capitalism works. Capitalism ensures people get paid market rate. If you don't like that rate, change the minimum wage.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      No one is forcing people to work for companies that pay low wages, so there's no justification for intervening in their private business and forcing them to shut down. You're also not helping anyone by killing off companies that pay low wages. There is no automatic substitution where a new company emerges that pays good wages when you kill off an old company that paid low wages. All you do by killing companies off with mandatory minimum labor standards is reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  >Or Tesla. They are already the target of many union's campaigns (some aren't straightforward, one can say) but for reasons that aren't related to working conditions and are far more threatening to unions's future: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-electromobility-jobs/switch-to-electric-cars-threatens-75000-german-auto-industry-jobs-idUSKCN1J115L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-electromobility-j...
  - sascha_sl 8y ago
    Ah yes, I forgot the inscription on the architrave of the Reichstag actually said "Der deutschen Industrie". The amount of lobbying involved in keeping the german automotive industry going despite them mostly missing out on recent developments is staggering.
chobeat 8y ago
or every company in the USA given the surreal working culture and level of exploitation that is common throughout the nation.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Or US voters could do the more efficient thing and ask for nationwide paid maternity/paternity leave, vacation, and removal of “exempt” employees. And decoupling health “insurance” from employers, dump everyone on healthcare.gov or taxpayer funded healthcare.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Can voters ask for anything in a country with a two party system?
    - vinay427 8y ago
      Yes. The US political parties are nothing like parties in a parliamentary system. You don't vote for a party to gain a majority (even if the media sometimes makes it seem like this) and the head of state is not elected by a party. There can be much more diversity within each party organization than there is in the parliamentary sense of "party."
      - chrisseaton 8y ago
        > You don't vote for a party to gain a majority I thought party majorities in the house and senate were crucial?
        vinay427 8y ago
        There's no such thing, or it doesn't mean anything, legally speaking. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) If a majority of one of the house's seats belong to people who identify with party A, then they're more likely to vote with party A, but they don't have any special privileges like choosing the head of state (e.g. Prime Minister). More practically, to vote in a specific PM in a country with a normal parliamentary system, you need to vote for local representives that belong to their party, then hope that the party keeps them as the PM. Meanwhile, you end up with local representatives you may not want in the course of supporting the party. A president, in contrast, is just voted on more directly (yes, electoral college inefficiencies aside). As far as I can tell, a parliamentary system lends itself to having more parties because they can form coalitions to maintain a majority and elect a new "government" or administration. While that isn't possible in the US, it also isn't directly needed because the President is elected.
stfwn 8y ago
Good! > [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot." Freudian slips. > She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets. Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits. > “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement. Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’ at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”
- steve19 8y ago
  Why is it disgusting? In a lot of job people are expected to rush to get things done. I know a lawyer who was fired because she didn't get a payment executed by 5pm (it ended up costing someone a lot of money)
  - krapp 8y ago
    Lawyers are compensated better for their time than Amazon warehouse workers. The raffle tickets aren't for, you know, a performance bonus or anything of value, it's just a cheap gimmick.
    - songshu 8y ago
      Also the reason lawyers make so much is that they have the best trade unions ever. There’s a reason you can’t buy legal services from Walmart.
      - jstanley 8y ago
        No, the reason lawyers make so much is that they have knowledge and skills that are in high demand and that most people don't have. Software developers don't have any trade union at all, and we're paid well. The reason you can't buy legal services from Walmart is the same reason you can't buy software development from Walmart. It's just not their business.
tootahe45 8y ago
$19 an hour for warehouse work? I can see why they need to unionize instead of just finding somebody willing to pay more, nobody else is going to pay that for any comparable unskilled workload.
- fiblye 8y ago
  $19 is basically minimum wage in the NYC area. If even that.
  - mhaymo 8y ago
    NYC minimum wage is <=$15, depending on the employer and area. https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-states-minimum-wage https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-sta...
    - fiblye 8y ago
      And nobody is getting by on $15 in or near NYC. It's nowhere near the minimum wage needed to survive.
      - Karunamon 8y ago
        The term you're looking for then is "living wage". "Minimum wage" is a purely legal definition that means the least amount you're allowed to pay.
- jgh 8y ago
  They're occasionally the largest company in the world, headed by the richest man in the world. I'm sure they can find the money somewhere to pay their employees a decent wage.
  - sparkling 8y ago
    Ahhh, the "XYZ is a billion dollar company!!1! they can afford to pay $x to their employees" argument. Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
deanCommie 8y ago
When Amazon first launched they only had a few FC's in the US, and as a result claimed they did not need to collect local taxes because they didn't have a "presence" in all the states of their shoppers. Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes. Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete. The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch. The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?) If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars. I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- jgh 8y ago
  > If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. I'm sure they've thought this through more than some random poster on Hacker News.
- krapp 8y ago
  >If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.
  - prepend 8y ago
Rainymood 8y ago
My gripe with the American unionization debacle is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're the pillars keeping the problem standing. It's the same with tipping. If everyone suddenly stopped tipping, then people would not have enough wages to meet their obligations. This results in people not being able to pay rent etc., however, this also leads to a walk-out of the servers that don't want to work for under minimum wage anymore. The problem is that people that are tipping and servers that are encouraging the tipping are keeping the problem alive. It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you. That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth. So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction. I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!
- syrgian 8y ago
  By your description of the problem it matches better the "Tragedy of the commons" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) than a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy would be if the belief that unions fail to help workers made them fail to help workers (which also happens).
- andreer 8y ago
  Technological innovation can also arise as a consequence of the minimum wage being high. By increasing the cost of human labor, automation becomes relatively cheaper / more cost effective. Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition. Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.
asianthrowaway 8y ago
I'm surprised Bezos doesn't empathize more with the working class, especially given his own humble origins. In fact, I find it hard to discern his personality.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Humble origins? Didn't he famously start Amazon with a $300,000 loan from his parents? I don't know what you consider humble, but my family does not have a spare 300 grand to gamble on risky investments.
- ionised 8y ago
  He was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by his parents to start a business. Not exactly humble beginnings.
intralizee 8y ago
It appears a lot of people desire suffering in the comments. Surprised we live in modern times and it's acceptable to not want others to be able to afford decent living. The ability to own a house/place of their own and with supporting kids if they choose. Minimum wage these days can make it impossible to live such a healthy lifestyle; with how prices are going up on everything.
- umvi 8y ago
  It's reasonable to be wary of unions in the US given what happened with them the first half of the 20th century. I don't think anyone wants suffering, but solutions are never as simple as they appear to be when poverty is involved.
  - intralizee 8y ago
    Unions appear to give the capabilities for workers to protest poor wages. I've heard positive things from my grandpa about unions when he needed to find work. Everything has negatives but I'm unsure why workers wouldn't want those positives.
    - umvi 8y ago
      Unions have the same exact problems as any organizational problem/solution pairing (such as car manufacturer/dealership pairing): the Shirky principle[1]. [1] https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ Unions have a few positives, but, especially in the US, unions have a reputation for historically becoming corrupted by organized crime, strangling businesses into oblivion, and/or making it impossible for companies to fire incompetent/lazy workers. I know it's not like that in some places in Europe, but the US has been burned by truly egregious unions that have set back progress for decades.
      - jammygit 8y ago
        Unions are lousy but they also force employers to treat their employees with some minimum levels of respect. People literally die and get maimed when governments and unions don't force employers to act better. Apples Chinese plants have suicide nets around them
apexalpha 8y ago
Americans are always up in arms defending capitalism. But don't you realise that in a free market labour should be allowed to work together? It is in their best interest to do so.
- jswizzy 8y ago
  Unions are mandatory to join it's not a free market you can't negotiate your own pay.
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    Everyone in the union decides that it is in their best interest to use collective bargaining. And hearing the stories from the bottom 30% of the American workforce I can't say that they are wrong.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      No, the majority of employees in a work unit make that determination. Majority will overrides the individual's contracting rights. And it is not in people's best interest to undermine the free market. It totally impoverishes people. Laws robbing people of their freedom make society poorer. The US would still have a manufacturing base if it weren't for laws subordinating employers to unions.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    >Unions are mandatory to join Only if the company is mandatory to work for.
tjpnz 8y ago
Clearly the two are miles apart but I've long been curious if any of the attitudes Amazon has towards Warehouse staff filter through to those in engineering roles. I would be especially interested in hearing from any Amazonians here.
- sosilkj 8y ago
  the new york times has addressed this. the short answer is: apparently yes. "[Amazon] is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable" https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
  - jkingsbery 8y ago
    I work at Amazon as a Senior Software Development Engineer. (Obviously, my opinions are my own, and I don't speak for the company in any official capacity.) I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that. At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many people around.
nimbius 8y ago
to the employees at Amazon trying to unionize: good luck...this is a hard hard road in the US. I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year. Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.
- schnevets 8y ago
  I'm glad to hear your story had a happy ending (with the notable exception of those injured by the old owner's negligence). I do wonder how much better the US economy would look if these kinds of investments against corruption were more commonplace.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I would be interested if you might be able to share lessons from this experience that could be used to shape the building of tooling to help workers organize at scale. Email in my profile.
BenjaminBlair 8y ago
It's sad to read how the workers respond "they are talking to us like we are robots". Commodified labor is what they are, ever since the Fordist model of capitalism people have been gradually reduced to salary numbers and I for one am happy to see people standing for their rights. Or to remind they have rights, to begin with. Just I think there's not much left of the Left, a lot of people make it less about the economy and more about their hurt ego, at least that's what I think about postmodern leftists which I happen to know quite a lot.
CryptoPunk 8y ago
This is why the US and other liberal democratic countries can't have nice things. Anytime a company starts to produce huge returns for the economy in the form of export revenue, it is chased out of the country by unionization and other wealth extraction schemes, rationalized by maximally viral populist ideologies and narratives, like anything based on class resentment.
jammygit 8y ago
If they held a fundraiser to help them succeed, I'd chip in.
effingwewt 8y ago
I just want to say, threads like these almost always make me embarrassed to be an SE. For every level headed or compassionate comment, there are 10 more not understanding the problem from the pedestal they don't realize they are standing on. 'why not get another job?' 'no one is forcing them to work'. Seriously sometimes its disgusting and akways frustrating that wome people cant seem to even realize the bubble they are in. Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered, regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  You're missing the point that people are making when they say "they have a choice". They're not saying their lives are not rife with hardship and very difficult choices. They're saying that their lives are not being made worse by some employer somewhere offering them a bad job. You can't place the burden of providing them with a living income on the first person who hires them. It's just an immature way of assigning blame and responsibility, that resorts to first association thinking. It's not rational/correct. It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down. Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone any favors by reducing their employment options. Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated. An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or contract.

If any company needs a strong union to push back against working conditions, it's Amazon. Or Tesla.

alecco 8y ago
I disagree. There is low unemployment and some companies need extra work to be competitive. They should be paying higher than market rates and before joining you should be aware of where are you getting into. Years ago I declined Amazon mid way into the interview process after reaching out to ex-amazon workers from that same office. On the other hand, I know Amazon workers in a different country who love their jobs. Unions are needed if you don't have options.
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  If you can't be competitive and ensure your employees have a livable wage, die. Amazon could start by stopping the free banana handouts (in a city so gentrified nobody who lives there needs a free banana) and instead paying their workers in that area more.
  - alecco 8y ago
    Competitive with whom? The mall? No, China would wise up and take over the Amazon market from outside USA. They can just do the just-in-time shipping from Mexico or Canada, with robots or something.
    - sascha_sl 8y ago
      Then maybe you should globalize workers rights before you globalize the economy. Nobody likes protectionism but maybe it's justified in this case. But your president is doing great work there from what I gathered :^)
      - huyzz 8y ago
        Exactly what we need, more globalisation. Thanks.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    >If you can't be competitive and ensure your employees have a livable wage, die. This livable wage argument is insane. If you think the livable wage argument is $19/hr, vote to change the minimum wage (and please don't do it nationally, San Francisco hardly has the same cost of living as anywhere in West Virginia for example). Stop trying to shame companies into it, that's not how capitalism works. Capitalism ensures people get paid market rate. If you don't like that rate, change the minimum wage.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    No one is forcing people to work for companies that pay low wages, so there's no justification for intervening in their private business and forcing them to shut down. You're also not helping anyone by killing off companies that pay low wages. There is no automatic substitution where a new company emerges that pays good wages when you kill off an old company that paid low wages. All you do by killing companies off with mandatory minimum labor standards is reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages.
rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
>Or Tesla. They are already the target of many union's campaigns (some aren't straightforward, one can say) but for reasons that aren't related to working conditions and are far more threatening to unions's future: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-electromobility-jobs/switch-to-electric-cars-threatens-75000-german-auto-industry-jobs-idUSKCN1J115L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-electromobility-j...
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  Ah yes, I forgot the inscription on the architrave of the Reichstag actually said "Der deutschen Industrie". The amount of lobbying involved in keeping the german automotive industry going despite them mostly missing out on recent developments is staggering.

or every company in the USA given the surreal working culture and level of exploitation that is common throughout the nation.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
Or US voters could do the more efficient thing and ask for nationwide paid maternity/paternity leave, vacation, and removal of “exempt” employees. And decoupling health “insurance” from employers, dump everyone on healthcare.gov or taxpayer funded healthcare.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Can voters ask for anything in a country with a two party system?
  - vinay427 8y ago
    Yes. The US political parties are nothing like parties in a parliamentary system. You don't vote for a party to gain a majority (even if the media sometimes makes it seem like this) and the head of state is not elected by a party. There can be much more diversity within each party organization than there is in the parliamentary sense of "party."
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      > You don't vote for a party to gain a majority I thought party majorities in the house and senate were crucial?
      - vinay427 8y ago
        There's no such thing, or it doesn't mean anything, legally speaking. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) If a majority of one of the house's seats belong to people who identify with party A, then they're more likely to vote with party A, but they don't have any special privileges like choosing the head of state (e.g. Prime Minister). More practically, to vote in a specific PM in a country with a normal parliamentary system, you need to vote for local representives that belong to their party, then hope that the party keeps them as the PM. Meanwhile, you end up with local representatives you may not want in the course of supporting the party. A president, in contrast, is just voted on more directly (yes, electoral college inefficiencies aside). As far as I can tell, a parliamentary system lends itself to having more parties because they can form coalitions to maintain a majority and elect a new "government" or administration. While that isn't possible in the US, it also isn't directly needed because the President is elected.

stfwn 8y ago

Good! > [Employee:] "They talk to you like you’re a robot." Freudian slips. > She said she’s insulted by the company’s "power hours" in which employees are pressured to move extra fast in hopes of winning raffle tickets. Besides this being disgusting, it’s an interesting analogy for the process by which companies like Amazon and Huawei supposedly pick the location for a new major factory/warehouse/campus; let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits. > “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution” the company said in a statement. Workers probably won’t gather at the entrances of the warehouse to yell ‘scab’ at strikebreakers, so the resolution Amazon is getting at probably is probably “you’re fired.”

steve19 8y ago
Why is it disgusting? In a lot of job people are expected to rush to get things done. I know a lawyer who was fired because she didn't get a payment executed by 5pm (it ended up costing someone a lot of money)
- krapp 8y ago
  Lawyers are compensated better for their time than Amazon warehouse workers. The raffle tickets aren't for, you know, a performance bonus or anything of value, it's just a cheap gimmick.
  - songshu 8y ago
    Also the reason lawyers make so much is that they have the best trade unions ever. There’s a reason you can’t buy legal services from Walmart.
    - jstanley 8y ago
      No, the reason lawyers make so much is that they have knowledge and skills that are in high demand and that most people don't have. Software developers don't have any trade union at all, and we're paid well. The reason you can't buy legal services from Walmart is the same reason you can't buy software development from Walmart. It's just not their business.

tootahe45 8y ago

$19 an hour for warehouse work? I can see why they need to unionize instead of just finding somebody willing to pay more, nobody else is going to pay that for any comparable unskilled workload.

fiblye 8y ago
$19 is basically minimum wage in the NYC area. If even that.
- mhaymo 8y ago
  NYC minimum wage is <=$15, depending on the employer and area. https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-states-minimum-wage https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-sta...
  - fiblye 8y ago
    And nobody is getting by on $15 in or near NYC. It's nowhere near the minimum wage needed to survive.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      The term you're looking for then is "living wage". "Minimum wage" is a purely legal definition that means the least amount you're allowed to pay.
jgh 8y ago
They're occasionally the largest company in the world, headed by the richest man in the world. I'm sure they can find the money somewhere to pay their employees a decent wage.
- sparkling 8y ago
  Ahhh, the "XYZ is a billion dollar company!!1! they can afford to pay $x to their employees" argument. Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.

deanCommie 8y ago

When Amazon first launched they only had a few FC's in the US, and as a result claimed they did not need to collect local taxes because they didn't have a "presence" in all the states of their shoppers. Lawmakers complained this created an unfair advantage over local retailers and insisted on regulation that forced Amazon to collect local taxes. Except that meant that there was no longer any reason why Amazon wouldn't open local fulfillment centers in basically every state, improve delivery speed, lower costs through economies of scale, and make it even harder for the local brick and mortar retailers to compete. The Cobra Effect[1] is a bitch. The relevance here is unions are good, and worker rights are good. But Amazon is already working hard on replacing all those workers with robots and automation (who isn't?) If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. And then it will be the government's problem to figure out what to do with millions of low skilled workers leaving the labour force at the same time as millions of truck drivers becoming redundant with self-driving cars. I do not have good faith in the US figuring this out without substantial social upheaval (The rest of the West will handle it much better because of the existing safety net and early experimentation with Universal Basic Income). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

jgh 8y ago
> If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. I'm sure they've thought this through more than some random poster on Hacker News.
krapp 8y ago
>If these workers succeed in unionizing, it will only just accelerate Amazon's quest to replace MOST of these workers with robots. It won't, though. Amazon is already investing as much time, money and effort as possible into automation. Nothing workers do, or don't do, is going to affect that timetable, only the feasibility of deploying automation technology at scale versus the cost effectiveness of existing human labor.
- prepend 8y ago

Rainymood 8y ago

My gripe with the American unionization debacle is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're the pillars keeping the problem standing. It's the same with tipping. If everyone suddenly stopped tipping, then people would not have enough wages to meet their obligations. This results in people not being able to pay rent etc., however, this also leads to a walk-out of the servers that don't want to work for under minimum wage anymore. The problem is that people that are tipping and servers that are encouraging the tipping are keeping the problem alive. It's the same thing with unionization, unionization is beneficial for workers, yet everyone keeps undercutting each other to stay afloat and meet their obligations. Because people can not properly cooperate and work together you are stuck in this bad equilibrium where companies have so much power over you. That being said, this exploitation of the working class has lead to a lot of technological innovation coming from the USA, let's not forget that. Of course, this has lead to a huge inequality and divide in social class and wealth. So that concludes my rant basically. Your attitude towards these kind of problems is complex, but completely human and understandable. No complex question has a simple answer ... but I think that this is a step in the right direction. I want to conclude that I'm a European, so if you feel like I completely missed the mark, please feel free to open a dialogue with me!

syrgian 8y ago
By your description of the problem it matches better the "Tragedy of the commons" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) than a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy would be if the belief that unions fail to help workers made them fail to help workers (which also happens).
andreer 8y ago
Technological innovation can also arise as a consequence of the minimum wage being high. By increasing the cost of human labor, automation becomes relatively cheaper / more cost effective. Here in Norway this has led to the near complete elimination of classes of jobs. As a very visible example, we have no toll booth operators or garage attendants, these have been universally replaced by automatic license plate recognition. Thankfully we have a (relatively) good social safety net to take care of those who lose their jobs to such things.

asianthrowaway 8y ago

I'm surprised Bezos doesn't empathize more with the working class, especially given his own humble origins. In fact, I find it hard to discern his personality.

ForHackernews 8y ago
Humble origins? Didn't he famously start Amazon with a $300,000 loan from his parents? I don't know what you consider humble, but my family does not have a spare 300 grand to gamble on risky investments.
ionised 8y ago
He was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by his parents to start a business. Not exactly humble beginnings.

intralizee 8y ago

It appears a lot of people desire suffering in the comments. Surprised we live in modern times and it's acceptable to not want others to be able to afford decent living. The ability to own a house/place of their own and with supporting kids if they choose. Minimum wage these days can make it impossible to live such a healthy lifestyle; with how prices are going up on everything.

umvi 8y ago
It's reasonable to be wary of unions in the US given what happened with them the first half of the 20th century. I don't think anyone wants suffering, but solutions are never as simple as they appear to be when poverty is involved.
- intralizee 8y ago
  Unions appear to give the capabilities for workers to protest poor wages. I've heard positive things from my grandpa about unions when he needed to find work. Everything has negatives but I'm unsure why workers wouldn't want those positives.
  - umvi 8y ago
    Unions have the same exact problems as any organizational problem/solution pairing (such as car manufacturer/dealership pairing): the Shirky principle[1]. [1] https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ Unions have a few positives, but, especially in the US, unions have a reputation for historically becoming corrupted by organized crime, strangling businesses into oblivion, and/or making it impossible for companies to fire incompetent/lazy workers. I know it's not like that in some places in Europe, but the US has been burned by truly egregious unions that have set back progress for decades.
    - jammygit 8y ago
      Unions are lousy but they also force employers to treat their employees with some minimum levels of respect. People literally die and get maimed when governments and unions don't force employers to act better. Apples Chinese plants have suicide nets around them

apexalpha 8y ago

Americans are always up in arms defending capitalism. But don't you realise that in a free market labour should be allowed to work together? It is in their best interest to do so.

jswizzy 8y ago
Unions are mandatory to join it's not a free market you can't negotiate your own pay.
- apexalpha 8y ago
  Everyone in the union decides that it is in their best interest to use collective bargaining. And hearing the stories from the bottom 30% of the American workforce I can't say that they are wrong.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    No, the majority of employees in a work unit make that determination. Majority will overrides the individual's contracting rights. And it is not in people's best interest to undermine the free market. It totally impoverishes people. Laws robbing people of their freedom make society poorer. The US would still have a manufacturing base if it weren't for laws subordinating employers to unions.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  >Unions are mandatory to join Only if the company is mandatory to work for.

tjpnz 8y ago

Clearly the two are miles apart but I've long been curious if any of the attitudes Amazon has towards Warehouse staff filter through to those in engineering roles. I would be especially interested in hearing from any Amazonians here.

sosilkj 8y ago
the new york times has addressed this. the short answer is: apparently yes. "[Amazon] is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable" https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
- jkingsbery 8y ago
  I work at Amazon as a Senior Software Development Engineer. (Obviously, my opinions are my own, and I don't speak for the company in any official capacity.) I don't doubt any stories shared in that article, but none of those match my personal experience. I'd imagine like at any large company, some of it will depend on who your boss is, and in my particular case my boss is very clear that family stuff is first priority, and that any "crunch time" should be limited both by length and frequency of occurrence. When people on our team have health issues, have to take care of sick children or spouses, have to deal with car or apartment problems, they go and deal with it and I've never seen any teammates be anything but supportive of that. At most of the companies I've worked at prior to Amazon, it was common to have people stay until 6:30 or later. When I stay until 6:30 or so (which I do because I commute from NJ into the city, and so my schedule lines up with train times - not because I'm being overworked), there are usually not many people around.

nimbius 8y ago

to the employees at Amazon trying to unionize: good luck...this is a hard hard road in the US. I worked for a large automotive repair chain briefly in 2007 that eventually unionized after 3 years. working conditions were absolutely miserable and unsafe. The garage pit for oil changes caught fire twice in a year due to lack of maintenance from management. At some point our oil heating system burst before christmas and we were all made to work with no heat over new years. we habitually hired anyone with a pulse and paid the price in OSHA violations until our insurance dropped us. the last straw was when someone lost half their foot under a jerry-rigged lift that management wouldnt fix for a year. Once we did get a union, management closed the shop and chained the doors. six of our long-timers and a very nice local doctor got together and bought the property from the franchise owner out of bankruptcy. The Local 701 chipped in and helped re-brand the shop and even replaced the aging air compressors.

schnevets 8y ago
I'm glad to hear your story had a happy ending (with the notable exception of those injured by the old owner's negligence). I do wonder how much better the US economy would look if these kinds of investments against corruption were more commonplace.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
I would be interested if you might be able to share lessons from this experience that could be used to shape the building of tooling to help workers organize at scale. Email in my profile.

BenjaminBlair 8y ago

It's sad to read how the workers respond "they are talking to us like we are robots". Commodified labor is what they are, ever since the Fordist model of capitalism people have been gradually reduced to salary numbers and I for one am happy to see people standing for their rights. Or to remind they have rights, to begin with. Just I think there's not much left of the Left, a lot of people make it less about the economy and more about their hurt ego, at least that's what I think about postmodern leftists which I happen to know quite a lot.

CryptoPunk 8y ago

This is why the US and other liberal democratic countries can't have nice things. Anytime a company starts to produce huge returns for the economy in the form of export revenue, it is chased out of the country by unionization and other wealth extraction schemes, rationalized by maximally viral populist ideologies and narratives, like anything based on class resentment.

jammygit 8y ago

If they held a fundraiser to help them succeed, I'd chip in.

effingwewt 8y ago

I just want to say, threads like these almost always make me embarrassed to be an SE. For every level headed or compassionate comment, there are 10 more not understanding the problem from the pedestal they don't realize they are standing on. 'why not get another job?' 'no one is forcing them to work'. Seriously sometimes its disgusting and akways frustrating that wome people cant seem to even realize the bubble they are in. Let me try and make this clear for those who can't see it- most of these workers do NOT have a choice, they have to take the 1st job offered, regardless of pay. It's also very hard to look for another job when you are being ground down with long hours, etc. If you find you cant try and see things from someone else's perspective, think if maybe you have a family member going through something like this, or how you'd feel if they were instead of 'LOL too bad so sad find a better job suckers!'

CryptoPunk 8y ago
You're missing the point that people are making when they say "they have a choice". They're not saying their lives are not rife with hardship and very difficult choices. They're saying that their lives are not being made worse by some employer somewhere offering them a bad job. You can't place the burden of providing them with a living income on the first person who hires them. It's just an immature way of assigning blame and responsibility, that resorts to first association thinking. It's not rational/correct. It's also economically wrong thinking. It's almost tantamount to thinking vaccines are a conspiracy by Big Gov/Pharma, in rejecting standard economics as some kind of conspiracy by the establishment to keep The Man down. Prohibiting bad jobs does not cause good jobs to appear to substitute them. It eliminates bad jobs and replaces them with nothing. You're not doing anyone any favors by reducing their employment options. Finally, it hurts industry, and encourages outsourcing, which hurts workers in the country. It also reduces the performance of those industries that can't be outsourced, because the micro-economic incentives to perform are eradicated. An advanced economy is an extremely complex system, and it only works as well as it does due to bottom-up order created through a vast interplay of self-interested action, motivating individuals to generate value. To think that it will work just as well with collections of workers attaining monopolistic control over their company's hiring decisions is being blinded to reality by idealistic/emotional thinking. The casualty of this kind of economically unsound and ideologically motivitated thinking is the worker, who sees their wage growth stagnate, because the industries their wages depend on stagnate or contract.