12 ms·

Amazon finds an alternative workforce of people with disabilities

80 points by wallflower 8y ago

mkmk 8y ago
Amazon's PR team really gave this story the green light? Seems a bit shameless trot out the fact that you hire disabled people as a feel-good story. What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?
- sodosopa 8y ago
  What has your company done to enable workers with a disability?
  - petermcneeley 8y ago
    Any company that allows for remote work likely enables a whole class of workers with various disabilities.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      Only if you actually follow through and hire them. You can put in a wheelchair ramp and feel good about yourself, but probably should actually hire some in a wheelchair.
    - tetra_proxy 8y ago
      You'd be surprised, in my experience, most jobs aren't flexible on schedule or understanding when you have regular doctors appointments. Chronic medical conditions and disabilities can require many regular appointments. I have 2-3 appointments a month and that doesn't include any physical therapy I might have. My Dad has multiple appointments per week usually. Luckily I found a job that let's me work my schedule around my appointments.
      - dmix 8y ago
        Really? You’ve had jobs where going to the doctor a few times a month is a deal breaker for the company? This type of thing could easily be negotiated early on in all the startups I’ve worked for. Even non dev employees. Even worse for a remote job?
        Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        You have been lucky and have had few low-paying jobs. Most jobs I've worked in the US are like this - you are fully expected to be there 100% of the time the company thinks you should be. All else should be done on your own time around the company time. This is even more true for low-paying jobs. It sucks for anyone with health problems and sucks for anyone with children. People lose jobs because their children are sick and because they wind up with a major medical thing that happens. FMLA only covers large medical stuff - if you've worked full time for a year for a large enough company. Some of this could be fixed with laws that protect employees and things like that. I'm generally thankful I don't have to deal with the lack of worker protection in the US right now - it meant that breaking my elbow while working a seasonal job didn't mean I was out of an income, for example.
        vertex-four 8y ago
        Someone I know recently interviewed for a company that would give them 7 sick days a year. Being chronically ill, they’d realistically go through that by the end of February. Flex time wasn’t an option either.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Exactly. Threads like this are an invitation for Copenhagen Ethics (i.e. "No matter how little anyone else has done, if you even do a tiny amount for cause X, you will be criticized for all you failed to do.") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
  - mkmk 8y ago
    I don't think that's relevant at all... my comment wasn't about the relative merits of doing or not doing something good for workers with a disability. My point was that, in their monthly/quarterly PR pitch meeting, somebody on their comms team pitched 'let's make a big deal about how we're helping disabled people' and that nobody else in that meeting said "oh, maybe let's not use the fact that we hire disabled people to advance our PR goals."
    - sodosopa 8y ago
      It is or should I mark that as a 'no'? I've contracted with companies who specifically hire disabled workers. Their unemployment rate is ridiculously high (edit, I've heard numbers of up to 70%) and my leadership wanted to so something about that. I needed web usability experience added to my team, why not have someone with a disability to lead that? Guy was unemployed for a year, had a masters in HCI, this was an easy choice. My company wanted to include our work in their diversity report, why not? They're specifically reaching out and hiring people who cannot find work, if they get positive PR for that, why the hell should we stop them? It gets more like-minded people in the company and shows others in our industry that they can do this too. It's leadership.
- uptown 8y ago
  "What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?" Maybe they could start with Boxers.
- HaloZero 8y ago
  Companies will always do what's best for them too. In this case, the story talks about how Amazon held them to the same standard and they did better in terms of attendance, accident rate, and productivity. Which hopefully showcases to other employers that you can use Northwest and other types of facilities too.
- natalyarostova 8y ago
  You can expand your thinking a little. Let's say society as a whole confers a benefit of $x for a 'feel good' story about a corporation doing well. We can interpret this however we want, for example, the propensity to shop on Amazon increases by some epsilon. This now means companies will try to do morally 'good' things in order to gain these rents. This is a mechanism in which we reward companies for engaging in socially optimal behavior, and it operates without any central management. Of course, like all things, this can be gamed. But that's not, on its own, a reason to suspect it's all for naught.
  - mkmk 8y ago
    This is an interesting way to look at it, thank you. However, I do think that there are certain norms, that when violated, deserve to be called out. By calling them out, we help enforce the norms that are important to us. For me, the norm that was violated here was "don't use the fact that you are treating disabled people decently as a way to elevate your business," which is a subset of a larger norm of "don't use disadvantaged members of our society for personal gain". Pitching this story to the press (which Amazon certainly did) is different than doing the good deed itself, and the positive benefit to their business for doing this seems like it shouldn't outweigh the social norm that has been violated. Surely there are positive moral things they have done (some recycling initiative?) that don't rely on violating the norms I listed above.
    - natalyarostova 8y ago
      I guess the higher order question we may be disagreeing on is "Is it okay to use disadvantaged people for personal gain, if in doing so you also improve their state in life? I would answer (not enthusiastically) that it is okay.
908087 8y ago
If they hire people who have colostomy bags they won't even have to worry about micromanaging their bathroom use.
atdrummond 8y ago
Not mentioned - that they can pay far less for these workers by dint of the much lower minimum wage for disabled persons. The NW Center has been cited in the past for such underpayment. https://patch.com/washington/seattle/nonprofit-underpaid-disabled-workers-seattle-labor-office https://patch.com/washington/seattle/nonprofit-underpaid-dis...
- goda90 8y ago
  I was going to say. It's good to provide opportunities and accomodations for disabled people, but to expect this to be altruistic on the part of Amazon is naive. They've done the math and think the accommodations won't counteract the gains from being able to pay less, and get some PR.
  - julianozen 8y ago
    > Likewise, Northwest Center employees and those it places with Amazon are paid at least minimum wage. (Seattle closed a loophole in its minimum wage law that allowed employers to pay people with a disability a sub-minimum wage and recovered back wages from Northwest Center in 2018. This was mentioned and it is implied that amazon is not paying these employees less > employees placed at Amazon by Northwest Center chalked up a productivity rate that was 98 percent of the average while achieving 37 percent better quality work than the general population, and with a perfect safety record, compared with a 1.1 percent warehouse incident rate. They also had better attendance. This sounds like a pretty big win Disclaimer: I am a former amazon employee
    - joker3 8y ago
      If they don't come out and say that Amazon's not paying these employees a lower wage, then I'm not going to place a lot of faith in any implication.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        Direct quotes from the article, emphasis mine: > “I’m grateful to actually have gotten a job,” Howard said during a work break. “It’s just part time, but even still, it’s a good job. … I’m making above minimum wage.” > Likewise, Northwest Center employees and those it places with Amazon are paid at least minimum wage. (Seattle closed a loophole in its minimum wage law that allowed employers to pay people with a disability a sub-minimum wage and recovered back wages from Northwest Center in 2018. Washington and many other states still allow minimum wage waivers.)
drewda 8y ago
A recent point of comparison: Walmart quietly eliminating the "greeter" position, which is often filled by people with physical or developmental disabilities: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/696718872/walmart-is-eliminating-greeters-workers-with-disabilities-feel-targeted https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/696718872/walmart-is-eliminat... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251858
- zzleeper 8y ago
  Tbh greeters seemed almost like a waste, as they were not directly creating any output.
  - seretogis 8y ago
    Imagined or not, there is/was a notion that greeting people helps for loss-prevention purposes. (i.e. if you say hello and make eye contact with someone as they enter your establishment, they are less inclined to steal from you.) If Walmart is removing those positions, they may have found it to be a misconception. [edit: it seems like Walmart is not removing greeters, just making it harder for disabled/elderly people to hold those positions and expanding their responsibilities.]
    - benatkin 8y ago
      They're also calling them hosts, which is annoying, because they aren't anything like a host at a restaurant, because going shopping in a giant big box retailer isn't anything like dining at a sit-down restaurant. I can see why they would use an overblown title, because they call their employees associates to say that they consider them partners, when in reality there are over a million employees and there's no way they could all be partners.
      - crooked-v 8y ago
        They seem to be changing the positions from being generally at the door to instead being staff generally designated for welcoming but also helping people with requests, in which case 'host' makes sense as a distinction from other staff intended to focus on stocking, cleaning, checkout, etc.
avgDev 8y ago
I have chronic pain fortunately I manage and can work full time as SE. However, I know others who could not transition from physical field into something else. Most people with disability genuinely want to work, but they usually get fired due to missing days or jobs that lack flexibility and cannot accommodate doctor visits for example. Many are just as good if not better than healthy employees. I thought about creating some kind of non-profit to help connect disabled employees and employers(have not researched the market, not sure if that already exists). I think if people had clearly defined limits employers would be more likely to hire them. In western nations, with disability often comes feeling of not being worthy, as worth is often attached to work. Ability to work remote and flexible hours could really put many people back to work.
- MuffinFlavored 8y ago
  What does SE stand for? Software engineer? What kind of chronic pain do you have and why do you have it? How common is this?
  - avgDev 8y ago
    Yes, software engineer. I have widespread tendon pain caused by a severe reaction to a popular antibiotic. I generally am pretty normal just get pain. Some medical professional label my symptoms as "fibromyalgia", however, this has been causing a lot of problems to finding the actual cause. Here is a link if you are interested on the subject: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/referrals/quinolone-fluoroquinolone-containing-medicinal-products https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/referrals/quino... Currently, most doctors in the US are not aware of the issue and nobody wants to speak up. It has been an odd experience for me.
    - atdrummond 8y ago
      A fluoroquinolone by chance?
      - avgDev 8y ago
maerF0x0 8y ago
When i was younger I had a summer job of working in a paper recycling plant. It was soul crushing boring work. I'm talking pick up a spent roll of newsprint, saw it length wise, put the paper in the paper feed, the roll in the cardboard feed. Good job that was ~30 seconds. Repeat for 8 hours. We had a bunch of mentally disabled people on our team (think low IQ / down syndrome). These guys loved their job. They felt like they were doing cool shit all day. They cheered and smiled when the food truck would roll around 11AM and they'd spend what seemed like 1/2 their earnings on snacks and drinks. They smiled nearly every moment of that job. Good for them and good for the plant manager understanding this reality and making a good for society out of a relatively bad situation (boring ass work, people having a disability few of us could handle).
- yazr 8y ago
  Thank u for this write up. It made me smile, and hopefully this will last for more than the 5min it takes to reach the comments about worker conditions and low-cost exploitation.
- tetra_proxy 8y ago
  I worked at Food Lion(Southeastern US Grocery Store) as a teenager and they hire people with mental disabilities as baggers. They loved the job and never complained, I was a cashier and bagger and let me tell you it sucks rounding up carts when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but those guys were just happy to be working and around people who accepted them. And anyone who talked down to or badly about them didn't have a job for long.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  In Huxley's novel Brave New World, people have exactly the mental capability to perform their role in society and no more. Everyone happily fulfills their function and goes about their lives. Of course, people of sufficiently low mental capability don't occur naturally at a high enough rate. So they have to help things along by disrupting fetal development for some people. That part seems morally questionable. Great novel though, highly recommended.
escapologybb 8y ago
Quick question: can anybody, with a straight face explain why I as a quadriplegic software developer, Hacker, public speaker and all round pain in the arse earn less than everybody else? I'm asking because more than one person in this thread seems to think it's okay. I haven't replied to anybody specifically because I don't want to start a flame war, but I am genuinely interested. Slightly off topic, but I had to start my own company because finding a job when you are quadriplegic is richly impossible. Granted, quadriplegics can make terrible employees in that it's difficult to say you will definitely be at a certain place at a certain time. But it just takes a little tweaking and a little flexitime to get around the obstacle for instance.
- atdrummond 8y ago
  You shouldn't. But as a disabled person myself, I have strong opinions on this topic. I'm not a quadriplegic but I've experienced significant discrimination in hiring due to my conditions, despite being extremely productive - on both an absolute and relative basis.
- obrisintor 8y ago
  I'll try to explain. The first rule of life that you have to understand it's that life isn't fair. People without disabilities can go to conferences and expand their social network better than quadriplegics. They can go to more job interviews easier. They appear to have more options than disabled people. They appear more dominant and able to negotiate a better salary. A potential employer wants to pay the lowest salary for the best work. They think (and based on what you wrote, rightly so) that they can get away with paying quadriplegic people less.
  - dang 8y ago
    This is so patronizing that it crosses into the general territory of personal attack and trolling, even though you probably didn't mean it that way. Can you please not post like this to HN? If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it.
danite 8y ago
Very skeptical that this is due to Amazon's generosity and not just because they can tap into an underpaid and underemployed workforce. They don't seem to be giving these people access to the jobs that actually make money at Amazon. I'm very wary of feel good stories about employing people with disabilities in low paying jobs with lots of repetitive manual labor. Often it's a way to get cheaper and more easily exploited labor that you can get your PR team to spin as charity.
- ummonk 8y ago
  That's good though isn't it? The more employers start seeking competitive advantage in hiring disabled people, the narrower the pay and employment gap will become.
  - danite 8y ago
    It's more likely that they use it to depress the wages of abled workers. This sort of unskilled labor isn't exactly scarce enough to cause meaningful competitive pressure like you describe.
    - dmix 8y ago
      This worldview almost always ends up creating no jobs rather than any jobs for a greater amount of people. Always in the name of ‘good intentions’. Having a job and financial independence vs nothing at all is the real world reality for the vast majority of these people. Just because Amazon makes these jobs available is not taking other well paying jobs away from them. That’s not how this works. Wether or not there should be more high paying jobs to capable disabled people is a different question.
      - danite 8y ago
        The US is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. If we want to make providing disabled people with fulfilling jobs that pay a good wage a priority, we are entirely capable of accomplishing that.
titanomachy 8y ago
"We have a really big problem with attrition and retention and absenteeism in our sortation centers" Is this perhaps a sign that you have terrible work conditions? Or perhaps you aren't paying enough? Seems more likely than "the people we hire are usually terrible workers".

80 points by wallflower 8y ago

mkmk 8y ago

Amazon's PR team really gave this story the green light? Seems a bit shameless trot out the fact that you hire disabled people as a feel-good story. What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?

sodosopa 8y ago
What has your company done to enable workers with a disability?
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  Any company that allows for remote work likely enables a whole class of workers with various disabilities.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Only if you actually follow through and hire them. You can put in a wheelchair ramp and feel good about yourself, but probably should actually hire some in a wheelchair.
  - tetra_proxy 8y ago
    You'd be surprised, in my experience, most jobs aren't flexible on schedule or understanding when you have regular doctors appointments. Chronic medical conditions and disabilities can require many regular appointments. I have 2-3 appointments a month and that doesn't include any physical therapy I might have. My Dad has multiple appointments per week usually. Luckily I found a job that let's me work my schedule around my appointments.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Really? You’ve had jobs where going to the doctor a few times a month is a deal breaker for the company? This type of thing could easily be negotiated early on in all the startups I’ve worked for. Even non dev employees. Even worse for a remote job?
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        You have been lucky and have had few low-paying jobs. Most jobs I've worked in the US are like this - you are fully expected to be there 100% of the time the company thinks you should be. All else should be done on your own time around the company time. This is even more true for low-paying jobs. It sucks for anyone with health problems and sucks for anyone with children. People lose jobs because their children are sick and because they wind up with a major medical thing that happens. FMLA only covers large medical stuff - if you've worked full time for a year for a large enough company. Some of this could be fixed with laws that protect employees and things like that. I'm generally thankful I don't have to deal with the lack of worker protection in the US right now - it meant that breaking my elbow while working a seasonal job didn't mean I was out of an income, for example.
      - vertex-four 8y ago
        Someone I know recently interviewed for a company that would give them 7 sick days a year. Being chronically ill, they’d realistically go through that by the end of February. Flex time wasn’t an option either.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Exactly. Threads like this are an invitation for Copenhagen Ethics (i.e. "No matter how little anyone else has done, if you even do a tiny amount for cause X, you will be criticized for all you failed to do.") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
- mkmk 8y ago
  I don't think that's relevant at all... my comment wasn't about the relative merits of doing or not doing something good for workers with a disability. My point was that, in their monthly/quarterly PR pitch meeting, somebody on their comms team pitched 'let's make a big deal about how we're helping disabled people' and that nobody else in that meeting said "oh, maybe let's not use the fact that we hire disabled people to advance our PR goals."
  - sodosopa 8y ago
    It is or should I mark that as a 'no'? I've contracted with companies who specifically hire disabled workers. Their unemployment rate is ridiculously high (edit, I've heard numbers of up to 70%) and my leadership wanted to so something about that. I needed web usability experience added to my team, why not have someone with a disability to lead that? Guy was unemployed for a year, had a masters in HCI, this was an easy choice. My company wanted to include our work in their diversity report, why not? They're specifically reaching out and hiring people who cannot find work, if they get positive PR for that, why the hell should we stop them? It gets more like-minded people in the company and shows others in our industry that they can do this too. It's leadership.
uptown 8y ago
"What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?" Maybe they could start with Boxers.
HaloZero 8y ago
Companies will always do what's best for them too. In this case, the story talks about how Amazon held them to the same standard and they did better in terms of attendance, accident rate, and productivity. Which hopefully showcases to other employers that you can use Northwest and other types of facilities too.
natalyarostova 8y ago
You can expand your thinking a little. Let's say society as a whole confers a benefit of $x for a 'feel good' story about a corporation doing well. We can interpret this however we want, for example, the propensity to shop on Amazon increases by some epsilon. This now means companies will try to do morally 'good' things in order to gain these rents. This is a mechanism in which we reward companies for engaging in socially optimal behavior, and it operates without any central management. Of course, like all things, this can be gamed. But that's not, on its own, a reason to suspect it's all for naught.
- mkmk 8y ago
  This is an interesting way to look at it, thank you. However, I do think that there are certain norms, that when violated, deserve to be called out. By calling them out, we help enforce the norms that are important to us. For me, the norm that was violated here was "don't use the fact that you are treating disabled people decently as a way to elevate your business," which is a subset of a larger norm of "don't use disadvantaged members of our society for personal gain". Pitching this story to the press (which Amazon certainly did) is different than doing the good deed itself, and the positive benefit to their business for doing this seems like it shouldn't outweigh the social norm that has been violated. Surely there are positive moral things they have done (some recycling initiative?) that don't rely on violating the norms I listed above.
  - natalyarostova 8y ago
    I guess the higher order question we may be disagreeing on is "Is it okay to use disadvantaged people for personal gain, if in doing so you also improve their state in life? I would answer (not enthusiastically) that it is okay.

908087 8y ago

If they hire people who have colostomy bags they won't even have to worry about micromanaging their bathroom use.

atdrummond 8y ago

Not mentioned - that they can pay far less for these workers by dint of the much lower minimum wage for disabled persons. The NW Center has been cited in the past for such underpayment. https://patch.com/washington/seattle/nonprofit-underpaid-disabled-workers-seattle-labor-office https://patch.com/washington/seattle/nonprofit-underpaid-dis...

goda90 8y ago
I was going to say. It's good to provide opportunities and accomodations for disabled people, but to expect this to be altruistic on the part of Amazon is naive. They've done the math and think the accommodations won't counteract the gains from being able to pay less, and get some PR.
- julianozen 8y ago
  > Likewise, Northwest Center employees and those it places with Amazon are paid at least minimum wage. (Seattle closed a loophole in its minimum wage law that allowed employers to pay people with a disability a sub-minimum wage and recovered back wages from Northwest Center in 2018. This was mentioned and it is implied that amazon is not paying these employees less > employees placed at Amazon by Northwest Center chalked up a productivity rate that was 98 percent of the average while achieving 37 percent better quality work than the general population, and with a perfect safety record, compared with a 1.1 percent warehouse incident rate. They also had better attendance. This sounds like a pretty big win Disclaimer: I am a former amazon employee
  - joker3 8y ago
    If they don't come out and say that Amazon's not paying these employees a lower wage, then I'm not going to place a lot of faith in any implication.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      Direct quotes from the article, emphasis mine: > “I’m grateful to actually have gotten a job,” Howard said during a work break. “It’s just part time, but even still, it’s a good job. … I’m making above minimum wage.” > Likewise, Northwest Center employees and those it places with Amazon are paid at least minimum wage. (Seattle closed a loophole in its minimum wage law that allowed employers to pay people with a disability a sub-minimum wage and recovered back wages from Northwest Center in 2018. Washington and many other states still allow minimum wage waivers.)

drewda 8y ago

A recent point of comparison: Walmart quietly eliminating the "greeter" position, which is often filled by people with physical or developmental disabilities: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/696718872/walmart-is-eliminating-greeters-workers-with-disabilities-feel-targeted https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/696718872/walmart-is-eliminat... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251858

zzleeper 8y ago
Tbh greeters seemed almost like a waste, as they were not directly creating any output.
- seretogis 8y ago
  Imagined or not, there is/was a notion that greeting people helps for loss-prevention purposes. (i.e. if you say hello and make eye contact with someone as they enter your establishment, they are less inclined to steal from you.) If Walmart is removing those positions, they may have found it to be a misconception. [edit: it seems like Walmart is not removing greeters, just making it harder for disabled/elderly people to hold those positions and expanding their responsibilities.]
  - benatkin 8y ago
    They're also calling them hosts, which is annoying, because they aren't anything like a host at a restaurant, because going shopping in a giant big box retailer isn't anything like dining at a sit-down restaurant. I can see why they would use an overblown title, because they call their employees associates to say that they consider them partners, when in reality there are over a million employees and there's no way they could all be partners.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      They seem to be changing the positions from being generally at the door to instead being staff generally designated for welcoming but also helping people with requests, in which case 'host' makes sense as a distinction from other staff intended to focus on stocking, cleaning, checkout, etc.

avgDev 8y ago

I have chronic pain fortunately I manage and can work full time as SE. However, I know others who could not transition from physical field into something else. Most people with disability genuinely want to work, but they usually get fired due to missing days or jobs that lack flexibility and cannot accommodate doctor visits for example. Many are just as good if not better than healthy employees. I thought about creating some kind of non-profit to help connect disabled employees and employers(have not researched the market, not sure if that already exists). I think if people had clearly defined limits employers would be more likely to hire them. In western nations, with disability often comes feeling of not being worthy, as worth is often attached to work. Ability to work remote and flexible hours could really put many people back to work.

MuffinFlavored 8y ago
What does SE stand for? Software engineer? What kind of chronic pain do you have and why do you have it? How common is this?
- avgDev 8y ago
  Yes, software engineer. I have widespread tendon pain caused by a severe reaction to a popular antibiotic. I generally am pretty normal just get pain. Some medical professional label my symptoms as "fibromyalgia", however, this has been causing a lot of problems to finding the actual cause. Here is a link if you are interested on the subject: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/referrals/quinolone-fluoroquinolone-containing-medicinal-products https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/referrals/quino... Currently, most doctors in the US are not aware of the issue and nobody wants to speak up. It has been an odd experience for me.
  - atdrummond 8y ago
    A fluoroquinolone by chance?
    - avgDev 8y ago

maerF0x0 8y ago

When i was younger I had a summer job of working in a paper recycling plant. It was soul crushing boring work. I'm talking pick up a spent roll of newsprint, saw it length wise, put the paper in the paper feed, the roll in the cardboard feed. Good job that was ~30 seconds. Repeat for 8 hours. We had a bunch of mentally disabled people on our team (think low IQ / down syndrome). These guys loved their job. They felt like they were doing cool shit all day. They cheered and smiled when the food truck would roll around 11AM and they'd spend what seemed like 1/2 their earnings on snacks and drinks. They smiled nearly every moment of that job. Good for them and good for the plant manager understanding this reality and making a good for society out of a relatively bad situation (boring ass work, people having a disability few of us could handle).

yazr 8y ago
Thank u for this write up. It made me smile, and hopefully this will last for more than the 5min it takes to reach the comments about worker conditions and low-cost exploitation.
tetra_proxy 8y ago
I worked at Food Lion(Southeastern US Grocery Store) as a teenager and they hire people with mental disabilities as baggers. They loved the job and never complained, I was a cashier and bagger and let me tell you it sucks rounding up carts when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but those guys were just happy to be working and around people who accepted them. And anyone who talked down to or badly about them didn't have a job for long.
titanomachy 8y ago
In Huxley's novel Brave New World, people have exactly the mental capability to perform their role in society and no more. Everyone happily fulfills their function and goes about their lives. Of course, people of sufficiently low mental capability don't occur naturally at a high enough rate. So they have to help things along by disrupting fetal development for some people. That part seems morally questionable. Great novel though, highly recommended.

escapologybb 8y ago

Quick question: can anybody, with a straight face explain why I as a quadriplegic software developer, Hacker, public speaker and all round pain in the arse earn less than everybody else? I'm asking because more than one person in this thread seems to think it's okay. I haven't replied to anybody specifically because I don't want to start a flame war, but I am genuinely interested. Slightly off topic, but I had to start my own company because finding a job when you are quadriplegic is richly impossible. Granted, quadriplegics can make terrible employees in that it's difficult to say you will definitely be at a certain place at a certain time. But it just takes a little tweaking and a little flexitime to get around the obstacle for instance.

atdrummond 8y ago
You shouldn't. But as a disabled person myself, I have strong opinions on this topic. I'm not a quadriplegic but I've experienced significant discrimination in hiring due to my conditions, despite being extremely productive - on both an absolute and relative basis.
obrisintor 8y ago
I'll try to explain. The first rule of life that you have to understand it's that life isn't fair. People without disabilities can go to conferences and expand their social network better than quadriplegics. They can go to more job interviews easier. They appear to have more options than disabled people. They appear more dominant and able to negotiate a better salary. A potential employer wants to pay the lowest salary for the best work. They think (and based on what you wrote, rightly so) that they can get away with paying quadriplegic people less.
- dang 8y ago
  This is so patronizing that it crosses into the general territory of personal attack and trolling, even though you probably didn't mean it that way. Can you please not post like this to HN? If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it.

danite 8y ago

Very skeptical that this is due to Amazon's generosity and not just because they can tap into an underpaid and underemployed workforce. They don't seem to be giving these people access to the jobs that actually make money at Amazon. I'm very wary of feel good stories about employing people with disabilities in low paying jobs with lots of repetitive manual labor. Often it's a way to get cheaper and more easily exploited labor that you can get your PR team to spin as charity.

ummonk 8y ago
That's good though isn't it? The more employers start seeking competitive advantage in hiring disabled people, the narrower the pay and employment gap will become.
- danite 8y ago
  It's more likely that they use it to depress the wages of abled workers. This sort of unskilled labor isn't exactly scarce enough to cause meaningful competitive pressure like you describe.
  - dmix 8y ago
    This worldview almost always ends up creating no jobs rather than any jobs for a greater amount of people. Always in the name of ‘good intentions’. Having a job and financial independence vs nothing at all is the real world reality for the vast majority of these people. Just because Amazon makes these jobs available is not taking other well paying jobs away from them. That’s not how this works. Wether or not there should be more high paying jobs to capable disabled people is a different question.
    - danite 8y ago
      The US is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. If we want to make providing disabled people with fulfilling jobs that pay a good wage a priority, we are entirely capable of accomplishing that.

titanomachy 8y ago

"We have a really big problem with attrition and retention and absenteeism in our sortation centers" Is this perhaps a sign that you have terrible work conditions? Or perhaps you aren't paying enough? Seems more likely than "the people we hire are usually terrible workers".