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> or that workers somewhere in Iceland (360,000) have been required to work around a fallen co-worker. But neither of these things, if they happened, would be p
by locallost 7y ago
> or that workers somewhere in Iceland (360,000) have been required to work around a fallen co-worker. But neither of these things, if they happened, would be proof that working conditions in Luxembourg or Iceland are appalling.
They would however be proof that working conditions in a company in Iceland are appalling.
- the8472 7y agoNot really, since they are single events you don't know anything about the frequency and how it compares to the frequency in other locations. The law of large number causes unusual events to happen every day, which means the more globally your news operates the more freak events you can accumulate. Your town newspaper regularly reporting that someone had to work next to a corpse would be concerning. BBC world news reporting that this happened somewhere in the world might be statistical blips.
- Guest42 7y ago"The weak law of large numbers states that the sample average converges in probability towards the expected value" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
- the8472 7y agoAh, I was thinking of "The Law of Truly Large Numbers"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- locallost 7y agoI wish this was the only report about Amazon's poor working conditions. But it's not true, is it?
- the8472 7y agoNo, the article has multiple arguments. One is reporting on extremely unusual things (working next to corpses), which hopefully don't happen in amazon facilities more regularly than in any other facility but due to amazon's size even a low probability of such a thing happening on any particular day means it's eventually going to happen in one of their facilities. Another is that the undercover reporters come from an environment where what's considered normal or even better-than-averagee in manual labor jobs would seem outrageous if someone demanded it from them in their regular jobs. Combining unusual cherry-picked events with their own perception tinted with nightmare vision goggles leads to biased reporting that may not necessarily reflect the experience of most workers.
- locallost 7y agoBut I commented on one argument, which is that it's basically a fluke. But for some reason I keep seeing streams of reports of many different flukes. Are they all unrelated? So if that AMA reddit thread describes working conditions where people don't want to drink water because they don't have time to pee, is it unrelated to reports of warehouse workers defecating thrash cans or drivers peeing in bottles? One common thread there is that workers seem to have pretty steep quotas that don't tolerate breaks of any kind. Is then the situation of working next to a corpse at Amazon really comparable to a similar unusual situation in Luxembourg?
- the8472 7y agoI don't know, the point is that we would need statistics to judge better than with the anecdotes we have now. Amazon might be an especially egregious case of soulcrushing manual labor and exploitation of poor people who don't have many options. Or they might be a far less headline-worthy case of having an incident rate no worse than industry-average but with above-minimum wage pay (as TFA claims) and the reports we're seeing are mostly due to their size amplifying any tiny signal. Anyway, your initial post about the mere existence of incidents at X being proof that working conditions at X are appalling. Which is incorrect because it doesn't tell us anything about whether the incident rate is above the base rate outside X or not. Of course one can still find those incidents appalling, but if X is nothing special compared to its environment then we would have to improve things everywhere and can't uniquely blame X.