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Their workers are treated like robots, not slaves. And the "good wages for low qualifications" argument is equally exhausting. Money shouldn't be some univers

Their workers are treated like robots, not slaves. And the "good wages for low qualifications" argument is equally exhausting. Money shouldn't be some universal justification for overlooking poor workplace conditions and unethical treatment of human beings.

txcwpalpha 6y ago
I never said that good wages is justification for anything. Please don't put words in my mouth. I do a lot of work with AWS, and I care where my money goes, so I spend a lot of time researching this whenever an article accusing Amazon comes up. I have not seen anything outside a few edge cases that qualifies as "unethical treatment". This is exactly what I'm referring to in my original comment. A story about an FC worker peeing in a bottle doesn't mean they're being treated unethically. I've seen stories about Google SWEs peeing in bottles and sleeping under their desk because they were under a tight deadline, and yet I don't see people boycotting Google over their treatment of SWEs (coincidentally, one of the ways I do see people justifying these tight deadlines for SWEs is that they make lots of money, so it seems at least some people do think that good wages is justification for tough working conditions). If you want a better manual labor comparison, oilfield workers work in grueling conditions, are forced to sleep in tiny bunks, and sometimes come out of the job with a missing limb, but I don't see posts on HN every day about how we should boycott oil companies over their treatment of workers (and again, lot's of people justify the grueling conditions of oilfield workers by pointing out they make a lot of money, so...). I only have a certain amount of processing power in my brain and can only be outraged at so many things at any given time. If Amazon workers truly were being treated terribly, I would care. But a handful of workers (out of nearly 1 million) saying that they got stressed out at work because their boss asked them to work faster just doesn't make the cut for me. Could it be better? Sure, and with my nearly-unlimited supply of online social media slacktivism, I'll advocate for things to be better. But in the real world where resources aren't unlimited, there are many companies that I'll boycott over working conditions before Amazon.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  It is intense, hard labor with a lot of performance pressure squeezed out of people who are the most desperate for work. When it comes down to it nobody can put the pressure on a software engineer to do that kind of every second counts work which forces people to go beyond their limits and ruin their bodies because they need to put food on the table and have few other options.
  - kryogen1c 6y ago
    > the most desperate for work > they need to put food on the table and have few other options. how does that make any sense? how are people being taken advantage of when they "have few other options", are "desperate for work", and "need to put food on the table"? amazon should pay less and make the job easier? then theyd just be another of the bad options. so, your argument is amazon simply has an obligation to pay workers more (after theyre already a good option) because... why?
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      When people don't have options, they find themselves forced to choose between terrible working conditions and not being able to afford to eat. When your workforce consists of people taking the only job they can find, you worsen working conditions until just above where people would rather starve than work for you. The issue isn't pay, it's employment practices and on-the-job pressures. There are very believable stories out there of the working conditions.
- tareqak 6y ago
  What do you think of the accounts in https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ ?
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    So there's been 14 posts on that site since Jan 2020. I clicked through a few of them, and it's things like someone complaining that their boss asked them to be a self-starter and get started on work without having to be explicitly told what to do. It's hard to take that seriously. There's one in there about being denied an MRI after getting injured, which doesn't sound ideal, but it's also only 3 sentence so I feel like I'm missing parts of the story. And even if I did take all of these at face value and was outraged at them, an average of 3 complaints per month from a workforce of nearly 1 million is... well... makes it seem like Amazon is doing a stellar job treating its employees well if there are so few complaints. Of course in reality this website only captures a subset of employees, but just based on this site alone, my opinion has not changed.
fbonetti 6y ago
Adults are capable of deciding risk/reward factors when selecting a job. There are many jobs that are well known for being grueling, and yet people still sign up to take those jobs because they value the compensation more than other considerations.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  In many regions Amazon and other large retailers with similar conditions are some of the very few employers left to even offer a decent income, to the point where local governments are groveling in front of these companies. The classism of the managerial tech class is always on pure display in these discussions, because contrary to developers who can pick and choose their workplace in some free competitive market, unqualified blue collar workers are often more or less forced to work under these conditions if they even want healthcare or be able to send their kids to a decent school. If healthcare and education was free like it is in other developed countries and not employer bound you could make the argument that they're free to work another job instead. In the US it's a facetious point.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    > In many regions Then move. It's not hard. I've moved for better work five times in my life with nothing but what fit in two suitcases four of those five times. This includes moving from one country to another twice. In two of these five cases I knew nobody where I was moving to, In one I knew exactly one person and in two I knew just a single family. Both my parents did the same when they came to the US. They came alone and knew nobody in the US when they moved here.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      Moving in the US virtually provides no wage premium for non-college educated people any longer. This is largely the consequence of breakdown of what would be considered 'good jobs', over the last twenty to thirty years. "As the geographical pattern of work has shifted, so has that of wages. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of an urban wage premium: workers in more densely populated places earn more, in part because of the productivity benefits of crowding together that nurture urban growth in the first place. This pay premium used to hold across the range of skills. In 1970 workers without any college education could expect to get a boost to their earnings when they moved to a big city, just as better-educated workers did (see chart). Since then the urban wage advantage for well-educated workers has become more pronounced, even as that for less-educated workers has all but disappeared. [...] Most jobs in the first two of these categories are located in cities, open mainly to holders of college degrees and decently paid (frontier work is particularly lucrative). Only the last-mile jobs are occupied disproportionately by workers without a college education. They are better than nothing, but only just. Both wages and the quality of such jobs are typically low, which is just as well, since they are unlikely to avoid the creeping tide of automation for very long." Bifucration of the economy, automation and the shift towards ever increasing knowledge sector and endemic housing shortages have largely destroyed the benefits of moving towards economic clusters for uneducated workers. This is not a solution in this day and age, it's a romanticised fiction. It may have worked for mom and pop who came to the US with nothing else but their clothes, but this is history. The world today is a different one, and it has largely left this segment of the population behind. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/the-outlook-is-dim-for-americans-without-college-degrees https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/t...
colechristensen 6y ago
An old Slavic word robota (slavery is a good translation) was the inspiration for early science fiction writer Chapek to coin the word robot in the book Rossum's Universal Robots. The plot centers around artificial flesh and bone life (the robots) which "lack nothing but a soul" used as a forced labor class with outcomes you might imagine. Given the origin, really "robots, not slaves!" doesn't hold up as a particularly strong argument.
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  In Czech robota means more along the lines of "manual labor" not slavery. It has a connotation of drudgery and tedium though. Edit: The related word Robotnik (like the villain in Sonic) means something like "serf" though
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    When such words were really in use though, how much was the manual labor a result of choice or freedom of the laborer?
    - HideousKojima 6y ago
      "Robota" is still in regular use in modern Czech. And when R.U.R. was written (1920) the days of serfdom were pretty far in the past for Czechs (abolished in 1848).
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    In Polish, robotnik means just a physical laborer, there's no negative connotation at all.
- 0x4477 6y ago
  > An old Slavic word robota (slavery is a good translation)... This is unequivocally false. I speak both Czech ans Slovak, with the word robota being Czech in origin. Robota either means work in general, or manual labour specifically. It does not, nor has it ever, meant slavery. The word for that would be otroctvo in Slovak or otroctví in Czech.
adequateness 6y ago
Is your argument that since you don't want to do this job you don't think other people should be able to either? It certainly isn't unethical. Amazon offered people money to do this job and people agreed to take those jobs.

txcwpalpha 6y ago

I never said that good wages is justification for anything. Please don't put words in my mouth. I do a lot of work with AWS, and I care where my money goes, so I spend a lot of time researching this whenever an article accusing Amazon comes up. I have not seen anything outside a few edge cases that qualifies as "unethical treatment". This is exactly what I'm referring to in my original comment. A story about an FC worker peeing in a bottle doesn't mean they're being treated unethically. I've seen stories about Google SWEs peeing in bottles and sleeping under their desk because they were under a tight deadline, and yet I don't see people boycotting Google over their treatment of SWEs (coincidentally, one of the ways I do see people justifying these tight deadlines for SWEs is that they make lots of money, so it seems at least some people do think that good wages is justification for tough working conditions). If you want a better manual labor comparison, oilfield workers work in grueling conditions, are forced to sleep in tiny bunks, and sometimes come out of the job with a missing limb, but I don't see posts on HN every day about how we should boycott oil companies over their treatment of workers (and again, lot's of people justify the grueling conditions of oilfield workers by pointing out they make a lot of money, so...). I only have a certain amount of processing power in my brain and can only be outraged at so many things at any given time. If Amazon workers truly were being treated terribly, I would care. But a handful of workers (out of nearly 1 million) saying that they got stressed out at work because their boss asked them to work faster just doesn't make the cut for me. Could it be better? Sure, and with my nearly-unlimited supply of online social media slacktivism, I'll advocate for things to be better. But in the real world where resources aren't unlimited, there are many companies that I'll boycott over working conditions before Amazon.

colechristensen 6y ago
It is intense, hard labor with a lot of performance pressure squeezed out of people who are the most desperate for work. When it comes down to it nobody can put the pressure on a software engineer to do that kind of every second counts work which forces people to go beyond their limits and ruin their bodies because they need to put food on the table and have few other options.
- kryogen1c 6y ago
  > the most desperate for work > they need to put food on the table and have few other options. how does that make any sense? how are people being taken advantage of when they "have few other options", are "desperate for work", and "need to put food on the table"? amazon should pay less and make the job easier? then theyd just be another of the bad options. so, your argument is amazon simply has an obligation to pay workers more (after theyre already a good option) because... why?
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    When people don't have options, they find themselves forced to choose between terrible working conditions and not being able to afford to eat. When your workforce consists of people taking the only job they can find, you worsen working conditions until just above where people would rather starve than work for you. The issue isn't pay, it's employment practices and on-the-job pressures. There are very believable stories out there of the working conditions.
tareqak 6y ago
What do you think of the accounts in https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ ?
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  So there's been 14 posts on that site since Jan 2020. I clicked through a few of them, and it's things like someone complaining that their boss asked them to be a self-starter and get started on work without having to be explicitly told what to do. It's hard to take that seriously. There's one in there about being denied an MRI after getting injured, which doesn't sound ideal, but it's also only 3 sentence so I feel like I'm missing parts of the story. And even if I did take all of these at face value and was outraged at them, an average of 3 complaints per month from a workforce of nearly 1 million is... well... makes it seem like Amazon is doing a stellar job treating its employees well if there are so few complaints. Of course in reality this website only captures a subset of employees, but just based on this site alone, my opinion has not changed.

fbonetti 6y ago

Adults are capable of deciding risk/reward factors when selecting a job. There are many jobs that are well known for being grueling, and yet people still sign up to take those jobs because they value the compensation more than other considerations.

Barrin92 6y ago
In many regions Amazon and other large retailers with similar conditions are some of the very few employers left to even offer a decent income, to the point where local governments are groveling in front of these companies. The classism of the managerial tech class is always on pure display in these discussions, because contrary to developers who can pick and choose their workplace in some free competitive market, unqualified blue collar workers are often more or less forced to work under these conditions if they even want healthcare or be able to send their kids to a decent school. If healthcare and education was free like it is in other developed countries and not employer bound you could make the argument that they're free to work another job instead. In the US it's a facetious point.
- malandrew 6y ago
  > In many regions Then move. It's not hard. I've moved for better work five times in my life with nothing but what fit in two suitcases four of those five times. This includes moving from one country to another twice. In two of these five cases I knew nobody where I was moving to, In one I knew exactly one person and in two I knew just a single family. Both my parents did the same when they came to the US. They came alone and knew nobody in the US when they moved here.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Moving in the US virtually provides no wage premium for non-college educated people any longer. This is largely the consequence of breakdown of what would be considered 'good jobs', over the last twenty to thirty years. "As the geographical pattern of work has shifted, so has that of wages. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of an urban wage premium: workers in more densely populated places earn more, in part because of the productivity benefits of crowding together that nurture urban growth in the first place. This pay premium used to hold across the range of skills. In 1970 workers without any college education could expect to get a boost to their earnings when they moved to a big city, just as better-educated workers did (see chart). Since then the urban wage advantage for well-educated workers has become more pronounced, even as that for less-educated workers has all but disappeared. [...] Most jobs in the first two of these categories are located in cities, open mainly to holders of college degrees and decently paid (frontier work is particularly lucrative). Only the last-mile jobs are occupied disproportionately by workers without a college education. They are better than nothing, but only just. Both wages and the quality of such jobs are typically low, which is just as well, since they are unlikely to avoid the creeping tide of automation for very long." Bifucration of the economy, automation and the shift towards ever increasing knowledge sector and endemic housing shortages have largely destroyed the benefits of moving towards economic clusters for uneducated workers. This is not a solution in this day and age, it's a romanticised fiction. It may have worked for mom and pop who came to the US with nothing else but their clothes, but this is history. The world today is a different one, and it has largely left this segment of the population behind. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/the-outlook-is-dim-for-americans-without-college-degrees https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/t...

colechristensen 6y ago

An old Slavic word robota (slavery is a good translation) was the inspiration for early science fiction writer Chapek to coin the word robot in the book Rossum's Universal Robots. The plot centers around artificial flesh and bone life (the robots) which "lack nothing but a soul" used as a forced labor class with outcomes you might imagine. Given the origin, really "robots, not slaves!" doesn't hold up as a particularly strong argument.

HideousKojima 6y ago
In Czech robota means more along the lines of "manual labor" not slavery. It has a connotation of drudgery and tedium though. Edit: The related word Robotnik (like the villain in Sonic) means something like "serf" though
- colechristensen 6y ago
  When such words were really in use though, how much was the manual labor a result of choice or freedom of the laborer?
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    "Robota" is still in regular use in modern Czech. And when R.U.R. was written (1920) the days of serfdom were pretty far in the past for Czechs (abolished in 1848).
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  In Polish, robotnik means just a physical laborer, there's no negative connotation at all.
0x4477 6y ago
> An old Slavic word robota (slavery is a good translation)... This is unequivocally false. I speak both Czech ans Slovak, with the word robota being Czech in origin. Robota either means work in general, or manual labour specifically. It does not, nor has it ever, meant slavery. The word for that would be otroctvo in Slovak or otroctví in Czech.

adequateness 6y ago

Is your argument that since you don't want to do this job you don't think other people should be able to either? It certainly isn't unethical. Amazon offered people money to do this job and people agreed to take those jobs.