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> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skil

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for.

schnischna 6y ago
That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded "The Big Issue", a magazine that homeless people sell in Britain. They also had to put some rules in place that seem strange, for example the vendors (homeless people) had to buy the magazines they wanted to sell. They are alcoholics, gamblers, addicts, so unfortunately some special rules were necessary to make it work.
- whymauri 6y ago
  >That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did. But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It's also hard when traditional means for acquiring skills, like going to college, no longer have the same returns they used to. All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. So it's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead. I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
    - DagAgren 6y ago
      We absolutely need people working in warehouses. Our society would collapse far faster without them than if all of us reading this would go away. And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.
      - defnotashton2 6y ago
        I'm not disagreeing people deserve respect. But with automation do we need people in factories? Answer is no.
        GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
        It probably depends a bit more on how you define “need”. Do factory owners need people in factories when a robot can do the job? Probably not. Does society need people in factories so that the individuals have a job, which creates a sense of purpose and means through which people can provide for themselves? Probably.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently. > And by all means, if you are capable go for it And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever. That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.
- Someone 6y ago
  “perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.” They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees. I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.
  - toyg 6y ago
    You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that. Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.
    - felipemnoa 6y ago
      Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.
    - User23 6y ago
      The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      If the lowest tier of job is relatively easily replaced, one assumes the next tier is as well meaning the people who are often making these rules are not well trained veteran managers but people who may be first time people managers or not be cut out to be a manager. I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.
- arez 6y ago
  I suspect the same percentage of people exploiting the system in warehouses as in office jobs, still you can see very "inhumane" rules only in warehouses.
  - fastball 6y ago
    The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position. It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency. I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
    - arez 6y ago
      yeah definitely, but it would still be nice if workers would be treated more equal no matter their profession
- lkramer 6y ago
  You don't think there are higher skilled people trying to exploit the system? I suspect the real difference here is developers are in higher demand. If we feel the checks becomes to unfair, we can go look for a different job. If a warehouse worker doesn't like his smoke breaks being monitored, there is little recourse, someone else can be hired who will accept these condition out of desperation for a job.
  - adamc 6y ago
    Your explanation seems off to me. Why would lower demand necessarily imply there was someone suitable who was desperate? It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced. More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.
    - azernik 6y ago
      Low or high demand are always relative to supply. So think "high supply" rather than "low demand".
- throwaway55554 6y ago
  > I have never run a warehouse, You don't know... > ... but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. ... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely. I think these biases are the issue being discussed.
  - mtrower 6y ago
    > You don't know... Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules. Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy. It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.) I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.
    - throwaway55554 6y ago
      > Do you? I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine. On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture. It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.
- __s 6y ago
  My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer) So you don't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong
  - eightysixfour 6y ago
    Unfortunately that's incredibly hard to scale. I've seen many construction companies hit the growth wall thinking that they could grow using that model instead of building process.
  - roosterdawn 6y ago
    This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise. With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.
    - miscPerson 6y ago
      Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that. Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer. Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?
- rchaud 6y ago
  > I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). There have been large, profitable corporations that preceded Amazon and did not need to implement such draconian tracking systems. Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination.
  - schnischna 6y ago
    Can you give examples? "Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination." If that was the case, the same would have happened at the previous large corporations.
wazoox 6y ago
No, indeed this gets to the heart of the idea of class warfare.
buboard 6y ago
IT workers are partly to blame for it. By creating , embracing, extending, normalizing and advertising a culture where companies compete for office perks, they also allowed the creation of the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it's OK to treat them like wage slaves.
- cat199 6y ago
  pretty sure "the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it's OK to treat them like wage slaves." existed long before computers were ever thought of
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I don't think they're saying IT/computers are a root cause, but rather that they might be modern enablers of these power hierarchies.
    - icebraining 6y ago
      I think "allowed the creation" rather implies it is the root cause.
      - whymauri 6y ago
        Mm, yeah. You seem to be right.
      - buboard 6y ago
        did not mean it that way, but that i've never seen in the tech press someone noticing that e.g. walmart doesnt have massage rooms
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I doubt the tech office perks are taking employee money from other companies. Warehouse work wasn’t likely to ever be awash in cash to lavish on the workers because that’s coming straight out of the customers’ pockets; every other logistics company is competing on that basis and consumers are generally price-sensitive.
kmlx 6y ago
i worked in a warehouse carrying boxes around right after high school. the amount of brain effort to do this kind of job is close to 0. you need a bit of physical prowess, but this is easily attainable in a couple of week. since the job was basically the least complex job one can ever have, the pay was low. and it made sense back then: you want to move on to a better job/better pay/better conditions? get better qualifications, learn to do a different job etc. of course i can't comment on what happens at amazon, but these kinds of jobs are so easy to do that it's ridiculous they haven't been completely automated till now. i do wonder what will happen to all these people once automation is 100%.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  You're right, they're not complex. For a person They haven't been automated because it is still hard to do. Simply carrying boxes is easy, but picking up products (of different sizes, shapes, weights, "grabability", etc and putting them into orders is complicated. That being said, it might be that different companies have different stress and pressure levels and different working conditions.
  - darrenoc 6y ago
    It's not that complicated. If you look up Ocado, they have entirely automated their warehouses.
    - 98Windows 6y ago
      What does entirely automated mean??
- quii 6y ago
  Just because something isn't skilled doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't bring value. The people who do these jobs deserve a decent wage and respect, not psuedo-wage-slavery
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
chrisan 6y ago
> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring. I can only provide 2 anecdotes, but I can see why people get treated this way after time. I highly doubt there are many people that just start their management role in a hostile, suspicion, condescension kind of way. Normally it takes something repeated over time to build up those kinds of traits of dealing with something In college I used to work for RPS (they got bought by Fedex or UPS, I forget) sorting packages. To get the job you had to lift up to 50lbs and memorize the first 2 digits of the zip code (just the region so it was like 20-30 numbers) and you'd stand in front of a big chute and sort boxes onto 1 of 3 conveyors. The amount of anger people would take out on other's boxes was insane. Kicking, punching(??), throwing over the ledge (we were like 3 floors up), or just outright stamping of boxes was nuts. After working there I learned what it means to package something well as I could not count on any package of mine being treated with respect. The other anecdote are my wife's pharmacy techs she has to manage. Some of them will bitch and moan if they have to remake a drug, sometimes outright REFUSE to make a drug if it means they have to gown back up and go back into the clean room. They will disappear for an hour after delivering a drug (up a few floors). They will take well over an hour for lunch breaks. It is a very maddening situation because all of these actions means the kids don't get what they need on time.
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  > I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring Pay low wage, get low motivation. No one's going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Give an inch and they take a mile. You could pay a McDonalds worker all you like and he'll still just try to get away with doing less work.
globular-toast 6y ago
> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. That's because, unfortunately, a lot of them do need their hands holding. Many of these people have very low IQ and will always avoid work if they can. You can't compare them with the people in the offices you work in who have top 10% IQs. I know it should be like this, and should be like that, but if you would actually expose yourself to the kinds of people who work in these places you will see why these seemingly hostile rules are put in place. But think of it like this: these people get a safe working environment, comfortable lives which no high levels of responsibility, and they get to reap the benefits of living in a modern society. If they were left to their own devices they'd be in poverty.
sargun 6y ago
I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporting that people had worked a few hours rather than a full shift. I had no idea how this could happen. When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Friday (change days as required). This meant that they were clocking 24 hours / day. The only way this could happen is if they were colluding with their store manager, as the manager was meant to close out the time keeping system at the end of the day. The stores with employees that abused the system tended to have lower margins. This often led to them being closed down. It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group. I expect over time (10s of years) the computer industry will get closer to other professional industries as opposed to being the wild west it is today.
- loopz 6y ago
  It's well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers/departments and various general types of allowed "hours". This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to "punch in your hours", employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&C futility. The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone. I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong. I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company. Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid. If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust. This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.
gowld 6y ago
Warehouse workers are disrespected for the same reason poor people are: because a nontrivial proportion are desperate and willing to act on it. Poor people get fired and prosecuted for things that rich people feel entitled to do every day, like fart around on HN at work while getting paid, or grab a soda or a whole meal from the cafe without paying for it.
microcolonel 6y ago
> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. The reason for that is simple. For jobs with few qualifications, undisciplined people and people who struggle with thinking are in the highest supply. Ask anyone who operates a bar or restaurant what sort of behaviour they can expect from low-qualification employees, hired without significant attention, at the going rate. It may be a matter of privilege for a lot of people; I know many brilliant and well-intentioned people who have had a hard go of life because they picked up a counterproductive fear, insecurity, or opinion when they were young, but it would not surprise or offend me that their employers would grow to dislike them. I have had some advantages on this, because I was blessed with a referral for my first job, and my first colleagues guided me away from my self-destructive behaviours (I was 17). That's not to say it's all of them, but if you hire people for work that requires little or no discipline to meet the hiring requirements, you are going to be exposed to a lot of candidates who lack discipline. There are many people working jobs that have a low- or no-skill entry level, who are incredibly hard-working, disciplined, and passionate; but there are also many who are none of these things. You can observe a maybe-similar effect with specialized "consultants", who merely have to claim to be able to resolve problems like one you're experiencing; then they get paid for a few months to have a go at it, and it turns out they don't know any more than you do about your problem.
alharith 6y ago
I don't want to disagree with most of what you are saying, but this is where I can always tell the majority of HN hasn't started a non-tech, low skill business before (restaurants, sales, salons, construction, etc). Your workers consistently put you in bad positions. People will call out for no reason, no shows are frequent. Sometimes you just get people that completely disappear. That's fine in the tech world where most of our deadlines and time estimates are made up anyways, but when you have one of your line cooks or stylists or sales rep fail, to show on a busy Saturday it can be disastrous if you don't have the good will of another one of your employees covering. Seriously, next time you get a chance, talk to your local restaurant manager, construction manager, barber shop owner or sales manager, they all say the same things: how difficult it is to find good workers. (and "good" here is a pretty low bar: show up when you are scheduled on time)
- toyg 6y ago
  "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." Manual labor in many sectors is structurally underpaid. Nobody with half a brain would ever choose waiting tables as a career, even if they enjoyed it. So you're left with people with no choice or with mental-health issues (or both), who often resent having to do the job. Whether that's by design or a collateral effect of certain societal and economic structures, is open to discussion; but this is definitely the case. Until we allow that waiter and that delivery driver a level of dignity equal to this or that white-collar job, the situation will not change.
  - alharith 6y ago
    I somehow knew this would be the first comment. Unfortunately, for these industries, where you sell real goods at affordable prices (not over-inflated fantasyland prices to your "enterprise" customers) margins are razor thin. This is the sector of the economy that has been YoY consistently left behind since the Bush-Oil eras drove prices sky high. Trying my best not trying to sound snooty, but again this shows once more that the majority of people here really haven't ran a business like this.
    - 6y ago
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supergeek133 6y ago
I think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales). For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was meant to be illustrative, not an exact ratio. This makes companies take extreme policy measures for the few instances of this that impact everyone, because the financial impact is so disproportionate. Now, the argument can (and is) made that pay is a factor. "If you pay me more I won't act like this". But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.
- this2shallPass 6y ago
  Thankfully no "high pay" labor ever just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc) ;) And never at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. Pay might be a factor. I think people are people, and their behavior and beliefs vary.
  - supergeek133 6y ago
    I completely agree, but we, as a society tend to look down more on the low paid people who do this versus the high paid ones.
    - yters 6y ago
      Exactly, and the high paid thieves are those who can wreck the lives of millions vs the low paid thieves take an infinitesimal bit away from the bottom line of a multi billion dollar company.
      - banads 6y ago
        "We hang the petty thieves, and appoint the great ones to public office" -Aesop
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jimbokun 6y ago
> Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. This is exactly why privilege is not an accurate or constructive term to use in these conversations. Privilege implies something undeserved. So it sounds like an argument for taking away those bare minimums, so everyone is equally treated with suspicion, condescension and hostility. Better words are "oppression", "discrimination" and "bigotry". Make it clear that the goal is treating everyone with a basic level of trust and respect, as a bare minimum, and nothing less than that is acceptable.
hysan 6y ago
All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1], and kept the business running as long as possible even after 9/11 + the recession killed the business. The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”. People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly, if they see that it’s very much possible for the system to be improved, that’s when the thoughts of “this is unfair” begin to emerge. [1] My dad was by title the owner while my mom was in the union the workers belonged to. His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers, but far lower than could have been possible had they attempted to fight the union on pay to nickel and dime them.
- esoterica 6y ago
  No one who runs a business that hires multiple employees can reasonably call themselves lower middle class. Showing my work: > My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1] >His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers. Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage. Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).
  - ndespres 6y ago
    Food service, maintenance, landscaping, small tetail.. plenty of possible examples come to mind.
  - acolumb 6y ago
    I disagree. Lower middle class people can open businesses propped up on loans, in which their drive to hit their margin is even higher.
jonny_eh 6y ago
> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged That's because basic trust and respect shouldn't be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let's focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.
- mcguire 6y ago
  "Why should we focus on those 'disadvantaged' people? My life is hard, too."
zouhair 6y ago
We live in a society where the most important and essential jobs are treated with condescension.
cbsmith 6y ago
There's also the reality that "low-skilled" really means "there's more supply of the skill than there is demand", or "depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent/advantage that few people have".
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  There is the reality that ~ 10% of the population has an IQ so low, US army cannot recruit them by law. 10% is a lot of people, a few tens of millions in US. I have someone in the family that has the mind of a children of 8-10 years old, for that person a "low skilled" job in an Amazon warehouse would be excellent; the alternative is zero income.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    There's also a IQ != skill. But I believe your specific example here fits the "depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent/advantage that few people have".
taurath 6y ago
I tell people I've never worked as hard as I did the morning shift at taco bell. Just being treated like a human with independent thoughts and needs is a huge benefit in so many workplaces. There's a level of just violence and mistrust in the "normal" working world that is terrifying if you haven't experienced it, and jarring if you haven't experienced it in a while. The bean-counters who make up the systems where in human labor is a cog are really creating skinner boxes. The larger scale the corporation goes the less emphasis on empathy and human needs. You become a bit that can either do the work or can't. Our cold "efficient" corporate machines has actively done everything it can to take humanity and empathy away from every process. Consumers are numbers on a dashboard. Workers are line items in an S-1. As much as people like to claim otherwise, the companies actions never take a hit that they know doesn't have a benefit elsewhere. Amazon is a big pioneer in the space - take something and remove all human decision making from it, automate it and then move onto the next thing. Now they apply that against hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees.
raven105x 6y ago
> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. I've wondered since coming to this country how such a large collective delusion continues to persist. The part of the world where I grew up, it is not unheard of for people to get stabbed for having a fresh loaf of bread or a big bag of potatoes. Don't get me wrong, it is a great ideal and I support it ...but it is not realistic. The very concept of the weak simply ASKING to be granted the same power / privileges is outlandish - how do 400M adults collectively delude themselves into believing this is true? Based on my observations, SJWs are the modern day gestapo. They do not get their whims catered to because they are weak and we are idealistic, but because they will witch hunt individuals and businesses into oblivion within the public eye and they are therefore dangerous, for example. What is privilege? Is it even inherently immoral? How about inequality (of outcome, not of opportunity)? Most importantly, how do we still not have a clear set of goals for when we know we "reached" it? Repeated sweeping, collective laws and actions based on something so vague are truly vexing.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  What are "SJWs"? (i don't know that acronym)
  - livingparadox 6y ago
    It stands for "Social Justice Warriors". This originally meant someone standing up for minorities and the disadvantaged, but the term has been twisted into a derogatory insult for anyone who disagrees with conservatives on social issues.
    - TheCraiggers 6y ago
      The SJW term, like everything else touching this issue, is not black and white. Both of your definitions exist, yes, but so does everything else in between. By making things black and white, you are perpetuating the exact same behavior you seem to be fighting against.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. To add: from an European perspective, much of US-Reddit/HN and their stories are frankly unbelievable. "Hire at will", bankruptcies because of cancer or people not calling an ambulance even if they are heavily injured because they fear thousands-of-dollars bills, MLMs, robocall terrorism, companies firing people for unionizing - basically unheard of, because there are laws that prevent this reasonably good, and transgressors will mostly be held accountable by courts and public opinion.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  It's clear to anyone who isn't mainlining USA jingoist media that USA is failing the current test, hard. It seems likely that expanded unionization would help us make wiser and more humane decisions. We should have laws like the ones you describe. The legislative process seems incapable of producing them, however.
bendbro 6y ago
Why are you embarrassed? Embarrassment over their workplace implies you feel you have some level of stewardship of their workplace.
Nelson69 6y ago
A while back I helped a startup that was doing managed video services, specifically internal surveillance. A very logical "service" for them was to have actual humans review and verify various incidents and so they staffed up a small team of hourly video watchers. It was a culture shock. Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues; and there was no store-front or exposure to customers, it was just what's acceptable in a professional office. Someone quitting with no notice wasn't uncommon. I think the most shocking aspect was most lived in this sort of land of grand illusion, they had no concept that there were non-hourly jobs or workers building the system they used. All of them lived in a fairly delicate balance, a small inconvenience like some car trouble was potentially life altering for them. We did these somewhat terrible Thursday night deployments (think 4 hours most of the time) and more than a few times some of these guys wanted to "help" to get some overtime pay, they were incredulous at the idea that we didn't get paid extra for that. Everyone deserves dignity and respect but it's also easy to see how these untrusting sorts of institutions come to be. The big difference between ordering on Amazon and walking in to a Walmart is you have to look some of those people in the eye in Walmart. Credit to Tim for shining a little light on this. I've sort of thought that we might be in for a wave of 21st century unionization, I think the floor is a lot lower than that though. It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world.
- esoterica 6y ago
  > Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues That's the norm for many (most?) high-paying jobs, even more so than the typical low-paying job. Tech is kind of the outlier, if you're a banker or lawyer or consultant, you're expected to wear a suit everywhere.
- troyvit 6y ago
  > It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world. It would have to be a huge cultural shift away from profits being the #1 goal of companies. We need something to replace it.
ajhurliman 6y ago
When I switched from mechanical engineering to software engineering people would ask me how the switch went, and I would tell them it was like I became a new class of citizen. The pay was better, I didn't get drug tested anymore, management was friendly, the rules were lax. This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both.
- myu701 6y ago
  > This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both. I agree. Anecdote: The difference in treatment between a permatemp ('seasonal' worker at an entertainment facility working more than 9 months per year, later round-the-clock) and F.T.E. is massive. In the former, you are guilty until proven, if not innocent, then merely suspicious. In the latter, you are innocent until proven guilty or more commonly incompetent. I'm glad I work at one of the latter places now.
- twomoretime 6y ago
  >software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with Maybe people would be less hostile to the idea if you didn't dismiss the fruits of their labor with accusations of "privilege." It's kind of insulting to be told that you effectively didn't earn part or all of your success because of your race and/or gender.
  - ajhurliman 6y ago
    Maybe privilege is the wrong word (I never used that word in these discussions), and race/gender is completely tangential to this conversation. I'm not trying to say that the status is unearned, either, but I see why developers wouldn't want to agree with me. It's not humbling at all, and can appear arrogant.
- cardiffspaceman 6y ago

schnischna 6y ago

That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded "The Big Issue", a magazine that homeless people sell in Britain. They also had to put some rules in place that seem strange, for example the vendors (homeless people) had to buy the magazines they wanted to sell. They are alcoholics, gamblers, addicts, so unfortunately some special rules were necessary to make it work.

whymauri 6y ago
>That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did. But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It's also hard when traditional means for acquiring skills, like going to college, no longer have the same returns they used to. All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. So it's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead. I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
  - DagAgren 6y ago
    We absolutely need people working in warehouses. Our society would collapse far faster without them than if all of us reading this would go away. And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.
    - defnotashton2 6y ago
      I'm not disagreeing people deserve respect. But with automation do we need people in factories? Answer is no.
      - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
        It probably depends a bit more on how you define “need”. Do factory owners need people in factories when a robot can do the job? Probably not. Does society need people in factories so that the individuals have a job, which creates a sense of purpose and means through which people can provide for themselves? Probably.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently. > And by all means, if you are capable go for it And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever. That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.
Someone 6y ago
“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.” They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees. I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.
- toyg 6y ago
  You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that. Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.
  - felipemnoa 6y ago
    Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.
  - User23 6y ago
    The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    If the lowest tier of job is relatively easily replaced, one assumes the next tier is as well meaning the people who are often making these rules are not well trained veteran managers but people who may be first time people managers or not be cut out to be a manager. I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.
arez 6y ago
I suspect the same percentage of people exploiting the system in warehouses as in office jobs, still you can see very "inhumane" rules only in warehouses.
- fastball 6y ago
  The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position. It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency. I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
  - arez 6y ago
    yeah definitely, but it would still be nice if workers would be treated more equal no matter their profession
lkramer 6y ago
You don't think there are higher skilled people trying to exploit the system? I suspect the real difference here is developers are in higher demand. If we feel the checks becomes to unfair, we can go look for a different job. If a warehouse worker doesn't like his smoke breaks being monitored, there is little recourse, someone else can be hired who will accept these condition out of desperation for a job.
- adamc 6y ago
  Your explanation seems off to me. Why would lower demand necessarily imply there was someone suitable who was desperate? It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced. More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.
  - azernik 6y ago
    Low or high demand are always relative to supply. So think "high supply" rather than "low demand".
throwaway55554 6y ago
> I have never run a warehouse, You don't know... > ... but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. ... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely. I think these biases are the issue being discussed.
- mtrower 6y ago
  > You don't know... Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules. Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy. It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.) I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.
  - throwaway55554 6y ago
    > Do you? I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine. On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture. It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.
__s 6y ago
My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer) So you don't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  Unfortunately that's incredibly hard to scale. I've seen many construction companies hit the growth wall thinking that they could grow using that model instead of building process.
- roosterdawn 6y ago
  This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise. With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.
  - miscPerson 6y ago
    Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that. Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer. Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?
rchaud 6y ago
> I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). There have been large, profitable corporations that preceded Amazon and did not need to implement such draconian tracking systems. Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination.
- schnischna 6y ago
  Can you give examples? "Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination." If that was the case, the same would have happened at the previous large corporations.

wazoox 6y ago

No, indeed this gets to the heart of the idea of class warfare.

buboard 6y ago

IT workers are partly to blame for it. By creating , embracing, extending, normalizing and advertising a culture where companies compete for office perks, they also allowed the creation of the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it's OK to treat them like wage slaves.

cat199 6y ago
pretty sure "the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it's OK to treat them like wage slaves." existed long before computers were ever thought of
- whymauri 6y ago
  I don't think they're saying IT/computers are a root cause, but rather that they might be modern enablers of these power hierarchies.
  - icebraining 6y ago
    I think "allowed the creation" rather implies it is the root cause.
    - whymauri 6y ago
      Mm, yeah. You seem to be right.
    - buboard 6y ago
      did not mean it that way, but that i've never seen in the tech press someone noticing that e.g. walmart doesnt have massage rooms
sokoloff 6y ago
I doubt the tech office perks are taking employee money from other companies. Warehouse work wasn’t likely to ever be awash in cash to lavish on the workers because that’s coming straight out of the customers’ pockets; every other logistics company is competing on that basis and consumers are generally price-sensitive.

kmlx 6y ago

i worked in a warehouse carrying boxes around right after high school. the amount of brain effort to do this kind of job is close to 0. you need a bit of physical prowess, but this is easily attainable in a couple of week. since the job was basically the least complex job one can ever have, the pay was low. and it made sense back then: you want to move on to a better job/better pay/better conditions? get better qualifications, learn to do a different job etc. of course i can't comment on what happens at amazon, but these kinds of jobs are so easy to do that it's ridiculous they haven't been completely automated till now. i do wonder what will happen to all these people once automation is 100%.

raverbashing 6y ago
You're right, they're not complex. For a person They haven't been automated because it is still hard to do. Simply carrying boxes is easy, but picking up products (of different sizes, shapes, weights, "grabability", etc and putting them into orders is complicated. That being said, it might be that different companies have different stress and pressure levels and different working conditions.
- darrenoc 6y ago
  It's not that complicated. If you look up Ocado, they have entirely automated their warehouses.
  - 98Windows 6y ago
    What does entirely automated mean??
quii 6y ago
Just because something isn't skilled doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't bring value. The people who do these jobs deserve a decent wage and respect, not psuedo-wage-slavery
- lotsofpulp 6y ago

chrisan 6y ago

> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring. I can only provide 2 anecdotes, but I can see why people get treated this way after time. I highly doubt there are many people that just start their management role in a hostile, suspicion, condescension kind of way. Normally it takes something repeated over time to build up those kinds of traits of dealing with something In college I used to work for RPS (they got bought by Fedex or UPS, I forget) sorting packages. To get the job you had to lift up to 50lbs and memorize the first 2 digits of the zip code (just the region so it was like 20-30 numbers) and you'd stand in front of a big chute and sort boxes onto 1 of 3 conveyors. The amount of anger people would take out on other's boxes was insane. Kicking, punching(??), throwing over the ledge (we were like 3 floors up), or just outright stamping of boxes was nuts. After working there I learned what it means to package something well as I could not count on any package of mine being treated with respect. The other anecdote are my wife's pharmacy techs she has to manage. Some of them will bitch and moan if they have to remake a drug, sometimes outright REFUSE to make a drug if it means they have to gown back up and go back into the clean room. They will disappear for an hour after delivering a drug (up a few floors). They will take well over an hour for lunch breaks. It is a very maddening situation because all of these actions means the kids don't get what they need on time.

ianleeclark 6y ago
> I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring Pay low wage, get low motivation. No one's going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Give an inch and they take a mile. You could pay a McDonalds worker all you like and he'll still just try to get away with doing less work.

globular-toast 6y ago

> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. That's because, unfortunately, a lot of them do need their hands holding. Many of these people have very low IQ and will always avoid work if they can. You can't compare them with the people in the offices you work in who have top 10% IQs. I know it should be like this, and should be like that, but if you would actually expose yourself to the kinds of people who work in these places you will see why these seemingly hostile rules are put in place. But think of it like this: these people get a safe working environment, comfortable lives which no high levels of responsibility, and they get to reap the benefits of living in a modern society. If they were left to their own devices they'd be in poverty.

sargun 6y ago

I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporting that people had worked a few hours rather than a full shift. I had no idea how this could happen. When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Friday (change days as required). This meant that they were clocking 24 hours / day. The only way this could happen is if they were colluding with their store manager, as the manager was meant to close out the time keeping system at the end of the day. The stores with employees that abused the system tended to have lower margins. This often led to them being closed down. It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group. I expect over time (10s of years) the computer industry will get closer to other professional industries as opposed to being the wild west it is today.

loopz 6y ago
It's well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers/departments and various general types of allowed "hours". This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to "punch in your hours", employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&C futility. The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone. I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.
koonsolo 6y ago
If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong. I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company. Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid. If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust. This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.

gowld 6y ago

Warehouse workers are disrespected for the same reason poor people are: because a nontrivial proportion are desperate and willing to act on it. Poor people get fired and prosecuted for things that rich people feel entitled to do every day, like fart around on HN at work while getting paid, or grab a soda or a whole meal from the cafe without paying for it.

microcolonel 6y ago

> There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. The reason for that is simple. For jobs with few qualifications, undisciplined people and people who struggle with thinking are in the highest supply. Ask anyone who operates a bar or restaurant what sort of behaviour they can expect from low-qualification employees, hired without significant attention, at the going rate. It may be a matter of privilege for a lot of people; I know many brilliant and well-intentioned people who have had a hard go of life because they picked up a counterproductive fear, insecurity, or opinion when they were young, but it would not surprise or offend me that their employers would grow to dislike them. I have had some advantages on this, because I was blessed with a referral for my first job, and my first colleagues guided me away from my self-destructive behaviours (I was 17). That's not to say it's all of them, but if you hire people for work that requires little or no discipline to meet the hiring requirements, you are going to be exposed to a lot of candidates who lack discipline. There are many people working jobs that have a low- or no-skill entry level, who are incredibly hard-working, disciplined, and passionate; but there are also many who are none of these things. You can observe a maybe-similar effect with specialized "consultants", who merely have to claim to be able to resolve problems like one you're experiencing; then they get paid for a few months to have a go at it, and it turns out they don't know any more than you do about your problem.

alharith 6y ago

I don't want to disagree with most of what you are saying, but this is where I can always tell the majority of HN hasn't started a non-tech, low skill business before (restaurants, sales, salons, construction, etc). Your workers consistently put you in bad positions. People will call out for no reason, no shows are frequent. Sometimes you just get people that completely disappear. That's fine in the tech world where most of our deadlines and time estimates are made up anyways, but when you have one of your line cooks or stylists or sales rep fail, to show on a busy Saturday it can be disastrous if you don't have the good will of another one of your employees covering. Seriously, next time you get a chance, talk to your local restaurant manager, construction manager, barber shop owner or sales manager, they all say the same things: how difficult it is to find good workers. (and "good" here is a pretty low bar: show up when you are scheduled on time)

toyg 6y ago
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." Manual labor in many sectors is structurally underpaid. Nobody with half a brain would ever choose waiting tables as a career, even if they enjoyed it. So you're left with people with no choice or with mental-health issues (or both), who often resent having to do the job. Whether that's by design or a collateral effect of certain societal and economic structures, is open to discussion; but this is definitely the case. Until we allow that waiter and that delivery driver a level of dignity equal to this or that white-collar job, the situation will not change.
- alharith 6y ago
  I somehow knew this would be the first comment. Unfortunately, for these industries, where you sell real goods at affordable prices (not over-inflated fantasyland prices to your "enterprise" customers) margins are razor thin. This is the sector of the economy that has been YoY consistently left behind since the Bush-Oil eras drove prices sky high. Trying my best not trying to sound snooty, but again this shows once more that the majority of people here really haven't ran a business like this.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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supergeek133 6y ago

I think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales). For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was meant to be illustrative, not an exact ratio. This makes companies take extreme policy measures for the few instances of this that impact everyone, because the financial impact is so disproportionate. Now, the argument can (and is) made that pay is a factor. "If you pay me more I won't act like this". But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.

this2shallPass 6y ago
Thankfully no "high pay" labor ever just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc) ;) And never at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. Pay might be a factor. I think people are people, and their behavior and beliefs vary.
- supergeek133 6y ago
  I completely agree, but we, as a society tend to look down more on the low paid people who do this versus the high paid ones.
  - yters 6y ago
    Exactly, and the high paid thieves are those who can wreck the lives of millions vs the low paid thieves take an infinitesimal bit away from the bottom line of a multi billion dollar company.
    - banads 6y ago
      "We hang the petty thieves, and appoint the great ones to public office" -Aesop

deleted 6y ago

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jimbokun 6y ago

> Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. This is exactly why privilege is not an accurate or constructive term to use in these conversations. Privilege implies something undeserved. So it sounds like an argument for taking away those bare minimums, so everyone is equally treated with suspicion, condescension and hostility. Better words are "oppression", "discrimination" and "bigotry". Make it clear that the goal is treating everyone with a basic level of trust and respect, as a bare minimum, and nothing less than that is acceptable.

hysan 6y ago

All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1], and kept the business running as long as possible even after 9/11 + the recession killed the business. The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”. People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly, if they see that it’s very much possible for the system to be improved, that’s when the thoughts of “this is unfair” begin to emerge. [1] My dad was by title the owner while my mom was in the union the workers belonged to. His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers, but far lower than could have been possible had they attempted to fight the union on pay to nickel and dime them.

esoterica 6y ago
No one who runs a business that hires multiple employees can reasonably call themselves lower middle class. Showing my work: > My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1] >His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers. Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage. Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).
- ndespres 6y ago
  Food service, maintenance, landscaping, small tetail.. plenty of possible examples come to mind.
- acolumb 6y ago
  I disagree. Lower middle class people can open businesses propped up on loans, in which their drive to hit their margin is even higher.

jonny_eh 6y ago

> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged That's because basic trust and respect shouldn't be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let's focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.

mcguire 6y ago
"Why should we focus on those 'disadvantaged' people? My life is hard, too."

zouhair 6y ago

We live in a society where the most important and essential jobs are treated with condescension.

cbsmith 6y ago

There's also the reality that "low-skilled" really means "there's more supply of the skill than there is demand", or "depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent/advantage that few people have".

AdrianB1 6y ago
There is the reality that ~ 10% of the population has an IQ so low, US army cannot recruit them by law. 10% is a lot of people, a few tens of millions in US. I have someone in the family that has the mind of a children of 8-10 years old, for that person a "low skilled" job in an Amazon warehouse would be excellent; the alternative is zero income.
- cbsmith 6y ago
  There's also a IQ != skill. But I believe your specific example here fits the "depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent/advantage that few people have".

taurath 6y ago

I tell people I've never worked as hard as I did the morning shift at taco bell. Just being treated like a human with independent thoughts and needs is a huge benefit in so many workplaces. There's a level of just violence and mistrust in the "normal" working world that is terrifying if you haven't experienced it, and jarring if you haven't experienced it in a while. The bean-counters who make up the systems where in human labor is a cog are really creating skinner boxes. The larger scale the corporation goes the less emphasis on empathy and human needs. You become a bit that can either do the work or can't. Our cold "efficient" corporate machines has actively done everything it can to take humanity and empathy away from every process. Consumers are numbers on a dashboard. Workers are line items in an S-1. As much as people like to claim otherwise, the companies actions never take a hit that they know doesn't have a benefit elsewhere. Amazon is a big pioneer in the space - take something and remove all human decision making from it, automate it and then move onto the next thing. Now they apply that against hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees.

raven105x 6y ago

> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. I've wondered since coming to this country how such a large collective delusion continues to persist. The part of the world where I grew up, it is not unheard of for people to get stabbed for having a fresh loaf of bread or a big bag of potatoes. Don't get me wrong, it is a great ideal and I support it ...but it is not realistic. The very concept of the weak simply ASKING to be granted the same power / privileges is outlandish - how do 400M adults collectively delude themselves into believing this is true? Based on my observations, SJWs are the modern day gestapo. They do not get their whims catered to because they are weak and we are idealistic, but because they will witch hunt individuals and businesses into oblivion within the public eye and they are therefore dangerous, for example. What is privilege? Is it even inherently immoral? How about inequality (of outcome, not of opportunity)? Most importantly, how do we still not have a clear set of goals for when we know we "reached" it? Repeated sweeping, collective laws and actions based on something so vague are truly vexing.

jjtheblunt 6y ago
What are "SJWs"? (i don't know that acronym)
- livingparadox 6y ago
  It stands for "Social Justice Warriors". This originally meant someone standing up for minorities and the disadvantaged, but the term has been twisted into a derogatory insult for anyone who disagrees with conservatives on social issues.
  - TheCraiggers 6y ago
    The SJW term, like everything else touching this issue, is not black and white. Both of your definitions exist, yes, but so does everything else in between. By making things black and white, you are perpetuating the exact same behavior you seem to be fighting against.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. To add: from an European perspective, much of US-Reddit/HN and their stories are frankly unbelievable. "Hire at will", bankruptcies because of cancer or people not calling an ambulance even if they are heavily injured because they fear thousands-of-dollars bills, MLMs, robocall terrorism, companies firing people for unionizing - basically unheard of, because there are laws that prevent this reasonably good, and transgressors will mostly be held accountable by courts and public opinion.

jessaustin 6y ago
It's clear to anyone who isn't mainlining USA jingoist media that USA is failing the current test, hard. It seems likely that expanded unionization would help us make wiser and more humane decisions. We should have laws like the ones you describe. The legislative process seems incapable of producing them, however.

bendbro 6y ago

Why are you embarrassed? Embarrassment over their workplace implies you feel you have some level of stewardship of their workplace.

Nelson69 6y ago

A while back I helped a startup that was doing managed video services, specifically internal surveillance. A very logical "service" for them was to have actual humans review and verify various incidents and so they staffed up a small team of hourly video watchers. It was a culture shock. Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues; and there was no store-front or exposure to customers, it was just what's acceptable in a professional office. Someone quitting with no notice wasn't uncommon. I think the most shocking aspect was most lived in this sort of land of grand illusion, they had no concept that there were non-hourly jobs or workers building the system they used. All of them lived in a fairly delicate balance, a small inconvenience like some car trouble was potentially life altering for them. We did these somewhat terrible Thursday night deployments (think 4 hours most of the time) and more than a few times some of these guys wanted to "help" to get some overtime pay, they were incredulous at the idea that we didn't get paid extra for that. Everyone deserves dignity and respect but it's also easy to see how these untrusting sorts of institutions come to be. The big difference between ordering on Amazon and walking in to a Walmart is you have to look some of those people in the eye in Walmart. Credit to Tim for shining a little light on this. I've sort of thought that we might be in for a wave of 21st century unionization, I think the floor is a lot lower than that though. It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world.

esoterica 6y ago
> Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues That's the norm for many (most?) high-paying jobs, even more so than the typical low-paying job. Tech is kind of the outlier, if you're a banker or lawyer or consultant, you're expected to wear a suit everywhere.
troyvit 6y ago
> It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world. It would have to be a huge cultural shift away from profits being the #1 goal of companies. We need something to replace it.

ajhurliman 6y ago

When I switched from mechanical engineering to software engineering people would ask me how the switch went, and I would tell them it was like I became a new class of citizen. The pay was better, I didn't get drug tested anymore, management was friendly, the rules were lax. This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both.

myu701 6y ago
> This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both. I agree. Anecdote: The difference in treatment between a permatemp ('seasonal' worker at an entertainment facility working more than 9 months per year, later round-the-clock) and F.T.E. is massive. In the former, you are guilty until proven, if not innocent, then merely suspicious. In the latter, you are innocent until proven guilty or more commonly incompetent. I'm glad I work at one of the latter places now.
twomoretime 6y ago
>software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with Maybe people would be less hostile to the idea if you didn't dismiss the fruits of their labor with accusations of "privilege." It's kind of insulting to be told that you effectively didn't earn part or all of your success because of your race and/or gender.
- ajhurliman 6y ago
  Maybe privilege is the wrong word (I never used that word in these discussions), and race/gender is completely tangential to this conversation. I'm not trying to say that the status is unearned, either, but I see why developers wouldn't want to agree with me. It's not humbling at all, and can appear arrogant.
cardiffspaceman 6y ago