7 ms·

Amazon's tactics in response to unionizing efforts been extremely revealing. Even if unionizing fails, I'm happy that it forced Amazon to show us all the level

Amazon's tactics in response to unionizing efforts been extremely revealing. Even if unionizing fails, I'm happy that it forced Amazon to show us all the level of contempt they have for their workforce.

minikites 6y ago
Every corporation has contempt for its workforce, it's why labor unions are so necessary.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Nearly every corporation has naked contempt for its “human resources”, that's why it calls them, and the department responsible for minimizing the cost of exploiting them, “human resources”.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Indeed. It's a bit sad how us human resources often balk at accepting this fact.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  It varies. Not because some corporations are moral, but because happy workers are a good long-term strategy and many corporations are stuck with rolling short-term-ism. They reward the top tier on a three-ish year cycle, so executives only need to make the numbers go up for three years before exiting with a higher paying job and compensation via stock sales. The US has a massive issue in general with rolling corporate pump & dump. The whole stock market basically encourages it. That's why we see things like customer retention strategies that actually reduce re-subscriptions and hurt the long term reputations remaining popular (because the short term matters more to executives than the long term, even if the company burns down after they leave).
  - willcipriano 6y ago
    "I'll be gone, you'll be gone"[0] [0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG
  - minikites 6y ago
    >happy workers are a good long-term strategy I always see this cited as a reason but it so rarely happens that it might as well be a Horatio Alger fable. It's not instructive or useful in our current reality and it would be like taking lessons from the workplace successes of Santa's elves.
    - Someone1234 6y ago
      Contrast Walmart and Costco, in terms of employee happiness and turnover.
      - minikites 6y ago
        >As of February 2021 Walmart has a market cap of $374.31 B >As of February 2021 Costco has a market cap of $148.54 B https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-sinks-as-pay-raise-plan-is-panned-by-wall-street-2017-04-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-si... >“We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups,” Baker wrote in a note to clients. Treating employees well is punished by the market and neither Costco or American Airlines treat them particularly well, just less terribly than their competitors. A company necessarily has to treat its employees like shit in order to succeed.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      It depends on where in the world you are, what kind of work the company does, etc. It even depends on where within a country the company has its principal activity. Of course it is not necessarily the case that what works here in Norway would work in the US even if the legal framework were changed to support it.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Amazon has particular contempt. It's not limited to the floor workers; engineers get punted if they look like they may be more short-term trouble than they're worth. Contrast with a company like Google, that goes out of its way to hire the best they can and then retain them under the belief that an engineer invested in pays dividends down the road. Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Frost1x 6y ago
That's pretty much every employer ever in our economic system. Your labor force is a necessary evil and means to an end in far too many business leaders' minds. Any way they can reduce labor cost, the better, unfortunately they have to tiptoe around laws to do it and invent new clever approaches to achieve the same ultimate goal: labor rights and wage supression. It's not just businesses though who are employers. If you've ever hired someone to do a contract job for you, say a plumber, electrician or some other small construction project, you probably thought about and devised all sorts of ways to reduce the time and material costs of their efforts to save you money. I see this happen with a lot of people. Our culture has a deep seated disregard for other humans when money is involved. For those who can easily afford the cost, I don't understand. For those who have to pay someone out of necessity but can't really afford the costs, I understand. Successful businesses fall into the former category. They are not charities, they have a profit motive and margin so they can afford it otherwise they have a failing business model. It all becomes a matter of how much success of that model they want to share with those who make their model possible and how entitled they feel in deserving of reward for their models success. To me, a lot of it is sheer coincidence and luck. I say you should contribute back to those who enable and make you successful. It's all about balance though, again, a business (well, most) isn't a charity and its reasonable to expect them to garner rewards for their efforts and success, whether it be luck or innovation and hard work based. A business also shouldn't be on the other extreme operating as a sweat shop driving down others rights to benefit those in charge. There's a healthy balance somewhere in between and many captains of industry or investors holding the purse strings seem to have forgotten this. In addition, hyper competitive markets have forced these sort of optimizations. If you take two identical businesses with identical cost structures, products, etc and one decides to better compete and lower costs to consumers, they can reduce their labor costs, then other participants in the market will have to follow suit to remain competitive or fail in a low cost driven society. So even if you understand the value of people and want to share the wealth, it would be quite difficult. The way to protect against this is through baseline legislation like minimum wage, overtime limits, etc. When all competitors in a market have to comply or be fined a cost with too high of risk (the punishments for violation need to be high to dissuade abuse), it's not possible to undercut your competitors in these aspects because you can't optimize beyond these constraints. We need more robust labor laws and enforcement to fix this issue, IMO. Let businesses optimize outside of labor because labor is already incredibly optimized as is and will only reduce quality of life for most if it continues the ongoing trend.
missedthecue 6y ago
To their workforce or to a potential cartel they'd be federally forced to deal with?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- leafmeal 6y ago
  A "cartel" that represents their workforce, so yes by proxy, their workforce.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You mean the Board of Directors?
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    There isn't only one board of directors in the US. There is only one UAW. There is only one IlWU. There is only one teamsters.
plandis 6y ago
That’s literally every company though. Amazon is no different than any other company with respect to fighting against things they perceive as not being in the companies benefit.

minikites 6y ago

Every corporation has contempt for its workforce, it's why labor unions are so necessary.

dragonwriter 6y ago
Nearly every corporation has naked contempt for its “human resources”, that's why it calls them, and the department responsible for minimizing the cost of exploiting them, “human resources”.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Indeed. It's a bit sad how us human resources often balk at accepting this fact.
Someone1234 6y ago
It varies. Not because some corporations are moral, but because happy workers are a good long-term strategy and many corporations are stuck with rolling short-term-ism. They reward the top tier on a three-ish year cycle, so executives only need to make the numbers go up for three years before exiting with a higher paying job and compensation via stock sales. The US has a massive issue in general with rolling corporate pump & dump. The whole stock market basically encourages it. That's why we see things like customer retention strategies that actually reduce re-subscriptions and hurt the long term reputations remaining popular (because the short term matters more to executives than the long term, even if the company burns down after they leave).
- willcipriano 6y ago
  "I'll be gone, you'll be gone"[0] [0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG
- minikites 6y ago
  >happy workers are a good long-term strategy I always see this cited as a reason but it so rarely happens that it might as well be a Horatio Alger fable. It's not instructive or useful in our current reality and it would be like taking lessons from the workplace successes of Santa's elves.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    Contrast Walmart and Costco, in terms of employee happiness and turnover.
    - minikites 6y ago
      >As of February 2021 Walmart has a market cap of $374.31 B >As of February 2021 Costco has a market cap of $148.54 B https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-sinks-as-pay-raise-plan-is-panned-by-wall-street-2017-04-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-si... >“We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups,” Baker wrote in a note to clients. Treating employees well is punished by the market and neither Costco or American Airlines treat them particularly well, just less terribly than their competitors. A company necessarily has to treat its employees like shit in order to succeed.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    It depends on where in the world you are, what kind of work the company does, etc. It even depends on where within a country the company has its principal activity. Of course it is not necessarily the case that what works here in Norway would work in the US even if the legal framework were changed to support it.
- rcxdude 6y ago
shadowgovt 6y ago
Amazon has particular contempt. It's not limited to the floor workers; engineers get punted if they look like they may be more short-term trouble than they're worth. Contrast with a company like Google, that goes out of its way to hire the best they can and then retain them under the belief that an engineer invested in pays dividends down the road. Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Frost1x 6y ago

That's pretty much every employer ever in our economic system. Your labor force is a necessary evil and means to an end in far too many business leaders' minds. Any way they can reduce labor cost, the better, unfortunately they have to tiptoe around laws to do it and invent new clever approaches to achieve the same ultimate goal: labor rights and wage supression. It's not just businesses though who are employers. If you've ever hired someone to do a contract job for you, say a plumber, electrician or some other small construction project, you probably thought about and devised all sorts of ways to reduce the time and material costs of their efforts to save you money. I see this happen with a lot of people. Our culture has a deep seated disregard for other humans when money is involved. For those who can easily afford the cost, I don't understand. For those who have to pay someone out of necessity but can't really afford the costs, I understand. Successful businesses fall into the former category. They are not charities, they have a profit motive and margin so they can afford it otherwise they have a failing business model. It all becomes a matter of how much success of that model they want to share with those who make their model possible and how entitled they feel in deserving of reward for their models success. To me, a lot of it is sheer coincidence and luck. I say you should contribute back to those who enable and make you successful. It's all about balance though, again, a business (well, most) isn't a charity and its reasonable to expect them to garner rewards for their efforts and success, whether it be luck or innovation and hard work based. A business also shouldn't be on the other extreme operating as a sweat shop driving down others rights to benefit those in charge. There's a healthy balance somewhere in between and many captains of industry or investors holding the purse strings seem to have forgotten this. In addition, hyper competitive markets have forced these sort of optimizations. If you take two identical businesses with identical cost structures, products, etc and one decides to better compete and lower costs to consumers, they can reduce their labor costs, then other participants in the market will have to follow suit to remain competitive or fail in a low cost driven society. So even if you understand the value of people and want to share the wealth, it would be quite difficult. The way to protect against this is through baseline legislation like minimum wage, overtime limits, etc. When all competitors in a market have to comply or be fined a cost with too high of risk (the punishments for violation need to be high to dissuade abuse), it's not possible to undercut your competitors in these aspects because you can't optimize beyond these constraints. We need more robust labor laws and enforcement to fix this issue, IMO. Let businesses optimize outside of labor because labor is already incredibly optimized as is and will only reduce quality of life for most if it continues the ongoing trend.

missedthecue 6y ago

To their workforce or to a potential cartel they'd be federally forced to deal with?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
leafmeal 6y ago
A "cartel" that represents their workforce, so yes by proxy, their workforce.
mywittyname 6y ago
You mean the Board of Directors?
- missedthecue 6y ago
  There isn't only one board of directors in the US. There is only one UAW. There is only one IlWU. There is only one teamsters.

plandis 6y ago

That’s literally every company though. Amazon is no different than any other company with respect to fighting against things they perceive as not being in the companies benefit.