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>“Amazon does not tolerate violations of labor laws," Leah Seay, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. "Where we find repeated violations, or an inability to

>“Amazon does not tolerate violations of labor laws," Leah Seay, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. "Where we find repeated violations, or an inability to correct labor violations, we terminate contracts with DSP program participants.” At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. The general population are becoming aware of these practices. Amazon may not have directly committed the violation but they've created and shaped an environment ripe for rampantly abusive labor practices. If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. Don't just leverage cheaper labor from labor abuse until it gets public attention and then terminate a contract set in place to pass blame and responsibility. Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands?

adamcstephens 6y ago
The latter, and this is the accepted practice in modern corporations. How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced. Amazon is just playing in the same broken system.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  At some point we have to admit that the richest corporations and people in the world, with the most power to change the system, are not just playing in the system but are a part of what makes it broken. From their perspective the system is not broken at all — it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to make shareholders (themselves) fabulously rich at the expense of laborers. On one side of the equation we have people being paid poverty wages, on the other side we have the richest man in the world with the power to change that. This isn’t a coincidence or just a strange, second-order, unintended byproduct of the system. It’s cause and effect. It’s what the system was designed explicitly to do. The system is in fact working to spec.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    But on the Amazon side of the fence, they are using their power to change that; they pay all employees at least $15, and are lobbying to get the federal minimum wage raised to that level from $7.25. So this can't just be a simple story of a company paying as little as they can get away with. Something's gone wrong to make them not care about (or not think they're responsible for) these delivery drivers.
    - aboringusername 6y ago
      They don't care. The only reason they have an interest/stake at $15 min wage is so they can crush anyone who might challenge them. Essentially solidify their position. A rival might not be able to afford that so they let everyone go, or Amazon gobbles them up for dinner. There's always an ulterior motive when lobbying is involved.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I'm not really sure how to engage with this. Surely you're not saying that it's bad to pay $15, or that Amazon ought to cut everyone's wages to make room for their competitors.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It's bad to require competitors to pay $15. This is the thing that regularly gets lost in the minimum wage debates. Some jobs suck more than others. Amazon warehouse jobs suck kind of a lot. You spend all day standing up and doing manual labor. Because that's what it takes to make unskilled work produce $15/hour in value. You pass a law requiring competitors to do the same and the ones who were paying $10/hour but workers had more down time, will have to make them more like Amazon jobs. In other words, will have to make them suck more. There are a lot of people for whom that is not a good trade off. For a 20 year old who can physically do the Amazon job, it might be a good choice in order to make more money. For a 60 year old who can't physically do the Amazon job, taking away the less demanding job they can do is really screwing them over.
- syshum 6y ago
  They "terminate" the contract with a "supplier" who often it just a holding company or "contractor" in a 5 level deep shell game, and the "new" contractor is a name on a form but the same factory is making the same product with the same labor inside a week...
- salawat 6y ago
  The greatest lie ever perpetuated in the United States corporate system is that a company's fiduciary duty justifies or excuses malbehavior. You do not get to formulate sketchy ways of doing business because you must make shareholders money. They invested, and took a risk. They don't always get to win. Losses are not something that should be unfathomable. The fact that people haven't done that great a job at rooting this stuff out sooner is a bit on the mystifying side only up until you realize the folks we'd count on to do it are having their checks paid by the people getting investigated.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced. Strange how these companies keep getting hoodwinked into profiting immensely from slave labor. I mean, how could a billion or trillion dollar company know whether or not its supply chain uses slaves to produce the goods they sell? It seems like the only way to know if slaves produced their goods is to get caught red-handed by someone else. How do these underfunded NGOs and regulators catch the companies innocently profiting from slave labor?
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands? The same thing companies do when they go to a different state within the US with weaker labor and environmental laws. And the same thing individuals do when choosing to purchase products at cheaper prices from places with weaker labor/environmental laws. Blaming individual companies for regulatory arbitrage is a fruitless endeavor.
pessimizer 6y ago
> At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. At what hypothetical point is this? I'm pretty sure you can do this indefinitely, which is why they do it.
34679 6y ago
The whole thing seems to be a corporatized version of a carny game. Amazon is behind the counter, promising gullible passersby top prizes if they can toss a ring over a bottle. "Watch me, I'll show you how easy it is!" But instead of young couples on dates being taken for $20 a pop on promises of large stuffed animals, they're luring in new business owners with promises of riches. The problem is, it's a rigged game. Amazon know it, otherwise they'd do this work themselves.
- stonecraftwolf 6y ago
  Reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. spoiler warning The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive. If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Yep, and if the punishment is typically fines that take a small percentage of your profit, why wouldn't you turn around and keep doing it.
  - artificial 6y ago
    The Moist von Lipwig trilogy is fantastic. Have you seen the TV movie?
    - stonecraftwolf 6y ago
      Holy sh*t there’s a movie?? Thank you for making my day!
      - artificial 6y ago
kkielhofner 6y ago
It's amazing to me that people often accept these kinds of "explanations" from corporations; as though it was some unintended eventuality, mistake, etc. Not to mention the sheer gall of repeated corporate responses when caught like these that are ridiculous even at face value. Most people don't seem to notice these "mistakes" are always to the benefit of the corporation. NEVER to the benefit of the customer, employee, etc.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  It's rude to call someone incompetent at their job. Unless they overlooked corruption, in which case it's rude to call them competent at their job. How odd.
chha 6y ago
The problem here as seen from Amazon's point of view isn't that someone broke the rules, it's that they were busted for doing so. Same with Apple and any other corp where a contractor violates the rules; you punish them for being discovered, not for breaking the rules in the first place.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. We can see from Amazon's actions, and lack of actions, that they're as committed to not breaking labor laws as they are committed to not committing fraud and IP & trademark infringement by selling counterfeit items on their marketplace. That is to say, it's all rhetoric and PR. After all of this time, and reading countless words from Amazon promising to fix it, I still cannot report to Amazon that I received a counterfeit item from them via their return process, and Amazon drivers are still making less than minimum wage.

adamcstephens 6y ago

The latter, and this is the accepted practice in modern corporations. How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced. Amazon is just playing in the same broken system.

ModernMech 6y ago
At some point we have to admit that the richest corporations and people in the world, with the most power to change the system, are not just playing in the system but are a part of what makes it broken. From their perspective the system is not broken at all — it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to make shareholders (themselves) fabulously rich at the expense of laborers. On one side of the equation we have people being paid poverty wages, on the other side we have the richest man in the world with the power to change that. This isn’t a coincidence or just a strange, second-order, unintended byproduct of the system. It’s cause and effect. It’s what the system was designed explicitly to do. The system is in fact working to spec.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  But on the Amazon side of the fence, they are using their power to change that; they pay all employees at least $15, and are lobbying to get the federal minimum wage raised to that level from $7.25. So this can't just be a simple story of a company paying as little as they can get away with. Something's gone wrong to make them not care about (or not think they're responsible for) these delivery drivers.
  - aboringusername 6y ago
    They don't care. The only reason they have an interest/stake at $15 min wage is so they can crush anyone who might challenge them. Essentially solidify their position. A rival might not be able to afford that so they let everyone go, or Amazon gobbles them up for dinner. There's always an ulterior motive when lobbying is involved.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'm not really sure how to engage with this. Surely you're not saying that it's bad to pay $15, or that Amazon ought to cut everyone's wages to make room for their competitors.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It's bad to require competitors to pay $15. This is the thing that regularly gets lost in the minimum wage debates. Some jobs suck more than others. Amazon warehouse jobs suck kind of a lot. You spend all day standing up and doing manual labor. Because that's what it takes to make unskilled work produce $15/hour in value. You pass a law requiring competitors to do the same and the ones who were paying $10/hour but workers had more down time, will have to make them more like Amazon jobs. In other words, will have to make them suck more. There are a lot of people for whom that is not a good trade off. For a 20 year old who can physically do the Amazon job, it might be a good choice in order to make more money. For a 60 year old who can't physically do the Amazon job, taking away the less demanding job they can do is really screwing them over.
syshum 6y ago
They "terminate" the contract with a "supplier" who often it just a holding company or "contractor" in a 5 level deep shell game, and the "new" contractor is a name on a form but the same factory is making the same product with the same labor inside a week...
salawat 6y ago
The greatest lie ever perpetuated in the United States corporate system is that a company's fiduciary duty justifies or excuses malbehavior. You do not get to formulate sketchy ways of doing business because you must make shareholders money. They invested, and took a risk. They don't always get to win. Losses are not something that should be unfathomable. The fact that people haven't done that great a job at rooting this stuff out sooner is a bit on the mystifying side only up until you realize the folks we'd count on to do it are having their checks paid by the people getting investigated.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> How many times have the Gap or Apple been caught using child labor, only to terminate the contract and move on? If they don’t push these boundaries they’re considered irresponsible fiduciaries and may be replaced. Strange how these companies keep getting hoodwinked into profiting immensely from slave labor. I mean, how could a billion or trillion dollar company know whether or not its supply chain uses slaves to produce the goods they sell? It seems like the only way to know if slaves produced their goods is to get caught red-handed by someone else. How do these underfunded NGOs and regulators catch the companies innocently profiting from slave labor?

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> Are you really outsourcing labor or are you outsourcing the risks associated with abuses of labor needed to meet your demands? The same thing companies do when they go to a different state within the US with weaker labor and environmental laws. And the same thing individuals do when choosing to purchase products at cheaper prices from places with weaker labor/environmental laws. Blaming individual companies for regulatory arbitrage is a fruitless endeavor.

pessimizer 6y ago

> At some point you can't pass blame for repeated violations through contract vehicles. At what hypothetical point is this? I'm pretty sure you can do this indefinitely, which is why they do it.

34679 6y ago

The whole thing seems to be a corporatized version of a carny game. Amazon is behind the counter, promising gullible passersby top prizes if they can toss a ring over a bottle. "Watch me, I'll show you how easy it is!" But instead of young couples on dates being taken for $20 a pop on promises of large stuffed animals, they're luring in new business owners with promises of riches. The problem is, it's a rigged game. Amazon know it, otherwise they'd do this work themselves.

stonecraftwolf 6y ago
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. spoiler warning The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive. If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Yep, and if the punishment is typically fines that take a small percentage of your profit, why wouldn't you turn around and keep doing it.
- artificial 6y ago
  The Moist von Lipwig trilogy is fantastic. Have you seen the TV movie?
  - stonecraftwolf 6y ago
    Holy sh*t there’s a movie?? Thank you for making my day!
    - artificial 6y ago

kkielhofner 6y ago

It's amazing to me that people often accept these kinds of "explanations" from corporations; as though it was some unintended eventuality, mistake, etc. Not to mention the sheer gall of repeated corporate responses when caught like these that are ridiculous even at face value. Most people don't seem to notice these "mistakes" are always to the benefit of the corporation. NEVER to the benefit of the customer, employee, etc.

Qwertious 6y ago
It's rude to call someone incompetent at their job. Unless they overlooked corruption, in which case it's rude to call them competent at their job. How odd.

chha 6y ago

The problem here as seen from Amazon's point of view isn't that someone broke the rules, it's that they were busted for doing so. Same with Apple and any other corp where a contractor violates the rules; you punish them for being discovered, not for breaking the rules in the first place.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> If Amazon is serious about fixing the problem and committed to good labor practices, stop contracting out services and take control of the issue. Set policies in place with teeth that remove managers and middle managers caught pushing such work conditions. We can see from Amazon's actions, and lack of actions, that they're as committed to not breaking labor laws as they are committed to not committing fraud and IP & trademark infringement by selling counterfeit items on their marketplace. That is to say, it's all rhetoric and PR. After all of this time, and reading countless words from Amazon promising to fix it, I still cannot report to Amazon that I received a counterfeit item from them via their return process, and Amazon drivers are still making less than minimum wage.