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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

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.
        dcow 6y ago
        Amazon aside, I see the $15 argument more about making minimum wage, a concept we’re already engaged at a policy level, reflect reality. IMO if we’re going to have minimum wage in the US then we need to make it work for its intended purpose of requiring companies to pay people a living wage for their labor. If that were the goal we’d adjust minimum wage for inflation and cost of living since its inception and then require it to adjust every year as the value of the dollar does. In its current form it is more of an excuse for companies pay below a living wage.
        ctdonath 6y ago
        pay people a living wage for their labor I truly don’t understand why so many think that someone doing less than what it takes to live (alone, independently) should be paid a living wage. Food, housing, energy, care, ... all take productivity; if someone can’t produce enough to cover their own needs, they need be recognized as a dependent and treated as such. It’s not your obligation to pay me a living wage just because you need floors swept or burgers flipped.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Amazon says one thing, behaves "responsibly" internally but still works with known bad actors till caught. Greed has gone wrong.
  - Jochim 6y ago
    I've seen this argument around quite often, but it feels more and more like the product of the Amazon PR machine. It appears that in at least some cases wages for warehouse workers fell 30%[0] once Amazon opened it's warehouses. Amazon seems to be dragging warehouse wages down to $15 rather than up. [0] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amazon-does-to-wages https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The Amazon jobs aren't forklift drivers. The wages of forklift drivers go down because Amazon automates a lot of that work, which means there is less demand for forklift drivers. It's the classic automation story and has basically nothing to do with what they pay to pickers.
      - Jochim 6y ago
        The data in the economist article is for both forklift drivers and pickers. It seems fairly clear that even lower skilled warehouse workers are being paid less than they were before Amazon entered their market. The fact that automation is both reducing the number and quality of jobs probably merits discussion as well. We simply don't have anything in place to ensure automation doesn't ruin people's standard of living.
        AniseAbyss 6y ago
        Building an economy on unskilled labour is a pretty bad idea. Anything that can be automated or outsourced WILL- capitalism demands it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    They enacted the minimum wage when Bernie Sanders threatened them, years after they started outsourcing labor abuses.
    - astrange 6y ago
      That was just theater. Bernie's argument here made no sense and he knew it, but it sounded good. He was arguing that society "has to pay people welfare" because Amazon doesn't pay enough. In other words he's arguing that paying welfare is bad, which is not true and goes against the rest of his platform. Actually it's good, and the reason it's good is that it raises your wages because it gives you more freedom! In other words, without welfare the employees would be getting paid even less. (This can change depending on work requirement rules, which are mostly bad, but not enough of a problem to change the dynamic here.)
      - ModernMech 6y ago
        > He was arguing that society "has to pay people welfare" because Amazon doesn't pay enough. In other words he's arguing that paying welfare is bad, which is not true and goes against the rest of his platform. This is not quite the argument. What you're leaving out here is that Amazon can afford to pay enough, their CEO is the richest man in the world worth over a hundred billion dollars, and Amazon pays $0 in income tax. Bernie is not saying welfare is bad, he's saying that corporations using the welfare system to subsidize their profit margins while their CEO enriches himself is bad.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    My guess is that most of the labor cost is due to delivery and not the warehouse. If they advocate for higher wages in the warehouse, regulators and the general public will be less suspicious of the policies that drive the lion's share of their labor costs. I'm sure if they thought they could get away with "subcontracting (wink wink)" all of their labor positions so that they are not liable for the wage theft that must occur to meet the contracts, they would do so.
    - oceanghost 6y ago
      I think you're correct. I used to get advertisements all the time for "logistics.amazon.com". Which if you were to believe it, Amazon wants to "help" you start a delivery business, with as little as $10k to invest. Think about that for a second. Instead of paying delivery drivers and providing capital (trucks, gasoline, insurance, etc). Amazon wants YOU to pay them for the privilege. They've turned what should be a job into a contracting business with one, predatory customer. Amazon.
      - astrange 6y ago
        Is Chik-Fil-A preying on people by letting them start franchises? The investment requirement is actually the same and they're probably more onerous.
  - syshum 6y ago
    >>>and are lobbying to get the federal minimum wage raised to that level from $7.25. What you fell for the Con... Amazon wants $15 in order to put the final nail in the coffin of small business hiring that teen for their first job stocking the small local store... No they want those positions gone, they want those business shuttered. This idea that Amazon is "fighting for the worker" in their drive for $15/hr minimum wage is moronic. $15/hr min wage is also not based on any economic reality and as a basis for a "living wage" it would be far to low in some reasons, and far too high in many others. Minimum Wage should be a LOCAL, or state level policy not a national one.
    - astrange 6y ago
      > Amazon wants $15 in order to put the final nail in the coffin of small business hiring that teen for their first job stocking the small local store... This is correct but it's a good thing because small businesses are unironically bad. Small business owners are the most reactionary demographic in the US, less productive than large businesses, the most abusive towards employees, and exempt from discrimination laws. They also don't have negotiation power and can't improve anything with their suppliers (e.g. Chinese restaurants may all be family-owned, but they're all buying ingredients from the same place).
      - syshum 6y ago
        >> small businesses are unironically bad. I did not think I would see the day that HN was pro corporation and Big business. Aside from the fact your completely wrong, most people are employed by small or medium businessed, and SMB's are often more agile and able to respond faster to market demands than larger companies This is why you do not see large companies innovating, instead they buy out small companies that have innovated in an effort to grab and/or hold the market share they lose to upstarts. Also it is ironic that in a post dedicated to talking about how terrible Amazon treats its retail employee's and with provable evidence of employment abuse by other large companies on the world stage you stake a claim that small businesses are more abusive, that is laughably absurd Small and medium business are the backbone of the economy, and in large part treat their employee's better than large companies. Sure some very small micro business with less than 25 employee's might but SMB is generally companies 25 - 1000 employees and under 1 billion in revenue. Companies this bracket often have some of the highest employee satisfaction scores, and lowest turn over it is absurd to to think that SMB's are worse than the Large Global Corporations.
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?

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.
      - dcow 6y ago
        Amazon aside, I see the $15 argument more about making minimum wage, a concept we’re already engaged at a policy level, reflect reality. IMO if we’re going to have minimum wage in the US then we need to make it work for its intended purpose of requiring companies to pay people a living wage for their labor. If that were the goal we’d adjust minimum wage for inflation and cost of living since its inception and then require it to adjust every year as the value of the dollar does. In its current form it is more of an excuse for companies pay below a living wage.
        ctdonath 6y ago
        pay people a living wage for their labor I truly don’t understand why so many think that someone doing less than what it takes to live (alone, independently) should be paid a living wage. Food, housing, energy, care, ... all take productivity; if someone can’t produce enough to cover their own needs, they need be recognized as a dependent and treated as such. It’s not your obligation to pay me a living wage just because you need floors swept or burgers flipped.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Amazon says one thing, behaves "responsibly" internally but still works with known bad actors till caught. Greed has gone wrong.
- Jochim 6y ago
  I've seen this argument around quite often, but it feels more and more like the product of the Amazon PR machine. It appears that in at least some cases wages for warehouse workers fell 30%[0] once Amazon opened it's warehouses. Amazon seems to be dragging warehouse wages down to $15 rather than up. [0] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amazon-does-to-wages https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The Amazon jobs aren't forklift drivers. The wages of forklift drivers go down because Amazon automates a lot of that work, which means there is less demand for forklift drivers. It's the classic automation story and has basically nothing to do with what they pay to pickers.
    - Jochim 6y ago
      The data in the economist article is for both forklift drivers and pickers. It seems fairly clear that even lower skilled warehouse workers are being paid less than they were before Amazon entered their market. The fact that automation is both reducing the number and quality of jobs probably merits discussion as well. We simply don't have anything in place to ensure automation doesn't ruin people's standard of living.
      - AniseAbyss 6y ago
        Building an economy on unskilled labour is a pretty bad idea. Anything that can be automated or outsourced WILL- capitalism demands it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  They enacted the minimum wage when Bernie Sanders threatened them, years after they started outsourcing labor abuses.
  - astrange 6y ago
    That was just theater. Bernie's argument here made no sense and he knew it, but it sounded good. He was arguing that society "has to pay people welfare" because Amazon doesn't pay enough. In other words he's arguing that paying welfare is bad, which is not true and goes against the rest of his platform. Actually it's good, and the reason it's good is that it raises your wages because it gives you more freedom! In other words, without welfare the employees would be getting paid even less. (This can change depending on work requirement rules, which are mostly bad, but not enough of a problem to change the dynamic here.)
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      > He was arguing that society "has to pay people welfare" because Amazon doesn't pay enough. In other words he's arguing that paying welfare is bad, which is not true and goes against the rest of his platform. This is not quite the argument. What you're leaving out here is that Amazon can afford to pay enough, their CEO is the richest man in the world worth over a hundred billion dollars, and Amazon pays $0 in income tax. Bernie is not saying welfare is bad, he's saying that corporations using the welfare system to subsidize their profit margins while their CEO enriches himself is bad.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  My guess is that most of the labor cost is due to delivery and not the warehouse. If they advocate for higher wages in the warehouse, regulators and the general public will be less suspicious of the policies that drive the lion's share of their labor costs. I'm sure if they thought they could get away with "subcontracting (wink wink)" all of their labor positions so that they are not liable for the wage theft that must occur to meet the contracts, they would do so.
  - oceanghost 6y ago
    I think you're correct. I used to get advertisements all the time for "logistics.amazon.com". Which if you were to believe it, Amazon wants to "help" you start a delivery business, with as little as $10k to invest. Think about that for a second. Instead of paying delivery drivers and providing capital (trucks, gasoline, insurance, etc). Amazon wants YOU to pay them for the privilege. They've turned what should be a job into a contracting business with one, predatory customer. Amazon.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Is Chik-Fil-A preying on people by letting them start franchises? The investment requirement is actually the same and they're probably more onerous.
- syshum 6y ago
  >>>and are lobbying to get the federal minimum wage raised to that level from $7.25. What you fell for the Con... Amazon wants $15 in order to put the final nail in the coffin of small business hiring that teen for their first job stocking the small local store... No they want those positions gone, they want those business shuttered. This idea that Amazon is "fighting for the worker" in their drive for $15/hr minimum wage is moronic. $15/hr min wage is also not based on any economic reality and as a basis for a "living wage" it would be far to low in some reasons, and far too high in many others. Minimum Wage should be a LOCAL, or state level policy not a national one.
  - astrange 6y ago
    > Amazon wants $15 in order to put the final nail in the coffin of small business hiring that teen for their first job stocking the small local store... This is correct but it's a good thing because small businesses are unironically bad. Small business owners are the most reactionary demographic in the US, less productive than large businesses, the most abusive towards employees, and exempt from discrimination laws. They also don't have negotiation power and can't improve anything with their suppliers (e.g. Chinese restaurants may all be family-owned, but they're all buying ingredients from the same place).
    - syshum 6y ago
      >> small businesses are unironically bad. I did not think I would see the day that HN was pro corporation and Big business. Aside from the fact your completely wrong, most people are employed by small or medium businessed, and SMB's are often more agile and able to respond faster to market demands than larger companies This is why you do not see large companies innovating, instead they buy out small companies that have innovated in an effort to grab and/or hold the market share they lose to upstarts. Also it is ironic that in a post dedicated to talking about how terrible Amazon treats its retail employee's and with provable evidence of employment abuse by other large companies on the world stage you stake a claim that small businesses are more abusive, that is laughably absurd Small and medium business are the backbone of the economy, and in large part treat their employee's better than large companies. Sure some very small micro business with less than 25 employee's might but SMB is generally companies 25 - 1000 employees and under 1 billion in revenue. Companies this bracket often have some of the highest employee satisfaction scores, and lowest turn over it is absurd to to think that SMB's are worse than the Large Global Corporations.

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?