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I think the actual economics paper[1] is far more interesting than Amazon’s PR spin on it. What Amazon (I suspect) knows but the paper authors sidestep a bit is

• kube-system 5y ago
  Of course. How else do you entice literally hundreds of thousands of people to apply for a job? They’ve hired somewhere around a million employees in the past 5 years. > The $15 is enough to lure some people to work at Amazon but it seems there are others for which slightly lower pay and the benefit of bathroom breaks I know a couple of people who work at an Amazon warehouse, and I’ve asked them about this, and they said it’s never been an issue.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • toast0 5y ago
    I think bathroom breaks in warehouses was an issue several years ago. When that got enough media attention, it seems to have stopped (at least mostly); but now that bathroom breaks for drivers is an issue, a lot of people are assuming it's the same thing, so it must have been going on the whole time. But while it's the same type of problem, it's not quite the same problem as before.
    • blackoil 5y ago
      Driver issue seems to be systemic and not something Amazon can solve. If nearest bathroom is 20-30 mins away I'll choose to pee in bottle, irrespective of the salary, stress, timings.
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        Proper planning and facilities would mean you get regular good opportunities to use the bathroom, so that when you're half an hour away from one you don't need it.
        • lobotryas 5y ago
          Did you seriously just suggest that Amazon time the individualistic liquid consumption and bladders of their drivers? Do you have any idea how much outrage that would cause? At least you could suggest retrofitting each truck with a urinal. That would make more sense despite being equally untenable.
          • Dylan16807 5y ago
            I'm suggesting they have a bathroom and time to use it at the package pickup location, and if that's going to be the main bathroom drivers use then the delivery segments shouldn't be longer than 2-3 hours or so. And if that's not going to be the main bathroom then it should be Amazon's responsibility to make sure something is available, not the driver's. How did you get anything about tracking fluid intake from "regular good opportunities"? I'm really curious.
            • wearywanderer 5y ago
              If you've got to go, you've got to go. Holding in your pee for up to 2-3 hours isn't very healthy; that's the kind of thing Amazon got in trouble for demanding in their warehouses. So yeah, obviously they should have bathrooms at the warehouses that drivers can use. I'm earnestly surprised they don't already, it's common sense. But I don't think it will stop drivers from peeing in bottles. Edit: > 2-3 hours since the last bathroom break shouldn't be unhealthy. That assumes you chose to avail yourself at that time. If didn't feel like you had to use the bathroom at that time, you might neglect to do so anyway. Maybe because you were walking around outside your truck, and walking around somewhat suppresses that full-bladder sensation. Then you sit down in your truck and half an hour later, after a cup of coffee, you realize you have to piss. You're still 2 hours away from your next bathroom break, so what do you do? Is this a consequence of poor planning on the part of the driver? Maybe. But that's inevitably going to happen anyway.
• awillen 5y ago
  "Amazon’s 2018 wage increase from $11/hour to $15/hour resulted in an average local unskilled low-wage increase of 4.7% suggesting those local markets didn’t need to meet Amazon’s wages in order to compete with them." I think you're 100% right, but that doesn't mean they don't provide a useful service in bringing up the bottom. If you're in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25, you're suddenly dealing with employees that have a credible alternative of $15/hour. To your point, a lot of folks will trade some money for better conditions, but it makes it pretty untenable to pay less than half of what Amazon's paying.
• AuryGlenz 5y ago
  That’s how it should work, and that’s why wages have remained suppressed in our country for so long. In my area is a large turkey processing plant - if you ever eat turkey there’s a good chance you’ve eaten something from there. I’m in Minnesota. Inside the plant is cold, wet, incredibly loud even with earmuffs, and the workers are doing repetitive tasks all day. In the 80s, it was a crappy job that paid well. Local people (including my mom) worked there as a sacrifice to get more money and get ahead. After that, they discovered they could keep the pay low if they hired on people that didn’t have a better option - illegal immigrants. There was literally a sign advertising for people to come to that town of 20,000 at the Mexican border. But then they had to stop doing that, both for presumably legal reasons and because Mexicans have integrated and have better options. It just so worked out that our state started importing “refugees” from Somalia at the same time. I’ve been in the plant a couple of times myself. There are literally no base-level workers that aren’t immigrants. None. In rural Minnesota. This has suppressed wages for our area as a whole for decades. It’s a huge plant - if they already had to pay people $20 or $25 instead of what they do now just imagine the ripple effect that would have on the local economy.
  • BoiledCabbage 5y ago
    It's a great point you make above, and reflects a lot of a wave of change in our country over the past 40 years. The analysis of meat packing goes one level deeper and according to the US govt has an additional cause: > Industry consolidation has been accompanied by important changes in labor relations in meatpacking. In 1980, 46 percent of workers in the meat products industry were union members, a figure that had remained stable through the 1970’s. Most unionized slaughter plant workers belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, whose base wage rate was $10.69 an hour in 1982. In that year, many unionized firms began to press for large reductions in base wages, to $8.25 an hour, consistent with what was being offered in non-union plants. The union at first acceded to wage cuts, but by 1984 adopted a strategy to vigorously contest them, in the view that large wage cuts at older unionized plants only postponed plant closings. Between 1983 and 1986, there were 158 work stoppages in cattle and hog slaughter plants, involving 40,000 workers. There were lengthy strikes, plant closings, and deunionizations at some ongoing and reopened plants.14 By 1987, union membership had fallen to 21 percent of the workforce, and has remained at that lower level through the most recent data (1997); wage reductions were imposed in most plants, and wages have risen only modestly since then. > Declining unionization coincided with changes in slaughter plant demographics. Immigrants, primarily from Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Central America, make up large and growing shares of the workforces at both hog and cattle slaughter plants. There was a structural shift in power between workers and corporations. Unions representing the worker who had pushed for those higher wages were fairly systematically pushed out of power. The loss of power of unions is what led to the low wages. The use of immigrant labor is just the particular method companies went about implementing it, but if there hadn't been people immigrating it still would've been forced low wages by the corporations. This is evidenced by the fact that the low-wages began in the non-union corporations. A lot of people look at this same situation and mistake the cause for the effect. The cause of the situation was a huge shift in power away from workers to corporations via the loss of union power. The particular manifestation of how corporations used that power was by changing who they were hiring, but to be clear even without immigrants, wages would've still fallen as they already were doing. Ie if unions had negotiated and maintained a minimum wage of $10 or $12 it's irrelevant where the people they're hiring come from. 1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41108/18003_aer785d_1_.pdf?v=41061 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41108/18003_ae...
• irrational 5y ago
  Another thing to consider is where are the Amazon warehouses located? They aren’t as ubiquitous as Target, Home Depot, etc. Our closest one is a 40 minute car drive away by the airport. And no public transportation goes there. So do I drive in my car for 40 minutes to go to work for $15/hour, or do I go to work for $13.50-14/hour (the typical minimum wage where I live) at a place that is a few minutes away?
  • pkaye 5y ago
    I know Amazon build some huge warehouses in my city in the middle of the Bay Area. I think they are trying to bring down the delivery times by stocking common stuff locally for quick delivery.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Amazon should just build giant warehouses underneath other buildings.
      • blackoil 5y ago
        building underground warehouse would be too costly. I would love to see pneumatic tubes with packets zipping around.
• jjk166 5y ago
  We live in very strange times when paying workers more to do a harder job is vilified.
• imglorp 5y ago
  > slightly lower pay and the benefit of bathroom breaks is a trade-off they’re willing to make in the labor market I really don't understand Amazon's position here. A small number of cheap improvements would vastly raise worker satisfaction. More bathrooms through the building, paid time in security lines, and some honest safety interventions are all cheaper than raising wages or even, say, a private space program or an airliner fleet.
  • krapp 5y ago
    Amazon is weird that way. It's a multi-billion dollar global corporation that's run like a mafia front. They'll spend who knows how many millions of dollars on video game kiosks[0] to incentivize productivity through addictive feedback loops but won't spend a dime updating or replacing the equipment their employees actually use. [0]https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331502/amazon-warehouse-gamification-program-expand-fc-games https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331502/amazon-warehouse...
  • skybrian 5y ago
    These improvements sound good to me too, but they are not cheap. Paid time in security lines would increase worker’s paychecks. It’s effectively another way of raising wages. As is more breaks. (Amazon doesn’t have a space program.)
    • flerchin 5y ago
      Blue Origin seems like a space program. Whether "Amazon" owns it is kind of pedantic.
      • skybrian 5y ago
        No, it's like saying Tesla and SpaceX are the same company. It means you're fundamentally confused about what's going on. (It's a pretty close parallel. Tesla is public and SpaceX is private. Similarly for Amazon and Blue Origin.)
    • qchris 5y ago
• Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Does it not also suggest that Amazon has excessive control and ability to fix the price of labor in an area due to large size?
• tom-_- 5y ago
  The paper shows employment elasticity wrt to wages is very low (Table 4, 5 page 50, 51). Sure, many workers would choose the less labor intensive Target job over the shitty Amazon warehouse job for the same wage but in many of the warehouse locations, there is simply not that much demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise the market would bear that out. Also, Amazon has more opportunities for career paths/upward mobility than a local Target/Home Depot.
• kirillzubovsky 5y ago
  Conversely, or maybe tangentially (?), increased labor cost is how Amazon wins in the long run. It's the same logic they use for undercutting prices of consumer electronics, but in reverse. Today you can get an $x/hour at Amazon or Target, but if Amazon does it right and keeps driving costs down and prices up, coupled with continuous explosion in online shopping, in 10 years Target loses its edge and you can only get a job at Amazon. It's not to say that short term gains aren't worth it for employees, but long term, those gains might already be baked into Amazon's logic. Today, they employ 1M people, but in 10 years, when there's no longer a Target or a Wallmart, they overnight add 10M robots and there's no one to say no at that point. They are notorious for playing very long games, and they don't seem to do anything that doesn't eventually benefit them. Being in tech I find the tactics very interesting, but it's getting progressively harder to tell if the world is becoming net positive as a result.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Also, volume. Amazon needs a lot of workers. You might get N qualified candidates per month with a $13, but need to offer $17 in order to get 3N. The more people they need to hire, the more they need to offer. This is often why "mom & pop" businesses often represent the lowest salary tier. They need few employees.