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> There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse. Well, that's in theory. In pract

> There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse. Well, that's in theory. In practice every single country prefer thousands of minimum wage workers employed by Amazon than thousands of unemployed people because Amazon doesn't really need them and hiring a lot of people that do not provide actual value to the company is simply their part of the deal with governments. Now imagine that there are literally hundreds of smaller Amazons that employ millions of workers. It's an hard problem to solve, shortage of labor does exist and appear in many forms, one of them is not enough qualified workers for the job. Where worker protection laws are stronger than US, conditions are better for employed people, but worse for unemployed ones,because the job market is blocked. Salaries are lower because a stiff market guarantees that workers will have a harder time switching job, they'll accept a lower salary for a job that's safer and protected by the State and work there as long ad they can. Also: a very limited number of businesses are competing for talents in the job market. Most of them will only make sure they fill the positions they need at the price they are willing to pay, they won't start offering higher salaries to everybody.

narag 5y ago
[deleted] Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments. I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Not every single country works like that They do. Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians? > Unemployment is more expensive, It is not a financial issue. Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates. Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries. EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.
  - narag 5y ago
    I explicitly qualified my comment, as you can see in the fragment you quote. Not every single country is the USA. There are countries where Amazon is rejected and the reason, not the immediate reason (unions), but the ultimate reason that affects the bottom line is what I wrote, then deleted. Anyway I give up, nothing that touches any politics anymore. Some people doesn't deserve my time, really.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      I am from Italy. I live in Italy. I am almost 50 years old. Amazon is only the most popular choice of brand, but all other big companies act like that, unions or not. I would say that here in Italy, were unions are pretty strong and have been historically even stronger for a long time, many companies have received undeserved favours simply because they employed hundreds of thousand of people (see FIAT in Italy) and in Italy the constitution at art. 1 says "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor" so everybody tries to preserve the jobs of those already employed, rising their salaries is not as important. That's the bottom line, you might think people don't understand you, but truth is realism is necessary to address complex issues. Another example is public schools in Italy, where unions prefer two teachers at a shitty salary than hire half of them with a substantially higher salary. Why? Because that's two jobs created instead of one, during their time, it sounds great in the brochure. Of course not all unions are equal, of course some of them are fighting for better salaries, bit when the choice is between better salaries for less people or same old salary for more people, they will always chose the second. What you get here is better social welfare, more work protection, paid holidays, paid sick leave, but much worse salaries than in US because that's not a priority, better salaries for everybody means that companies will start questioning why they should pay more people that can barely do their job, after years of doing the same thing over and over and nobody wants to discuss about that. Unions first. In Italy salary negotiation is mostly collective, if you hire someone to do job X at salary Y, you have to give the same amount of money to all other workers with the same job X. If you hire Alice and Bob to do the same job and Alice is better than Bob, you can't pay her more than Bob. It's illegal. You can't even promote her at will if the contract requires a minimum seniority before stepping up (for example: minimum two years). I theory its purpose is to avoid favoritism, in practice it completely annihilate the incentive to do better at work. The only way to negotiate a better salary is working as a contractor, which is another can of worm entirely here, and that also means renounce to almost all the protections. Don't assume people don't know shit, try to assume people have experience on how a perfectly good solution in theory is going to fail miserably in practice.
nitwit005 5y ago
Amazon isn't hiring all those people to suck up to the government. They would happily replace them all with robots. They are constantly trying to automate more.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  That's exactly what I said. They are hiring all those people to have leverage in governments deals. But they could automate a lot more, hire much less people and make higher profits, at the cost of more scrutiny from the government: it recently happened in Italy where they have been fined for abuse of dominant position and immediately after they announced a program to hire a thousand more workers by year-end.

narag 5y ago

[deleted] Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments. I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Not every single country works like that They do. Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians? > Unemployment is more expensive, It is not a financial issue. Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates. Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries. EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.
- narag 5y ago
  I explicitly qualified my comment, as you can see in the fragment you quote. Not every single country is the USA. There are countries where Amazon is rejected and the reason, not the immediate reason (unions), but the ultimate reason that affects the bottom line is what I wrote, then deleted. Anyway I give up, nothing that touches any politics anymore. Some people doesn't deserve my time, really.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    I am from Italy. I live in Italy. I am almost 50 years old. Amazon is only the most popular choice of brand, but all other big companies act like that, unions or not. I would say that here in Italy, were unions are pretty strong and have been historically even stronger for a long time, many companies have received undeserved favours simply because they employed hundreds of thousand of people (see FIAT in Italy) and in Italy the constitution at art. 1 says "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor" so everybody tries to preserve the jobs of those already employed, rising their salaries is not as important. That's the bottom line, you might think people don't understand you, but truth is realism is necessary to address complex issues. Another example is public schools in Italy, where unions prefer two teachers at a shitty salary than hire half of them with a substantially higher salary. Why? Because that's two jobs created instead of one, during their time, it sounds great in the brochure. Of course not all unions are equal, of course some of them are fighting for better salaries, bit when the choice is between better salaries for less people or same old salary for more people, they will always chose the second. What you get here is better social welfare, more work protection, paid holidays, paid sick leave, but much worse salaries than in US because that's not a priority, better salaries for everybody means that companies will start questioning why they should pay more people that can barely do their job, after years of doing the same thing over and over and nobody wants to discuss about that. Unions first. In Italy salary negotiation is mostly collective, if you hire someone to do job X at salary Y, you have to give the same amount of money to all other workers with the same job X. If you hire Alice and Bob to do the same job and Alice is better than Bob, you can't pay her more than Bob. It's illegal. You can't even promote her at will if the contract requires a minimum seniority before stepping up (for example: minimum two years). I theory its purpose is to avoid favoritism, in practice it completely annihilate the incentive to do better at work. The only way to negotiate a better salary is working as a contractor, which is another can of worm entirely here, and that also means renounce to almost all the protections. Don't assume people don't know shit, try to assume people have experience on how a perfectly good solution in theory is going to fail miserably in practice.

nitwit005 5y ago

Amazon isn't hiring all those people to suck up to the government. They would happily replace them all with robots. They are constantly trying to automate more.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
That's exactly what I said. They are hiring all those people to have leverage in governments deals. But they could automate a lot more, hire much less people and make higher profits, at the cost of more scrutiny from the government: it recently happened in Italy where they have been fined for abuse of dominant position and immediately after they announced a program to hire a thousand more workers by year-end.