4 ms·

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an

by blagie 4y ago

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses. This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).

bsedlm 4y ago
It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side. Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...
- abakker 4y ago
  Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
  - ruined 4y ago
    i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation. maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.
    - andi999 4y ago
      Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the staff. The definition is no good.
      - ruined 4y ago
        true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.
        adrianN 4y ago
        I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.
        ruined 4y ago
        the negative moral connotation of "exploitation" is an effect of anticapitalist propaganda :)
    - SR2Z 4y ago
      It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before. It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. "Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.
- blagie 4y ago
  I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for people who have worked there, and therefore have better-informed opinions. I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market. I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether: - Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or - Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.
president 4y ago
Solution to #1 is bringing in workers that care more about $ than lifestyle. Same situation in the tech industry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ComputerGuru 4y ago
> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had. Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible. The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.
- blagie 4y ago
  I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and professional when a customer would draft in, but for the most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like that much above minimum wage, or anywhere close to Amazon's wage. If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's nightmarish warehouses. That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country, which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent / mortgage needs a bit more.
  - stevenwoo 4y ago
    Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment? 30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year. Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than 15/hour as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4-needs-to-get-by-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4...
jppittma 4y ago
Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe." 1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided. 2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop. 3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors. 4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.

by blagie 4y ago

bsedlm 4y ago

It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side. Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...

abakker 4y ago
Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
- ruined 4y ago
  i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation. maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.
  - andi999 4y ago
    Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the staff. The definition is no good.
    - ruined 4y ago
      true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.
        ruined 4y ago
        the negative moral connotation of "exploitation" is an effect of anticapitalist propaganda :)
  - SR2Z 4y ago
    It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before. It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. "Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.
blagie 4y ago
I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for people who have worked there, and therefore have better-informed opinions. I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market. I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether: - Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or - Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.

president 4y ago

Solution to #1 is bringing in workers that care more about $ than lifestyle. Same situation in the tech industry.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ComputerGuru 4y ago

> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had. Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible. The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.

blagie 4y ago
I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and professional when a customer would draft in, but for the most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like that much above minimum wage, or anywhere close to Amazon's wage. If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's nightmarish warehouses. That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country, which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent / mortgage needs a bit more.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment? 30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year. Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than 15/hour as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4-needs-to-get-by-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4...

jppittma 4y ago

Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe." 1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided. 2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop. 3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors. 4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.