4 ms·

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 l

by 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.
    - ruined 4y ago
      sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice. but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs. >It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. these are both literally happening. if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone. as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.
- politician 4y ago
  The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their compensation at the outset of the engagement. This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > the market will solve this. I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is true, then the market is basically solving this now. In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs 250k of them to operate their biz and the average retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left previously are now looking for jobs and the only option is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor, then they will collectively argue for higher pay. Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work conditions eventually catches up with them and the market will respond. If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be repossessed.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem. People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.
  - Beldin 4y ago
    > "if you do X like me, Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).
- int_19h 4y ago
  > Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do. Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?
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.

by bsedlm 4y ago

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.
  - ruined 4y ago
    sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice. but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs. >It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. these are both literally happening. if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone. as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.
politician 4y ago
The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their compensation at the outset of the engagement. This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.
mbesto 4y ago
> the market will solve this. I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is true, then the market is basically solving this now. In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs 250k of them to operate their biz and the average retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left previously are now looking for jobs and the only option is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor, then they will collectively argue for higher pay. Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work conditions eventually catches up with them and the market will respond. If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be repossessed.
cupofpython 4y ago
If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem. People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.
- Beldin 4y ago
  > "if you do X like me, Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).
int_19h 4y ago
> Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do. Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?

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.