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This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal. The definition of sub-contractor has got to change and/or have laws/policies in pla

This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal. The definition of sub-contractor has got to change and/or have laws/policies in place that actually make sense in a sub contractor relationship. These are shell companies that spin up and exclusively deliver for amazon, they aren't gig workers delivering when they want, they have strict quotas.

cyanydeez 3y ago
Unfortunately "subcontractor" is politically equivalent to "small business owner". You have a whole class of people who think they're being pandered to by tax incentives and other programs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
The solution is to enforce the laws we have, not feign powerlessness every time some crackerjack claims to have identified a profitable loophole.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Absolutely. The courts are supposed to be the last vestige of common sense. It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense.
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    > It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense. See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits. However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is. [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...
    - runesofdoom 3y ago
      We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here. 1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.
      - thfuran 3y ago
        I kind of think that everything is pretty much inevitably fucked once it becomes tacitly accepted that all politicians are liars.
  - sshine 3y ago
    > It’s judges dropping the ball here It's also a work culture. (What can you generally expect from an employer?) I've never worked in the US. But it sounds like workers are not protected. The American Dream is a story of entrepreneurship, not of employment.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- taeric 3y ago
  I'd also be happy with better base level care for everyone. Would start requiring more taxes on corporations, largely because that is where the money is siphoning to. But would be far more efficient than the current efforts we do where every time a new rule is made, bypasses are found.
  - snoman 3y ago
    As long as the bills proposing tax increases also contain where the tax money is going to be allocated, I'd be all for it. America's track record for directing tax money towards the public good, is poor.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Nobody has a track record of using money well. Basically period. At best, you can find some examples that were short lived, but by and large, building wealth turns to either wasting it, or hoarding it. With that framing, I honestly don't like "as long as we tightly control where it is spent" arguments. They all beg the question that we know where money should be spent. Where history is a great guide that, no, we didn't. We have examples to look to, to be sure. Some decent guidelines, as it were. But they are often last year's guidelines, and that year came and went. So, I'm game to "keep our eyes open" as we increase allocation. But, by and large, I think insisting on winning bets is a fools errand that will likely cause more problems than it solves.
    - yojo 3y ago
      Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I disagree with the idea that everything be pre-allocated, but you make the point in a civil way. Earmarking everything is almost impossible to do right. Tax revenue streams go up or down from forces outside the legislature’s control. If there’s a bumper crop of corporate receipts, the right move might be to save them in a rainy day general fund for disasters, or when times are lean, etc. Put another way, if we can’t seem to spend money well doing it in an annual budgeting process, I don’t know how we will do any better trying to do the same thing years in advance when the tax is passed.
- themagician 3y ago
  Often what happens is delay, delay, delay, appeal, delay… and then you are “too big to fail” and everyone has to “think of all the jobs that will be lost”.
- deelowe 3y ago
  This is why the US uses the common law system. Laws are written and the courts then interpret them. The courts should be telling these yahoos that these actions are against the intent of the law.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    > courts then interpret them. correct. They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends." If the legislators really wanted it to say something else, they should have written it that way.
    - deelowe 3y ago
      I think that's splitting hairs a bit. Laws are written fairly broadly all the time and it's left up to the courts to determine the specifics.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        Patent claims are also written broadly, deliberately by the lawyers. There's a whole part of every trial where "claim construction" takes place, and I personally helped with many of those briefs when in Google Legal. The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs. "Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today. That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.
        deelowe 3y ago
        Not trying to be rude here, but I highly recommend you do a little more research on the common law system and how it works. At it's core, common law states that laws are interpreted over time and these interpretations become the official law of the land. There is no requirement that every conceivable form of infraction be enumerated within the law itself. Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.
- romafirst3 3y ago
  Completely. There are lots of laws already on the books but there is nobody actually enforcing them. Everyone from Uber to door dash to Amazon are profitably evading their responsibilities to their employees by miss categorizing them as contractors. This is bad for the employees, bad for society and bad for competitor companies who are playing by the rules. The solution is fairly obvious. Invest in bodies to proactively enforce the laws we already have.
- stale2002 3y ago
  This stuff follows the law though. Its not illegal, not even close. Not even sure how you would go about making it illegal. What, paying money to another company is illegal? You can't contract out work? It doesn't make any sense.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    Simple. If your contracted out work employs more than XYZ number of employees then those contractors must provide benefits/meet employment requirements/etc on the same level as a company with the (aggregate of all contract providers headcount for the contracted service type) employee headcount.
- scoofy 3y ago
  I think the real issue is the political problem that most people like the exploitation that is happening. When ride-sharing laws were changed in California to protect hired drivers, the counter ballot initiative passed easily.
  - ffhhttt 3y ago
    Or maybe because proposition didn’t made a whole lot of sense and wouldn’t have improved the situation that drivers that much on average.
fallingknife 3y ago
These aren't contractors like Uber drivers. They are corporations that are contractors of Amazon, and the drivers are employees of those companies. How would this possibly be a legal issue?
- fouc 3y ago
  The fact that the employees of the contractor companies ultimately work for only one company - Amazon - that means they should be treated like employees of Amazon. This is the same situation when independent contractors have only one client.
  - kova12 3y ago
    We all ultimately work for IRS
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Why? A company hiring another company like this seems perfectly reasonable to me. There is no argument to be made about contractor vs employee status because the employees are still full time employees. Why should they have to be an employee of a single corporate parent? When companies like Amazon buy other companies and vertically integrate, people complain. When Amazon contracts with vendors instead, people complain too. I don't think there is any legitimate point to this and it's just "I hate Amazon."
    - patmorgan23 3y ago
      Yeah, you're just wrong. It's not like Amazon is doling out work to local delivery companies out of the goodness of their heart. They're setting up these companies as part of their DSP program to limit their liability. They're following the chicken industries playbook(which shouldn't be legal either) by requiring the DSP use Amazon equipment, with a loan from Amazon, pay back by revenue from Amazon. They're also using this as part of an anti-unionization strategy. One of their DSPs recently unionized and Amazon just cancelled their contract. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-delivery-service-partner-anti-union-california https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-deliv...
tiahura 3y ago
"Shell company" isn't a legal term and has varying definitions, but generally is a company that only exists on paper and doesn't do anything. These companies deliver products for Amazon. Make sense to whom? People that have no experience with running a business and hiring subcontractors?
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  If you have a single product that kills people, you aren't legally allowed to put all your liabilities and none of your assets into another (non-shell, by your definition) company to get out of your liabilities. [0] What's happening here is quite similar. [0] See, for example, the J&J case, which was an even more generous form of the same.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    Let's say I have $100 in assets and $10 in liabilities. The assets consist of Nike sneakers I'd like to sell; the liabilities consist of bags of trash that would cost me $30 to throw away at the dump. I'm lazy, so sell some shoes and I pay the trash man $35 to take the liabilities away. I have put all my liabilities in one company (the trash man) and left all my assets in my company. Now, I have a company with a few Nike assets and no liabilities. One of the pairs of shoes catches on fire and becomes a smelly, smoking liability. I sell the rest of the shoes and return the money to the shareholders, leaving the company only owning the burned shoe liability. Now all of the company's assets belong to the shareholders, and all the company has is liabilities. Which law did I break?
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      That's not what assets and liabilities are ... Your bag of trash would still be listed on the Assets side but expenses on trash removal would be on the liabilities side.
      - singleshot_ 3y ago
        It depends. If you feel that metaphor is poor let's try this: One bag of trash magically turns into a loan that I have taken from a bank. I am obligated to repay $35 at an adjustable interest rate. Because I don't like risk, I pay another bank $45 and they take over the loan. Now I have assets and the second bank has the liability (the first bank, of course, still lists the loan as an asset).
kova12 3y ago
This is a pretty slippery slope you are getting on. Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes. What you are proposing will essentially make anybody a criminal, because there's always a way to second guess one's intentions. What your point is however illustrating is how wrong the union legislation is. It's essentially forcing free people into organization they didn't choose. I'm not questioning the usefulness of trade unions in old days of industrialization, but now those just became cancers that suck out resources from businesses and consumers
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes. It's common and (sort of) fine if the subcontractor has many different clients. Like a cleaning service or whatever who works for a ton of separate companies all needing to have their floors mopped. But if the "subcontractor" only has one client? That reeks of escaping union or other labor agreements, illegal liability shielding, questionably legal tax / social security evasion schemes or other unethical behavior.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate. The threat of a strike and labor action is far scarier to Amazon than nosey lawmakers that can just be silenced with enough campaign donations.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate. The problem is, with jobs that do not require more than a driver's license and the ability to read names you are a fungible cog in the giant machinery of Amazon. It's a job that virtually everyone with a half working body can do: no need for special training, certifications, not even language - here in Germany, it's been reported that the Amazon phone app their delivery people use has like at least half a dozen languages. Fine, you go on strike with your colleagues? Your official employer won't pay as he can't because Amazon pays shit, barely enough to keep the lights on. You keep striking. Amazon will just terminate your employer's contract. Your employer shuts down. Amazon finds someone else willing to start up a "delivery company", and that person finds another bunch of people desperate to make a pittance.
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    Amazon won't find other people in this labor market--the service sector has been absolutely on fire with hiring, employment, and wage growth now and throughout the pandemic. Letting COVID rip has killed and disabled millions of workers and put tons of pressure on service jobs.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Amazon maybe not, but their contractors? If in doubt they'll just use undocumented people like farms do all the time. They got caught multiple times doing that in Germany and Austria, no reason to believe the situation in the US with massively more pervasive labor exploitation would be different. It's funny, Amazon always says "we expect that our partners comply with laws and regulations", and yet they absolutely have to know that their "partners" have to skirt the law to survive on their extremely low package rates. Hell, they probably have enough data from the delivery smartphones to be able to easily detect labor law violations (overtime beyond 10h, no / not enough long breaks). [1] https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-illegale-unter-amazon-paketboten-TXROLBMLTILVDOV4VYBR4CHEZM.html https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-... [2] https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengladbach-grosseinsatz-vom-zoll-bei-amazon-in-rheindahlen_aid-58200187 https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengl... [3] https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html [4] https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia-in-troisdorf-bei-koeln_184856.html https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia...
rootusrootus 3y ago
It would be interesting to try and make that work. It sounds like basically you'd define a monopsony as effectively an employer relationship, rather than a contractual one. But there are lots of regular everyday businesses that work together in a monopsony relationship. Should we force all of them to consolidate into a single business entity? Or does this only happen for larger companies? Or only gig-style companies?
varispeed 3y ago
It's not going to happen because of existence of corporations like Infosys that do exactly that, except with IT workers. edit: In the UK, we done worst of both worlds - exempted big corporations and "sub-contractors" can still be hired, but they don't have any employment rights.
nitwit005 3y ago
The real fix is to stop tying various benefits to employment, so there'd be no need to worry about who is full time or part time, or who they work for. Unfortunately, changing most of those programs is political suicide, particularly anything health care related.
- esalman 3y ago
  It's political suicide for Republicans. Left leaning Democrats like Bernie are all for it.
  - taude 3y ago
    Not enough far left leaning Dems to make Bernie a reality.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die every year in the US. 4 million voters turn 18. We're just arguing time horizon and cohort turn out rates. Bernie was just too early after Reagan, globalization, and deregulation. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generations-party-identification-midterm-voting-preferences-views-of-trump/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generation... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generat... https://archive.is/iRyQE https://archive.is/iRyQE https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-politics-of-american-generations-how-age-affects-attitudes-and-voting-behavior/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-polit... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-millennials-and-gen-x-outvoted-older-generations-in-2018-midterms/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-mil... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennials-approach-baby-boomers-as-largest-generation-in-u-s-electorate/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennia...
fma 3y ago
Yep...This isn't really new to anyone that has any exposure to the business world that deals with actual good/services. Amazon had some program where they'd give a loan to business operator money to lease trucks, buy uniforms, etc and you get routes. The terms work out such that you make a certain amount money, almost guaranteed. To them, it's a form of insurance. You deliver their goods. They track your performance. It's your business, but from a distance, they control everything. They have zero liability for what happens...it's not their company, their employees. But they can "union bust" by cancelling your contract. If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee.
- supertrope 3y ago
  > If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee. This right here should get Amazon.com classified as a joint employer. A franchise model is suppose to delegate HR decisions to the local owner.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    Yep, sounds like the legal term of 'distinction without a difference'.
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    Congress had the right idea when they made ERISA pension liabilities joint liabilities among controlled companies. Of course, that’s probably one of the factors that contributed to the decline of private sector pensions, but I think some new joint liability laws would be a great idea.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Something like: - laborers presumably have social security numbers - if a laborer is working in the premises of a company (and a van is definitely that) WITH THE MARKETING, then you have a direct line between the worker and the company using its labor. - if a laborer is working on a company's premises, it must report that labor for the hours. - if the total labor for a company exceeds a "full time" trigger, then it triggers all that employment law about "full time employees" or "part time employees". - you can have a cutoff amount for lucrative consulting that this doesn't apply to. So if your bill rate is like 100+/hr, you can be exempt from the tracking. Basically, companies are going to utilize corporate law, limited liability, shell company obfuscation, and supplier relationships to obfuscate full time vs part time vs employee vs "contractor". This isn't really that new. Use the social security number system to break through this. Of course it relies on reporting and compliance, but there's numerous examples of big bad hammers that can be employed, especially if it tracks back to a big bad company like Amazon. But the real issue is that government oversight of corporations is basically nonexistent except where the regulatory capture is valuable. The SEC and FTC are total jokes, the mortgage crisis showed that in plain view. So even if I come up with some good tieback mechanism, it won't work. ... unless there is a consortium of companies that will push it against Amazon, which I'm surprised hasn't happened. Everyone seems to be competing with Amazon in the marketplace, which at this point they are now monopolized. Walmart / Bestbuy / Target don't seem to be fighting in government regulation yet which is what they need to do. Likewise Azure and GCP aren't fighting AWS in antitrust either. But I think at some point it will happen.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
The real fix is to just stop tying benefit requirements to who the employer is and what the employee's full time status is. A lot of these problems go away with just universal healthcare, and providing benefits beyond pay via society rather than via companies.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. It might hurt some, but if these companies can not survive without workers, they will hire full time. And if they can not afford they don't deserve to exist.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. Isn't that what Universal Healthcare does? They obviously charge premiums, but they are a percentage of income that goes all the way down to 0. Universal healthcare takes healthcare from being a concern to companies at all, and now they can just hire who they want for however long they want. It also makes the labor pool much more fluid, and makes low end jobs much more viable (morally and economically).
  - tbrownaw 3y ago
    Some people specifically want part time work. Tying things to employment that don't cleanly scale up or down with hours removes useful flexibility.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  We have socialized healthcare in the USA, we just deliver it at the emergency room, the worst possible place. The more we get people to realize that we already have this the more we can reduce the resistance to expanding it in a sane way. America 100% has socialized medicine. Go to the emergency room and you will be treated.
alberth 3y ago
> ” This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal.” It comes down to priorities. In the US at least, regulators are very pro jobs & job creation. People employed contributor to society in many ways (eg purchase goods, taxes, lower crime, etc). Which means, US wants to make it easy for someone to create a company so they can hire a people. Now if the business that’s created to employee people is a subcontractor for a Mega Corp, the US regulators don’t care. Because again, it comes down to priorities - which is pro job creation. Note: I’m not anti-unions. I’m just trying to depict it comes down to what’s highest priorities for regulators. And pro job creation / making it easy to create a company, is pretty high on this list.
- pluto_modadic 3y ago
  "pro jobs" here meaning... not pro workers...
jerojero 3y ago
Pretty sure this has been solved in other countries by allowing sectorial unions (so in this case all delivery drivers would be in one union and they negotiate collectively regardless of the particular business they work for). But I don't think these kind of laws can really pass in the USA, the political will is just not there.
faeriechangling 3y ago
The very system of contractors vs part time vs full time getting different levels of benefits is designed to avail employers of paying their employees benefit. The end to the loophole is simply ending these arbitrary classifications and it won’t happen without a serious fight because why would employers give up their right to hire employees at a discount? The modern day purpose of the system is to allow employers to misclassify their employees for the purpose of stealing their wages.
- wilg 3y ago
  I’d entertain a policy proposal that does this without too much damage to the ability to flexibly hire for part time and contract and freelance type work.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
Just buy from the physical store. Otherwise at the end of day you will choose a online retailer that successfully prevents unionization because it is more efficient and cheaper.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Workers are the physical store are also subject to these same issues. Consumer side activism doesn't work.
oneTbrain23 3y ago
Thesw workers already agreed to Amazon employment contract. If they are not happy they can quit and join high paying programming jobs by Apple or Meta...assuming they can code. Instead, they wish to renegade on their employment contracts and blackmail Amazon (which indirect jack our price) via a cartel known as union. Union tactics are usually very straightforward....we want more....in exchange we dont go on strike to renegade on your employment contract because we too lazy to learn to code to get paid better so easier to just blackmail you. And that is how America lose out to China.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Why do you think the answer to labor issues it to get everyone to learn how to code?
patmorgan23 3y ago
IIRC there are provisions in the NLRA that address situations like this. If Amazon primarily directs the activities of the workers, not the contractor company, if Amazon can dismiss individual employees then they're consider a kind of joint employer and can still be unionized against.

cyanydeez 3y ago

Unfortunately "subcontractor" is politically equivalent to "small business owner". You have a whole class of people who think they're being pandered to by tax incentives and other programs.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

The solution is to enforce the laws we have, not feign powerlessness every time some crackerjack claims to have identified a profitable loophole.

dclowd9901 3y ago
Absolutely. The courts are supposed to be the last vestige of common sense. It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  > It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense. See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits. However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is. [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...
  - runesofdoom 3y ago
    We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here. 1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      I kind of think that everything is pretty much inevitably fucked once it becomes tacitly accepted that all politicians are liars.
- sshine 3y ago
  > It’s judges dropping the ball here It's also a work culture. (What can you generally expect from an employer?) I've never worked in the US. But it sounds like workers are not protected. The American Dream is a story of entrepreneurship, not of employment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
taeric 3y ago
I'd also be happy with better base level care for everyone. Would start requiring more taxes on corporations, largely because that is where the money is siphoning to. But would be far more efficient than the current efforts we do where every time a new rule is made, bypasses are found.
- snoman 3y ago
  As long as the bills proposing tax increases also contain where the tax money is going to be allocated, I'd be all for it. America's track record for directing tax money towards the public good, is poor.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Nobody has a track record of using money well. Basically period. At best, you can find some examples that were short lived, but by and large, building wealth turns to either wasting it, or hoarding it. With that framing, I honestly don't like "as long as we tightly control where it is spent" arguments. They all beg the question that we know where money should be spent. Where history is a great guide that, no, we didn't. We have examples to look to, to be sure. Some decent guidelines, as it were. But they are often last year's guidelines, and that year came and went. So, I'm game to "keep our eyes open" as we increase allocation. But, by and large, I think insisting on winning bets is a fools errand that will likely cause more problems than it solves.
  - yojo 3y ago
    Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I disagree with the idea that everything be pre-allocated, but you make the point in a civil way. Earmarking everything is almost impossible to do right. Tax revenue streams go up or down from forces outside the legislature’s control. If there’s a bumper crop of corporate receipts, the right move might be to save them in a rainy day general fund for disasters, or when times are lean, etc. Put another way, if we can’t seem to spend money well doing it in an annual budgeting process, I don’t know how we will do any better trying to do the same thing years in advance when the tax is passed.
themagician 3y ago
Often what happens is delay, delay, delay, appeal, delay… and then you are “too big to fail” and everyone has to “think of all the jobs that will be lost”.
deelowe 3y ago
This is why the US uses the common law system. Laws are written and the courts then interpret them. The courts should be telling these yahoos that these actions are against the intent of the law.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > courts then interpret them. correct. They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends." If the legislators really wanted it to say something else, they should have written it that way.
  - deelowe 3y ago
    I think that's splitting hairs a bit. Laws are written fairly broadly all the time and it's left up to the courts to determine the specifics.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Patent claims are also written broadly, deliberately by the lawyers. There's a whole part of every trial where "claim construction" takes place, and I personally helped with many of those briefs when in Google Legal. The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs. "Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today. That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.
      - deelowe 3y ago
        Not trying to be rude here, but I highly recommend you do a little more research on the common law system and how it works. At it's core, common law states that laws are interpreted over time and these interpretations become the official law of the land. There is no requirement that every conceivable form of infraction be enumerated within the law itself. Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.
romafirst3 3y ago
Completely. There are lots of laws already on the books but there is nobody actually enforcing them. Everyone from Uber to door dash to Amazon are profitably evading their responsibilities to their employees by miss categorizing them as contractors. This is bad for the employees, bad for society and bad for competitor companies who are playing by the rules. The solution is fairly obvious. Invest in bodies to proactively enforce the laws we already have.
stale2002 3y ago
This stuff follows the law though. Its not illegal, not even close. Not even sure how you would go about making it illegal. What, paying money to another company is illegal? You can't contract out work? It doesn't make any sense.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Simple. If your contracted out work employs more than XYZ number of employees then those contractors must provide benefits/meet employment requirements/etc on the same level as a company with the (aggregate of all contract providers headcount for the contracted service type) employee headcount.
scoofy 3y ago
I think the real issue is the political problem that most people like the exploitation that is happening. When ride-sharing laws were changed in California to protect hired drivers, the counter ballot initiative passed easily.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  Or maybe because proposition didn’t made a whole lot of sense and wouldn’t have improved the situation that drivers that much on average.

fallingknife 3y ago

These aren't contractors like Uber drivers. They are corporations that are contractors of Amazon, and the drivers are employees of those companies. How would this possibly be a legal issue?

fouc 3y ago
The fact that the employees of the contractor companies ultimately work for only one company - Amazon - that means they should be treated like employees of Amazon. This is the same situation when independent contractors have only one client.
- kova12 3y ago
  We all ultimately work for IRS
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Why? A company hiring another company like this seems perfectly reasonable to me. There is no argument to be made about contractor vs employee status because the employees are still full time employees. Why should they have to be an employee of a single corporate parent? When companies like Amazon buy other companies and vertically integrate, people complain. When Amazon contracts with vendors instead, people complain too. I don't think there is any legitimate point to this and it's just "I hate Amazon."
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    Yeah, you're just wrong. It's not like Amazon is doling out work to local delivery companies out of the goodness of their heart. They're setting up these companies as part of their DSP program to limit their liability. They're following the chicken industries playbook(which shouldn't be legal either) by requiring the DSP use Amazon equipment, with a loan from Amazon, pay back by revenue from Amazon. They're also using this as part of an anti-unionization strategy. One of their DSPs recently unionized and Amazon just cancelled their contract. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-delivery-service-partner-anti-union-california https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-deliv...

tiahura 3y ago

"Shell company" isn't a legal term and has varying definitions, but generally is a company that only exists on paper and doesn't do anything. These companies deliver products for Amazon. Make sense to whom? People that have no experience with running a business and hiring subcontractors?

polygamous_bat 3y ago
If you have a single product that kills people, you aren't legally allowed to put all your liabilities and none of your assets into another (non-shell, by your definition) company to get out of your liabilities. [0] What's happening here is quite similar. [0] See, for example, the J&J case, which was an even more generous form of the same.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Let's say I have $100 in assets and $10 in liabilities. The assets consist of Nike sneakers I'd like to sell; the liabilities consist of bags of trash that would cost me $30 to throw away at the dump. I'm lazy, so sell some shoes and I pay the trash man $35 to take the liabilities away. I have put all my liabilities in one company (the trash man) and left all my assets in my company. Now, I have a company with a few Nike assets and no liabilities. One of the pairs of shoes catches on fire and becomes a smelly, smoking liability. I sell the rest of the shoes and return the money to the shareholders, leaving the company only owning the burned shoe liability. Now all of the company's assets belong to the shareholders, and all the company has is liabilities. Which law did I break?
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    That's not what assets and liabilities are ... Your bag of trash would still be listed on the Assets side but expenses on trash removal would be on the liabilities side.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      It depends. If you feel that metaphor is poor let's try this: One bag of trash magically turns into a loan that I have taken from a bank. I am obligated to repay $35 at an adjustable interest rate. Because I don't like risk, I pay another bank $45 and they take over the loan. Now I have assets and the second bank has the liability (the first bank, of course, still lists the loan as an asset).

kova12 3y ago

This is a pretty slippery slope you are getting on. Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes. What you are proposing will essentially make anybody a criminal, because there's always a way to second guess one's intentions. What your point is however illustrating is how wrong the union legislation is. It's essentially forcing free people into organization they didn't choose. I'm not questioning the usefulness of trade unions in old days of industrialization, but now those just became cancers that suck out resources from businesses and consumers

mschuster91 3y ago
> Hiring a subcontractor is common business practice for many purposes. It's common and (sort of) fine if the subcontractor has many different clients. Like a cleaning service or whatever who works for a ton of separate companies all needing to have their floors mopped. But if the "subcontractor" only has one client? That reeks of escaping union or other labor agreements, illegal liability shielding, questionably legal tax / social security evasion schemes or other unethical behavior.

qbasic_forever 3y ago

You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate. The threat of a strike and labor action is far scarier to Amazon than nosey lawmakers that can just be silenced with enough campaign donations.

mschuster91 3y ago
> You don't need laws to enforce this change or behavior, you just need the Amazon drivers to show solidarity and unionize. They can demand (and get!) far more change than the government will ever legislate. The problem is, with jobs that do not require more than a driver's license and the ability to read names you are a fungible cog in the giant machinery of Amazon. It's a job that virtually everyone with a half working body can do: no need for special training, certifications, not even language - here in Germany, it's been reported that the Amazon phone app their delivery people use has like at least half a dozen languages. Fine, you go on strike with your colleagues? Your official employer won't pay as he can't because Amazon pays shit, barely enough to keep the lights on. You keep striking. Amazon will just terminate your employer's contract. Your employer shuts down. Amazon finds someone else willing to start up a "delivery company", and that person finds another bunch of people desperate to make a pittance.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Amazon won't find other people in this labor market--the service sector has been absolutely on fire with hiring, employment, and wage growth now and throughout the pandemic. Letting COVID rip has killed and disabled millions of workers and put tons of pressure on service jobs.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Amazon maybe not, but their contractors? If in doubt they'll just use undocumented people like farms do all the time. They got caught multiple times doing that in Germany and Austria, no reason to believe the situation in the US with massively more pervasive labor exploitation would be different. It's funny, Amazon always says "we expect that our partners comply with laws and regulations", and yet they absolutely have to know that their "partners" have to skirt the law to survive on their extremely low package rates. Hell, they probably have enough data from the delivery smartphones to be able to easily detect labor law violations (overtime beyond 10h, no / not enough long breaks). [1] https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-illegale-unter-amazon-paketboten-TXROLBMLTILVDOV4VYBR4CHEZM.html https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-... [2] https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengladbach-grosseinsatz-vom-zoll-bei-amazon-in-rheindahlen_aid-58200187 https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengl... [3] https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html [4] https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia-in-troisdorf-bei-koeln_184856.html https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia...

rootusrootus 3y ago

It would be interesting to try and make that work. It sounds like basically you'd define a monopsony as effectively an employer relationship, rather than a contractual one. But there are lots of regular everyday businesses that work together in a monopsony relationship. Should we force all of them to consolidate into a single business entity? Or does this only happen for larger companies? Or only gig-style companies?

varispeed 3y ago

It's not going to happen because of existence of corporations like Infosys that do exactly that, except with IT workers. edit: In the UK, we done worst of both worlds - exempted big corporations and "sub-contractors" can still be hired, but they don't have any employment rights.

nitwit005 3y ago

The real fix is to stop tying various benefits to employment, so there'd be no need to worry about who is full time or part time, or who they work for. Unfortunately, changing most of those programs is political suicide, particularly anything health care related.

esalman 3y ago
It's political suicide for Republicans. Left leaning Democrats like Bernie are all for it.
- taude 3y ago
  Not enough far left leaning Dems to make Bernie a reality.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die every year in the US. 4 million voters turn 18. We're just arguing time horizon and cohort turn out rates. Bernie was just too early after Reagan, globalization, and deregulation. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generations-party-identification-midterm-voting-preferences-views-of-trump/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generation... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generat... https://archive.is/iRyQE https://archive.is/iRyQE https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-politics-of-american-generations-how-age-affects-attitudes-and-voting-behavior/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-polit... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-millennials-and-gen-x-outvoted-older-generations-in-2018-midterms/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-mil... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennials-approach-baby-boomers-as-largest-generation-in-u-s-electorate/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennia...

fma 3y ago

Yep...This isn't really new to anyone that has any exposure to the business world that deals with actual good/services. Amazon had some program where they'd give a loan to business operator money to lease trucks, buy uniforms, etc and you get routes. The terms work out such that you make a certain amount money, almost guaranteed. To them, it's a form of insurance. You deliver their goods. They track your performance. It's your business, but from a distance, they control everything. They have zero liability for what happens...it's not their company, their employees. But they can "union bust" by cancelling your contract. If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee.

supertrope 3y ago
> If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee. This right here should get Amazon.com classified as a joint employer. A franchise model is suppose to delegate HR decisions to the local owner.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Yep, sounds like the legal term of 'distinction without a difference'.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Congress had the right idea when they made ERISA pension liabilities joint liabilities among controlled companies. Of course, that’s probably one of the factors that contributed to the decline of private sector pensions, but I think some new joint liability laws would be a great idea.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

Something like: - laborers presumably have social security numbers - if a laborer is working in the premises of a company (and a van is definitely that) WITH THE MARKETING, then you have a direct line between the worker and the company using its labor. - if a laborer is working on a company's premises, it must report that labor for the hours. - if the total labor for a company exceeds a "full time" trigger, then it triggers all that employment law about "full time employees" or "part time employees". - you can have a cutoff amount for lucrative consulting that this doesn't apply to. So if your bill rate is like 100+/hr, you can be exempt from the tracking. Basically, companies are going to utilize corporate law, limited liability, shell company obfuscation, and supplier relationships to obfuscate full time vs part time vs employee vs "contractor". This isn't really that new. Use the social security number system to break through this. Of course it relies on reporting and compliance, but there's numerous examples of big bad hammers that can be employed, especially if it tracks back to a big bad company like Amazon. But the real issue is that government oversight of corporations is basically nonexistent except where the regulatory capture is valuable. The SEC and FTC are total jokes, the mortgage crisis showed that in plain view. So even if I come up with some good tieback mechanism, it won't work. ... unless there is a consortium of companies that will push it against Amazon, which I'm surprised hasn't happened. Everyone seems to be competing with Amazon in the marketplace, which at this point they are now monopolized. Walmart / Bestbuy / Target don't seem to be fighting in government regulation yet which is what they need to do. Likewise Azure and GCP aren't fighting AWS in antitrust either. But I think at some point it will happen.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

The real fix is to just stop tying benefit requirements to who the employer is and what the employee's full time status is. A lot of these problems go away with just universal healthcare, and providing benefits beyond pay via society rather than via companies.

Ekaros 3y ago
Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. It might hurt some, but if these companies can not survive without workers, they will hire full time. And if they can not afford they don't deserve to exist.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. Isn't that what Universal Healthcare does? They obviously charge premiums, but they are a percentage of income that goes all the way down to 0. Universal healthcare takes healthcare from being a concern to companies at all, and now they can just hire who they want for however long they want. It also makes the labor pool much more fluid, and makes low end jobs much more viable (morally and economically).
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  Some people specifically want part time work. Tying things to employment that don't cleanly scale up or down with hours removes useful flexibility.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ROTMetro 3y ago
We have socialized healthcare in the USA, we just deliver it at the emergency room, the worst possible place. The more we get people to realize that we already have this the more we can reduce the resistance to expanding it in a sane way. America 100% has socialized medicine. Go to the emergency room and you will be treated.

alberth 3y ago

> ” This behavior of legal loopholes to discount workers should be made illegal.” It comes down to priorities. In the US at least, regulators are very pro jobs & job creation. People employed contributor to society in many ways (eg purchase goods, taxes, lower crime, etc). Which means, US wants to make it easy for someone to create a company so they can hire a people. Now if the business that’s created to employee people is a subcontractor for a Mega Corp, the US regulators don’t care. Because again, it comes down to priorities - which is pro job creation. Note: I’m not anti-unions. I’m just trying to depict it comes down to what’s highest priorities for regulators. And pro job creation / making it easy to create a company, is pretty high on this list.

pluto_modadic 3y ago
"pro jobs" here meaning... not pro workers...

jerojero 3y ago

Pretty sure this has been solved in other countries by allowing sectorial unions (so in this case all delivery drivers would be in one union and they negotiate collectively regardless of the particular business they work for). But I don't think these kind of laws can really pass in the USA, the political will is just not there.

faeriechangling 3y ago

The very system of contractors vs part time vs full time getting different levels of benefits is designed to avail employers of paying their employees benefit. The end to the loophole is simply ending these arbitrary classifications and it won’t happen without a serious fight because why would employers give up their right to hire employees at a discount? The modern day purpose of the system is to allow employers to misclassify their employees for the purpose of stealing their wages.

wilg 3y ago
I’d entertain a policy proposal that does this without too much damage to the ability to flexibly hire for part time and contract and freelance type work.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

Just buy from the physical store. Otherwise at the end of day you will choose a online retailer that successfully prevents unionization because it is more efficient and cheaper.

wildrhythms 3y ago
Workers are the physical store are also subject to these same issues. Consumer side activism doesn't work.

oneTbrain23 3y ago

Thesw workers already agreed to Amazon employment contract. If they are not happy they can quit and join high paying programming jobs by Apple or Meta...assuming they can code. Instead, they wish to renegade on their employment contracts and blackmail Amazon (which indirect jack our price) via a cartel known as union. Union tactics are usually very straightforward....we want more....in exchange we dont go on strike to renegade on your employment contract because we too lazy to learn to code to get paid better so easier to just blackmail you. And that is how America lose out to China.

saagarjha 3y ago
Why do you think the answer to labor issues it to get everyone to learn how to code?

patmorgan23 3y ago

IIRC there are provisions in the NLRA that address situations like this. If Amazon primarily directs the activities of the workers, not the contractor company, if Amazon can dismiss individual employees then they're consider a kind of joint employer and can still be unionized against.