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The worker was grateful for the opportunity, and enjoyed his time at Amazon, though he felt unmotivated toward the end. He was paid fairly, and presumably comm

• anigbrowl 13y ago
  'Freedom' becomes a slippery concept when you're dealing with contracts of adhesion, though. Non-executive workers have little or no negotiating power over their terms of employment, and the greater the asymmetry the less of a free economic choice it is. Obviously he's not that happy about it or he wouldn't have written this screed.
  • jkonowitch 13y ago
    Is there research to back this up? Ie is it really the case that 'non-executive' workers have no negotiating power? Is this true in all sectors or only some? Anecdotally I've seen instances where non-execs successfully negotiated a salary increase, etc.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      Not that I'm going to dig out right now. I mentioned 'terms' because I wanted to address things like the contract period and so on, rather than just pay.
    • hobs 13y ago
      Check middle class salary increase the last 30 years.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    Well, I don't know necessarily that he was unhappy with it, though clearly he thought it was stupid of them to do as it bore on product quality and all that. Regardless of whether or not he liked it, I'm wondering why the OP can call it "taking advantage of". I just don't see that here, and thought maybe I was missing something, versus my bar just being set at a different height.
• Jormundir 13y ago
  You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? These days any given new graduate who didn't attend an ivy league is in a situation where it is extremely difficult to get a job. The alternative to working as a contractor at Amazon is not working at all. This is the situation these contractors are in. When the alternative is being in extreme debt / homeless, a choice cannot be made freely. This is the situation that Amazon and Walmart are taking advantage of, employee these people as hourly, no benefits contractors. Obviously there's the argument that Amazon and Walmart are being 'good' providing them with hourly pay when they would otherwise be paid nothing. This, however, doesn't mean they're not taking advantage of the people they hire as contractors. I would also not argue, but hold as a belief that it is extremely immoral to not pay the people who are struggling to help the company succeed, in order to pay people who are already wealthy more. Before you explode with economic principles of how they are being paid what they're worth due to the harsh job market conditions, save your breath, I already know. The thinking is right from a market philosophy perspective, but these principles also weaken the company, and I would say are actually wrong from a perspective of building and growing a successful business.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    > You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? Yes, I do, and I'd appreciate you not starting off posts being invective in the future. I'd downvote you for that if I could, even though I acknowledge you make an otherwise neutral point. I'm not suggesting that Amazon is being good or evil, but I don't see any advantage having been taken. As Nostromo stated in a higher-voted thread, the unemployment rate in Seattle is currently at 4%, which is pretty good. > The alternative to working as a contractor at Amazon is not working at all. I don't see that having been suggested in the article at all. Regardless, some temporary work on a real product right after college seems like exactly the kind of thing I wish had been around when I was younger. What I'm not seeing is that there was anything exploitative going on. Amazon paid a fair market wage, or at least I didn't see anything in the article to suggest he was making Walmart level wages. I don't see that the working conditions were harsh, or otherwise problematic beyond the normal level of office politics. If these principles weaken the company, then I again don't see how that is taking advantage of the article's author. I'm not suggesting that these are amazing working conditions, or that it's doing Amazon any favors, but at the same time, I don't see that anybody was taken advantage of either.
• grecy 13y ago
  > The worker was grateful for the opportunity Uh-huh. And if I give you no food for a week then throw you a dog bone you'll be grateful for that too. What a disgusting way to behave.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    Again, there's been nothing to suggest that these were sub-par working conditions. Except for the length of the engagement, which is fairly normal, I don't see anything even remotely unusual about this working arrangement.
    • grecy 13y ago
      Employing someone for 11 months so you can avoid paying benefits is disgusting. Just because it's not "unusual" doesn't make it acceptable.
      • bmelton 13y ago
        If he was hired on the promise that his contract would only be 11 months, and he knew that up front, I don't see why it's a problem. If he were just randomly fired after 11 months so that they could avoid paying the difference, then I would completely agree with you.
        • anigbrowl 13y ago
          I would be very interested to know just how transparent they were about that. At one extreme I can see some vague handwaving saying 'this is a contract position...you get what that means right? so sign here...' At the other you might get a HR person saying 'yes contract jobs can lead to full-time opportunities' even though that might only happen for one person once a year.
          • bmelton 13y ago
            I would too, but I've worked in plenty of situations, as much as two decades ago, where there was a contract, and the potential for future employment. Once you get on site, you start asking the actual employees how serious the potential is, but the contract length is known full well ahead of time. Again though, I just don't see anything odd or unusual in this setup. It's pretty much the exact same setup that companies like Manpower and Adecco have used for decades. I don't know anything about the wages at Amazon, but I'm far more laissez faire on that than I suspect much of the rest of HN, and that's fine, but clearly Amazon isn't breaking the law here.
• bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  Social, cultural and political context. The entire concept in which Amazon use temporary contract workers is seen as an exploitative abuse of the power by the employer the majority of societies outside the US. The use of the term "wankers" leads me to believe that pasbesoin is not American, which means there's a pretty big chances he's used to different employer - employee relations and probably stricter laws limiting this kind of thing. Personally, I don't consider this kind of thing to be "employment". It offers neither the security of being an employee, nor the freedom of being fully self-employed.
• vacri 13y ago
  It's nice how you do the "he was paid fairly with unicorns and rainbows, with sweet choirs singing him to his rest... .... ... ... (or what he was willing to accept)", front-loading the idea that the employment was an ideal situation rather than what the guy may have had to take at the time. You could say exactly the same thing about illegal jobs paying under minimum wage.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    > That's a nice reframing of his entire essay, which was about how the employees were being abused and how that was making them feel shit and shipping inferior product. I must have read a different article than you did. I didn't see anything in there about how employees were being abused whatsoever. Yeah, he thought that the politics were goofy, but they always are. Yeah, he thought that it led to an inferior product, but that doesn't mean he hated it, or that he was abused. I don't see how I've attempted to 'reframe' it in any way, but we each took dramatically different things away from that article. > You could say exactly the same thing about illegal jobs paying under minimum wage. Except those jobs would be... illegal? This one is, from what I read, not illegal in any way. I don't see how you can make a legitimate comparison between something perfectly legal and something expressly not.
    • vacri 13y ago
      I edited the comment within a minute, I thought I'd caught it before it might have been seen. This being said, creating an environment that makes people do subpar work is something of an abuse. I've had to leave two jobs previously because the structure of the position meant it was impossible for me to turn out quality work. My initial pre-edit comment overstated this considerably, admittedly, but I do disagree that there was no comment on what can be considered abuse in the essay (eg promotions based on physical attractiveness)
      • bmelton 13y ago
        Ah, apologies. I must have just refreshed the page in time. > creating an environment that makes people do subpar work is something of an abuse. I mean, I suppose that's a fair concern, but the simple fact of the matter is that MOST companies, especially large, bureaucratic ones, exhibit those same symptoms. Very few environments are 'optimal' working conditions, and what might be optimal for you might be miserable for me, and vice versa. We might be used to more amenable environments than the one exhibited in this article, but that speaks more to the luxury of other positions than it does the misery of this one. > By saying this you're effectively making the argument that as long as a job is legal, it's not abusive. Well, I mean, that's what the government has set the bar at, so yeah. The government has determined that working conditions meeting their rigid regulatory standards are not in fact abusive, as a matter of law. If an employer is paying at the very bottom of the wage scale though, they're going to get bottom-of-the-wage-scale employees, which disadvantages them in the marketplace, or affects their competitive agility. Is it great? No, but I don't personally see that it equates to abuse. Of note, I did not suggest that we couldn't (or shouldn't) boycott them for it, but calling a spade a spade, abuse it isn't, at least not to me.