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If you have not read it already I recommend reading The Guardian article - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazon-insider-feature-treatme

by conorh 13y ago

If you have not read it already I recommend reading The Guardian article - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazon-insider-feature-treatment-employees-work http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazo.... One quote from it that stands out for me: "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking." There was another previous thread on Hacker News where people compared Amazon warehouse workers to Costco workers. I wish Amazon could be more like Costco in regards to their warehouse workers (I don't shop at Amazon any more for that reason).

sheetjs 13y ago
+1 for supporting Costco. I also find that there is no guesswork: I've been happy with every Costco purchase, their return and replace policies are extremely friendly, and, while they don't cover all niche items, all of the products they sell are good to excellent quality. I suspect, if they really tried, they could eat Amazon's lunch in the space Unfortunately there is no Costco in Germany
mathattack 13y ago
My view on this is if you want to be paid better, work somewhere else. Or encourage an environment where there are more alternative employers. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to take a job there. (And yes, I know that Europe has a different view of unions than the US)
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  I totally agree with this.
  - DigitalJack 13y ago
    I understand the down voting because it was essentially devoid of meaty content, but considering the GP's point of view is unpopular in HN, I thought sharing my agreement was enough reason to post. In that way it is deeper than the normal "me too" or +1 post.
    - collyw 13y ago
      Maybe because it shows a lack of critical thinking.
      - DigitalJack 13y ago
        Well I can't help how you interpret things, but it seems pretty superficial to think me uncritical based on what little you read of me on HN. The medium is so devoid of expression that on any given post the reader is filling in much of the information they attribute to the sender.
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  Unless that's the only job you can actually find. Not a nice position to be, but it always happens to someone, since there are more people that jobs in many parts of the world. Or would it be better those people "choose" not to have any job just because they find their current one is shitty? If everyone had that attitude in 19th century, we would still work 16 hours a day, without fighting for change.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I appreciate your thoughts. I still think it's better to spend time and energy on education and increasing corporate creation initiatives, than strong arming companies. Let's take your example further... Yes, unions (especially in the auto industry) had a lot of success. This was alongside efforts by Henry Ford to increase pay. But where did it lead? The unions kept winning, and look at where Detroit is now. The unions won victory after victory, only to wind up with companies so hollowed out that they can't afford their hard won pensions.
    - levosmetalo 13y ago
      I'm not talking about this specific case right now. The problem of lack of jobs is systemic, and applies to all professions, with a strong tendency to be even more pressing. Due to automation, software and other things the number of jobs, especially low skilled ones is shrinking. Yes, you can educate yourself, and anyone can/should, but in the end, one quarter of the people will be undereducated just because the bar is higher, and will still not be able to find a better job. We, as a mankind, have to seriously consider radical solutions to this problem, and not focus short term on any specific industry. Should be start decreasing working hours due to productivity increase, or just invent bullshit jobs just to keep people employed? Or to progress to Star Trek economy where people will be provided with all basic needs and work only on what they would like to? I know what I would like to happen, but I also fear what would happen. Talking only about unions, Detroit or any specific industry or place is not going to "fix" the global problem, and that is that the need for jobs is decreasing, and number of people is rising. We should tackle that problem instead. Sorry for rambling, it might only be tangentially relevant to the article and discussion, but what I see in all this cases is just this problem. Ok, I might be overgeneralizing, since I'm software engineer, but not to much.
- jeena 13y ago
  They kind of do, because if you've been unemployed for some amount of time you have to take every job they offer you, otherwise you don't get any unemployment money at all, then you can't pay your rent and have to start stealing food, etc. Not everybody is fortune enough to be born into such an environment where he/she is able to get a reasonable education so he/she can chose where he/she would like to work.
  - Artistry121 13y ago
    My great grandfather spent most of his money to get to America (from Germany) by boat, didn't speak English, arrived in New Orleans and worked his way to the Midwest where he toiled as a grocery store worker for years before starting his own store in another town. No education, no money, no connections and he spoke broken english throughout his life. He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have. Hard work and willingness to learn leads to success and then the ability to choose work. There is a spectrum that underlies this issue. On one side is the freedom of individuals to contract with other individuals and on one side is government setting contract policies. If freedom and respect for individuality are strong values (which I think they are post-enlightenment) policies and views should be closer to the former. Also note that any change to labor laws affects small business far more than large business. Amazon can create robots to do the jobs of sorting where smaller firms cannot. The more regulation on labor in industries and companies the more important capital is and the more valuable size is. The financial industry in America (and in many other countries) is a key example of this.
    - phaer 13y ago
      > He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have And most of the top 5% Americans and Germans back than lived in fear of militant strikes, riots and revolutionary workers in general. They would have envied the social peace of modern western societies. And I don't know when your Great grandfather migrated but one hand you can't draw conclusions from a single persons experiences and on the other hand stories like this have a lot to do with the specific economic situation in his new homeland at that time
- conorh 13y ago
  I'm a strong believer in the idea that a society can be judged by how it treats those weakest and least able to defend themselves. I do agree that encouraging alternative employment is necessary, but if you read the article you will see that often the reality is that there is no other option. Therefore these people at the bottom of the employment pole are taken advantage of because they can be. I do not think this is a state of affairs that we should encourage, or that needs to exist, and companies like Costco show otherwise. I hope that those of us with the means will spend our money in as conscionable a way as we can (ie. not at companies encouraging this).
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Wouldn't it seem reasonable that it's better to give people better access to more jobs (through education or improving the environment for new business creation) than strong-arming existing employers? The former assumes that the pie can be grown. The latter assume we're fighting over a limited pie, which actually winds up shrinking it.
    - Uchikoma 13y ago
      Education in Germany is mostly free except a (unfortunate) selection process after 4th grade (most states). So people have access to education, and Germany made some great steps forward towards easy business creation (new limited company types, standard contracts, lower costs, ...) in the last 10 years [1]. So what's next? [1] That said the common idea is in school and on television since around the 70s: The coolest guy is the one with the worst grades - every celebrity boosts how bad they were at school. And living on welfare has become a verb ("harzen") and is the live goal (perspective?) of many young people.
      - biafra 13y ago
        Universities are not free anymore in most states of Germany. And the selection after 4th grade is very much determined by the area you live in because you have to send your kids to the public school where you live.
- mrweasel 13y ago
  I think one important point is that Germany currently doesn't have a minimum wage. It is the job of the union to negotiate a reasonable salary for the workers in a given field. In many European countries unions and employers have historically been able to work together and reach agreements that have been better for both parties, compared having a law impossed by the government. Amazon is ruining that, and I don't believe that the rules that will follow from the governments will be as good as an agreement reach between an employers and the people who work for him.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I fully agree that it's best to be in an environment where people and companies come to agreements on wages that is best. My thought is about what happens when you don't agree - in that case, go work for someone else. And as a society, we're better off encouraging the creation of new companies, and educating people to get better jobs.
    - mrweasel 13y ago
      Not everyone are meant to start a business and while education is important, it's not always the answer either. Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon. Regardless of how highly educated a society is or how many new companies we start, there's still someone who has to do the manual picking in the warehouse. Someday that job may be automated away, but until then, we need to ensure that the people taking these jobs are treated decently and paid a wage that will sustain them. Amazon can move their warehouse to Poland, and pay a little less and still provide a decent salary. The behavior however should be the same regardless of which country they operate in. We often forget that there are bad/boring/hard/dirty jobs and that they actually need to be done. Education won't make these jobs go away. Just as often we forget that there are people who enjoy them and have no desire to educate themselves further. Regardless of our feeling towards the lack of education or dislike of the job fulfilled by the people "at the bottom of society", we should be respectful of their choices in life and help them should they feel exploited. Just for the record I work for a online shop and are on occasion asked to help in the warehouse. It's physical hard work, boring and you're on a strict schedule to ensure that everything is ready then the delivery companies arrive to pick up orders. We pay a lot better than Amazon, almost double it seems and your not given a fixed time in which to complete the picking of an order, so there's hopefully less stress. So I have no reason to believe that Amazon couldn't a nice place to work as well, and still make a profit.
- collyw 13y ago
  You swallowed the USA flavoured cool aid didn't you.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I spent enough time looking at Detroit. :-) The US is by no means perfect, but I think encouraging entrepreneurship is a better solution than organized labor. But the reality is, if Amazon is so bad, folks should just go work somewhere else.
    - mratzloff 13y ago
      Organized labor had an overwhelmingly positive impact on Western workers that you also benefit from in terms of work hours, weekends, holidays, and so on. But because there are some cases where unions contributed in part to financial problems (which have quite a bit to do with government corruption and corporate greed as well), they are now an antiquated artifact of the past? > Folks should just go work somewhere else. This is really tone deaf to the realities of the people who must accept jobs like these, though.
      - mathattack 13y ago
        First - thanks for jumping in to a contentious debate. In terms of being tone deaf, isn't that more for politicians and corporate heads? Here we're arguing ideas, like should we support unions that strike during peak periods, and what should Amazon's response be? While I have a general dislike for unions in some places, it is specifically their company-harming tactics that bother me the most. This can be striking during the holidays (which is the situation mentioned) and can also be protesting in front of hotels, scaring away customers. This is an attitude of, "If you don't see if my way, I'll destroy the company." While unions have made some strides, some improvements have also been a result of unilateral action by employers. Take the Henry Ford example, of shortening days and raising wages. [1] As a broader society, we can help those who "must accept jobs like these" by encouraging entrepreneurs to create companies that could hire people like them. Employees get better treatment when there are more people fighting to hire them. [1] http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/677-5-dollar-a-day http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/...
samolang 13y ago
Choosing Costco over Amazon seems like a rather pointless moral stand to make. What about the people who work in the logging, fishing, and mining industries? You probably use their products every day and they risk life and limb for similar salaries. What about everything made in a factory in a third world country? I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China.
- marquis 13y ago
  >I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China. Are we to drag ourselves down to the lowest common denominator for our citizens, in countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - samolang 13y ago
    In countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights there are laws in place to ensure workers' rights don't regress. Amazon isn't breaking any laws. The working conditions are safe, the employees are paid above minimum wage, and the employees are not working 80 hour weeks. The worst possible (legal) working conditions in these countries are far better than working conditions in third world countries. No matter what shopping choices you make, workers' rights in these countries will never regress to those of a third world country.
    - biafra 13y ago
      There is no minimum wage in Germany.
      - lsaferite 13y ago
        What? I find that incomprehensible. What is the replacement for that employee safeguard then?
brianbreslin 13y ago
The type of work in a costco warehouse vs amazon warehouse I am guessing is hard to compare. One is the moving of entire pallets, the other is picking and packing hundreds of individual items a day (probably thousands).
- mathattack 13y ago
  It's also a strategic decision by Costco to treat their employees better. Why not allow them this type of strategic advantage? If Amazon doesn't want to follow suit, let them lag.
mhb 13y ago
Why Wal-Mart [and presumably, Amazon] Will Never Pay Like Costco: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...
henrik_w 13y ago
This was also on HN not too long ago: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...
- mogrim 13y ago
  Amusingly the interstitial ads are served from the Amazon cloud :)
patrickaljord 13y ago
> "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking." So Amazon is the only employer offering jobs to people who tend to be rejected everywhere else, providing people that have no skills to offer to society a chance at getting a job, learning some skills and maybe getting a better job rather than staying at home and living on welfare, which is lower than Amazon wages and provides no future. Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.
- collyw 13y ago
  Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice. Now take away that assumption and see if your opinion still hold weight. Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons?
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    > Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice. Not at all. I wrote that the alternative would be living on welfare with no prospects and no opportunities to learn skills. Amazon is offering a real job instead. > Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons? Yes, they are. They offer wages way higher than the medium salary in China. Why do you think everybody wants to work for them? Nobody is being forced to work there. The alternative would be having no jobs at all. Socialists want to impose very high minimum wages, but the reality is that very high minimum wages imposed by law just creates more unemployment and more misery, the very thing socialists are supposed to oppose but keep creating everywhere they get power.
    - simplemath 13y ago
      Libertarians, the Dr. Seuss crowd of the economic world.
      - 13y ago
bd_at_rivenhill 13y ago
Would you start shopping at Amazon again if they replace all of the workers with robots from Kiva?
- sdoering 13y ago
  Nice derailing, as this is clearly not the topic of the argument here. The replacing will happen in due time - be it with amazon, be it with every other big warehouse. But that does not allow amazon till then to pay his warehouse-workers way under the trade-agreement, that is binding for this kind of industry in Germany. Amazon says it does not have to pay the trade-agreement-wages from the mail order business, as it is just a logistics company. And that is the whole reason of the strikes. So the union is pushing for strike, to bring amazon in line with the other mail-order-businesses in Germany. So that its workers might one day earn the same amount of money, that every other worker in this industry earns already.
- qq66 13y ago
  An intermediate stage would likely be an increase in the percentage of goods drop-shipped from China (I've already received several Amazon items this way in the US)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sireat 13y ago
I have friends who have worked at the Amazon UK packing werehouse Peterborough. They tell me it was a truly horrid, literally back breaking experience. First note of caution was the hiring test. For them english is a second language but they found the test alarmingly easy, something you would give a 2nd grader in social skills test. I suppose the test weeds out those who have no ability to follow any direction. After that the repetitive work started, within months both had developed repetitive stress injuries in the back and arms. The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months. It seems there was little or no thought left for ergonomics of any kind. They both were already pretty skinny, but both lost a substantial amount of weight while on the job.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months. // There are plenty of people and some evidence to suggest that people are considered a disposable resource. Burn 'em out and chuck them back on the unemployment pile.
twoodfin 13y ago
Of course, many of the workers you interact with on a typical trip to Costco are not Costco employees. Costco chooses not to hire their own "sample servers" and instead contracts out those jobs to firms which don't offer particularly good wages or benefits: http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/we-are-family/Content?oid=2172067 http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/we-are-family/Content?oid=2...
e12e 13y ago
There's also this older story from Financial Times (February 2013): http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144...
jotm 13y ago
There's also this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598

by conorh 13y ago

sheetjs 13y ago

+1 for supporting Costco. I also find that there is no guesswork: I've been happy with every Costco purchase, their return and replace policies are extremely friendly, and, while they don't cover all niche items, all of the products they sell are good to excellent quality. I suspect, if they really tried, they could eat Amazon's lunch in the space Unfortunately there is no Costco in Germany

mathattack 13y ago

My view on this is if you want to be paid better, work somewhere else. Or encourage an environment where there are more alternative employers. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to take a job there. (And yes, I know that Europe has a different view of unions than the US)

DigitalJack 13y ago
I totally agree with this.
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  I understand the down voting because it was essentially devoid of meaty content, but considering the GP's point of view is unpopular in HN, I thought sharing my agreement was enough reason to post. In that way it is deeper than the normal "me too" or +1 post.
  - collyw 13y ago
    Maybe because it shows a lack of critical thinking.
    - DigitalJack 13y ago
      Well I can't help how you interpret things, but it seems pretty superficial to think me uncritical based on what little you read of me on HN. The medium is so devoid of expression that on any given post the reader is filling in much of the information they attribute to the sender.
levosmetalo 13y ago
Unless that's the only job you can actually find. Not a nice position to be, but it always happens to someone, since there are more people that jobs in many parts of the world. Or would it be better those people "choose" not to have any job just because they find their current one is shitty? If everyone had that attitude in 19th century, we would still work 16 hours a day, without fighting for change.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I appreciate your thoughts. I still think it's better to spend time and energy on education and increasing corporate creation initiatives, than strong arming companies. Let's take your example further... Yes, unions (especially in the auto industry) had a lot of success. This was alongside efforts by Henry Ford to increase pay. But where did it lead? The unions kept winning, and look at where Detroit is now. The unions won victory after victory, only to wind up with companies so hollowed out that they can't afford their hard won pensions.
  - levosmetalo 13y ago
    I'm not talking about this specific case right now. The problem of lack of jobs is systemic, and applies to all professions, with a strong tendency to be even more pressing. Due to automation, software and other things the number of jobs, especially low skilled ones is shrinking. Yes, you can educate yourself, and anyone can/should, but in the end, one quarter of the people will be undereducated just because the bar is higher, and will still not be able to find a better job. We, as a mankind, have to seriously consider radical solutions to this problem, and not focus short term on any specific industry. Should be start decreasing working hours due to productivity increase, or just invent bullshit jobs just to keep people employed? Or to progress to Star Trek economy where people will be provided with all basic needs and work only on what they would like to? I know what I would like to happen, but I also fear what would happen. Talking only about unions, Detroit or any specific industry or place is not going to "fix" the global problem, and that is that the need for jobs is decreasing, and number of people is rising. We should tackle that problem instead. Sorry for rambling, it might only be tangentially relevant to the article and discussion, but what I see in all this cases is just this problem. Ok, I might be overgeneralizing, since I'm software engineer, but not to much.
jeena 13y ago
They kind of do, because if you've been unemployed for some amount of time you have to take every job they offer you, otherwise you don't get any unemployment money at all, then you can't pay your rent and have to start stealing food, etc. Not everybody is fortune enough to be born into such an environment where he/she is able to get a reasonable education so he/she can chose where he/she would like to work.
- Artistry121 13y ago
  My great grandfather spent most of his money to get to America (from Germany) by boat, didn't speak English, arrived in New Orleans and worked his way to the Midwest where he toiled as a grocery store worker for years before starting his own store in another town. No education, no money, no connections and he spoke broken english throughout his life. He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have. Hard work and willingness to learn leads to success and then the ability to choose work. There is a spectrum that underlies this issue. On one side is the freedom of individuals to contract with other individuals and on one side is government setting contract policies. If freedom and respect for individuality are strong values (which I think they are post-enlightenment) policies and views should be closer to the former. Also note that any change to labor laws affects small business far more than large business. Amazon can create robots to do the jobs of sorting where smaller firms cannot. The more regulation on labor in industries and companies the more important capital is and the more valuable size is. The financial industry in America (and in many other countries) is a key example of this.
  - phaer 13y ago
    > He would have envied the opportunities even the bottom 5% of Americans and Germans today have And most of the top 5% Americans and Germans back than lived in fear of militant strikes, riots and revolutionary workers in general. They would have envied the social peace of modern western societies. And I don't know when your Great grandfather migrated but one hand you can't draw conclusions from a single persons experiences and on the other hand stories like this have a lot to do with the specific economic situation in his new homeland at that time
conorh 13y ago
I'm a strong believer in the idea that a society can be judged by how it treats those weakest and least able to defend themselves. I do agree that encouraging alternative employment is necessary, but if you read the article you will see that often the reality is that there is no other option. Therefore these people at the bottom of the employment pole are taken advantage of because they can be. I do not think this is a state of affairs that we should encourage, or that needs to exist, and companies like Costco show otherwise. I hope that those of us with the means will spend our money in as conscionable a way as we can (ie. not at companies encouraging this).
- mathattack 13y ago
  Wouldn't it seem reasonable that it's better to give people better access to more jobs (through education or improving the environment for new business creation) than strong-arming existing employers? The former assumes that the pie can be grown. The latter assume we're fighting over a limited pie, which actually winds up shrinking it.
  - Uchikoma 13y ago
    Education in Germany is mostly free except a (unfortunate) selection process after 4th grade (most states). So people have access to education, and Germany made some great steps forward towards easy business creation (new limited company types, standard contracts, lower costs, ...) in the last 10 years [1]. So what's next? [1] That said the common idea is in school and on television since around the 70s: The coolest guy is the one with the worst grades - every celebrity boosts how bad they were at school. And living on welfare has become a verb ("harzen") and is the live goal (perspective?) of many young people.
    - biafra 13y ago
      Universities are not free anymore in most states of Germany. And the selection after 4th grade is very much determined by the area you live in because you have to send your kids to the public school where you live.
mrweasel 13y ago
I think one important point is that Germany currently doesn't have a minimum wage. It is the job of the union to negotiate a reasonable salary for the workers in a given field. In many European countries unions and employers have historically been able to work together and reach agreements that have been better for both parties, compared having a law impossed by the government. Amazon is ruining that, and I don't believe that the rules that will follow from the governments will be as good as an agreement reach between an employers and the people who work for him.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I fully agree that it's best to be in an environment where people and companies come to agreements on wages that is best. My thought is about what happens when you don't agree - in that case, go work for someone else. And as a society, we're better off encouraging the creation of new companies, and educating people to get better jobs.
  - mrweasel 13y ago
    Not everyone are meant to start a business and while education is important, it's not always the answer either. Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon. Regardless of how highly educated a society is or how many new companies we start, there's still someone who has to do the manual picking in the warehouse. Someday that job may be automated away, but until then, we need to ensure that the people taking these jobs are treated decently and paid a wage that will sustain them. Amazon can move their warehouse to Poland, and pay a little less and still provide a decent salary. The behavior however should be the same regardless of which country they operate in. We often forget that there are bad/boring/hard/dirty jobs and that they actually need to be done. Education won't make these jobs go away. Just as often we forget that there are people who enjoy them and have no desire to educate themselves further. Regardless of our feeling towards the lack of education or dislike of the job fulfilled by the people "at the bottom of society", we should be respectful of their choices in life and help them should they feel exploited. Just for the record I work for a online shop and are on occasion asked to help in the warehouse. It's physical hard work, boring and you're on a strict schedule to ensure that everything is ready then the delivery companies arrive to pick up orders. We pay a lot better than Amazon, almost double it seems and your not given a fixed time in which to complete the picking of an order, so there's hopefully less stress. So I have no reason to believe that Amazon couldn't a nice place to work as well, and still make a profit.
collyw 13y ago
You swallowed the USA flavoured cool aid didn't you.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I spent enough time looking at Detroit. :-) The US is by no means perfect, but I think encouraging entrepreneurship is a better solution than organized labor. But the reality is, if Amazon is so bad, folks should just go work somewhere else.
  - mratzloff 13y ago
    Organized labor had an overwhelmingly positive impact on Western workers that you also benefit from in terms of work hours, weekends, holidays, and so on. But because there are some cases where unions contributed in part to financial problems (which have quite a bit to do with government corruption and corporate greed as well), they are now an antiquated artifact of the past? > Folks should just go work somewhere else. This is really tone deaf to the realities of the people who must accept jobs like these, though.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      First - thanks for jumping in to a contentious debate. In terms of being tone deaf, isn't that more for politicians and corporate heads? Here we're arguing ideas, like should we support unions that strike during peak periods, and what should Amazon's response be? While I have a general dislike for unions in some places, it is specifically their company-harming tactics that bother me the most. This can be striking during the holidays (which is the situation mentioned) and can also be protesting in front of hotels, scaring away customers. This is an attitude of, "If you don't see if my way, I'll destroy the company." While unions have made some strides, some improvements have also been a result of unilateral action by employers. Take the Henry Ford example, of shortening days and raising wages. [1] As a broader society, we can help those who "must accept jobs like these" by encouraging entrepreneurs to create companies that could hire people like them. Employees get better treatment when there are more people fighting to hire them. [1] http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/677-5-dollar-a-day http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/...

samolang 13y ago

Choosing Costco over Amazon seems like a rather pointless moral stand to make. What about the people who work in the logging, fishing, and mining industries? You probably use their products every day and they risk life and limb for similar salaries. What about everything made in a factory in a third world country? I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China.

marquis 13y ago
>I bet Amazon's working conditions are far better than those of every factory in China. Are we to drag ourselves down to the lowest common denominator for our citizens, in countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- samolang 13y ago
  In countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights there are laws in place to ensure workers' rights don't regress. Amazon isn't breaking any laws. The working conditions are safe, the employees are paid above minimum wage, and the employees are not working 80 hour weeks. The worst possible (legal) working conditions in these countries are far better than working conditions in third world countries. No matter what shopping choices you make, workers' rights in these countries will never regress to those of a third world country.
  - biafra 13y ago
    There is no minimum wage in Germany.
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      What? I find that incomprehensible. What is the replacement for that employee safeguard then?

brianbreslin 13y ago

The type of work in a costco warehouse vs amazon warehouse I am guessing is hard to compare. One is the moving of entire pallets, the other is picking and packing hundreds of individual items a day (probably thousands).

mathattack 13y ago
It's also a strategic decision by Costco to treat their employees better. Why not allow them this type of strategic advantage? If Amazon doesn't want to follow suit, let them lag.

mhb 13y ago

Why Wal-Mart [and presumably, Amazon] Will Never Pay Like Costco: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...

henrik_w 13y ago

This was also on HN not too long ago: "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

mogrim 13y ago
Amusingly the interstitial ads are served from the Amazon cloud :)

patrickaljord 13y ago

> "At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking." So Amazon is the only employer offering jobs to people who tend to be rejected everywhere else, providing people that have no skills to offer to society a chance at getting a job, learning some skills and maybe getting a better job rather than staying at home and living on welfare, which is lower than Amazon wages and provides no future. Please, remind me why Amazon should be blamed for this and not praised.

collyw 13y ago
Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice. Now take away that assumption and see if your opinion still hold weight. Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons?
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  > Your stance is based purely on the opinion that there are more than enough jobs for everyone, and everyone has a choice. Not at all. I wrote that the alternative would be living on welfare with no prospects and no opportunities to learn skills. Amazon is offering a real job instead. > Do you think Foxconn are great for the same reasons? Yes, they are. They offer wages way higher than the medium salary in China. Why do you think everybody wants to work for them? Nobody is being forced to work there. The alternative would be having no jobs at all. Socialists want to impose very high minimum wages, but the reality is that very high minimum wages imposed by law just creates more unemployment and more misery, the very thing socialists are supposed to oppose but keep creating everywhere they get power.
  - simplemath 13y ago
    Libertarians, the Dr. Seuss crowd of the economic world.
    - 13y ago

bd_at_rivenhill 13y ago

Would you start shopping at Amazon again if they replace all of the workers with robots from Kiva?

sdoering 13y ago
Nice derailing, as this is clearly not the topic of the argument here. The replacing will happen in due time - be it with amazon, be it with every other big warehouse. But that does not allow amazon till then to pay his warehouse-workers way under the trade-agreement, that is binding for this kind of industry in Germany. Amazon says it does not have to pay the trade-agreement-wages from the mail order business, as it is just a logistics company. And that is the whole reason of the strikes. So the union is pushing for strike, to bring amazon in line with the other mail-order-businesses in Germany. So that its workers might one day earn the same amount of money, that every other worker in this industry earns already.
qq66 13y ago
An intermediate stage would likely be an increase in the percentage of goods drop-shipped from China (I've already received several Amazon items this way in the US)

deleted 13y ago

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sireat 13y ago

I have friends who have worked at the Amazon UK packing werehouse Peterborough. They tell me it was a truly horrid, literally back breaking experience. First note of caution was the hiring test. For them english is a second language but they found the test alarmingly easy, something you would give a 2nd grader in social skills test. I suppose the test weeds out those who have no ability to follow any direction. After that the repetitive work started, within months both had developed repetitive stress injuries in the back and arms. The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months. It seems there was little or no thought left for ergonomics of any kind. They both were already pretty skinny, but both lost a substantial amount of weight while on the job.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
>The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months. // There are plenty of people and some evidence to suggest that people are considered a disposable resource. Burn 'em out and chuck them back on the unemployment pile.

twoodfin 13y ago

Of course, many of the workers you interact with on a typical trip to Costco are not Costco employees. Costco chooses not to hire their own "sample servers" and instead contracts out those jobs to firms which don't offer particularly good wages or benefits: http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/we-are-family/Content?oid=2172067 http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/we-are-family/Content?oid=2...

e12e 13y ago

There's also this older story from Financial Times (February 2013): http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144...

jotm 13y ago

There's also this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598