Simon Head wrote "Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers" back in 2014, and if anything, it's gotten worse since then.

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...

It's not limited to warehouse workers, either. In 2015 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York times published an expose of the hard-charging environment at Amazon, with stories about employees reduced to tears at their desks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

That was so untrue, that Jeff Bezos felt the need to send out a memo stating how much he has never seen that side of Amazon, which, as CEO, of course he's never been mistreated by middle management.

The whole "people crying at their desks" thing was exaggerated and it varies a lot by team. I've worked there and now at Google, Google is much nicer obviously, but Amazon wasn't some dystopian nightmare as sometimes portrayed.

I'm also a mod at /r/cscareerquestions, Amazonians would chime in back when this was big news, but the vast majority were always like "yeah it exists but not my team".

I'm glad someone else brought this up. I've been on mobile and walking from site to site all morning and haven't had a chance.

Thank you.

> demonstrably absurd

Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.

> Amazon is a massive immoral monster

this should be enough

> devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.

Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either

> It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans.

Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited.

> Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this

This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off.

> the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business...

This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe.

> I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing

All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation

"Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either"

You haven't proven that. And its entirely possible that it's not worse for the economy in general, but it's quite awful for segments of it. And given the current attitude toward the safety net in the US, once those jobs are gone, that's it for those people.

> quite awful for segments of it

I wish this would see wider acknowledgement.

Lump of Labor is a fallacy, people do find new jobs, and productivity does improve the economy. But none of that implies that the displaced people will be better off in the end!

Similarly, free trade agreements are economically efficient, and boost per-capita GDP. But even aside from implementation issues (i.e. agreements that go far beyond lowering tariffs), there's no particular reason that the extra money ends up benefiting the same people who get hit by outsourcing.

If anything, the studies I've seen say that being displaced by automation or outsourcing causes a permanent wage decline. The original Luddites were right - they probably saw lower wages for their entire lives thanks to automation.

Pretending that overall growth inherently means an economy which works better for the majority of people is frankly dishonest, especially (as you say) in a country so opposed to helping the displaced.

you haven't proven your point either, so it remains that the original claim was unsubstantiated, which is what I was trying to asses here

You weren't trying to assess it, you were trying to assert it.

ah thanks, those always give me trouble

I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance.

I think that's awful. You think you should have to fight and use substantial resources to have a say in how your life is lived. I do not share this belief.

But it's worth pulling at one string of your argument. Work is effectively mandatory for US citizens. You cannot handle any health crisis, or even eat and drink reliably, if you do not work. There is no notion of job retraining or security, and over half the citizens of the US make so little money that they effectively get subsidies from the government and don't pay taxes.

Removing these people's livelihoods without any opportunity for retraining is effectively ruining their lives. Automation threatens to do this without sharing the returns on automation with the work force it's displacing. That is an unacceptable outcome.

> I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance.

nope, but I see that's not stopping you to go ahead and make up things about me just to hijack a high post for your tirade about social security, to which I agree in principle, but furthers nothing the argument at hand

You love freedom of speech and an open marketplace except when you're on the sharp end of it, I see.

and again jumping to conclusion seems the national sport wherever you live.

Good luck in the marketplace of ideas.

Because it used words like "immoral monster" and "devour the economy" without actually backing any of it up with evidence.

Those statements are obviously opinions. The evidence that I think they are such is before you. You're welcome to disagree, but don't demand I prove a moral judgement has been made, that's just silly.

I welcome the discussion.

I don't attempt to reason with people who are unreasonable.