This isn't an abusive job. It's just a working job. You can't leave your station at an automotive factory or in a line cook position either. You have to keep moving for 8 hours or more at a time. It's work. That's just how it goes. It's not for everyone.
Regardless of the pay it would always be a shitty job because it’s hard manual labor. There are worse jobs for sure but there is virtually no plausible amount of money that would make this job a good job other than the premise that any job is better than no job.
And we are at fault here we want cheap stuff delivered ASAP even in the middle of the night.
What it means is that you could pay two people 22k, plus some overhead, to do this 'job' or 'set of tasks'. And you could let them alternate a day and evening schedule, such that they can interact with other human beings, their friends, family. And you could require each to be 10% less productive, such that they can have a normal break where they can interact with other human beings.
The takeaway from this article wasn't that the remuneration was poor. It's typical for a menial job and not any worse than what we ever had in the past. The takeaway was that all the other work conditions are designed in an inhuman (not inhumane, but inhuman) manner, working like a robot with robots. His complaints aren't a lack of money, that's evident from the fact he lives with his parents and barely does anything fun despite having the money. His complaints were a lack of human interaction, having a shitty rhythm, sleeping away his off-time, not seeing his friends, no longer talking to his parents, working with robots.
That can be fixed, if we budgeted even just 30k for this set of tasks. That doesn't mean he gets paid more per year.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/29/140-jd-spor...
When you have members of the conservative government making noises about the owner of JD sports not being a fit and proper person to run a public company you know there is some really bad shit happening
I think I would happily do that if it paid well enough so that I only had to work, say, three months or less a year.
Even in the UK you can find fishing jobs that pay £1500-2000 a week during peak season which means you can earn what Amazon pays in 2.5 months but it’s much harder than sorting items at a warehouse.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/08/07/deadliest-job...
According to the industry's trade body, Seafish, there are 126 deaths per 100,000 fishermen each year; "many times higher" than any other sector of UK industry
http://www.hse.gov.uk/agriculture/pdf/ag-fatal-1617.pdf
Also please note the the vast majority of injuries and fatalities seems to be in farming rather than fishing those statistics are unified but the causes are broken down.
The individual deaths and causes are also listed http://www.hse.gov.uk/foi/fatalities/2016-17.htm I couldn't find one that related directly to fishing.
Don't get me wrong fishing is dangerous but I haven't seen anything that would indicate that it's one of the most dangerous jobs in the UK.
Also time is sometimes convertible to money, esp. if you have children. You don't have much time left if you have to work long hours, but if you can pay someone to do cleaning, etc.for you, then you are directly buying time.
I don’t normally comment here, but felt obligated.
Can you say a bit more about what that value is?
Edit: this is a genuine ( not snarky) question to someone who feels strongly on the subject. I suspect people say the value of hard work without really thinking through what that value is. As an extreme example some countries allow sentencing to penal labour( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour ) but I suspect the few would consider this to be a valuable gift to the convicted.
This is the kind of binary thinking that's problematic with a lot of people i talk to nowadays. How about this:
Instead of it being a question of which one is wrong or right, what if both are right to some degree?
What if standing for a full 8 hour work day is unhealthy, just in a different way than sitting for an 8 hour work day is unhealthy?
What if the real answer is: Both is necessary, in moderation?
The members of my family have dreams, but any free time they have they spend it on Facebook. I don't WISH these jobs on them, but this is exactly the skills they have.
Are we talking about the gold lined streets of Norway, as the 0.1% example that is supposed to represent the real condition of humanity among the other 7.6 billion people?
I've never known someone that hasn't done these types of basic work jobs at some point their lives. That's not an exaggeration.
It can be working a marina boating dock during the summer, pumping gas for minimum wage at 20 years old. It can be cutting yards & doing basic property maintenance work for $15 / hour at 25 years old. It can be a cashier at Walmart for $11 or $12 / hour. It can be working at a liquor store, doing cashier work, filling shelves, running product into the cooler, and vacuuming before going home at night. There are millions of basic jobs like that need to be done.
Well how about he gives his workers better work conditions? there are simple techniques that wouldn't even cost him much money like alternating tasks in warehouses, some tasks are less physical than others.
Clearly some here are happy the 19th century style exploitation is a reality for their fellow workers, with the same arguments as 200 years ago like "well if you're not happy go work somewhere else", like everybody has the choice.
That’s just not the Titan of Industry mentality. And the Titan of Industry mentality is required to build a company like Amazon. And everyone buys from Amazon because they offer the lowest price and the greatest convenience.
It’s got nothing to do with whether he could hire more people. It’s that whether it’s the Pyramids or Versailles or Amazon, humans are largely drawn to these things that represent or require the toil and suffering of invisible anonymous masses. It’s weird, but it seems fundamental to humanity. It’s always made me question the compatibility of humans with “human rights.” We fundamentally don’t value these things. At least we prioritize symbols of collective greatness to individual human experience.
The market provides a pretty damn diverse set of job opportunities. It turns out that shuffling boxes doesn’t require any intelligence and therefore doesn’t pay well. The problem is not that there are entry level jobs to shuffle boxes. Take those away and then this guy doesn’t just have a loser job, he has no job at all.
Make Amazon pay humans more to shuffle boxes and they’ll just have more incentive to buy better robots. Pay humans what it’s worth to shuffle boxes and the smart and motivated ones won’t be shuffling boxes for very long at all. Because it turns out if you have a brain you decide it’s better to learn a marketable skill in your off time instead of playing video games.
This guy has no need for current income. He says his expenses are about 100/mo. He should be working his 50 hours a week and then putting another 50 hours into coursework if he doesn’t like the job he’s got.
His government benefits which he doesn’t want to lose would (or should) not lapse if he has 40 hours of work AND/OR accredited coursework. If he loses benefits for choosing schooling over labor then that is a policy that should be fixed.
There are a lot of societal pressure which is putting 24 year old males in their parents basement working dead-end jobs and playing video games. But very very little of the blame sits on Amazon’s shoulders if you ask me. There are a lot of controversial social theories on the way we’ve been talking to and about adolescent men are driving them into these low self esteem self-defeating positions, and it’s certainly a growing demographic and a big problem. Look at labor participation rates for 20-30 yr old men, for example. Again, Amazon is providing a service here, not the villain of the story.
What do you do for a living, may I ask? Do you have a college education in your field of work? Who paid for it? Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?
Right, because a degree is worthless if you didn’t learn something applicable to the job you want afterwards. To many kids these days go to college, party and have fun, get a b/s degree, then wonder why they are basically screwed afterward and in a mountain of debt. Not everyone should go to college, trade schools have a bad stigma when really they are the right avenue for many young people.
> Do you have a college education in your field of work?
Yes
> Who paid for it?
Me, and without loans too. Admittedly I went in the mid 90s when prices were more realistic, but I also chose to go to a not big name state school and I worked my ass off in a job while in school to pay for it.
> Who paid your rent, food, and other expenses while you attended school?
Me, myself, and I. It wasn’t easy, but I also was raised with a strong work ethic and realized if I wanted to advance I had to do more than others, not just be average.
While GP’s tone was a bit confrontational, I feel yours is just as toxic. Putting in 50 hours in classes on top of 50 hours work is unrealistic for most, but 15-20hrs isn’t. Yes, it’ll take longer to advance, but it’s still doable. Many of the points GP made re: how young male generations were raised are sadly very on point and you should try to have an open mind and not just snap back.
They were nonesense then too.
Yep, the '90s were "gangsta" as the kids say...
My company paid for a portion of my tuition, the rest I paid myself as I went. A semester of courses cost, by my recollection, about $10k. But that would be regardless of if you took 3, 4, or 5 classes. So naturally I went to the Dean and got special permission to take 6 classes per semester. Combined with transferring half my credits from dirt cheap online classes I graduated after only paying for 4 semesters, about $50k total, $20k of which was expensed on the corporate card, all spread over 5-6 years.
My job at the time was technically an “internship” at Cisco Systems, paid $14/hour. I would typically log about 80 a week though, and it was all time-and-a-half after 40 and double-time after 60 hours a week, so effective pay was higher.
My GPA was shit, but it didn’t matter. No one has ever asked, and I got the degree. The amount of learning from being in the labs at Cisco working with core routers and coding IOS dwarfed anything I learned at college anyway.
Everyone told me I needed the diploma. But since then I’ve never had to so much as write a resume, after that first fluff piece I wrote to get into Cisco. In my case the degree was a massive waste of time and money, but so it goes.
Obviously I was massively lucky and privlidged to get into Cisco at 18, but staying there full time for several years and having them pay part of my tuition was because I worked my ass off for that $14/hr and was one of the most productive members of my team. By the time I left they had all but shut down the internship program and HR was afraid I was going to sue them for misclassifying me, but I was very happy to have had the opportunity.
I was just responding to the GP, who was wondering why Bezos doesn't just pay him more.
Socrates :-)
Makes the WWI peeps (who literally lost a generation) problems pale in comparison.
Consumers are largely drawn to low-cost products, which require the exploitation of masses. It is fundamental to capitalism, but not to humanity.
Capitalism enables global wealth re-distribution. Thus were 500 million Chinese lifted out of poverty from 1981 to 2012 (World Bank figures) thanks to consumers who've bought the products of their industry. Most of us have helped in that respect.
Almost all of humanity lived for thousand of years in miserable and degrading poverty; the life of even the very rich two hundred years ago and later would be considered a low grade existence by a great majority of ordinary people today and not just in the West.
It's perhaps a shitty alternative, but it's undeniable that without Amazon they'd do something even shittier.
Without Amazon, there might be more local tax revenue, more local shops providing employment, less focus on extracting 100% from every employee.
I've never seen a great diversity of businesses that surround a warehouse, say.
Every penny counts dear Maxxxxxx!
Is there a case where this is not true? Capitalists are all the same: Ignoring other's suffering to make a profit.
The only thing you're doing by supporting "Health and Safety" laws is offshoring suffering.
The only way to stop the cycle is to consume less, but that seems to be a foreign concept.
Can't say anything about other countries, since there's so much shit at home, they need to take care of their own...
But yeah, they also buy the latest shit (on credit), and when asked why, there's no good answer. I use my stuff until it's completely dead, and even then it's fixable. If everyone did it, maybe we'd get rid of planned obsolescence, which is an insane, but sadly profitable concept.
The trouble is there tends to be a one size fits all h&s I see track side workers wearing hard hats and the failure modes for accidents tends to be things like runaway trucks not heavy objects falling on your head.
I have also seen all the local bus drivers wearing high vis vests for no reason - I could see having one the bus in case it breaks down and they have to get out and put out hazard signs but when I have seen busses broken down they don't do that.
What needs to stop is western tax money pouring in through different channels to support repressive and corrupt regimes and policies under the guise of keeping these countries "business friendly".
The working and middle classes in the west have been undermining themselves for quite some time now.
There is in that a high level of unemployment leads to social unrest and governments toppling.
Most people in the developing world are willing to suffer in order for a better future for their family. If you take that away (as I mentioned, more automation) then you take that away, and you get a lot of pissed off people.
It's a lot easier to live in a sweltering room with your family if you have a reassurance that your children won't suffer the same fate.
Is the person who bought the piano morally guilty for "ignoring others' suffering"? Should they be held guilty unless they bid however much I needed for my cancer treatment, even if that's $1,000,000? Are they more guilty than the losing bidders, who offered even less, or people who didn't bid at all? That's what this seems to imply about Amazon (or all employers, really), except in this case, the person is selling a service (whatever work they perform) rather than a piano.
Your analogy is very leaky. Bidding and delivery is one and done, whereas in the dynamics of workplaces, employers have vast influence on the workplace conditions daily. Also applicants rarely get full insight when applying - this is true of piano bidding ("I wonder what it will be like to deal with this person") but that represents a small one-time exchange.
If anyone is going to start rambling off about the evils of capitalism, I suggest they stick their foot in their mouth until they've already stopped buying from companies that benefit from exploitative behaviour. But since I've met almost nobody who falls into that category, then it's time to admit that capitalists aren't inherently unethical, it's just that consumers, including you (and even me) have decided to reward the ones who aren't.
Of course society is (in theory) set up to ensure that it's the consumer's fault. Or that the consumer has some kind of mass control over this. Unfortunately the consumer is at a mass disadvantage. Not only do stress and monetary factors constrain the amount of control they can exercise, but also big companies expend hundreds of thousands of pounds in advertising and propaganda.
Putting the blame on the sheep for the faults of the farmer is ludicrous.
And Amazon's margins are far smaller than you're implying. Their latest quarterly had a profit margin of 0.59%. They have more than half a million employees and a net income of just ~$2.4 billion. Imagine they give a modest $1000 raise to all their employees. That'd be more than $500 million or about 23% of their entire net income. Mass increases in labor to the point that the hourly requirements of each employee substantially decreased is simply out of the question.
In looking at wealth inequality, I think we lose track of how many of us there are. If you received just $1 from each person on Earth you'd be the 175th richest person in the world. $15 per person and you'd be, by far, the richest person alive. And that also goes the other way - even the richest are diluted to very little on the scale of the populations of this place we live in. If every single dollar or produced value, at least according to GDP, was perfectly evently distributed in the US we'd each get about $52k a year. Getting about half the average for moving boxes doesn't seem like something that screams catastrophe to me.
The numbers will be even more impressive if life was made more miserable for a few billion people. Then you could argue that several billion people would give anything to take up a job like this.
Take a thought experiment and imagine we have 1000 people living under a single king all in complete filth and disgust, except for our king. Our people might be a bit jealous of the king but in general everything seems reasonably equal. Now imagine our king himself starts to feel guilty about the state of affairs and decides to begin progressive expansion. So he takes 50 of the people and grants them land and businesses giving them very comfortable lives.
Well people are kind of happy, but now there's certainly quite a lot of jealousy. It's not just one king, but a whole 5% of the population living head and shoulders above the rest. So the king realizes this and decides to make an incredible expansion expending much of his wealth in the progress. He now grants those 5% substantial estates and then grants a whole 20% the privileges and property just the 5% had before.
Again we'd expect society to be absolutely thrilled at the massive progress. But what this actually does is emphasize how shit the now 75% are. Instead of people being thrilled at people overall become wealthier, the 75% are now incensed. What's so special about those 25%? We want that too. As we, dramatically, improved society - society itself became even more incensed that it wasn't happening all at once. As we reach the point where the majority slowly become very comfortable, it would somehow paradoxically seem ever and ever more unfair and unjust.