The proven solution is to rename "power hours" to "hackathons".

My brother worked in one of these warehouses (not for Amazon, but more or less the same crap) and frankly I think it's a bit obscene to compare this situation to software engineering. It's exhausting, it's boring, it's unfulfilling, the turnover rate is huge, you can't really socialize with your coworkers (partly because they change so fast, but also because you have no time and you're often competing with each other).

I'm sure in the near future the vast majority of these jobs will be replaced by machines though. It's a bad thing for employment but I don't think I'll be sad to see them go. Let the machines to the boring work then take the wealth generated and redistribute it to the population to do actually interesting things! Technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines.

I've got a very cush job, and I can totally identify with what you're saying here.

One feature of that comparison you're critiquing, however, is very important.

A lot of us working in IT who have cushy jobs imagine that our interests are more aligned with the owning classes instead of with the working folks who are doing really painful jobs.

I don't agree with that view, and I feel that a lot of the callous and dismissive "no one is forcing them to work" comes from the fact that many people don't understand that at their core, the ideas that lead working people to have power of how they work affect everyone who is employed by the people who own businesses.

So while I agree that my working conditions are much, much better than any warehouse workers, fundamentally if I am going to stand in solidarity with them I need to understand that my interests are served by the same things that serve their interests, because we both labor for a business instead of owning a business.

To return the comment your criticizing, you have a reasonable point that working conditions for people who "engineer" are much better than those that move boxes.

At the same time, I feel like understanding that those folks moving boxes have the same underlying interests as those of use moving bits is completely necessary to understanding how we can move towards a world where your laudable premise that "technology should free the people, not enslave it to machines" can be treated descriptively instead of just normatively.

There doesn't appear to be an easy answer. My comment was only meant to convey that soldiering on to worry another day comes at an opportunity cost.

i assume you mean the shareholder population?

I'll go in and say it should be redistributed to the population at large -- anything that gets us, as a species, closer to that Star Trek utopia is a good thing. World's got the resources for it already.

i just think that's what would happen. trickle-down economics and the idea that any savings will be passed down to the consumer is a marketing crock of shit.

The key word here is "pressured". There is no pressure to perform or participate in a hackathon. You can work on your own pace, or choose to dropout. Almost all of the people who participate do so because of their interest and not to win a trophy or some cash.

I guess you haven't had the pleasure of participating in monthly workplace "hackathons". Of course participation is optional, but it can look good on your promotion case wink-wink nudge-nudge.

I think hackathons could be fun but they should either be done independently from a company or do something that's not of any direct value to the company but something fun.

What's weird to me is that these people aren't forced to work there. They're working there because it's their BEST option.

Secondly, it is not a reward for working efficiently, it is a reward for working the most efficiently. There is only one winner and the other participants get nothing. The company gets the added value either way of course. This is a great if you want to break up employee solidarity too.

Thirdly, the term 'efficiency' implies there is some sort of process optimization going on; the same energy goes in, more value comes out. I doubt workers are suddenly provided with better tooling during 'power hour', so 'efficiency' probably just means 'run faster, exhaust yourself'.

Finally, you can bet 'power hour' metrics are used to adjust regular productivity targets related to other 'incentives', overall making the jobs more demanding and less rewarding over time.

The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor, treating workers as mere goods that can be bought and systematically manipulated, and thinking about living, feeling humans in this way is disgusting to me.

I suppose we cant expect Amazon workers to go into excel and calculate their yearly earnings from prizes?

If they did this, its a non issue.

But I suppose we can't expect Amazon workers to do this... correct?

>The whole system reeks of commoditization of labor

You say this like its a bad thing. If you can turn labor into something an unskilled/uneducated worker can do, humanity is more productive. This is the goal of creating processes.

It's dehumanizing, and petty to try and squeeze people out this way.

I wasnt going to make a career out of a job that gave me a free shirt for working extra hard.

But then again, I'm an engineer, so maybe I make better decisions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seems unlikely. Engineers are as prone to bad decision making as anyone else. Some of them - the supercilious dickheads who believe their own hype - even more so.

There is no such thing as a race to the bottom.. This is a common trope from people who don't understand economics. Union benefits are zero sum rent extraction, and in the long run, inhibit economic growth and with it broad-based wage growth.

There are professions when skill transfer is problematic, like a railroad engineer, but warehouse worker is not one of them.

It is indeed not frictionless and requires some effort, but it's certainly doable.

You've just explained why this power isn't realistic to invoke. If you're a warehouse worker, can you afford the unemployment time long enough to find another job? Can your family?

In real life most people first secure a new job and then resign from their current position.

To answer your question: no, my family cannot afford me not working for half a year as well. I believe this is the case for most of people not living with parents.

It’s a job. If you add more value, you ought to be paid for it in dollars, not raffle tickets.

At least a feudal lord had obligations to their subjects.

Since many (most?) people in the US cannot afford the land and other resources necessary to provide for themselves (e.g. via farming or craftsmanship), I'm not sure that it's unfair to draw a parallel between them and serfs.

It's really not that uncommon for people outside of major cities to own their home?

keep everything private

do not collaborate

> let the local governments race each other with tax breaks and other ‘incentives’, the winner gets a negligible shot at profits.

I highly recommend the latest Reply All - https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/132-negative-mount-ple.... It's about that town in Wisconsin that "won" the new Foxconn factory.

It's not as if Amazon can't afford to provide decent working conditions.

These are not exclusive options. Workers can make a decent wage and be incentivized by bonus programs.

I’m not sure how this is undignified or how to have enough dignity in such a program.

It’s a challenge to try to maximize productivity and having elective programs where individuals can choose to put in extra effort than they normally would could certainly be structured in a way that isn’t compulsory and reduces the risk of someone harming themself.

It certainly would award workers who work harder and produce more than others. And there could be valid reasons for lower productivity (ie, poor health) that are outside of worker control. But I think the aim is not to evenly distribute wages across all workers, but to allocate wages to the most productive workers.

Manual labor is a challenge to manage.

They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.

If they did it by saying "everyone that meets this specific standard gets a bonus of X" then i don't think anyone would really complain. But because they are overworking themselves to have a chance to maybe get a prize, it seems unnecessarily exploitative.

Imagine the olympics where there is no gold, silver, bronze. Is it undignified to award the highest performers?

A method that awarded everyone would not lead to productivity gains desired since it skips the competition and motivation. This only applies to manual labor and not to many other careers.

Competition is not undignified or wrong if it is fair and structured properly.

Overworking is optional. It’s something I used to be into when I was young, but not now.

It’s tyrannical if all weee forced to work harder, even if age prevented it.

The Olympics is a competition, not a group of people working towards the same goal. It would be MORE like giving one member or a relay team a gold medal instead of giving it to an entire team when they win.

That's not how a raffle works. You earn tickets which increase your chances of winning. The highest performer isn't necessarily the winner. That also limits how much effort people are going to put into it.

I agree that getting rewarded for actual work performed is strictly better, but in the end the workers get to decide if they want to play that game or not.

> They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.

I guess the possibility that warehouse workers are going to sabotage each other and risk getting fired over raffle tickets wasn't considered in the planning. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it sounds far-fetched.

This is a rather short sighted view. In many cases, they either play or they lose out big (either financially or even up to losing their job). For many of those outside tech (and some in tech), losing your job isn’t a risk they are able to take.

Or they can close down the shop if they can't find the money to do the right /required thing.

They would have said margins are too thin, that it's impossible to pay more, that menial labor doesn't deserve more, that paying more would result in immediate widespread layoffs, that warehouse employees have little recourse but to accept their lot or quit because that's just how the market works.

But that argument assumes Amazon, or any business, pays some objective measure of what a job is "worth", or as much as the market will allow. They don't, they often pay as little as they can get away with.

So yes, Amazon could close down the shop, but Amazon could always close down the shop. They could also afford to pay their warehouse employees more. They don't, not because they can't, but because they prefer not to.

It's not Amazon that creates this situation. It's the market system itself and it will always exist, because if Amazon doesn't do it some other employer will -- in some jurisdiction or scenario in which they can get away with it -- and gain a competitive advantage. Unless there's a labour shortage, or government action, it's a race to the lowest common denominator or worse. And that's why the formation of a union across the whole sector is imperative.

Clearly, if you accept a job, you believe the compensation to be fair. If it wasn’t fair, you wouldn’t take the job. It’s as simple as that.

Or it's your only choice. We're not talking about skilled labour with lots of options.

Picking between running madly around an amazon warehouse for 15 dollars an hour or taking some other low skill job for less seems fine, until Amazon realizes that the workers are all interchangeable and the company benefits more by burning through them quickly and replacing them with fresh bodies than it does by continued support for its staff with long term plans of employment. The second they decide to exploit their labor for their sole benefit, rather than something that can be seen as mutually beneficial for both in the long term, that's when people start to feel you should be doing better.

Also, just to address a theme that gets thrown around a lot. >>Working at Amazon is literally no one's "only choice" in the US.

What does this mean? The US is a massive country with huge differences from one region to the next, never mind the difference between the urban and rural areas within a region. To try and pretend its a unified country with unified value systems and a unified equally distributed economic system is asinine. On top of that, who the fuck knows what's going on in "Joe Random-US-Citizen"'s life. Maybe it is his only option because he also has to take care of his dying father and is racked with student debt from a failed attempt at getting his BA. IDK what anyone's value choices represent, but this whole "you can always just do better if you really wanted" is a lie I'm sick of being peddled. The US is economically more advanced than many countries. There's still people living in relative poverty. There's still massive social problems.

Any time someone says any broad group (Americans, Gays, Engineers) all face the same situations, I have to roll my eyes because it's never true.

Sorry if this came across as a personal attack on your views (it isn't, I don't really know them from your 2 sentences), it's just something I see get brought up and this was me finally responding.

Well, actually...

"The Law Store offers fast, face­-to­-face legal services in convenient Walmart locations."

Software developers don't have any trade union at all, and we're paid well.

The reason you can't buy legal services from Walmart is the same reason you can't buy software development from Walmart. It's just not their business.

You're not paying for legal representation. You're paying for all the time and effort the lawyer spend establishing their professional reputation.

You or I would get laughed out of court. A professional lawyer could show up, say the same things and get taken seriously.

They're being treated like dogs, pressured to perform tricks in exchange of a treat.

I mean, move fast to receive raffle tickets? Seriously?

The context of this practice matters quite a bit, but it’s hard to say that work incentive programs are undignified because dogs get treats for tasks.

And a raffle is literally a form of income since it has value and is taxed as income. Perhaps you mean getting a raffle ticket and losing isn’t income.

You've just described my whole life...

Relatively mundane work doesn't get any more interesting the faster you do it.

I'm not saying that Bezos and the people packing goods in a warehouse should be paid equally but the absolutely obvious unfairness of the modern capitalist economy is simply unbearable for more and more people. The fact that many people still don't seem to have any issue with having somebody earn effectively a thousand times more money than their employees is absolutely baffling. And then they go around shopping for tax rebates for their new headquarters. Everything is fine people, the system is working.

IMO this (and global warming) are going to be the downfall of capitalism. There's too much greed. Too many rich people complaining about taxes while people sleep in the streets. As a result people will turn more and more towards populists as they feel betrayed by the elites. That's how you end up with Trump, Bolsonaro, the populist government in Italy and the current protests in France. People know that they are getting shafted.

I remember reading that are a gazillion rules and regulations on attempted unionization, so "you're fired" might not be it.

But I understand that it’s possible to put a passage in the employee handbook that “if you belong to a union, the following does not apply to you; check your union agreement for details,” and to offer some benefits, such as profit-sharing, only to nonunion employees. Since labor law is complex, I don’t know what limits exist on that approach.

Edit:

Guess the number is closer to 75 now. It originally started in NYC several years ago, but has rapidly expanded now.

See the cities list by clicking on the “see all cities” link below where you can enter your zip code here:

https://primenow.amazon.com/storefront

I'm thinking in particular of Amazon Flex.

If you are not happy, with Amazon policy, they will just not give you any package to deliver.

Income inequality is so obscene that it's far worse than the Gilded Age. Watch this infographic chart video showing the current distribution: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM

Actually, it's not. It's a page taken out of the old soviet playbook, where factory workers were pushed to increase production through means other than pay increases or productivity rewards, and played with psychological tricks such as appealing to nationalism or even conformance with the regime's ideal.

The exploitation trick is as old as time, but it's not specific to an economic system.

Occasionally, companies try to organize with market principles internally, with divisions charging each other for services performed. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it turns into Sears.

Actually, it's not. State capitalism has absolutely no relation to how workers were used and abused by communist regimes.

For example, the following is from "The Failure of the Working Class" by Anton Pannekoek in 1946:

The workers of the world nowadays have two mighty foes, two hostile and suppressing powers over against them: the monopolistic capitalism of America and England, and Russian state capitalism. The former is drifting toward social dictatorship camouflaged in democratic forms; the latter proclaims dictatorship openly, formerly with the addition "of the proletariat," although nobody believes that any more.

Hence the saying: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.

The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.

It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.

Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.

Of course, a union has to recognize that it's not blindly serving its members, if it drives companies out of business. Like hindering technological advancement by refusing automation.

This. Capitalism is all about freedom of association. Unions only start to become incompatible with capitalism if they start to force themselves as a monopoly to control who may or may not work for a company.