If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should have to own the trucks, pay the workers a salary, guarantee them basic labor rights, and so on. Foisting all of the legal and financial liability for bad practices onto fragmented and poorly managed subcontractors who only exist to serve Amazon as a single customer is a tremendous abuse.
Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.
Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy, and we can’t expect consumers to solve this type of problem.
>Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy
Of course not, however, they don't need full information to hear, at some point or another, that Amazon is a poor place to work.
And it isn't as if the government has a solid track record of producing new regulation lately. Can you name one well-executed regulatory initiative the US Federal Government has implemented in the last 20-30 years? Or better yet, one well-executed major infrastructure project?
I'm genuinely curious, maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.
One big federal problem with antitrust and other corporate–related law is that we have now had an unbroken half century of “conservative” domination of the US Supreme Court. Over that time consumer, worker, citizen, and small-business friendly interpretations of a wide variety of laws have been steadily replaced by interpretations friendly to wealthy/corporate interests.
That control should have been broken after Scalia died but the GOP-controlled Senate broke with any pretense of good faith or respect for norms or precedent and refused to allow even a moderate compromise candidate to come to a Senate confirmation vote. After regaining control of the presidency the Senate then eliminated the filibuster so it could force radical GOP ideologues through onto the bench.
> I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.
This is absurd. The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day. They do their work conscientiously and seriously, largely out of the spotlight.
Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:
https://www.scpr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/10/02/65410/
https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-what-is-the-fifth-risk-with-mich...
I'm not sure I need to read a biased polemic about how big government is good and the Trump admin is bad.
>The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day.
I've worked for government agencies, and this is certainly not how I would describe the workers there. I'd say this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805768 would more closely represent my typical experience with civil servants.. rampant incompetence.
If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should [be an even larger monopoly]
...
Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Amazon’s delivery network or other business practices. You’d have to ask a labor lawyer for a full account.
Simón Borreo, one of the founders of Rappi, said a few years ago in an interview[1] that the wildfire success of Rappi and other on-demand startups in Latin America and other emerging markets is due to vastly lower labor costs. The unfortunate reality is that by and large pricing for many items is artificially low due to (hyper)exploitation happening somewhere up the pipeline -- if something is cheap and accessible, often it is because somewhere up the chain, wages are lower or labor conditions are poorer. (Incidentally I think Simón's point should make everyone living in countries with strong labor and minimum wage laws who values those things highly suspicious of the on-demand model and the lobbying efforts of unicorns in that space)
It's relatively easy to drive availability for the small subset of the population who didn't notice the apples on their grocery bill cost $5.99 a pound because they were organically grown on a small biodynamic farm in Oregon that treats its workers kindly. It's much, much harder (or outright intractable) to drive availability for everyone else -- under the current system.
[1] https://lavca.org/2016/12/01/entrepreneur-profile-simon-borr...
Just vote with your votes for fair wages instead of tax breaks for Bezos.
Do we need HFT trading? Did we need traders in the pit? In any case, this resulted in the elimination of good jobs.
We could “automate” much of sports and just have fantasy leagues, why not?
Automating transportation, same thing. It will eliminate meaningful jobs. We are all contributing to this acceleration.
So we’re destroying jobs in many ways. From preferring auto checkouts to buying from amazon to putting services “in the cloud”.
Mentioned offhand in https://www.jstor.org/stable/2591872
At the moment we’re automating low hanging fruit and some arduous manual things (with agricultural automation and factory automation), but it will keep on creeping up.
There is only a certain percentage of people with aptitude to go further and further up the value chain. What do we do for the many who just don’t have what it takes? We’ve taken all their jobs away. A baseline UBI isn’t an answer. People will want more. People have _some_ ambition. Not everyone is made out to finding things to do at home all day (we need only look at retirees for data). What are they going to volunteer for? It’ll all be automated.
I don't know if this is true. Sure, if you grow up in a society where work is an important part of your self-worth for much of your life, it makes sense that upon retirement it's hard to see things differently.
But suppose you're raised in a society where this is not the case? Where for some, there isn't the often almost traumatic transition from play to school and school to work?
I'm inclined to believe that in such a society there will be different kinds of people, some who enjoy the tedious work, some who focus on art, and some who mostly fart around and remind the rest of us to take a break, so to speak.
As a child, I was always busy starting activity groups. I enjoyed learning for its own sake (preserved in part by not having to go to high school until I was around 17). I read voraciously. I explored. I learned a degree of diligence and discipline by other means that, in hindsight, felt a lot more natural than "do your homework". If I didn't 'have' to work I would probably still be doing the kinds of stuff that we now call work.
I've kind of become less certain that this is true for everyone, because other children seemed to mostly enjoy socializing and relaxing in various ways. But I can imagine there's a use for that too, and if we do manage to automate everything it's not like we can't afford these types of people too. I still suspect that with these other children perhaps they just hadn't yet found what innately motivates them.
If we care about workers and corporate behavior, we need to be willing to pay a little more for products that are made by companies who's ethics we can get behind. Purism and System76 are good examples of this in the laptop space.
When we do vote with our dollars, the results are often impressive, as seen by the surge in availability of organic meat and produce.