And they felt so strongly about this they appealed a case all the way to the Supreme Court... That was the snapping point for me too and I have not ordered from them in a long time.
The felt confident that they were right about it and the SC confirmed it. It's classic double standards if you celebrate one winner at the SC and condemn others based on your political/ideological opinion.
It can be both legal and wrong. No need for a "double standard".
you mean the company that pays high wages?
The bulk of Amazon's workforce are delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and datacenter rats. They are not paid fairly. It's pretty obvious from the numbers. For more supporting evidence, read TFA.
Also 15 dollars per hour can be high or not depending where you live.
Waiting in line to be frisked is something mandated by the employer. They control whether or not I have to do it, and how long the lines are. Since it’s under their control, it’s their financial responsibility.
It may be impossible in some cases to have short commutes, but if, even by chance, you managed to move in the same building as your office no one would force you to go through the metro.
Commutes are clearly a grey area, waiting times to be let "free" are less so.
If amazon isn't paying for your time in line, they have no incentive to make it fast. They can invest the bare minimum to protect their own interests, and fuck over their worker who have to wait in line. If they had to pay workers for their time then there is an incentive for them to make the line move quickly.
I can't imagine a setup that is more hostile to your fellow humans as forcing them to waste unpaid time.
Isn't the purpose of the screens less about catching bad actors and more about cultivating a culture of fear/suspicion, and hopefully getting a few effective informants out of the thing?
If the lines go to 2 minutes, or I get paid while in them, where's my incentive to rat out a coworker?
One of these cases eventually made its way to the Supreme Court [0], but they ruled (in favor of the plaintiffs) about the validity of the collective action, not about whether the Fair Labor Standards Act covered donning and doffing (it does, at least so I believe.)
It seems like donning and doffing is considered as time worked because it's a "principal activity" under the FLSA [1], and that includes waiting time. Seems like being frisked would be a "principal activity" as well - it's essentially doffing - so waiting time would be included too.
Someone could make a pretty penny bringing a collective suit against Amazon over this.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyson_Foods,_Inc._v._Bouaphake...
1. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/field-assistance-bulletins/...
Amazon is not allowing these people to walk out the door and go home. That is taking their time for company policies. So that is working.
For a fixed location job, the commute is fully under control of the employee and fair not to count as hours.
For variable location jobs like in construction, my view is that potential additional commute time should be compensated.
Of course not.
Once you step into your work, you should be paid for your time. Especially when you have no control over that.
Law != ethics
Where is the 2014 Supreme Court ruling mentioned by this article?
Anyway, there wasn't actually a Supreme Court ruling. The workers appealed their loss in the appellate court to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Aside from a few specific types of cases the Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction rather than mandatory jurisdiction. This was one of those discretionary jurisdiction cases.
When they decline to take a case they generally do not give a reason. It may be because they think the appellate court got it right and there is nothing more to say on the issue. On the other hand, it may be because they think the appellate court is not right but what is right is not clear and they want to see the issue arise in other districts and see what the appellate courts in those other districts decide before they take a case on the issue. Or they may be ready to tackle the issue, but they just don't like this particular case as a vehicle for deciding the issue and want to wait for a case that would work better.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-ru...
Not saying, that you don't disagree with the courts decisions, but I keep getting this feeling especially from the US. Why do people realistically expect a company to not stretch things as far as legally possible? I get why libertarians would see it this way, but everyone else?
In short: It is not ethical to do whatever you can get away with. You can choose to ignore questions of ethics, but if that's how you choose to live your life, expect to have a lot of people hate your guts. People treating you like a monster is a predictable consequence of living like a monster. This doesn't stop being true just because the choices are being made by multiple people under the banner of a corporation.
Furthermore, shaming one company to change its practices voluntarily does little to help workers at other companies subjected to the same thing.
So we really should push to change the law with more urgency than we use to push any give single employer.
However, you DON'T have to maximize your profits above all other corporations. There's no such actual fiduciary duty and there never could be. That's the point the poster is trying to make - something being legal doesn't make it ethical and acting in a unethical, but legal, manner does not absolve you of contempt.
There is quite the discrepancy for example in European history between royals acting like monsters and people treating them as such. Sure, eventually you'll have the people grab the pitchforks and roll out the guillotine, but you might not want to wait that long.
How much true accountability is there for those people making the choices under the banner of the corporations?
In my opinion, big part of what law should be, whoever is in charge of enforcing it, is a set of rules based on societies ethical compass. If someone can get away taking advantage and abusing others, this begs the question if those acts are in fact unethical, or if the the law needs updating.
It is not about shifting blame for behavior onto the law, but how you decide what behavior is blameworthy and should be punished. And I much prefer having a at least a somewhat transparent formalized system for this over Mob justice.
Look, I absolutely agree that something can be and often is immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it is illegal, and maybe my non-native English is a bit clunky.
But I do not care about having the moral high ground. I care about continued bad behavior having consequences, society protecting itself from bad actors. This can indeed be done trough various means (non exhaustive):
- Create incentives to act in a more desired way
- Call for boycotts and shunning them socially to try to force them to change
- Change the environment so bad behavior no longer provides benefits
- Create / update law
- Actually enforce the existing law
- Having increasingly big protest movements up to revolution / civil war scale
I'm fine with any combination of those depending on context and/or as different steps of escalation. I just think a bunch of people voicing anger at corporations on the internet doesn't do anything and, on the other hand, in a lot of places the situation is not bad enough to justify violence yet. So I lean towards a middle way using the instruments of these supposed democracies to change things.
What I expect people to do, what the standards I hold people to are often different.
I expect Amazon to push things as far as they are able. I strongly dislike them because of it. My standards of acceptable conduct are above "barely legal" conduct. My expectations are below legal conduct.
I also can blame two entities for this outcome. The law and the courts are awful for allowing this to stand as the settled law on the matter. I blame them for the situation. Amazon is also awful for pushing the law to this point and taking advantage of it. I blame them for the situation, too.
A bunch of people on internet being mad at them has in my opinion not proven very effective at changing their behavior and making the people in charge accountable for their acts.
Because doing the right thing is different from doing the legal thing.
If you're only interested in maximizing your profits under the umbrella of law, you are, by definition, not interested in acting morally. Which means you're probably doing many things that many people would consider immoral.
It's a mismatch of motivations.
When Amazon employees are frisked at the end of their shift (which is a practice that applies to at least some warehouses), they are not paid for the time they spend waiting in line to be frisked. This is not an anecdote; indeed Amazon fought and won a court case insisting that it has the right to not compensate employees for this time. (See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-...)