Forgive me for sidestepping the larger debate about labor (which should be had), but I think Amazon should offer the option for customers to opt out of Sunday deliveries and put other reasonable constraints on the lengths they will go to serve us.

I'm not Mormon but their community has a practice of not shopping or doing business on Sunday. As long as we as customers demand services on Sundays businesses must stay open and some company will serve us... Instead of attacking this on the supply side we as customers should have the option to demand less. I know they offer small credits for accepting slower shipping but I specifically want to put some constraints on when the people who serve me are asked to work. I also don't want their insultingly small credit for this, I'd rather they plant a tree(s) with the savings.

If you select an Amazon Delivery Day that is not Sunday you can assign your deliveries to that day.

You can set your address to not accept saturday or sunday deliveries.

Done, thank you!

Maybe it’s my privilege speaking but I never understood what’s so uniquely horrible about Amazon warehouse work that isn’t also found in numerous other menial jobs. We have lots of labor laws designed to prevent various abuses. What’s the new abuse here?

Because they employ so many people, in so many jurisdictions .. they obviously hold a huge amount of power.

How should we respond to that power?

I think Amazon is in danger of legitimising arguably exploitative working practices, if they aren't challenged when people aren't considered as much as profit.

I don’t think Amazon has the power to legitimize it, they, and the gig economy if anything brought this more to the limelight.

Before this those people tended to be more invisible.

What's new is widespread participation in this oppression. Every buy from Amazon is another wage theft.

But fruit picking is a much worse job and everybody participates in fruit eating.

There were protests about fruit pickers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delano_grape_strike

It's still a bad job, and now it's deeply entangled with illegal immigration. That makes it hard to make it visible.

Amazon pushes the limits of the law a bit less, because its workers aren't migrants. But because they're not migrants it's easier to focus on them.

Famous last words while clicking 'Order now' on the Amazon website.

I haven't ordered from Amazon in 2 years. It is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, though I understand it might not be easy for everyone.

Is this the bad reaction to my comment, you think I'm a hypocrite?

It was sarcasm but do you use Amazon? I do think that it's hypocritical for people to actually be a customer while on the other hand participate in popular culture by throwing big words like oppression around.

The problem is not convenience, the problem is the way capitalism treats labor: as just another commodity. Free markets drive the cost of all commodities down to the marginal cost of production, and the marginal cost of keeping a human being alive is pretty low. Which is great if you buying, not so much if you're selling.

I run a bakery and the incentives to keep our employees happy is high. The cost of employee turn over via lost tribal knowledge and the cost of finding new people far outweighs taking care of the employees. Yes, one side of the business requires me to plug employee capacity and capability into calculations of the cost of goods, but stopping at simply labor is short-sighted. I pay more than minimum wage not only for skill, but to grow loyalty. It is because of capitalism we don’t treat employees simply as labor.

Things change radically when you go from ten employees to ten thousand. (And Amazon has over a million.)

I never liked this socialist angle. Even a worker-owned collective is capable of the same abuses that a capitalist-owned corporation is capable of. Humans are fundamentally selfish and vile, and they will always oppress each other if given the opportunity and incentive.

People are also violent and will commit homicide. Justice isn't about total prevention but reduction and a form of retribution.

We are able to, and need to, ensure there is justice for labor, for basic human rights.

> Even a worker-owned collective is capable of the same abuses that a capitalist-owned corporation is capable of.

A worker-owned collective is not able to abuse its workers for the benefits of its owners.

> Humans are fundamentally selfish and vile, and they will always oppress each other if given the opportunity and incentive.

Speak for yourself.

Or summarize all human history including the concentration camps of today?

"Humans are selfish and vile" != "There are humans that are selfish and vile".

It appears that when push comes to shove, humans on average return to selfish and vile behavior.

There have been accounts of divers, for example, losing their oxygen source and then in survival mode killing their best friend trying to obtain life-giving breathe.

This type of behavior seems to be the norm.

There are also many horrific accounts during hurricane Katrina along these lines. Some of these were covered by NPR.

It goes to show that if shit ever really hit the fan, you might have to be prepared for zombie-like behavior.

The parenting motto is “make it easy to be good”. For kids at least this starts with sufficient healthy foods, enough sleep, and some autonomy over ones own actions.

Some call this idea "The Fundamental Attribution Error".

> > Humans are fundamentally selfish and vile, and they will always oppress each other if given the opportunity and incentive.

> Speak for yourself.

Aren't you advocating confiscatory policies where you take value one person has worked for and give it to someone who hasn't? That, and the infrastructure to maintain it, sounds pretty oppressive.

Beautifully said.

What is to be done? (What then must we do?)

> Beautifully said.

Thanks.

> What is to be done? (What then must we do?)

Change the policy. Labor is a commodity because we as a society have decided to make it so. If we want to change it, there are lots of options available: More stringent labor laws. Higher minimum wage. Stronger unions. UBI.

The challenge is not in figuring out what to do. That part is clear. The hard part is execution because, at least in the U.S., buyers of labor have much more political clout than sellers.

> Change the policy. Labor is a commodity because we as a society have decided to make it so. If we want to change it, there are lots of options available: More stringent labor laws. Higher minimum wage. Stronger unions. UBI.

What about the other side of some of these things, UBI in particular? How do you account for inflation and higher costs for goods?

Example (and I know it's overly simplified): minimum wage goes up to $20/hour. People have more buying power, so they buy more (demand increases). Costs of goods go up. Buying power is reduced. Another call to increase minimum wage is issued. Cycle repeats.

How do you reconcile these very real consequences? Can we really say that the benefits outweigh them?

Answer is: they may very well have more benefits, but we can't know without doing them - and the consequences of getting it wrong could be permanently damaging.

Inflation is a totally separate issue. The value of money is the value of the goods and services produced by the economy divided by the total money supply. That is completely independent of how that value is distributed. If you pay for UBI by borrowing, you will produce (some) inflation. If you pay for it with taxes, you won't. Again, this is purely political. When the government borrows, it indirectly taxes savings (by producing inflation), which people generally don't notice as much as an actual tax bill.

> Can we really say that the benefits outweigh them?

That's a judgement call. And there is more at play here than just inflation. The economy is a very complex dynamic system. My point is that these things are not consequences of the laws of physics which we are powerless to change. These things are consequences of decisions we make as a society. These decisions are not easy, but they are ours to make.

> If you pay for UBI by borrowing, you will produce (some) inflation. If you pay for it with taxes, you won't.

Yes, you will (unless you do a flat capitation so thst everyone’s taxes are equal to their benefits, but what’s the point of that?) Downward redistribution is inflationary (in CPI terms) because of differences in the marginal propensity to spend, in the same way that upward concentration creates asset price inflation because of marginal propensity to invest.

> in CPI terms

Any economic policy that changes prices can be seen as inflationary if you pick the right index. The CPI is not what matters. What matters (to workers) is the ratio of the CPI to wages. It doesn't matter if the CPI rises (temporarily) as long as wages rise faster. As long as you are not actually just printing new money, the system will eventually reach a new equilibrium where workers have more bargaining power than they do today and capital holders have less. That is an attainable policy goal. The problem is that that the moment capital has all the bargaining power, and capital wants low wages, so that's what we have. As I pointed out earlier, this is great if you're buying, not if you're selling.

> Any economic policy that changes prices can be seen as inflationary if you pick the right index. The CPI is not what matters. What matters (to workers) is the ratio of the CPI to wages.

Since UBI isn’t likely to drive wages up (and, if as often proposed it replaces or offsets minimum wage, it may drive them down at the low end), I don’t see any real difference there, even if it was correct (I agree that what matters to workers qua workers is real [that is, CPI-adjusted] wages, and to consumers qua consumers real income; but that doesn’t alter the definition of inflation, just notes the inflation per se is not the concern for those groups in those roles.)

UBI is likely to lead to inflation, is unlikely to lead to general real wage increases (though that’s complicated), but will lead to real income increases in the low end of the distribution unless cranked too high high too fast (and there are negative feedback controls that should avoid that problem unless deliberately subverted, say by indexing UBI to inflation.)

> UBI isn’t likely to drive wages up

That is far from clear. If workers don't have to worry about ending up destitute if they lose their job they will have more bargaining power. They would also be able to allocate more resources towards acquiring new skills.

One of the reasons workers put up with shitty working conditions is that the alternative, more often than not, is to end up on the street. Remove that from the equation -- by whatever means -- and lots of things will change.

That's ridiculous.Inflation caused by raising minimum wage did not really happen. You dont really increase the cost of vegetables or bread because more people can buy it.

If we are worried about inflation we can use the same economies of scale to give people that depend on minimum wage things they would not be able to afford.

Housing,healthcare,education,food.

Net demand doesn't increase, because that $20/hour came from somewhere. Increase in wages means less elsewhere (ideally, corporate profit). Total demand remains constant.

That's a macro view. Drilling down there will be some products that get more attention, some less. Say, Bezos buys one fewer yacht, and his employees switch from dollar store cat food to Chicken McNuggets. Prices will jiggle around, but there's no increase in the money supply and so no net inflation.

Data repeatedly shows that there isn't a consistent effect from increases to the minimum wage -- as expected. There are too many other factors in the price of goods, and minimum wage changes get lost in the noise.

> Data repeatedly shows that there isn't a consistent effect from increases to the minimum wage

Care to share that data?

The "Empirical Studies" section of the Wikipedia page has a decent overview. There's a lot to drill down into:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies

I couldn't agree more. I was actually referencing a Tolstoy tract:

http://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/whatthenmustwedo.pdf

Build toilets into delivery trucks

” There is a cost to next-day shipping, and it looks like a water bottle full of piss”

Brings back horrible memories of being stuck in a 4 hour stopped traffic jam on the way to Disney.

It’s crazy how intense this workplace sounds.

It's important to keep our humanity and dignity. Convenience and economies of scale are not worth it if we doom our fellow humans to be at the mercy of companies.

This argument makes no sense. A 15 minute bathroom break doesn't change anything. You'll still make the delivery on time. If 15 minutes is so important, you could just add 15 minutes to the working day and still make that delivery.

There are a million ways to solve this without treating employees poorly or lowering the quality of the service. In the same system they use to calculate the optimum route and delivery times, you can plan and factor in bathroom brakes.

The company just chose not to deal with the problem, that's all.