“Are there no workhouses?”

Such a difference between talking about working at a warehouse from the outside vs being born into a life that traps you there.

I think HN struggles with topics like unionisation because most of us have just never been at the bottom of society without a way out. We’re relatively rich and so highly skilled - we lucked out to be nerds in a world of tech, perhaps due to timing or perhaps because our parents were wealthy enough to put us here.

It’s the same phenomena of loving Uber or Airbnb and not understanding the cost to others.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I don’t personally want to go work at an Amazon warehouse so I can see how awful it is. I work damn hard but I know how lucky I must be.

How do you get the rich to realise that the poor are simply, by definition, less fortunate?

Funny enough, I have often have the same thought. I'm a military officer and the enlisted folks are often living not far from the Amazon warehouse workers. Indeed, the highest paid officers in the military make less than 10x more than the most junior enlisted recruit. These are people who command hundreds of thousands of people.

I think a significant difference is that most folks in tech do not live and work among the skilled and unskilled laborers. In the military, you know the cook, the plumber, the electrician, and the riflemen, the air traffic controller, the network technician. Personally. You've been around the world together, you may have been in firefights together.

In the military, the headquarters jobs with the bean counters are rare. Bean counting is essentially synonymous with 'fat and happy'. In tech, the equivalent of bean-counting headquarters is 90% of the organization. It's extremely advanced bean-counting, but the field units have atrophied quite a little bit.

That's a great reply, thanks. I see from up/down votes that I've hit a nerve.

I really like your perspective. Reminds me of the attempts in new towns in the UK to try to mix different socioeconomic classes on the same street. "Show me and I'll understand." I grew up in a deprived town (but my family was comfortable) and I've worked a lot of awful jobs, maybe that helps.

So a good first step would be to integrate within companies more? Perhaps corporates deliberately avoid that. Much easier to treat warehouse staff badly if your valuable engineers don't know them personally.

almost guaranteed though its not completely covered by amazon, and workers have to pay monthly premiums like most jobs that offer healthcare.

The monthly premium is around $20-80/mo for healthcare plans that are seriously amazing compared to other plans I’ve seen in America, ie $300 deductible and $2000 out of pocket (with $500 of it covered by Amazon).

I was on the bronze-level Obamacare plans for years and it was about $300 for bad coverage in comparison to “real” private insurance.

There is so much digging at Amazon I’d like to see the delivery and warehouse work role required performance metrics and work role benefits posted so we can look at facts.

It offers a company plan that workers DO have to pay for and often choose not to because they cannot afford it.