Reminds me of the weekly clapping for the NHS here in the UK when what they really need is a pay rise and PPE supplies. Sometimes thank you is not enough.
In the case of Amazon this seems much more sinister and cult like. I struggle to believe that any of the warehouse workers buy into it.
I read a great comment on Reddit on the news article about the 7th Amazon worker dying of Covid-19, and their refusal to even share the number of positive cases with the other employees.
Quoted in full:
"I automatically get angry when I hear the word hero now lol.
It's propaganda. It's not for us, it's to help the customers and society not feel bad about shopping. We're not wage slaves stuck in our shitty dangerous jobs for shit pay, because if that were the case people would have to feel guilty about coming to the store to shop. People might even feel so guilty that they boycott and cut into profits and we can't have that.
So instead we're heroes! We're loyal dedicated members of the Retail Family, we're choosing to work to help society get through this tough time. If we're heroes, customers don't have to feel guilty about coming to the store. If we get sick or die, they can throw a parade in honour of our selfless heroism instead of doing the hard work of actually improving our situation. Calling us heroes is like. A warm and fuzzy way to dehumanize us."
Exactly. It's the main reason why I never clap on Thursdays 20:00, it's meaningless. I donated to that war veteran's fundraiser and I believe it will have much more of an impact than whatever clapping happens
Yes, and from next year all immigrations from abroad have to pay NHS immigrant tax per person which can be up to £600. We already barely use the services we pay for, and now they want to charge even more. Why not increase it for all citizens?
Really get the feeling they don’t appreciate immigrants like us
Do you believe permanently raising wages to offset black swan events such as the COVID-19 epidemic is a wise move? What about the next black swan event? Are they going to be paid enough then or they'll need a pay rise again?
Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) is in the 2% of the earners. Emigrant doctors couldn't even dream of finding comparable wages in free market scenarios in their own countries and come to the UK.
I think the best we could do collectively is to pay out generous bonuses to frontline nurses for the duration of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 epidemic is not a black swan event. It is a foreseeable event with a computable probability of happening. Epidemics are recurring events throughout human history, including in the present day. Sure, the recurrence is low, especially for global pandemics, but you can be almost absolutely sure that within the next 100 years there will be another one.
In fact, even in the black swan book, they are explicitly given as an example of rare but NOT black swan-style events.
Point being, governments and corporations should have epidemic plans. It should never come as a surprise. Sure, a small mom-an-pop place or a start-up can't really prepare, but a corporation the size of Amazon should have an epidemic plan and reserves for that. Not having one would simply be irresponsible, both to shareholders and to employees.
Edit to add: airlines, restaurant, and hotel chains should have been the most aware of this. If they do not have plans for resisting a 2-6 month epidemic when business is shut down, then they are simply gambling on government intervention. There is almost 0% probability of operating one of these companies for 50 years and not having to battle at least a local epidemic in a large country.
Here's how this would go. The UK government did have epidemic plans, including a stockpile of PPE. Here's how the BBC described that stockpile: "Coronavirus: UK failed to stockpile crucial PPE". Of the four items that it complains were missing from the stockpile - gowns, visors, swabs and body bags - two (gowns and swabs) were ones that the government didn't expect to need for the epidemics it was planning for, the visors are expensive and bulky to store but so easy to manufacture hobbyists with 3D printers can literally do it at home, and I'm not even sure what's going on with body bags because there was famously a huge Brexit stockpile of those. Anyway, my overall point is that governments and corporations don't get credit for planning, they get blamed for the ways in which their plans don't predict the future exactly.
Perhaps you missed the C4 doco which showed that stockpiles of PPE of all kinds were run down and what was left was often out of date.
Or the conclusions of the government's own Exercise Cygnus in 2016 which stated clearly that this should never be allowed to happen because the consequences would be beyond horrific.
> Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds)
This is just utter nonsense. The average UK salary is around £30,000. Nurses can expect to earn anywhere between £22,000 and £30,000.
Junior doctors (which a new doctor can expect to be for somewhere around 5 years) starts at £23,000 increasing to somewhere between £30,000 to £45,000. GP's earn around £75,000.
I think a Black Swan event is an opportunity to shift society out of an inadequate equilibrium. Not just for NHS staff but to reshape the relationship between capital and labor.
Top 2% of income is no great shakes when you look at the full distribution. The 0.1 and 0.01% make several orders of magnitude more.
Why? Aside from the fact that if you give everybody more money you're just raising the supply of money in the market so people essentially have the same purchasing power as before, except now their integer in a database is bigger.
This isn't how the economy works. If thst was the case nobody would ever earn more, which of course isn't true.
Wages are only a small part of a products price, and there also is enough evidence that for example raising the minimum wage does actually help people.
For why it works, its simple: non-rich people spend any extra money, rich people don't do anything useful with their extra money. Which is also why trickle-down economics is a scam when its being presented as a way to help poor or average people. It does work of course as a way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.
This is exactly how the economy works. If you raise the supply of money, prices are going to rise. Does not matter whether you print it or you just extract it from someone's bank account and redistribute it. That's Econ101. You're equating SOME people getting to earn more, with your original statement that EVERYBODY should be earning more. Well that doesn't work.
Also, rich people don't do anything with their extra money? The exact opposite is true. Most of rich people's wealth is not in cash, it's in investments - while the average folk's extra money is "invested" in products that they can't afford, like the latest iPhone or a fancy house/car. No rich person that didn't just inherit their wealth lets their money sit in a bank except for a small percentage of their wealth, because they know it's a bad deal. How does trickle down economics transfer wealth from the poor to the rich? The poor should have wealth to begin with, in order for it to be transferred.
>Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) is in the 2% of the earners.
Oh please. Have you read "This is going to hurt" by Adam Kay?
Yes. Rise all wages to the point where everyone can at least fully support a family with it. You know, like during the good times when capitalism was still generating prosperity beside the usual death and destruction.
It's getting harder and harder to participate in the modern world for me. So far I've deleted my accounts on Uber (because of the harassment reports) Airbnb (because they don't give a fuck about scams), and last, Twitter (because they were enabling Nazis, and continuing to use Twitter is basically endorsing Twitter in my eyes). But the majority of the world seems to just shrug and are fine with the terrible behaviours.
The slaves must free themselves - I always think of the start of the mining unions - the strikes went on for a long time, and they were very nasty, it was a huge fight. People have been tricked out of these rights that were hard won, capital won't easily go back to decent conditions for workers without a fight.
Early 20th century unionisation only happened in the US after pitched battles and gun fights, and when that didn't stop it it was bought off where possible.
A lot of that history seems to have been suppressed to the point that hardly anyone knows about it. It's certainly not something you'll see being mentioned on any mainstream media channel.
yes its disappointing, younger people don't realise how much blood, sweat and tears went into obtaining the working conditions they have now, and as you say, it's not taught much any more.
I remember going to a huge meeting and strike in the 80's, things were a lot more civilised then. I was a young apprentice, there was an older guy who was 'blackballed' - he had turned on a switch against the slowdown rules (a partial strike) - no other worker would talk to him. There were strike funds for people who couldn't afford it, it was a very exciting thing for a young kid, I don't know if it happens any more. People dying on the job so the owners can make more money is nothing new.
> is handing out “Thanks to you, we will deliver” T-shirts to its fulfillment associates.
Is it too hard to say "warehouse workers" instead of convoluted and misleading terms like "fulfillment associates"?
> It is a societal statement on their power dynamics, not a hypocritical act.
There is no societal statement. It's self-serving PR. And if Amazon is so hell-bent on announcing pay hikes and toot their own horn on how great they are for increasing wages then it should also be ok when they are called out for backpedalling on their actions.
> Amazon wants to be seen as exploitative today, because it will morally justify the layoffs tomorrow once all this is automated away.
Since when does Amazon have a plan to cease to be exploitative? Last time I've checked, Amazon was firing warehouse workers for complaining about unsafe working conditions, and then mobilizing VPs to put on smear campaigns targeting their own workers to avoid having to do anything about the problem.
I try to objectively characterize their reasoning.
I see comments about how it is awful of me to call them “fulfillment associates”—but this is the term Amazon picked[0]. And they chose it to represent how they see it fit in their worldview.
My personal feelings? I am saddened by the lack of compassion. But the only way for people to optimize for the fulfillment of all lives instead of the minimization of all costs requires, at this point, a far teleportation of the Overton window in the political discourse.
“fulfillment associates” - wow, the word employee is too laden with Socialist entitlement! Let’s new-speak them into “associates”... sounds like a Country Club membership
The same bullshit is happening everywhere. In the German Bundestag MPs gave standing ovations for care workers. Meanwhile those continue to slave away for pennies, now more precariously than ever, while the next items on the MPs agenda are bailouts for airlines and fucking car manufacturers.
We can’t live without the care people and we don’t want to live without the fulfillment slaves. »Sie schulden euch Glück und Leben.« They should have huge leverage, especially in these times, why will they not organize?
At one point it almost seems like he is suggesting to this poor guy that it is unreasonable for him to protest for better working conditions because "people like me" need to be able to place orders on Amazon while in lockdown. Imagine the difference in salary between the guy working for CNBC and the guy working in the Amazon warehouse. Feels as if we are watching some dystopian fantasy film like Hunger Games.
I think it's a knee-jerk feeling that during an emergency you shouldn't refuse to work because you are making it harder on everyone else, as well as taking advantage of the emergency. That sounds reasonable enough, until you think about the fact that unless they organize and demand improvement now they won't have the leverage to do it after the emergency is over.
>Bundestag MPs gave standing ovations for care workers. Meanwhile those continue to slave away for pennies, now more precariously than ever, while the next items on the MPs agenda are bailouts for airlines and fucking car manufacturers.
Slaving away for pennies and immigrant workers, anything sounds familiar?
A large portion of every sector in Germany (aside from maybe the parliament) is immigrant workers, because Germany has a lot of immigrants (2nd highest foreign born population in the world, after the US):
And particularly a lot of immigrants that come to Germany for work as it has a strong job market, relatively liberal immigration policy & a very old native population.
I don't know where you get your information from but it's largely fantasy. Perhaps you should spend some time in Germany getting to know it. Then you might also find the implication that Germans are lazy and getting foreigners to do their work for them laughable.
That article doesn't say what you claim it does. It also covers a lot of stuff that would be no surprise to anyone in the EU (within and outside of Germany), and it's not particularly well put together either. Any article talking about German manufacturing that doesn't examine its Mittelstand in detail isn't worth much. There are tons of other points missing there too. Let's just say it's not great, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind so we should just leave it here.
>Let's just say it's not great, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind so we should just leave it here.
It's against HN guidelines. Suggesting ulterior motives behind my comments, is seen as a comment made in bad faith.
Germany has great quality of life because it has managed to ship its underclass to East of Europe.
If you don't believe this is true then why EU doesn't have free trade agreement with China or India? Yea you may suspect that their cheap low quality product will flood local market and outcompete the local producers. But how about high tech producers who have vastly superior technology and productivity flood poor countries with their high quality but cheap to produce products? Is that fine?
All I am saying is, there should be no union and free movement of goods and people between poor country and rich country. When this happens, rich country becomes even richer and poor country does grow a bit but it's upside is limited in long run.
And any farmer in Romania who has sold his land to Automobile companies from Germany can attest to it.
Germany isn't a winner in EU because it's best, it's winner because it started off better. When EU was formed, German producers flooded eastern economies with their mass produced goods and bought out their lands and local companies. The opposite couldn't happen because Eastern producers were technically and capital wise behind.
Unlike others I don't really believe in moral superiority of West European countries the fact that France still gets royalities from Africa (stinks of Imperialism) and Germany cramming Romanian farm laborers by not even offering them "social distancing" reeks of exploitation.
As EU members figure out the con of perpetual poverty trap, they'll walk away from EU.
>For EU citizens, the EU is a labor transfer union by design. These 'imported laborers' were not forced, they took their chances
No it's not that simple, other EU countries had to open their market to technologically superior Western European nations who had better quality highly skilled labor and capital.
If it was simple, labor movement - I wouldn't even be bringing this up.
>Are you seriously suggesting it is a problem foreigners are not making up the board of directors of German companies
Yes it based on the fact number of immigrants Germany has.
>As a direct neighbor of DE ( I am in NL ), DE seems to have been very generous accepting refugees. A bit too generous for some.
It's just a knee jerk reaction to their aging population.
What a thoroughly disingenuous comment. Here, let me have a go at emulating your style:
>I'm sorry but this is emotive gibberish.
Are you saying all emotion is gibberish? So you want people to have no emotions whatsoever? You're literally in favour of killing people who display emotions?
> people to have no emotions whatsoever? You're literally in favour of killing people who display emotions
I'm saying this person is using an emotionally assumed moral highground to justify arbitrary and unspecified ends. I want to know more about what they are insinuating.
Personnaly, the COVID episode is the final straw. I live in France rural area. Amazon brings huge benefits and comodities there but I can't stand their attitude towards employees anymore.
Actually most of stories that influenced my decision are from US: employees fired by algorythm, fired because trying to unionize, etc.
It seems all of this is impossible in France but still, this is not a culture I want to support.
...but what if your impression is just based upon the bubble of news you consume? Isn't it possible you, from France, don't get unbiased news about US companies?
I consume a lot of news from US and France on a quite large political spectrum, so I think the bias is quite reduced. I also discussed with an Amazon french warehouse manager.
My decision is cold and well thought. Btw I would love to be wrong because I will miss their services.
Clickbaity title (and worse than the article headline). Amazon is not cutting pay. It is removing the hazard pay, which was extra on top of the normal wages.
Given the current scenario, isn't all pay hazard pay?
Edit: And it's mentioned in the article as well:
> The token comes as Amazon announced it would be cutting the $2 per hour wage hike it brought in for staff in mid-March as hazard pay for coming in during the pandemic.
The "Hazard Pay" was a pay rise for coming in during the pandemic, which as far as I can see hasn't ended yet. Cutting hazard pay right now, in real terms, is cutting pay.
> In the past few days, workers tested positive for covid-19 at Amazon warehouses and shipping facilities across the country.
> workers complain Amazon hasn’t provided them with enough information about the spread of virus in their facilities
> [a worker] only found out there was an infected co-worker after confronting a human resources staffer in the break room
> Some workers complained that Amazon pushes them to meet the per-hour rate at which it wants orders fulfilled, a practice that they worry discourages safe sanitary practices such as washing hands after a cough or sneeze. Others have complained about “stand-up” meetings, where workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the start of each shift.
All of these support the notion that working in a warehouse is risky during the pandemic.
In any case, how does the proportion of people who contracted the coronavirus at work to total number of positive cases so far have to do with anything? If your hypothesis is true (and you've given no evidence for that), it could very likely be because of the lockdowns we've had so far, which have prevented people from going to work in situations where they could've gotten it. Regardless, the proportion has nothing to do with how risky working in a warehouse is in the first place!
Regardless of what you think about what working in a warehouse entails, the article itself states that the hazard pay was instituted for the warehouse workers for coming in during the pandemic. There is no way you can cut that pay while the stated reason for that hazard pay is still extant, and claim that it is not a pay cut in real terms.
This isn't about whether the hazard pay cut was justified. IMHO it wasn't justified.
The problem is that someone who didnt know hazard pay was in place could see the headline and infer that a reduction in pay from the normal rate happened. You could say that's unscrupulous on the reader's part, but it's equally unscrupulous of the publication to use a potentially misleading title.
I am trying to reduce my Amazon-usage to a minimum, which works better and better.
Only feature which is left are actually the wishlists to keep track of my own desires and ideas for gifts to others.
Anyone knows a good alternative for any kinds of goods, which integrates with all kinds of online shops? I live in Germany.
Aside from the general tone-deafness of this move, shouldn't the management at the warehouses be the ones wearing the thank you t-shirts? To you know, thank the workers...
I'm sure those workers would probably prefer and deserve a bonus and a heartfelt individual thank you though.
Workers are resources, not people. You're not considered a person in the US unless your net worth is high enough to make work unnecessary, and you can deal with a serious medical emergency without being bankrupted by it.
Does Amazon management simply don’t see that stuff like handing out t-shirt is actually making them look worse? They could have cut pay and saved the cost of the shirts.
I’m genuinely interested in what people who think of amazon as an evil company think it should do.
It hardly ever makes a profit. Any profit it makes is from AWS usually.
It is popular because it’s so cheap, which is why people buy there. So really the solutions can only be:
1. Raise prices and consumers suffer
2. Keep wages low and workers suffer
3. Stop existing.
I wonder how many people who complain about amazons working conditions don’t shop there and buy the same product for a higher price elsewhere. I’d guess not many.
Consumers suffer because they won't buy that 50in tv? Really, any business that exploits workers should not exist. If some goods are just too expensive then people should really learn to live without them. I don't mind "suffering" as a consumer if what I pay reflects the real costs of production. It's called honesty.
The problem is that any company as big as Amazon is a billion pound train moving at high speed, it can't make turns that fast. So while I would like for them to try harder I don't expect it to happen.
That might well be, but your view of how consumers should behave is not what happens in the real world. A lot of things in the world should be some way you imagine but they’re not.
Otherwise amazon (or Walmart) wouldn’t exist, because everyone would support their local store. But they don’t. Prices matter.
A potential solution would be to pass regulations that protect workers. Examples could include minimum wages, profit sharing plans, or mandatory benefits.
That wouldn't necessarily affect consumer behavior but it would affect what strategies corporations are able to use to service that behavior.
Ok, but then amazons prices will be higher. Taken to the extreme amazon might not exist because it can’t deliver the low prices it has so far.
Is that what you want? If you do, that’s fine, that’s a fair enough perspective, but understand that you are probably making it harder for people with less money. Same goes for Walmart.
The minimum wage in the UK is $10.55 and amazon still works just fine. In fact we’ve had 1 day delivery for a long time, and it’s still working post-covid.
Yes they will be higher. Other companies that don't treat employes that badly, whether out of goodwill or due to being in places with more regulations, will be more competitive.
There will always be a company that delivers products according to the minimum regulations required by law - that's how capitalism and competition are meant to work (given a near-unlimited labour supply).
Correct. But in this Imaginary scenario it will Certainly be more expensive than current amazon. Is that more acceptable, to say the poorest in society, than bad worker conditions?
The poorest in society, at least in a functioning capitalist society, are those either employed according to the minimum regulations or those receiving state benefits. By raising both of these, we raise the purchasing power of the poorest in society, hopefully in a way that is commensurate with the increased costs.
We are able to provide both good working conditions and a living wage to all people. We can afford it.
I agree. I even remember an article about an Amazon warehouse worker that could only afford diapers sold by Amazon because they were the cheapest. The irony.
But like someone else mentioned, there are countries where Amazon has to pay minimum wage and it works just fine. I think we as consumers have the responsibility to vote with our wallet but we as society have responsibility to put boundaries into laws to prevent abuse. So in my view consumers, suppliers and legislators are at fault.
I don't buy from Amazon because they're the cheapest, but because of the convenience and the excellent support. I wouldn't mind at all if they raised all prices 10-20% to pay their workers better.
Likewise, I can't think of a single thing I get from Amazon that I wouldn't be okay with paying 25% more to, say, support their workers and be more sure the stuff wasn't counterfeit etc.
Doing this WOULD make it more difficult for Amazon to crush and destroy every possible local store and national chain store that could ever exist, thus making it more possible for other choices to exist out there in the world (or even in our own communities where we live!) so from a stock market point of view, from a 'Jeff Bezos First Trillionaire' point of view, I can see why they feel compelled to go as hard as they can. Their purpose is not really to serve people, but to destroy everything else that serves a similar function as them, in order to be completely dominant and allow for, effectively, NO MARKET but just only them.
That's called a unicorn.
I'd rather pay 25% more and have… a market, I guess. I'd rather have different options. I see the motivations here, but I don't mind saying there's no benefit to ME in them. I'd be better off with Amazon only one of many supply chains I could draw on.
They have to be shockingly extreme in order to stifle the whole market, otherwise stuff will survive as a 'less good option' and remain accessible in spite of not being as 'good'.
it makes no profit yet Bezos is the richest man in the world by some margin?
How can you buy into that narrative.
The no profit book keeping is just a way to avoid paying tax.
As a shareholder I would rather see them pay fairer wages, be taxed appropriately and have a slower rate of growth.
If the cost of scaling at the speed they scale comes from unethical business practices then the answer is to scale slower, not exploit the worlds poorest and most vulnerable so that Jeff, myself and a load of other privileged capitalists can get even wealthier.
I’m not buying into anything but investors are. Amazon isn’t profitable. It’s not to avoid paying tax, it’s to reinvest. And because investors don’t care about profits in amazon it makes bezos the richest man. This doesn’t have anything to do with my initial comment though. Amazon is cheap because it pushes costs down in every area. Including workers. And consumers like that.
From my POV the most productive growth amazon can make as a company would be engaging in better ESG practices There are forms of capital outside of material assets and intellectual property.
Amazon is losing human capital (tbray as a high profile example, but I am sure he's the tip of an invisible and silent iceberg)
Amazon is losing brand capital which will hit the bottom line (ethical consumption is an ever increasing trend)
Amazon will continue to irk Governments with its lack of respect for sovereignty laws (tax in particular, but also labour and monopoly).
I do believe that at some point the customer is the one actually that is at fault.
If you buy from amazon, it means that you are accepting what is happening in their warehouses.
Why everyone is looking to save one penny to buy an other yet product that will remain on a shelf after a month?
Be reasonable, buy to a company close by even if it cost a bit more; at least that person will make profits and will come to eat at your restaurant!
It is ridiculous that you've boiled it down to those two options. The 3rd is cutting executive salary and paying low wage workers. Also amazon is not cheap compared to my local competitor and aliexpress, people buy from amazon because of convenience.
And amazon makes profit on non-AWS products as well, don't be silly. I can literally google their financial statements to prove this.
I am often amazed at how executive pay is overlooked in these debates. I have no qualms with founders making a pretty penny from taking the risk of starting the company. Most executives appointed once company has gained momentum don't deserve the huge pay they get. Don't get me wrong they deserve to be well paid but not as much as we are paying them. I have been in companies where people said to be "absolutely" critical leave announced and company continues to function without missing a beat.
They aren't magicians, or doing something only they can do. In fact, name any other job that pays as well, even for failure. As mentioned earlier they take no risk and get all the reward. C level pay is the biggest scam of our time. And nice dodge with the ad honinem. A third option was presented as reducing c level pay and your response was to call anyone critical of thus bullshit an armchair expert. Why is your opinion so weighty? Bigger arms on your chair?
The fundamental problem with this solution is a simple, numeric one: there are very few executives and a lot of low-wage workers, so large-sounding pay decreases for the former can only fund tiny pay increases for the latter.
If your execs earn a billion dollars a year collectively, and you have 200000 employees, you can distribute 2500 dollars to them all and the execs would still earn more than the low wage workers. So if simple arithmetic is your thing, there you go.
Amazon has around 570000 employees, and 22 executives. One of those executives actually earns a lot more than 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, with just 2 billion dollars you can give a decent pay raise to every single one of those employees. Some don't need it as much as others, but whatever.
Is Amazon really that cheap? I live in a different market from the US, but Amazon is usually cheap but rarely the cheapest. But they are a one-stop shop for everything, they already have your credit card number, and you know what you’re getting in terms of shipping speed/return policy. They’re more convenient than cheap.
At least for me the differentiating factor is often shipping cost. When I look at purchasing certain products (e.g. weights for exercise) from other vendors, the shipping costs are often higher than the actual price of the product.
In the case of Amazon this seems much more sinister and cult like. I struggle to believe that any of the warehouse workers buy into it.