[HN Gopher] Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out ...
___________________________________________________________________
Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to
hire
Author : Umofomia
Score : 467 points
Date : 2022-06-17 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| slenk wrote:
| I don't know why anyone wants to work for a company that
| acknowledges for attrition. No wonder they can't keep talent.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>"If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the
| available labor supply in the US network by 2024"
|
| At what price point?
|
| Offering what working conditions?
|
| >> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker
| productivity over just about everything else and churns through
| the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after
| year."
|
| Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better
| wages, and benefits?
|
| Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better
| rules that are not attempting to run employees like running
| machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't
| have to make a choice between making their performance numbers
| and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck?
|
| These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get
| ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead
| of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How
| To Manage" work...
|
| The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness
| of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their
| numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one
| or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to
| your goal.
| akagusu wrote:
| Who wants to work under inhuman conditions and be treated like
| garbage?
| fullshark wrote:
| Tells you how bad their alternative choice is.
| [deleted]
| pram wrote:
| "We would love you back in 90 days," Pagan says the HR staff
| member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should "do some GrubHub
| or Uber," the HR employee said.
|
| lol this is just monstrous.
| rexreed wrote:
| Let's quote more of this for context:
|
| Pagan began working at the Amazon delivery hub in October and,
| within two months, had been promoted to a role on the safety
| committee for the facility. The new role didn't come with a pay
| raise, and is on top of a worker's core tasks, but Pagan saw it
| as a stepping stone to an official promotion. But in April,
| Pagan told Recode, he took two days off to have an infected
| tooth looked at and ultimately removed.
|
| The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of
| unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had
| enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the
| company did not pull from that separate bank of days because
| Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance.
| Pagan said he also had a doctor's note but was told the company
| did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been
| excused from work with a doctor's note previously. He said he
| worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up
| one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer
| worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.
|
| An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do
| about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job
| at the company in three months, per Amazon policy.
|
| "We would love you back in 90 days," Pagan says the HR staff
| member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should "do some GrubHub
| or Uber," the HR employee said.
|
| "I find the whole situation crazy," said the 35-year-old Pagan,
| who was supporting his wife and daughter on his Amazon income.
| "They're gonna lose a good worker for nothing."
|
| It's not the issue of Grubhub or re-applying 90 days later,
| it's the completely inflexible termination policy and the lack
| of any sort of humanness or flexibility around decision-making
| that caused them to dig their own hole, in this specific
| example.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| * at their wage levels
| Vladimof wrote:
| I try to avoid purchasing from Amazon to help them as much as I
| can...
| whatever1 wrote:
| Why is this news? Amazon employs ~1M people. Of course they
| cannot churn people for long.
| dqpb wrote:
| > the company is running out of people to hire
|
| Pay more. That's how capitalism works.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| A lot of businesses are like that, particularly telemarketing and
| low skill. Churn and burn. It almost feels like the pornography
| industry at times, every day someone turns 18.
| fullshark wrote:
| Amazon has 1.6 MILLION employees based on its last financial
| report, with 1.1 million in the US. Basically 1% of the US labor
| force currently works for Amazon.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What % of the population of the US labor force currently shops
| on Amazon?
|
| Amazon has become the substrate for more than tech- ordering
| stuff on Amazon is practically a utility like electricity,
| water and internet now.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| That's getting into too-big-to-fail territory. I'd expect some
| big fat checks for free money from us taxpayers to Amazon in
| the future.
| daheza wrote:
| I work for a company which Amazon uses and pays us per seat.
| Scaling with them while they exploded in hiring has been a
| struggle.
| donclark wrote:
| I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the
| country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot
| find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Maybe potential candidates finally understand how much worse
| their life gets in the US if they don't speak English, and they
| won't have money to go back to latin america.
| Sebguer wrote:
| That person is not reputable, a fact that was easy to confirm
| in minutes just by googling their name and finding them
| peddling 'Obama's birth certificate is fake' nonsense as
| recently as 2 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s
| ddingus wrote:
| No they aren't.
|
| They are running out of people to over exploit.
|
| Big difference.
|
| Amazon will find better compensation and a modest change to work
| culture and environment will bring them as many people as they
| need.
| duxup wrote:
| They've got a high volume of employees at physical locations and
| high churn.
|
| That seems like a recipe for this.
| alangibson wrote:
| The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment
| by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to
| take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end.
|
| https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...
| aaomidi wrote:
| We're also living in a volatile time. It might end up meaning a
| potential civil war is a lot more likely.
|
| Desperation creates extremism. I don't think the US is prepared
| for the monster it may unleash.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Have you seen how obese we are? Only civil war happening will
| be for the last packet of Schezuan Sauce at Mcdonalds.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You don't have to be that fit to pull a trigger.
| Conversely, look at all the wars that continue to happen in
| places with severe food insecurity. In theory starving
| people shouldn't be able to fight, in practice those most
| willing to fight get enough of the limited food supply to
| keep fighting.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The Fed has shown they cannot plan 3 years in the future.
|
| The odds they won't find an excuse to reverse course within 3
| years seems low.
|
| They talked about reducing the balance sheet for almost a
| decade and barely made a dent before more than doubling it
| during the Pandemic.
|
| I will be shocked if in 5 years the Fed's balance sheet isn't
| substantially higher than it is now.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I've also found it quite hard to predict things, especially
| about the future. So I have a hard time being mad at the fed
| on that account.
| formercoder wrote:
| If anyone that worked at the fed could predict the future,
| they wouldn't work at the fed.
| dhosek wrote:
| The future is notoriously difficult to predict.
| Victerius wrote:
| The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see, the
| future is.
| ineedasername wrote:
| We should focus on easier tasks and build up to it. First
| we should try to predict the past accurately. Once we're
| comfortable with that maybe we can move on to predicting
| the present.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This is the sad reality. The associated wage stabilization is
| going to be necessary for us to control inflation.
|
| SWEs probably don't need worry about remaining employed, but
| the days of salary wars will be over.
| alangibson wrote:
| > The associated wage stabilization is going to be necessary
| for us to control inflation.
|
| It won't. Everyone involved in business dealing with physical
| goods knows it's a supply side problem.
|
| Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this
| time. The Fed of course knows this.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Supply is only a problem when it can't meet demand.
|
| If demand drops then supply stops being a problem.
| mikem170 wrote:
| How come Switzerland has only 2.5% year-over-year
| inflation, less than a third of the U.S. rate?
|
| Last I checked there seemed to be some correlation between
| a country's money printing and current inflation rates.
| That's not to say that a protion of the current inflation
| rate is not due to supply consitrictions, but I certainly
| not assume that is the only factor.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| 1) prices were already universally high in Switzerland
|
| 2) swiss government regulates the price of healthcare
|
| 3) Switzerland uses significantly less fossil fuels and
| aren't as effected by the war in Ukraine
|
| 4) Switzerland passed multiple laws over the past few
| years to reduce the cost of goods, including banning
| foreign companies from charging Swiss citizens more
| mywittyname wrote:
| The Swiss Franc has traditionally been a strong currency.
| Probably the world's strongest.
|
| The CHF has gained steadily on the EUR since the pandemic
| and is up about 10% since a year ago. That alone is going
| to offset a lot of the inflation.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this
| time
|
| The Fed has no control over fiscal policy. You mean
| monetary?
| mc32 wrote:
| We're seeing manufacturers tell their suppliers of JIT to
| hang on to components because they don't need them right
| now. So I don't think that's accurate everywhere.
| corrral wrote:
| Rising wages are a _very_ small part of cost increases,
| except for a few things like on-demand quick-response
| delivery services (food delivery and the like) and even
| there, fuel costs are a lot of it.
| mc32 wrote:
| Those idiots!
|
| Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008
| was going to blow up one day. Technology and unsubstantiated
| sectors allowed them to print without repercussions for a while
| and the administration and them also tried to fool people into
| believing the inflation was transitory... Reckless idiots. And
| now wage labor is the one to suffer most.
|
| 4TT in spending for BBB? Uhhuh! Even Yellen said it was crazy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 4TT in spending for BBB
|
| Over ten years.
| mc32 wrote:
| All those "over 10 years" programs tend to add up on a
| yearly basis.
| pardesi wrote:
| 2009. Thats how "growth" came from last decade & half. People
| never realized that & majority will never. Stocks/Home prices
| will keep going up to infinity crowd thinks its a hoax.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since
| 2008 was going to blow up one day.
|
| You can't "predict" that something will cyclical will happen
| on some indeterminate timeline then claim success when it
| eventually does. Impactful actions have pretty immediate
| results. So if you "predicted" that the actions of 09-10 to
| have an effect, if effect didn't happen by like 2012, your
| prediction was wrong. The economy is way too complicated to
| predict out more than a few years because it's constantly
| undergoing major shifts and changes.
|
| Inflation is being experienced globally, even in regions with
| little/no economic ties to the USA. And the USA is
| experiencing less inflation than in many other countries.
| This suggests that the underlying cause is external to the
| USA and whatever actions Americans are taking in response is
| more effective than what other countries are doing.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > You can't "predict" that something will cyclical will
| happen on some indeterminate timeline
|
| It was in plain sight as early as one year ago. The fed
| itself had signalled exactly one year ago (coincidentally)
| that they are preparing to tighten money supply in 2023
| [1]. Of course they didn't anticipate Russian invasion of
| Ukraine and the ensuing supply shortage. But as far as
| cycles go it was clearly expected. Also, it was obvious if
| one had paid attention the fed rate history [2]. Interest
| rates were on the rise until COVID struck forcing both fed
| and treasury to increase money supply to prevent hardship
| to the people. Also, back in Nov 2021 fed had slowed down
| money infusion by reducing MBS purchase speed.
|
| People don't realise the extent to which 2008 GFC continues
| to reverberate. 2010s were truly exceptional years where
| interest rates were kept artificially low and fed kept
| printing money through QE (e.g., MBS purchase [3]). It
| would be really absurd to expect fed to have kept creating
| money and as the last decade drew to an end something had
| to give just that COVID postponed the day of the reckoning.
| Make no mistake 2020s are going to be really harsh money
| supply wise; a generation of people are going to experience
| what tight money supply feels like.
|
| [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/6/16/federal-
| reserve-...
|
| [2] https://imgur.com/a/np0FkyQ
|
| [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TMBACBW027SBOG
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Inflation is being experienced globally, even in regions
| with little/no economic ties to the USA.
|
| Oil is priced in USD.
| mc32 wrote:
| Most oil, but some oil is now being priced in Rubles (and
| being source-washed thru India). But the Ruble has been
| appreciating as well...
| robocat wrote:
| Oil was a similar price from 2007 to 2013. What is your
| point?
| honkycat wrote:
| 4T is a big number but when I look at the details it all
| seems very reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Ba
| ck_Better_Plan#Origina...
|
| Honest question: How are we supposed to maintain our
| civilization without some government spending?
|
| Is climate change going to fix itself? Is our infrastructure
| going to modernize itself? We need to migrate to EVs and
| build out energy infrastructure.
|
| What is going to happen to aging and disabled people? The
| current answer appears to be to have them live in the
| streets.
|
| The country's 1% currently own 70% of the wealth. I think
| they can handle some taxation, especially when those taxes
| are going to be used to modernize our infrastructure.
| alangibson wrote:
| It's not the money supply. It's a supply side problem due to
| Corona shutdowns. All the Fed is about to do is induce a
| bunch of unemployment.
| native_samples wrote:
| It's both. The money supply grew enormously to fund the
| Corona shutdowns. You can see it clearly on a graph of M2.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
|
| Such a fast increase in such a short amount of time is
| extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented. There's nothing
| even remotely close to that instant increase since the
| dataset begins at the start of the 1980s.
|
| And then the COVID jump didn't only make a huge increase by
| itself, but the slope of the graph permanently increased.
|
| It's basic economics that if you do that to the money
| supply you will get a massive jump in inflation.
| albatross13 wrote:
| Since you seem to know your stuff, can you give me a
| slight tl;dr on the consequences of M1 and M2?
|
| M1 also shot way up:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
| native_samples wrote:
| Well, these are measures of the money supply. If the Fed
| "prints" money, then M1/M2 go up to reflect that. And
| they went up a lot. M2 went up by 40%, M1 it's harder to
| say because they adjusted the definition _exactly_ at the
| time they started printing tons of stimulus money (what a
| coincidence). But it 's definitely grown by a vast
| amount.
|
| The consequences of money printing are extremely basic
| and well known since antiquity. You get both inflation
| and, less well discussed but more important, consequent
| distortion of production in the currency zone as
| resources are reallocated to wherever the newly printed
| money enters the economy. The Edict of Diocletian was an
| example of this from Roman times [1].
|
| Unfortunately, in the last few years we've seen something
| very disturbing. Central bankers, who are theoretically
| chosen for their command of economics, have become
| delusional about this and started arguing that actually
| money printing doesn't create inflation at all [2]:
|
| _" But the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has
| dismissed claims that the Fed's money-printing is fueling
| today's price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions
| associated with reopening the economy. Like his most
| recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell
| says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a
| link between the amount of money circulating in the
| economy and rising prices."_
|
| This is economic illiteracy and sets us on the path to
| absolute ruin. If it were true then after the economy had
| "re-opened" (whatever that means) we'd experience
| deflation as prices re-adjusted back to their pre-
| pandemic norms, but no such deflation will ever happen,
| because inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary
| phenomenon".[3]
|
| In my view it's all a part of the same package of social
| phenomena you might call "government expertise failure".
| Anywhere you have the perception of expertise (whether
| justified or not), you create people who are incentivized
| to abuse that perception. Governments are filled with
| technocrats who claim to fully understand and control
| large systems, but their statements and beliefs seem to
| have been departing from what's actually correct at an
| ever higher rate. We are now all paying the price for
| their delusions at the checkout.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/06/fe
| deral-r...
|
| [3] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-
| spending/heritage-explai...
| ameister14 wrote:
| I mean...50% of the increase since April 2020 is the
| addition of OCD's to M1, isn't it?
|
| Why wouldn't it be better to look at the total monetary
| base?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > It's a supply side problem due to Corona shutdowns
|
| This is a lie being spread around. It's actually extracting
| stimulus back from the poor, making up for lost profit
| during COVID, and decreasing total employment.
|
| The market holds more power in the price of oil than the
| fed does with interest rates. The fed and the market are
| teaming up to make up for any ground (in profits and
| operating cost) that was lost during COVID.
| pardesi wrote:
| From a recent Bloomberg article: Wealth of bottom 50%
| doubled between 2020-2022. Top 1% rose significantly. While
| the remaining 49% didnt budge much. Interpret it for your
| supply chain concerns.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| How much of that wealth increase for the bottom 50% was
| driven by exploding property / home value increases ?
| monklu wrote:
| > the remaining 49% didnt budge much
| mywittyname wrote:
| The bottom 50% own very little. Home ownership rates in
| the USA are like 65% and poorer people are less likely to
| own their homes.
|
| So the answer is likely, a negligible amount. The
| increase in wealth among poorer people was most likely
| driven by stimulus money and a bit due to wage increases
| (which also favored the poor).
| sschueller wrote:
| Covid was the accelerant.
| mc32 wrote:
| They primed the pump, stimulated the economy, people had a
| bunch of money to spend, no where to put it. But aside from
| that, we're seeing MFGs tell their suppliers to slow their
| parts deliveries as demand is cooling.
|
| Their hands are in this. Corona has a role too, but so does
| the Fed and the admin. If instead of Biden and it were the
| Repubs, or, god forbid, Trump, imagine the headlines and
| finger pointing. we'd be getting --they'd probably be
| overshooting with their blaming, but we'd definitely see
| more blame at the foot of that administration and the Fed.
| [deleted]
| fugalfervor wrote:
| It's both. There's evidence supporting the idea that COVID
| relief contributed to inflation, if you'd like I can link
| the fivethirtyeight article exploring this.
|
| However, I should note that if it were up to me, I would
| accept inflation to save lives every single time. Without
| that relief, people would have died, starved, or gone into
| life-ruining debt. Inflation is unfortunate, but better
| than the alternative.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > There's evidence supporting the idea that COVID relief
| contributed to inflation
|
| The way inflation is being used here is not what it has
| traditionally meant. Inflation, ie, too much total liquid
| cash, accompanied by super high prices for labor (and
| therefore goods) started secretly and dramatically a very
| long time ago. It's debated if it's the 60s, or some
| people say as far back as pre or post great depression.
| That runaway inflation is an old story and has become the
| norm.
|
| The current definition of inflation is "whether the
| working class has enough money to feel secure." Which is
| something the market hates with a passion. The market
| wants all the money in the hands of the rich, so it can
| be in the market. The market wants cheap labor and an
| immobile workforce.
|
| The market ALREADY thought that the workforce had too
| much money BEFORE COVID. So they were absolutely appalled
| at the idea of a stimulus. So what you are seeing
| described as inflation is really that. Cost of goods are
| up because of price gauging barrels of oil, which is
| intentional.
|
| The measures taken to "reduce inflation" are actually to
| get money out of the workforce and back into the market.
|
| If you want to look at inflation, look at how much money
| is being held by the 1%.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Everyone is Ludwig von Mises these days.
|
| Time to start buying stock in Keynes.
| toolz wrote:
| Everything about our federal monetary policy is Keynesian
| and has been for a long time now, what do you mean?
| spamizbad wrote:
| ah but it will control inflation. So when the bank repossesses
| your home you can rest easy knowing a gallon of milk is 7 cents
| cheaper.
| adrianb wrote:
| Actually controlling inflation means slowing it down. So the
| gallon of milk will be only 7 cents more expensive than last
| month, not 70 cents.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > when the bank repossesses your home
|
| Most homeowners have been in their homes for a while,
| refinanced, and have benefited from a fixed payment for their
| home while wages have risen with inflation.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Who'da thought unsustainable labour practices are unsustainable.
| youessayyyaway wrote:
| I think this article might bury the lede a bit:
|
| >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience
| as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late
| 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for
| new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the
| decision to intense competition among employers.
|
| People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because
| $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in
| their geographic location.
|
| After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to
| find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token
| raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows
| that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the
| quantity of people that they need.
|
| It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum
| wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
| brightball wrote:
| I guess Walmart decided to become a better employer.
| efitz wrote:
| > It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal
| minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
|
| Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn't
| needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the
| employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
| glmdev wrote:
| It's not needed right _now_, perhaps, but wait a few months
| or a few years. Next time the job market shifts back to the
| employers, the incentives will align the other way.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse
| experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told
| Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average
| starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour,
| attributing the decision to intense competition among
| employers.
|
| This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often
| reveals the bias of the journalist.
|
| 1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr
|
| 2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr
|
| Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two
| statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this
| isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of
| journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like
| this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared
| understanding.
| whiddershins wrote:
| I don't think that formulation is misleading, it is GP who
| put an interpretation on it that was critical of Amazon.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| The point still stands: other employers are offering
| competitive wages for similar roles and are forcing Amazon to
| react. Otherwise Amazon wouldn't be struggling to hire
| warehouse workers.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| Totally, but why do a MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) comparison
| to bolster that point at all? Why not exclude the
| comparison, since it doesn't really communicate what the
| actual wage options are for prospective new warehouse
| workers or experienced workers.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I
| hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead
| to improved shared understanding.
|
| Shared understanding is not and never has been the goal of
| journalism, possibly excluding the business press. Stories
| are more interesting with heroes and villains so journalists
| create them if necessary.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The journalist did their job by offering these statements
| with all the qualifiers that you used to make your
| comparison.
|
| Journalists have to work with the information they get; they
| can't force two employers to give them perfectly comparable
| figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do
| get.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| There are plenty of websites where employees share their
| wages/salaries, which enable direct comparisons between
| companies. A simple google search reveals such data. Also,
| for a lot of these jobs, the companies post the pay ranges
| on the actual job description.
|
| These wages aren't some super secret data point.
| Referencing a 2021 Reuters article as the source for Amazon
| wage data is an interesting choice, when you can find
| better comparable data by spending 5 minutes on Google.
| simonw wrote:
| When you're working as a professional journalist, a
| "simple google search" isn't enough: how can you be sure
| that the information you are seeing on those kinds of
| wage comparison websites is accurate, and comes from
| people who genuinely worked at those companies?
| FFRefresh wrote:
| Yours is a broad epistemic question. How can you be sure
| of anything? How can you be sure what the Amazon exec
| stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?
|
| We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My
| position is that it's best to be transparent with our
| uncertainty.
|
| If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to
| directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation
| against each other", I would have loved it, because it'd
| show transparency/honesty/authenticity. Or if they did an
| analysis using data from job postings or wage sites and
| were very transparent on their methodology and admitted
| what you stated "These figures were taken from job
| postings on X.com, which can often have ranges. Consider
| there to be some degree of imprecision."
|
| I totally get that it's not a norm in the media today to
| do that, and there are a lot of structural incentives
| that create that situation. I can empathize with each
| actor/individual within the broader system, and that
| they're doing their best within the world they live in.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty
|
| Why is it best? I'm not interested in reading a bunch of
| gibberish disclaimer that I already know, and that all
| readers should know when consuming media. People can be
| wrong, facts are not black and white, and truth is a
| spectrum. It's not the job of a journalist on a deadline
| to spoon feed you critical thinking.
| simonw wrote:
| "How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a
| Reuters article last year is accurate?"
|
| You can't. That's why the article says "An Amazon
| executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was
| bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US
| to more than $18 an hour" - rather than stating as fact
| that "in 2021 the company bumped the average starting
| wage...".
| FFRefresh wrote:
| My comment was rhetorical in response to your prior
| comment on saying you can't use certain data points
| because of uncertainty. It was about that principle. The
| citation of the source of data here is okay, I'm not
| suggesting they were wrong to indicate where the
| quote/data point came from.
|
| The greater point is about source/data selection.
| MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) is a weird comparison to make.
| And choosing to quote two completely different sources
| for both the MAX(Walmart) data point [resolves to $25]
| and the MIN(Amazon) data point [resolves to $18] is
| strange, and I feel should have been explained if they're
| going to use quotes to communicate what might be
| happening in objective reality.
|
| How was Sheheryar Kaoosji, of the Warehouse Worker
| Resource Center, able to communicate what the max wage
| for a Walmart worker was, but unable to provide any
| comparable data point for Amazon (or it was provided, and
| an editor/journalist excluded it)?
| swatcoder wrote:
| I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful
| clarification about how those two statements relate, but the
| part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the
| journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political
| meme.
|
| You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also
| likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice
| the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly
| comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners
| because they needed to pick up their kid from school.
|
| _Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah..._
| FFRefresh wrote:
| Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the
| journalist (which may or may not be there).
|
| Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist,
| I do hope that we can find leaders (whether
| people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information
| environment to improve shared sensemaking.
|
| In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary
| deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups
| shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared.
| That's the world of today, and it leads to a very
| muddied/confused information environment, but I don't
| believe it's the only possibility for us.
| koofdoof wrote:
| I think you're correct that the statement isnt necessarily
| indicative of the writer having a specific bias. However
| misleading yet provocative comparisons like that are
| actively incentivized by the structure of journalism at the
| moment. Writing like that takes less effort and research
| yet it gets more views and shares. So perhaps its not
| malice or agenda pushing, but the writer also understands
| that being misleading is directly profitable. Why would
| they bother doing the work to make a more accurate or
| nuanced comparison if will hinder their own interests.
| CPLX wrote:
| Well yeah, but that's a very very direct explanation of why
| people might LEAVE Amazon to go work at Wal Mart, since they
| fit into that category of some workers with past experience.
|
| Turnover is the subject of the story, those two statements
| seem directly relevant.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples
| comparison
|
| Isn't that a good thing? What's your complaint?
| blagie wrote:
| Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has
| two corollaries:
|
| 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees
| would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and
| have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a
| lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
|
| 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay
| more while being competitive with other businesses.
|
| This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled
| moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments
| could be read into what I wrote).
| president wrote:
| Solution to #1 is bringing in workers that care more about $
| than lifestyle. Same situation in the tech industry.
| [deleted]
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach,
| guess where workers would prefer to go?
|
| You can really close to really identifying the issue but
| there's more to build off of this point. Amazon _does_ offer
| a (somewhat) comparable wage to "a lazy cafe job at the
| beach" but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in
| every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands
| of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-
| side jobs to be had.
|
| Previously, that meant that Amazon didn't have to raise wages
| (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs
| and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the
| hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring
| nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that's
| not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don't make
| employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human
| beings as being fungible.
|
| The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this
| historically-low unemployment we're seeing is coming to an
| end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.
| blagie wrote:
| I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza
| joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind
| shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and
| professional when a customer would draft in, but for the
| most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost
| guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty
| of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like
| that much above minimum wage, or anywhere close to Amazon's
| wage.
|
| If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's
| nightmarish warehouses.
|
| That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is
| probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a
| homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country,
| which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent /
| mortgage needs a bit more.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving
| for the downpayment?
|
| 30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United
| States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/libra
| ry/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
|
| But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent,
| though childcare would take a big bite out of their
| budget even at 60K per year.
|
| Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have
| jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than
| 15/hour as well.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-
| of-4...
| [deleted]
| jppittma wrote:
| Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound
| foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe."
|
| 1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than
| it does for individual employees to acquire on the open
| market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost
| to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp
| package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it
| weren't provided.
|
| 2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and
| asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than
| hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my
| weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours
| 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its
| money than the sweat shop.
|
| 3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1
| person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your
| competitors.
|
| 4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible
| for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for
| rubes.
| bsedlm wrote:
| It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the
| employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is
| exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on
| Amazon's side.
|
| Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar
| to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot
| of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g.
| due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as
| clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact
| that most law makers (specially senators) are from very
| wealthy backgrounds already...
| blagie wrote:
| I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily
| because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never
| worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong
| opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for
| people who have worked there, and therefore have better-
| informed opinions.
|
| I can make academic statements like this one: From the
| perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient,
| frictionless market would be proportional to contribution.
| If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes,
| they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a
| perfectly frictionless, efficient market.
|
| I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose
| perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is
| incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world
| around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to
| which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the
| individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether:
|
| - Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the
| time; or
|
| - Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor
|
| depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew
| of other things.
| abakker wrote:
| Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered
| into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it
| includes productivity measures?
|
| look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think
| it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with
| wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions.
|
| All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told
| recently by a company providing outsourced help desk
| services that they were struggling to compete for talent
| because target was paying more than they were. I told them
| that they were not paying enough. they responded that their
| clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the
| service...The answer is that either you will get
| underqualified people, declining service quality, or you
| will pay more.
| int_19h wrote:
| > Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate,
| entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative
| because it includes productivity measures?
|
| No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance
| between employers and employees - and market competition
| means that companies that don't exploit as much as they
| can lose to those that do.
|
| Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the
| market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first
| one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why
| don't we try the second?
| cupofpython wrote:
| If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with
| you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is
| exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to
| go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people
| who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the
| problem.
|
| People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead
| or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some
| people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of
| putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to
| get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the
| overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to
| help.
| mbesto wrote:
| > the market will solve this.
|
| I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is
| true, then the market is basically solving this now.
|
| In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for
| warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs
| 250k of them to operate their biz and the average
| retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left
| previously are now looking for jobs and the only option
| is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor,
| then they will collectively argue for higher pay.
|
| Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work
| conditions eventually catches up with them and the market
| will respond.
|
| If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the
| more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the
| mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be
| repossessed.
| ruined wrote:
| i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than
| it costs to keep them around, that's by definition
| exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely
| material.
|
| how you _feel_ about it is up to you, but the more it
| sucks for the worker the less they 'll like it.
|
| it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this
| situation involves the threat of fairly immediate
| homelessness, hunger, and family separation.
|
| maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market
| might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences
| than many of us would like, and we all have to live with
| them.
| prewett wrote:
| > if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it
| costs to keep them around
|
| That's a pretty simplistic argument. For one thing, it
| assumes a zero-sum game. But in economic theory both
| sides need to gain something in order for a transaction
| to occur. Walmart is not exploiting its customers just
| because it gets more from the customer than it cost (i.e.
| profit). Both sides are benefiting: the customer gets
| thousands of products in one location at pretty much the
| lowest possible price. Likewise, Target is not exploiting
| its customers just because it has higher prices than
| Walmart; customers get thousands of products in one
| location with somewhat higher quality than Walmart and a
| good deal better style. Target has a fairly loyal
| following, in fact, indicating that customers derive
| value from Target, even though Target is turning a
| profit; they could always go to Walmart if they were
| unhappy.
|
| My employer is (hopefully) getting more value from me
| than they are paying for. I do not see it as exploitative
| at all: I could be in business for myself, but I already
| tried it and I discovered I did not want to bother with a
| lot of the business stuff, and people were not interested
| in paying for my product. So I switched the (internally
| perceived) product I am selling: now I am selling my
| software engineering services. In return I get some
| money. I'm a lot happier now than when I felt like I was
| an employee.
|
| The problem is not that Amazon is getting more perceived
| value from the worker than the perceived value that they
| are paying the worker. The problem is that Amazon is
| abusive; people work for them either because they pay
| enough to make up for the abuse (at least the initial
| perception), or the worker does not feel like they have
| other options. The latter is not a problem of companies
| making a "profit" on workers, though; that is required
| for any employment to take place. It is a problem, but it
| is a different problem.
| jholman wrote:
| > that's by definition exploitation
|
| I think you're just factually wrong about this particular
| part. If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that
| the definition of "exploit" is "derive net profit from",
| but I've never seen any definition like that. Generally,
| I think there are two definitions:
|
| 1) use.
|
| 2) use unfairly
|
| The first is typical when describing _resource
| exploitation_. The second is typical when describing
| _relationships between humans_. In neither case does net
| profit come into it.
|
| That's both my personal understanding of the word (but
| who cares what I think), and also what I see in three
| different online dictionaries that I just checked. So I
| ask you: where are you getting your definition from?
| andi999 wrote:
| Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the
| staff. The definition is no good.
| ruined wrote:
| true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a
| material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.
| adrianN wrote:
| I'm not a native speaker, but to me _exploitation_ has a
| negative moral connotation. I think it 's possible for
| companies to make use of their employees to make a profit
| without exploiting them.
| ruined wrote:
| the negative moral connotation of "exploitation" is an
| effect of anticapitalist propaganda :)
| SR2Z wrote:
| It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is
| because two people can walk away from a trade better-off
| than they were before.
|
| It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into
| working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon
| is breaking labor laws.
|
| "Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of
| open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's.
| Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and
| hunger is hilariously wrong.
| ruined wrote:
| sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be
| hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands
| this. of course there is an element of choice.
|
| but you are underestimating how immediate and real the
| threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who
| work warehouse jobs.
|
| >It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into
| working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon
| is breaking labor laws.
|
| these are both literally happening.
|
| if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of
| their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be
| profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it
| doesn't require tricking anyone.
|
| as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the
| NLRB agrees.
| anotheracctfo wrote:
| Or you could band together and collectively withhold your
| labour. These are solved problems, its how the
| impoverished and exploited ended the gilded age.
|
| Individualization is heavily pushed because capitalism
| requires fungible labour. But if you band together then
| capitalism breaks down, because pure ideology runs into
| the brick wall of reality.
| politician wrote:
| The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on
| their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly
| speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their
| compensation at the outset of the engagement.
|
| This is problematic for employers like Amazon that
| ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why
| structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push
| back.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government
| can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market
| determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and
| the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's
| apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.
| hadlock wrote:
| Minimum wage is important when you have more people wanting
| to work, than jobs. Right now 1 in 300 people just died, a
| bunch retired, and 3-5% of the remaining workforce is out
| with covid and/or post-covid syndrome. So right now there are
| more jobs than workers.
|
| Given people's natural inclination towards reproduction, at
| some point in the future, there will once again be more
| people than jobs, and minimum wage will once again become a
| flashpoint as quality of life begins to shrink. That's not
| even accounting for inflationary effects on the bottom 75% of
| wage earners.
| FredPret wrote:
| As long as people are even mildly productive, economic
| growth will handily outpace population growth.
|
| This has been going on for a very long time now, which is
| why we're all so wildly rich compared to 100 years ago.
|
| My grandparents remembered a time when _completely_
| emptying a jar of peanut butter was essential and lavatory
| paper was counted by the individual sheet. Today I have
| homeless people refusing my gifts of food.
| munk-a wrote:
| That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America
| is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by
| value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the
| minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent
| extreme abuse of employees.
| corrral wrote:
| This is nonsense unless you're ready to go deeper on what
| "true" and "natural" mean here. Beware: it'll be easy to run
| into tautology.
| irrational wrote:
| Isn't it? My sister lives in a state where the true minimum
| wage is federal minimum wage. My teenager and her teenager
| both work at the same fast food place. My son makes $16/hour,
| her son makes $7.25/hour.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has
| to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.
| esaym wrote:
| >The purpose of minimum wage is a floor,
|
| It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that
| leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial
| first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were
| married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on
| all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare,
| food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered
| below the USA poverty line.
|
| I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it
| is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the
| government will pick up the other half. That is not "self
| regulation".
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It makes sense, kinda. When your public and private
| social programs are numerous and disconnected, getting a
| job can mean losing a lot of benefits while qualifying
| for others.
|
| e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits
| package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in
| how everything works. It would have been nice if they had
| a session on our national pension scheme since I was now
| obligated to start paying into that.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| would you prefer they not tell those people about the
| available benefits?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I would prefer that nobody who works 40 hours a week
| (tops! I'd be happy if the number was less) earns less
| than the US poverty level for a family with 1 or 2
| children (undecided over which). As a matter of law.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I'm sure my 16 year old son would have loved that.
|
| And everyone arguing that a company doesn't deserve to
| exist if it can't profitably pay more, is posting on a
| site funding money losing companies that couldn't exist
| if they actually had to make a profit.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you want to advocate the position that there's some
| age where the correlation between work and income can or
| should be looser, be my guest.
|
| For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week
| doing something that requires no skill should still
| entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life.
| Further, that it should require only one person in a
| family to do that work in order for the family do live a
| basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they
| will need to acquire more skills one way or another.
|
| I do not believe there can be any moral justification for
| somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an
| unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a
| basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing
| the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it
| doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything
| valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it
| can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So it costs a family of four about $7000 a month to live
| in San Francisco
|
| https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco
|
| Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
|
| That's $60/hour before taxes according to this gross up
| calculator
|
| https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/grossup/californi
| a/r...
|
| Portland Oregon is #25 on the list of the 50 largest
| metro areas in the US. A living wage there is about
| $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum
| wage in Portland?
|
| https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/41051
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well not quite. They exist because they are profitable on
| average.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You think that most companies that are YC funded and
| seeking additional rounds of funding are profitable?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "on average" does not mean "most companies".
|
| It could mean that, but in all likelihood it means that
| some YC funded companies make huge amounts of money for
| YC that sufficiently balances the losses that they keep
| doing it.
|
| Ya know, like most investment (that works).
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's not how VCs make money. They make money based on
| "exits" either via acquisition or IPO. Over the last few
| years, most companies had exits without ever showing
| profitability.
|
| Joe Bob's Burgers don't have the luxury of losing money
| hoping they can survive long enough to find the "greater
| fool" either via acquisition or IPO.
| mirker wrote:
| I think the point is Walmart is able to pay at a low
| enough rate that it must be effectively subsidized by the
| government. Walmart then plays into it as a further
| benefit "they" provide.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The government is setting the price floor for wages. If
| that price floor falls below the point at which the
| government will offer benefits to people, then it isn't
| Walmart that is being subsidized.
| Aunche wrote:
| That's not how economics works. Walmart is paying their
| employees low _despite_ welfare, not because of it.
| Without welfare, people would be more desperate for work
| and would be willing to work for lower wages.
| cbsmith wrote:
| If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are
| eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss
| during almost any company's new-hire orientation...
|
| There are lots of government benefits that are restricted
| to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that
| it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level
| or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so
| that they can take advantage of it.
| ghaff wrote:
| >If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are
| eligible for an FSA
|
| Assuming you mean a flexible spending account (for
| healthcare out of pocket), you're certainly not capped at
| $130K/year in the US. Your broader point is of course
| true.
| sgift wrote:
| > That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay
| people at that income level
|
| If that income level is the poverty line: Yes, it is.
| mbostleman wrote:
| >>but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low
| because the government will pick up the other half>>
|
| I don't think this is a situation that applies to the
| idea of self-regulation. In this case, a distortion of
| the market is first created by the government subsidy. So
| the natural behavior of a business would be to leverage
| it. Just as the natural behavior of the IRS is to go
| after things like your company's paying for your cell
| phone and calling it taxable income.
|
| I would suggest that the idea of self-regulation is best
| applied where there are no market distortions from the
| government that have already warped the context.
| mbostleman wrote:
| >>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor>> There's the
| purpose and then there's the outcome. I have always found
| it useful to also keep in mind the perspective on minimum
| wage that recognizes that from a practical perspective, it
| makes it illegal for workers that create a certain level of
| economic value to work. Of course that's not the
| perspective that a proponent of minimum wage would use to
| pitch it because that certainly is not the purpose. But
| it's hard to argue that this other perspective is not to
| some extent, the outcome in terms of economic mechanics.
| suture wrote:
| The natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent
| all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery.
| Enlightened people have moved passed the idea that the
| "market" alone should determine the minimum wage.
| int_19h wrote:
| There are countries in Europe which do not have a minimum
| wage mandated by the law - rather, it's the unions that
| negotiate them - and they still end up with more than
| people get in US. I guess you could term such negotiations
| "regulation", but it'd be really stretching it.
|
| Regulating a broken system is an exercise in futility. We
| need a system in which the feedback loops produce the
| desired outcomes in the first place.
| suture wrote:
| I'm pretty sure slavery is outlawed in all European
| countries so that alone prevents a 0 minimum wage. That
| itself is a regulation. There are lots of "regulations"
| (government interventions) that prevent a zero minimum
| wage. Indeed the legal protections and regulations
| regarding unions, social programs for the unemployed,
| universal healthcare, etc. all contribute to an
| environment where the lowest wage isn't zero. It is not a
| stretch at all to say that the legal infrastructure
| surrounding unions and requirements surrounding dealing
| with them count as "regulation".
|
| There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a
| broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke
| system of using child labor and fixed the broken system
| of slavery.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Exactly. Ever heard of scrip[0]? We have _historical proof_
| that companies won 't even pay their employees with real
| money unless the government mandates that they do so.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip#Company_scrip
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Does that mean open source work should count as slavery?
| You're right that the natural minimum wage is zero, but
| there's more to slavery than simply being paid nothing. I
| would think the enlightened you speak of would also know
| the difference between volition and compulsion.
| suture wrote:
| I do not at all understand the reason for your response.
| Do you really think that I was saying that doing
| something for free is always a form of slavery? I think
| it's obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and
| only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to
| respond as you did.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Please stop with the motte and bailey. I interpreted what
| you wrote and what you wrote was itself disingenuous. You
| stated that a zero-dollar income in a laissez faire
| market is sufficient to render anyone earning that amount
| a slave. You made no exceptions. As to the claim that the
| "more enlightened" are those who would reject the
| laissez-faire system, you've presented no credible
| evidence to that either.
| suture wrote:
| Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying "slavery is
| the natural minimum wage" in the absence of all
| regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal
| interventions). Clearly volunteering is not what people
| mean by "working for $0 per hour". This is obvious to
| anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous.
| Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither
| possible, desirable, or scalable. I won't convince of
| this and you won't convince me otherwise.
|
| You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of
| 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay.
| Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of
| seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in
| responding further but I will read and contemplate
| whatever response you decide to make.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines.
|
| The market "determined" this "natural minimum wage" because a
| patchwork of laws dictated (somewhere around) a $15 minimum
| wage in a lot of locations and as a policy for many
| state/city/county contracts.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > this article might bury the lede
|
| That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles.
| Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them,
| ideally verbatim.
| burlesona wrote:
| There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL
| minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is
| both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median
| home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas
| like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k).
|
| If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was
| tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need
| minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross
| artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of
| businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL
| areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish
| the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger
| joints, which might finally change the politics to actually
| permit affordable housing to be built.
| [deleted]
| dionian wrote:
| > It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal
| minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
|
| If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up
| the cost, not sure it's going to help
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _If we raise min wage then they 'll just fire people to
| make up the cost_ [...]
|
| Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-
| data in empirical studies:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
| surement wrote:
| While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these
| empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some
| elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an
| employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay
| that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater
| than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job,
| thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price
| elasticity of labor also don't bother to prove that there
| are real-world benefits beyond the fact that a higher
| minimum wage sounds good. Being unemployed is not better
| than making a low wage.
| jwagenet wrote:
| However, a if the minimum wage is increased to $9, the
| collective spending power of the minimum wage cohort may
| increase enough to increase the per worker revenue to $9
| or more. Likewise, if the employer cohort doesn't believe
| this to be the case and fires workers, then X% of the
| workforce will no longer have the discretionary spending
| to support $8 in revenue.
| babypuncher wrote:
| If a position cannot pay well enough for the employed to
| sustain themselves then it should not exist in the first
| place.
|
| If there literally are not enough jobs that can pay
| sustainable wages to everyone in need, then we need to
| rethink how our economy works on a fundamental level.
|
| A system that requires some portion of the population to
| go hungry or even homeless is ethically indefensible.
| surement wrote:
| Not sure how being unemployed is better than making a low
| wage in terms of being hungry or homeless. Are you just
| trying to advocate for communism?
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm not saying that being unemployed is better than
| making an unlivable wage. I am saying both outcomes are
| unacceptable.
|
| And I am not advocating for any specific solution, just
| saying that the current system does not work. I don't
| believe in false dichotomies. Being unhappy with
| capitalism does not automatically make one a communist.
| surement wrote:
| > both outcomes are unacceptable
|
| What is the alternative? You can't pay someone more than
| they earn in revenue and minimum wage laws create an
| artificial price floor that causes everyone who would
| otherwise earn between above zero and the minimum to
| instead make zero.
|
| The idea of a "living wage" is an worthless notion that
| assumes that the distribution of income by age and
| experience is not the one from the real world. In the
| real world, the more experience you have, the more money
| you make. The majority of low earners are simply young or
| at an early point in their careers. To rob them of entry
| level jobs by setting artificial price floors is what's
| unethical. Let them get low wage jobs while they still
| live at home or have roommates or don't live downtown SF
| instead of dictating that the world should be one of
| magical bounty and abundance where everyone can somehow
| work for "high" wages without price inflation for
| everything else making them effectively poor.
|
| Being unhappy with capitalism is being in denial about
| the world having scarce resources.
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| I tend to agree with this conventional Econ 101 wisdom,
| but your comment got me wondering if raising the minimum
| wage would have an effect of driving people to build
| skills and push harder. I.e. think of a minimum wage as
| the government saying to workers, 'Hey, if you want to be
| part of this economy, you better be at least X
| productive.'
| surement wrote:
| What about teenagers and young adults with no work
| experience? They are the age groups with the highest
| levels of unemployment.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
|
| In fact, very few people earn minimum wage past early
| adulthood. I don't remember where I got this figure but
| it was something like 93% of people over the age of 24
| make higher than minimum wage. In any case, income is
| highly correlated with age until retirement ages.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-
| household-...
|
| The motivation to earn skills to make more money is there
| regardless of minimum wage laws.
| cbsmith wrote:
| It can also drive businesses to develop models where
| people are more productive. Productivity isn't just a
| function of skills and how much people "push", but also
| how businesses operate.
| [deleted]
| dwallin wrote:
| Your analysis overly simplifies the matter. For one, this
| assumes that there is a replacement solution available
| for the role the employee fills with a cost less than the
| cost of an employee. This is trivially falsifiable in the
| large majority of employment situations, if so you would
| see these solutions already being implemented in places
| with higher minimum wages. Businesses prefer making some
| amount $x over $0.
|
| So what actually ends up happening in reality is, in
| order to not be forced to shutdown, the employer needs to
| increase the amount of per-employee revenue, which can
| happen in a number of ways:
|
| - Raising prices (Easiest move, and even easier when
| labor costs increase for your competitors simultaneously)
|
| - Negotiate lower supply costs (the threat of losing a
| big customer entirely can motivate a supplier to give up
| some percent of their profits)
|
| - Increasing employee efficiency (improved processes,
| additional training, etc). Theoretically the company
| should have been doing these already but an existential
| threat is an even larger motivator than marginal profits.
| This could result in layoffs depending on how the
| efficiency is realized.
|
| Really what ends up happening in reality is increased
| costs just get passed along. Yes, consumers probably end
| up spending more, but less in taxes are spent on benefits
| programs, making it a wash in overall cost to society. In
| fact, people who believe that government spending is
| inherently inefficient should theoretically love the idea
| of raising minimum wage as it allows us as a society to
| move resources from government spending into the free
| market.
| surement wrote:
| An employee that earns an employer $8 in revenue but gets
| paid $9 is a net loss of $1 to the employer. If x is -1
| then $x is not better than $0.
|
| If the employer could raise prices and still be in
| business, then they would already be doing it. Same thing
| with lowering costs. As for employee efficiency, yes, if
| you're forced to pay someone $9 then you will want to get
| at least $9 out of them. That means you won't hire anyone
| that's not experienced enough.
|
| > Really what ends up happening in reality is increased
| costs just get passed along
|
| Not if the employer wants to remain competitive. There
| are plenty of bigger companies with greater economies of
| scale that will happily run them out of business.
|
| This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of
| something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is
| for things or labor is irrelevant.
| hansvm wrote:
| > This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of
| something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is
| for things or labor is irrelevant.
|
| There's a little nuance.
|
| Some anecdata: When I tried charging $0 to get my feet
| wet in consulting I had zero takers. Raising my hourly
| rate to $100 drastically improved my success rate
| (nothing else changed, I was still just some kid in high
| school with a knack for programming at the time).
|
| The real world doesn't have perfect information and is
| more than happy to use imperfect signals to save time and
| effort (in any constant-bounded time that's provably
| required to hit any fixed desired epsilon of error). The
| price somebody is asking for is often enough a useful
| signal that demand need not be monotonic.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
|
| In the US, it depends on the programs that are available
| to you. For some people, a small part time job sabotages
| some existing subsidies. This is a critical component of
| the institutional poverty, that is now generational, in
| the US.
| surement wrote:
| I don't know about you but I think there's something
| wrong with programs that incentivize not working and
| gaining experience.
| Hasu wrote:
| > Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that
| if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue,
| they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if
| the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that
| worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour.
|
| One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been
| pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the
| exact amount of revenue a single employee is responsible
| for in any real world employment situation.
| jedberg wrote:
| In most cases, and almost certainly in any minimum wage
| case, sure.
|
| But sales people have a pretty directly attributable
| profit contribution.
| Hasu wrote:
| That's true, and there's going to be a spectrum of
| measurement, from very measurable roles to roles that are
| almost impossible to measure. I'd say even in the sales
| case, something that isn't getting measured is how much a
| good salesperson can rely on other parts of the
| organization to answer questions for customers that can
| make the difference in landing the sale or not. That
| attribution usually goes entirely to the salesperson,
| when someone else's knowledge was key to the transaction.
| It's a team effort.
|
| This is most obvious when you take the extreme case of
| looking at the department level - sales and marketing are
| "responsible" for 100% of the revenue, but if you delete
| legal, support, R&D, HR, and finance, your revenue goes
| to zero pretty quickly.
| surement wrote:
| So what, an employer is gonna go on losing money and will
| never look into why? If they go out of business then the
| employee will also lose their job.
| Hasu wrote:
| If the aggregate across all employees is negative, the
| company is losing money. If the aggregate over all
| employees is positive, you have profit.
|
| It's like that old joke about marketing budgets: half is
| wasted, but it's impossible to tell which half. The same
| can be true for employees, maybe half your employees lose
| money, but the other half make enough that you're
| profitable, but you can't attribute every dollar that
| comes into your company to the specific employee that
| generated that dollar.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that
| if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue,
| they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour,
|
| Unless they are a tech company funded by VCs...
| cbsmith wrote:
| > Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
|
| You're presuming it's a binary choice; consider the
| systemic effect might not make it a binary choice.
|
| Let's accept that it is a binary choice, then no, it's
| not necessarily better to be making a low wage, because
| that presumes a value for your time that is effectively
| zero. In truth, with your own time, you can find ways to
| feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc., and
| when you are working you can't do that stuff. Let's
| assume though that one wouldn't take a wage that was a
| net direct loss like this, there's still the possibility
| that a low wage might be tactically beneficial, but
| strategically & systemically quite harmful.
| surement wrote:
| > with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself,
| provide yourself with shelter, etc.
|
| You still have the option to quit your job if you're
| employed and don't find it worth your while.
|
| > strategically & systemically quite harmful
|
| How?
| SecondTimeAgain wrote:
| So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not
| being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're
| comment.
| macinjosh wrote:
| My understanding is that yes if their growth cannot be
| maintained because of labor shortages they will have to
| begin shrinking down to the size the labormarket can bear.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The comment was insightful.
|
| One part of the company raises wages the other fires to
| increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups
| get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get
| culled. Welcome to 2022
| vlunkr wrote:
| But then the warehouses are understaffed... Not sure
| that's a win
| ipaddr wrote:
| That only matter for the productivity team and that group
| gets fired because they are below their metrics. The
| hiring group just raised wages and they are doing all
| they can. The profitability group needs to get the
| numbers back on track and does the firing.
|
| Isolated the decisions make sense.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| When are they going to start firing people to make up for the
| actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some
| time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL
| area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't
| hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact!
| There is so much demand for workers that those places can't
| convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the
| crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising
| minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the
| current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago,
| makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is
| literally all around us right now.
| fugalfervor wrote:
| Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout
| the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the
| last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with
| the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing.
| The number of deaths is probably also higher among those
| who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of
| death from COVID was correlated with poverty.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| How many 80 year olds were working in fast food in 2019?
| irrational wrote:
| Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were
| not old people. I literally did not know of any old
| people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother
| got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that
| she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat
| Covid in the 2020s, and she did.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Before the pandemic, there were a lot of retirement-aged
| people working in food service, like an uncomfortable
| amount. I certainly haven't been out to eat as much as I
| have before COVID, but what I noticed was a suspicious
| lack of those older workers I've come to expect working
| in food service. A lot of restaurants and fast food
| places are running on skeleton crews, now, some of them
| with one or two 16 year olds running the whole businesses
| alone even during dinner rushes.
| fugalfervor wrote:
| This kind of response is why I asked the question, I
| guess. I don't know the answer!
| cameroncf wrote:
| > I think this article might bury the lede a bit:
|
| When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon
| employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is
| $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
|
| Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.
| subsubzero wrote:
| This is the sign of a extremely unhealthy place to work
|
| > But attrition at Amazon's facilities in the area grew from 128
| percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020
|
| I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this
| space in the next 5 years.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| They're really pushing the limits of their work force. I think
| slowing the pace down a smidge in the warehouse and not burning
| everyone out would really help them keep it sustainable.
| throwawayLabor5 wrote:
| asah wrote:
| tl;dr: you want to be a customer of Amazon, not an employee.
| Melatonic wrote:
| They're known to have such crazy warehouse shifts that people
| unofficially carry piss bottles with them.
|
| They're also known to be a crap place to work at the high end for
| the educated workforce and the best I have heard is "Get in, get
| out, pump your resume and leave as fast as you can"
|
| Surprise!
| [deleted]
| chaostheory wrote:
| What the memo doesn't account for is what will happen when the
| Fed Reserve is adamant about bringing demand destruction with
| their interest rate hikes.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| As many others have said, there's no shortage of labor in the US;
| there's a shortage of _pay_.
|
| Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a
| temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people
| willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no
| longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable
| (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages
| they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it
| which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking.
|
| Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves
| like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake
| reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because
| they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy
| something online.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at
| Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite
| fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or
| will just increasing pay bring enough people back?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| If it's anything like retail, a lot of these places work on the
| assumption that there are enough people who too desperate for a
| job that they'll come regardless of the working conditions.
| sophacles wrote:
| Yep, and when the free market sets up conditions to allow
| those people to be slightly less desperate the Fed will chime
| in about how unemployment is too low and we need more
| desparate people, while the wall st pundits go on and on
| lamenting how rising worker prices might mean that the
| companies make profits that _gasp_ don 't set records.
| Because apparently the only measure of a good economy is
| record profits - regular profitable businesses just don't cut
| it anymore.
|
| If you find this worrying, don't - someone will be along
| shortly to spend a lot of words proving that this situation
| (the one where we require desperate people to exist so Elon
| and Jeff can make a few extra $billion) is somehow the best.
| diordiderot wrote:
| the_only_law wrote:
| Having worked in conditions like this, god it's horrible.
|
| The people that were there when I started were rough guys,
| but they could do their job.
|
| After I started the company apparently could only hire angry
| alcoholics, lazy stoners, and fresh out of jail domestic
| abusers who were proud of it. How many of these people could
| the job effectively, no.
|
| Then the company had a merge and corporate came down with a
| brilliant plan to force all the fulltime employees (read
| legacy employees with some level of leadership
| responsibilities and the only ones good at their job) into
| part time positions or offer them severance to leave. You can
| imagine what happens.
|
| So then it was me, a couple other guys, and a slew of
| incompetent bums. I managed to take advantage of the
| situation to demand a pathetic raise and near total autonomy
| of my hours. These concessions ended up being not enough and
| one night I decided not to show up anymore, as management was
| constantly moving responsibilities of their "friends" to use.
|
| Luckily I had been using my time to make my break into the
| software industry. A couple years later, I read that triple
| merged company had to file for bankruptcy.
| zionic wrote:
| This is one reason why these types of megacorps support mass
| immigration, it provides a steady stream of desperate people
| they can exploit. Those from other countries also might lack
| the collective cultural knowledge to stay away.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I hadn't really thought before about how left-wing folks
| typically want higher wages as well as more mass immigration
| which inherently suppresses wages. In their defense, they
| want raises waged by law rather than by market (an elevated
| minimum wage would raise wages irrespective of immigration),
| but considering how unlikely a minimum federal wage hike is,
| it seems like they're pursuing two contradictory goals.
|
| EDIT: I was really (naively) hoping this would be discussed
| maturely. Some clarifying points:
|
| 1. "mass immigration" is just intended in opposition to
| highly selective immigration policies (e.g., policies which
| allow highly educated or wealthy people to immigrate). This
| isn't a criticism or a value judgment, and indeed there's
| something noble and egalitarian about this.
|
| 2. observing that these two goals are contradictory doesn't
| imply ignobility or foolishness, but rather difficulty of
| task.
|
| 3. I'm not a "right-winger" nor do I have a political tribe.
| I'm not slinging anything at left-wing people.
| orwin wrote:
| I'm just a supporter of equity. If your country have a FTA
| with another country, people from either country should be
| able to emigrate/immigrate between the two at will. If your
| country has a quota trade agreement with another country,
| you can do quotas as long as those respect a relationship
| with production quota.
|
| I find France, UK and US comportements towards their
| colonies ('trade partners') unjust.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I hadn 't really thought before about how left-wing folks_
|
| Can't HN be the one place on the internet that isn't
| sullied by tribalism?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't have a political tribe, I'm not a partisan, etc.
| I was hoping HN would be the one place on the Internet
| where we could discuss things maturely. Notably, I'm not
| attacking left-wing people or viewpoints here, but
| observing that there are two goals that are in apparent
| conflict (which isn't to say they contradict each other
| or that they're ignoble or anything else).
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >I'm not attacking left-wing people
|
| You said "left-wing folks typically want ... more mass
| immigration", which I disagree with, though not with any
| real authority or conviction (I wrote a separate comment
| about it). The rub is - coming from most people on the
| internet at large, I would assume that statement was
| purposefully uncharitable, but I think on HN, the chances
| that a person (you, in this case) is being honest are
| higher (i.e. that your opinion that left-wing people want
| more mass immigration is derived honestly and
| holistically to the best of your ability, regardless of
| whether there is a reasonable argument against it out
| there somewhere).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yes, my honest impression is that left-wing people
| _generally_ (i.e., it 's a very popular position on the
| left) wanted to lower the barrier for "asylum seekers"
| which implies admitting lots of people without respect to
| their educational background or skill (hence "mass
| immigration"). I didn't realize this was controversial (I
| thought everyone agreed that this is a popular position
| on the left). This also isn't a value judgment--a
| conservative might look at that and see unintended
| consequences (a burden on social services, wage
| suppression, etc) but a progressive might look at that
| and see nobility ("Give me your tired, your poor, your
| huddled masses" etc).
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| "Asylum seeker" is a specific term, for example see this
| UN glossary: https://www.unhcr.org/449267670.pdf. In
| particular it's not about huddled masses, it's about
| people escaping violent situations and active
| persecution. Putting "asylum seeker" in scare quotes and
| conflating it with general immigration is a right-wing
| thing to do. If you don't want people to mistake you for
| a right-wing partisan then consider just saying
| "immigration" of whatever type you mean.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm sure I'm somewhat imprecise with my terms (I didn't
| realize I was speaking to a group of immigration
| lawyers). I've been as clear as I can be, and I can't
| force anyone to understand against their will. Good day.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I agree. But I don't agree that that position
| is tantamount to "supporting mass immigration", by the
| normal colloquial meaning of that phrase. I think that
| wording, unqualified as in your original usage, implies
| antagonism toward the position you're describing (though,
| as I mentioned in another reply, "mass immigration" might
| have a domain-specific definition I'm not aware of? Sort
| of like how "obese" technically refers to a much lower
| weight than the way we use the word colloquially, and how
| "mass shooting" can technically mean a victim count as
| low as three, depending on other circumstances, again
| contrary to what the typical colloquial threshold
| probably is in most cases).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Fair enough. I didn't know that phrase was loaded. I just
| meant it in opposition to highly-selective admissions
| processes.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Far too late for that unfortunately, but we can try to be
| better.
| giardini wrote:
| reaperducer says >"Can't HN be the one place on the
| internet that isn't sullied by triablism(sic)?"<
|
| Can't HN be the one place on the internet that isn't
| sullied by obvious misspellings?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Can 't HN be the one place on the internet that isn't
| sullied by obvious misspellings?_
|
| Fixed it. Just for you. _-kiss-_
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I don't see that as tribalistic/negative language at all.
| However, I do see it in the unqualified assertion that
| left-wing people want "more mass immigration", which
| seems misleading and tangential to their actual desires
| (which seem to be more about treating immigrants better
| and allowing more cases of legitimate asylum seeking,
| rather than actively seeking "more" and "massive"
| immigration in the general case). Even just the more
| innocuous version of that statement - "make immigration
| easier" - is not even a popular opinion of leftwingers,
| as far as I can tell.
|
| Edit: Where "popular" means a strong majority. However,
| I'm speaking totally intuitively. I'm not sure what the
| reality of the numbers are, and there are so many subtly
| different opinions one can poll for just be tweaking the
| wording.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I don 't see that as tribalistic/negative language at
| all._
|
| Left wing is a tribe. Right wing is a tribe. Just like
| all the sportsball teams are tribes.
|
| Politics would work better if politicians, and their
| followers, worked for people, rather than their tribes.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Eh, labels are useful. I don't believe that saying
| "left/right wingers tend to X" means "the world is black
| and white" or "everybody is left/right wing and that's
| all you need to know about them". It's how you use labels
| that matters. And yeah, a label can get misused so bad
| that it loses its usefulness in honest discussion, but I
| think "left/right-wing" is far from that death. It
| carries too much useful meaning when thoughtfully
| applied.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Even accepting that "left wing is a tribe", summarizing
| the views of a tribe (especially in relatively objective
| terms) isn't the same as engaging in tribalism.
| 22SAS wrote:
| Left wingers overwhelmingly support immigration of poor
| people, from poor nations. They think these people would
| benefit the most out of immigrating to the US. They too,
| like the right wingers, despise white collar workers
| immigrating here, since that'd mean more competition for
| high paying jobs.
|
| They know that recent immigrants from poorer countries, do
| not have the education and English language skills to break
| into white collar jobs, and will mostly work in low paying
| jobs for their whole career. The white collar immigrants
| can break into all these jobs, and that is something that
| they see as a danger.
| duxup wrote:
| >as well as more mass immigration
|
| I really haven't seen this with "left wing folks". That
| sounds more like some folks talking points they want you to
| buy into.
|
| I think you might be mistaken. Any immigration /= "more
| mass immigration".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not trying to malign anyone here. I'm pretty sure
| more mass immigration is a left-wing opinion, and I
| thought that much was uncontroversial. I don't understand
| the distinction you're making between "any immigration"
| and "mass immigration". The US already allows a lot of
| immigration.
| duxup wrote:
| >I don't understand the distinction you're making between
| "any immigration" and "mass immigration".
|
| Because the amount matters?
|
| If we talk about the impact of migration the amount
| certainly plays into what if any impact occurs.
|
| It really seems like you're stuck on a sort of rhetorical
| talking point phrase.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Sure, but what's the argument? "The left wants _some_
| immigration, but not a lot "? Because we already _have_
| "some" immigration, so presumably they want more
| immigration, and presumably they oppose constraining that
| immigration by education level or wealth or etc, hence
| "mass".
|
| In other words, "mass" doesn't refer to an amount, but a
| lack of filtration/selection/etc. Note also that this
| isn't even an inherently bad thing--there's something
| noble about wanting America's doors open to everyone:
| "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses
| yearning to breathe free...".
| duxup wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by "what's the argument"?
|
| Policies and the impact (something that should hopefully
| inform a policy) are more nuanced than just "mass
| migration" "more migration" and so on. Your understanding
| seems entirely disconnected from actual policy.
|
| I can't possibly explain something that is going to be
| different from person to person or politician to
| politician, even more so if for you it only ends up being
| categorized in weird generalities that read like they're
| someone else's rhetoric skewed talking points / loaded
| phrases. I don't think you can expect to understand
| something if you just generalize in that way.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I don't know what you mean by "what's the argument"?
|
| I'm asking "what is your argument?" What argument are you
| making?
|
| > Policies and the impact (something that should
| hopefully inform a policy) are more nuanced than just
| "mass migration" "more migration" and so on.
|
| Of course, and still we speak in shorthand all the time
| because regurgitating the complete nuance in every single
| Internet comment is untenable. If "left-wing folks
| generally support mass immigration" is inaccurate or
| incomplete, let's talk about that--what nuance am I
| overlooking?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Likewise, I've always found it amusing that right wing
| business guys pay lip service to being against illegal
| immigration, yet they move their meat packing plants to
| nowhere-ville.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| "use illegal immigration for meat packing" isn't a
| broadly-held right-wing position, it's something certain
| unprincipled business owners do (and I'm not even sure
| that they're universally right-wing). In contrast,
| "increasing wages" and "increasing mass immigration" are
| broadly-held left-wing positions. Again, this doesn't
| suggest incoherence on the left.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Please. It's deeply embedded in GOP power brokering.
| Principles are for the mass of idiots.
|
| The only difference today is that after years of taking
| the votes of reactionaries and doing little, the populist
| blocs of reactionary voters are the tail wagging the dog.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| So what's the idea? Republicans secretly favor the cheap
| labor that immigration provides, but they obstruct
| themselves at every turn by opposing said immigration?
| Anyway, we're talking about "right wing" people generally
| rather than GOP politicians specifically--these two
| groups often have somewhat different agendas (yes, even
| in a representative democracy).
| scarface74 wrote:
| "Unprincipled" business owners, farmers, and basically
| every other company that wants cheap labor in "rural
| America".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Maybe, but that doesn't support the generalization that
| this is a broadly-held right-wing position, which is what
| we were debating. Note also that plenty of ostensibly
| left-wing companies want cheap labor as well.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How is it not broadly held? What business is saying "we
| really wish we could spend more on labor, that would be
| great!" Politicians on the right have been playing lip
| service to "illegal immigration" for years. But they all
| knew just what would happen if they actually did it.
| Business interest and farmers would crucify them.
|
| Even Trump supporting farmers were complaining about not
| being able to find anyone.
|
| Just like they were all for the wall until the government
| started using eminent domain to take their land to build
| it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Politicians on the right have been playing lip service
| to "illegal immigration" for years. But they all knew
| just what would happen if they actually did it. Business
| interest and farmers would crucify them.
|
| It's the same thing with climate change on the left
| (Democrat politicians never manage to pass any kind of
| carbon pricing because they know they'd get crucified by
| business interests), but I wouldn't say that the left-
| wing broadly opposes carbon pricing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I wouldn't say that the left-wing broadly opposes
| carbon pricing.
|
| The left wing does not, and much of it actively supports
| it.
|
| The Democratic Party-in-government, dominated by its
| center-right faction, does oppose it, or at least does
| not actively support it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies
| want cheap labor as well.
|
| There are (outside of small local cooperative
| enterprises) approximately zero left-wing companies in
| the US.
|
| The things painted as "left-wing" companies by the far
| right are center-right neoliberal corporate capitalist
| enterprises that do some mix of opposing far-right
| culture war efforts as a drag on corporate capitalist
| exploitation and making PR gestures to the left side of
| culture war fights while remaining locked in the economic
| center-right.
|
| Yeah, in the GOP's current view of the world, the _U.S.
| Chamber of Commerce_ is considered radical leftists, but,
| that 's not reflective of reality.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think you and I have debated this before, and I think
| your definition for "left-wing" is pretty different from
| the general population (and you may think the same about
| my definition, all good, agree to disagree, etc). Anyway,
| I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately
| because I don't think any company actually adheres to an
| ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing
| departments say or do, but rather they all comport
| themselves according to their individual profit motives.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately
| because I don't think any company actually adheres to an
| ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing
| departments say or do, but rather they all comport
| themselves according to their individual profit motives.
|
| Where do you think ideologies come from? One of the most
| common places is some identifiable group's economic self-
| interest; neoliberalism is that for the owner class in
| capitalist society, which is why institutions controlled
| by that class (especially when they are controlled
| broadly by that class rather than by an individual member
| who may have personal quirks) tend to pursue it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't think they come from corporations, although no
| doubt organizations may promote popular ideologies.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I think your use of the word "mass" is causing a lot of
| confusion, but I'm not sure who's "fault" it is.
| According to your edit on your original post, you say
| you're using it to mean "less selective" immigration,
| which, to me, is a _way_ different sentence - but it 's
| completely possible this is a domain-specific use of the
| word "mass" that I am just not familiar with.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Fair enough. The idea was that the left wants to lower
| the barrier for "asylum seeking" or perhaps just admit
| more asylum seekers irrespective of their educational
| value or their ability to support themselves (i.e.,
| minimal selection criteria). This isn't a criticism or
| value judgment.
| dsteffee wrote:
| The left wants to help people, no matter who they are, and
| that means supporting both immigration and livable wages;
| the right only cares about the rich and themselves.
| peyton wrote:
| Well Jeff Bezos wants to help people by supporting mass
| immigration as his father benefited from "grit,
| determination, and the support and kindness of people
| here in the U.S.," but perhaps there is somebody more
| opportunistic and less altruistic than Jeff Bezos who
| might try to take advantage of such policies? Such a
| person may even lie about their motives.
| scarface74 wrote:
| "I want to both increase the supply of labor and increase
| the price of labor".
|
| You don't see anything wrong with that statement?
| giardini wrote:
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The left wants to help people, no matter who they are,
| and that means supporting both immigration and livable
| wages
|
| I'm not saying otherwise, I'm observing that in this
| particular case, mass immigration has a wage suppressing
| effect which contradicts the "livable wages" goal. Noting
| the challenge doesn't imply ignobility.
|
| > the right only cares about the rich and themselves
|
| I really don't know what this has to do with the subject.
| PKop wrote:
| It's zero sum. You're hurting your fellow citizens by
| diluting their labor. You may think this is a righteous
| position, but from the perspective of a nationalist, you
| are strictly harming not helping your fellow countrymen,
| and therefore you set yourself up as their enemy.
|
| >only cares about
|
| And the prosperity of their own country. It is "selfish"
| yes. But a selfishness that extends out to their kin and
| their neighbors. They recognize the world is an arena of
| competition for scarce resources and power, and so they
| fight for their community and country to be as prosperous
| and powerful as possible, because they know foreign
| nations will do the same for their own people.
|
| See: "Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral
| circle" [0], specifically Figure 5: Heatmaps indicating
| highest moral allocation by ideology [1] for a nice
| visualization of the difference between the moral
| allocation of right vs left.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0?fb
| clid=Iw...
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/fi
| gures/5
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _You 're hurting your fellow citizens by diluting
| their labor_"
|
| No more so than having children and growing the
| population that way, which is a concept the right
| generally supports ("family values", "pro life").
|
| > " _you are strictly harming not helping your fellow
| countrymen_ "
|
| It's not like the right do things to _help_ fellow
| countrymen; taking away rights ( "pro choice"), scorning
| single mothers instead of helping them and their
| children, demonizing social welfare users as 'welfare
| queens', opposing 'free' healthcare, oppising livable
| wages, remove unions and removing the bargaining power
| workers would need to have good wages otherwise,
| worsening education and making it less accessible and
| more expensive. The society their actions move towards is
| one where wealthy people live off the back of a working
| class who grind for money and die when they aren't
| productive anymore, along with a militarised police force
| acting to keeps the poors in line, and a 'justice' system
| which lets the rich away without punishment. And you can
| see it in action when Texas power fails and Ted Cruz
| takes his family on holiday, or the needlessly cruel
| treatment the UK Conservative Party's Department for Work
| and Pensions does to disabled people.
|
| Nationalism isn't "help fellow citizens", it's "given a
| region drawn on a map, inside good, outside bad".
| ryan93 wrote:
| How many pro immigration leftists live their life as if
| its no more valuable than anyone else's? .001% maybe.If
| you wanted to help the global poor sending them American
| dollars would go a lot further in their own country
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think it is zero sum?
|
| Increasing the amount of people means more resource
| usage, but also more chances for innovation and economies
| of scale.
|
| Much power in Trump's trade war came from the size of the
| consumer base
| 0daystock wrote:
| "We're the government and we're here to help" should
| terrify any adult with even a high school level grasp of
| world history.
| sophacles wrote:
| I see you get the entirety of your understanding of
| history and poltics from an actor with alzheimer's. Maybe
| you could expand your sources a bit to see that this is a
| lot less true than you imply.
| 0daystock wrote:
| If an ad hominem attack is all you can muster in
| response, it doesn't show a good faith attempt at
| discourse.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Boy they "helped" a lot of people during his time.
| nxm wrote:
| Counterpoint: right wants free market so that wages rises
| organically through businesses competing for workers,
| while the left wants open borders and endless government
| spending that leads of inflation and lower standard of
| living which we are experiencing now.
| [deleted]
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >The left wants to help people
|
| Unless it's members of demographics they hate, like the
| white working class, who get harmed by mass immigration.
| And even demographic they claim to love, like the black
| working class.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Some parts of the right have advocated for more _skilled_
| immigration, which would tend to equalize wages across the
| board (mitigating a non-trivial cause of inequality) while
| raising fewer social concerns compared to the unregulated
| immigration of lower-skill workers. Unfortunately, many
| left-wing folks tend to oppose such proposals, with the
| usual 'they tuk er jerbs!!1' arguments. Just look at the
| reactions here at HN anytime the subject of H1B visas is
| brought up.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not sure that H1B visas are a particularly
| politically polarized position. I could easily see people
| on the right arguing against H1B visas on the basis that
| we should keep American jobs for Americans. I don't think
| there's broad agreement on H1Bs on the right?
| 22SAS wrote:
| Both the left and the ring wing voters despise work visa
| programs. There are a few in the US, only H1B's get the
| hate since it is the most used of all work visa programs,
| and highly publicized as well.
| Thetawaves wrote:
| You should be forthright and acknowledge that H1Bs fill
| white collar jobs at below market rates. This obviously
| doesn't apply to agriculture (and other) work visas.
| 22SAS wrote:
| They probably do in crappy places. I am an H1B, work in
| HFT and can say that in big tech and HFT's, H1B's are
| paid fairly well, probably in the top tier.
|
| BTW, the L1 visa is even worse. The people bought in via
| that visa are also paid below market rates, and they are
| not even allowed to change companies on that visa.
|
| My issue is that people love to shit talk about us, and
| forget there are other visas, like the L1, that are
| crappier. Worse is, when some lump all of us "H1B? They
| are probably low paid", and then I and many of my friends
| chuckle when we look at we are paid.
| ezconnect wrote:
| You'll be surprised how many people are looking for a job and
| these companies know the numbers. That's the reason why they
| dictate the process. In some countries there's just not enough
| population to fill all the vacancies so the workers dictate the
| terms. eg South Korea.
| jaywalk wrote:
| They can only increase pay so much before they have to increase
| their fees beyond the point people are willing to pay them. As
| an anecdote, I have completely stopped using DoorDash because
| they recently increased their fees to a level that I consider
| to be absurd.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I'm not sure how much food delivery should cost. Though most
| local restaurants around me seen to do it for free (and
| tipping isn't expected, in fact it would be a struggle, most
| drivers drop the food and run now).
|
| I'm not naive enough though not to notice that it's all done
| under the table. Few are paying tax or commercial insurance
| on their vehicles to do restaurant delivery.
|
| I'm pretty sure doing it legitimately costs a reasonable
| amount. Doubly so when you aren't just trying to get your
| food to your customers but also paying a bunch of developers
| Silicon Valley wages to try to capture the entire market
| before someone else does.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There is no "how much it should cost". If there are a lot
| of people who do not have better opportunities in life,
| then it will be lower priced. If people have access to
| better opportunities than spending time delivering food,
| then it will be higher priced.
|
| When my family goes to their homes in a developing country,
| they have drivers and cooks and maids, because there is a
| huge supply of poorer people willing and able to do those
| things for a sufficiently low price for my family.
|
| When they return to the US, they have to do all of that
| themselves, because there is not a huge supply of poorer
| people willing and able to do those things for a
| sufficiently low price.
|
| Same thing applies to being able to shop on a Sunday
| evening, or get a burrito at 11PM, or 2 day delivery. I
| like seeing fast food stores closed due to insufficient
| labor, because that means the people that used to have to
| do those jobs for menial wages now have a better option.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Same. My last doordash order was for 20 dollars of food and
| after tip (the suggested) it came to over double the original
| food cost. That's just not sustainable for anyone.
| sophacles wrote:
| I mean they could also not set record profits, and just have
| regular profits for a while.
| lumost wrote:
| It is not a given that all service economy business models
| will survive. Historically as goods got cheaper relative to
| labor, service prices rose. In poor countries service jobs
| such as doorman or shaver are much more common than in rich
| countries. The classic example is that below a certain income
| level, the majority of men start to have their faces
| professionally shaved rather than doing it themselves.
|
| Having another _person_ spend 15-30 minutes in a high stress
| situation to deliver you food _should_ be a high cost
| activity that gets _more_ expensive relative to your income
| over time. Traditional delivery services only made this cost
| effective by making food for low cost. The alternative is an
| economy where wages cannot rise relative to goods.
| corrral wrote:
| DoorDash costs have always been absurd, they just hide a lot
| of it by pricing the food higher than it normally is.
|
| I've noticed our grocery delivery services doing that, too,
| giving us prices on items that are higher than they are if
| you go to the store yourself. We'll stop using them soon.
| It's bullshit. Delivery costs ought to be transparent.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, and places like pizza joints that already had
| delivery service are starting to get a lot more aggressive
| about differentiating delivery vs. pick-up pricing. They've
| long had a deal or two at a time that's carry-out only, but
| now it's _all_ the decent deals, and even some deals specify
| that they 'll be less-good if you order delivery. Delivery
| can easily be 40% more expensive than carry-out, as a result,
| because they _also_ still charge the delivery fees they all
| started tacking on a decade or so ago (which are also higher,
| now) and you still, despite already potentially paying $10+
| more than you would have for carry-out, have to tip, because
| most of that money 's not making it to the delivery driver.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I have to believe that a large portion of delivery markup
| is price discrimination. Restaurants have long looked for
| ways to charge more to people who are willing to pay more,
| but have been largely unable to because everyone gets the
| same menu. Delivery provides a convenient way to weed out
| those that will pay more by letting those who aren't pick
| up the food themselves.
| jaywalk wrote:
| It seems like most of the prices are either equivalent to
| the restaurant's prices, or only slightly higher. But when
| I compare DoorDash to UberEats, with the food prices being
| the same, I have seen $10+ differences in the final total.
| That's when I dropped DoorDash.
| corrral wrote:
| I just know that a couple years back when I had a couple
| "free delivery!" coupons from DoorDash, I struggled to
| make use of it in a way that wasn't a rip-off, because
| the food prices were so much higher than their usual menu
| price. In the end, to make it any kind of _actual_
| bargain, I had to be careful to order only very small
| amounts (one or two things), and avoid many menu items
| entirely. That got it down to being about the same as
| picking up, plus tip, which made it useful. Otherwise I
| was still paying a large premium for delivery, despite
| "free delivery".
| lisper wrote:
| I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and
| even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say
| (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I
| absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares
| the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some
| random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of
| convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to
| buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience
| is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.
| amzn-throw wrote:
| For the record, being on the other side, and working hard to
| CREATE these experiences that customers love is absolutely
| addictive and intoxicating.
|
| You have to actually give a shit about it though. Which most of
| us do. It requires effort and grit to have this level of
| "customer obsession", and to be fair, I would say we are mostly
| well compensated for it.
|
| But it's not for everyone. Plenty of SDEs, including in this
| market just want to punch in and punch out, and not
| meaningfully move the bar forward. That's probably OK.
|
| It's not good enough for me. My work is 1/3 of my life, 1/2 of
| my waking life. That better be fucking meaningful and
| significant.
|
| You'd be surprised, you might enjoy working here too.
| lisper wrote:
| Kudos to you. If you think it's a fair deal, more power to
| you. I'll sleep better at night knowing that you feel like
| you're not being exploited, and that you're being fairly
| compensated for the work you do.
|
| But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk
| myself.
| amzn-throw wrote:
| This comment isn't directed to you specifically, but the
| many many others who feel the same.
|
| "What have you got to lose?"
|
| By that I mean, we're in a hot tech market. If it doesn't
| work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.
|
| OK, but we're about to hit a recession. I'd venture Amazon
| is a lot safer than many other tech companies to ride out a
| recession in - the core business (cloud and retail) is
| fundamentally sound. The company is only ever not
| profitable when it chooses not to be because it invests all
| gains into new R&D and lines of business. When things
| tighten in the market, Amazon refocuses on core
| optimizations, and realizes massive profits again.
| Certainly I can't predict layoffs or no layoffs, but noone
| can, at any company.
| lisper wrote:
| > If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job
| elsewhere with ease.
|
| If that's true then I could just skip the Amazon pain and
| go straight to the "job elsewhere".
| kvathupo wrote:
| I'm curious if Amazon retail was equally efficient in the past,
| say the early 2000s. Was warehouse management the same?
| kube-system wrote:
| Amazon wasn't a logistics expert from day one, they've
| learned a lot over the years:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390
| Vladimof wrote:
| You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up
| their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for
| a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as
| possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to
| avoid the waste but that's what they do.
| lisper wrote:
| Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the
| purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one
| monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't think there is a small mom & pop one stop shop, but
| if you are willing to buy different things from different
| stores, you have options. I buy most of my electronics from
| B&H, and things like fasteners from McMaster-Carr.
|
| Amazon does feel pretty unavoidable for the long tail,
| though.
| lisper wrote:
| I'm surprised that these specialty retailers have not
| banded together to form some kind of syndicate with a
| common web front end to take orders. That sort of thing
| could be an Amazon-killer. Combined with a doordash-like
| delivery service it could offer same-day delivery and
| reliable product vetting.
|
| Hm, anyone here want to start a company?
| jrockway wrote:
| Isn't that kind of what Shopify, Fast, and some other
| company that I only heard off because they laid off half
| their staff doing?
|
| I haven't researched the industry extensively, but I'm
| guessing that companies like to keep customer data to
| themselves and curate what they think is the ideal
| checkout experience. (Everyone should copy McMaster,
| though.) That's why you see companies happy to delegate
| the financing involved in buying their products to credit
| card companies, but still make their own
| website/checkout/fulfillment rather than letting, say,
| Amazon do that for them. (Shopify does seem to have quite
| a lot of traction, however.)
| lisper wrote:
| None of those companies are syndicates, i.e. none of them
| are _owned_ by the retailers they represent. They 're
| trying to just be middlemen. That won't work.
| Vladimof wrote:
| McMaster-Carr is amazing but Grainger is very nice too.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is that why I get recruiter emails almost daily?
| delecti wrote:
| If you really are, my recommendation is to get stern with your
| responses. I got them to stop for a little while by just asking
| them to stop, and then to stop entirely by asking again while
| mentioning who I sent my previous request to. Like "Hi John,
| please stop contacting me", and then a few months later like
| "Hi Steve, a few months ago I asked John Doe (johndoe@) to stop
| contacting me". The second step seems to have been the trick.
| synaesthesisx wrote:
| Same. Amazon has been relentless in recruiter spam, more so
| than any other company I've ever seen.
| LegitShady wrote:
| This is simply laying down groundwork for hiring temporary
| foreign workers.
| 22SAS wrote:
| and how do they plan on bringing all of them? There are 85,000
| new H1B visas in a given year, and they cannot be used for
| warehouse workers. The work visas are mainly for white collar
| jobs, and the only way then can bring a ton of foreign workers
| is from Amazon offices overseas, via the L-1 work visa, and
| that is not that easy since they need to maintain headcount to
| support the use of Amazon services in those countries.
| LegitShady wrote:
| H1B visas are for workers in the tech sector, but they have
| other visas for other purposes. H2A visas are for
| temporary/seasonal agricultural workers, H2B visas for
| temporary workers in non agricultural fields.
|
| So they could be shipped in via H2B visas, or they could
| lobby for some new kind of temporary worker visa.
|
| In Canada we've already seen similar - McDonalds (and other
| similar businesses) offers non-living wages for work, and
| when they can't find workers for low wages, the canadian
| government lets them ship in temporary foreign workers to run
| their fast food restaurants because 'there's no workers at
| the market (non livable) wage'.
|
| With programs like these the free market for labour dies. Why
| are wages low? because companies can offer extremely low
| wages and when no one bites, ship in temporary workers.
| [deleted]
| torginus wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOFdr03-CVM
| usr1106 wrote:
| Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about
| supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they
| get from me has been well under 100 EUR / yr. for many years. And
| I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should
| move to some smaller player, but it's more work.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This isn't just their warehouse workers, their delivery drivers
| (many through partner companies) have been struggling with this
| for a while. They grind through employees fast. Drivers will
| sometimes just leave their keys in the ignition and walk off the
| job.
|
| There was a lot of speculation that this is why they dropped the
| drug testing requirement last year.
| thrill wrote:
| s/people to hire/people to hire cheaply/
| danamit wrote:
| I wonder if this or similar stories is leaked by purpose to
| encourage more people to apply.
| mmastrac wrote:
| So it turns out that people are fungible after all. At least at
| the scale that Amazon operates at.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Amazon designed its warehouses from the very beginning to have
| it workers be completely replaceable. By not letting them make
| any decisions, instead just mindlessly doing what the computer
| says, they can easily plug and play new hires with minimal
| training. The end goal is pretty obviously to not have any
| warehouse workers, and making their jobs as simple and
| repetitive as possible probably makes them easier to automate.
| Madmallard wrote:
| Maybe you should treat your employees better then?
| encrux wrote:
| Surely at some point the market will just regulate itself and
| amazon will have to improve working conditions to keep operations
| running... Right? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
| dymk wrote:
| That's what's happening. Walmart is paying warehouse workers
| $25/hr and Amazon is losing workers to them.
| etempleton wrote:
| When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of
| corporate employees I mentioned on here how it felt wrong in
| comparison to what they pay their warehouse workers and drivers
| and got some backlash on here. A lot of talk about how an
| engineer provides XXX% more value and supply and demand.
|
| Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be
| paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a
| decent wage and have decent work conditions.
| ASinclair wrote:
| > When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of
| corporate employees
|
| I'm pretty sure they just doubled the salary cap. That doesn't
| necessarily mean everyone's salary was doubled.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Amazon didn't even do that. Before, no matter who you were,
| your cash component was maxed out between $160K - $175K. The
| rest of your compensation was in stock.
|
| Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I passed the edit window. I meant more of your compensation
| can be _cash based_.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Funnily enough, I got paid 100$ to do a 20 minutes survey that
| was asking hiring questions (which fang would you apply for and
| why) and it was just a pretest to have someone from Aws trying to
| recruit you.
| amotinga wrote:
| offer remote work - I'm in
| 22SAS wrote:
| In SWE jobs, a lot of AWS teams are allowing remote, still not
| worth the ultra-crap culture.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| You can still be hired-to-fire as a remote, probably more so.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can remotely work a warehouse job, which
| is what this article is about.
| gman2093 wrote:
| You jest, but they are absolutely on it
| booboofixer wrote:
| Control the amazon warehouse robots from your bed.
| FpUser wrote:
| It is an obvious sarcasm
| monkey88 wrote:
| Well, an Amazon recruiter contacted me, so they must be
| desperate.
| binbag wrote:
| Who are the emerging competitors to Amazon that the article
| refers to?
| EGreg wrote:
| I guess this implied people are burned out by working in these
| warehouses and they will have churned through EVERYONE IN THE
| UNITED STATES who might have considered it. Quite a feat. Maybe
| finally allow people bathroom breaks rather than peeing in
| bottles? Or just develop more robots.
| arbuge wrote:
| This is from mid-2021. I suspect they are now more concerned
| about having expanded too quickly during the pandemic period.
| xwdv wrote:
| I'd suggest rather than paying by the hour, Amazon should switch
| to paying workers by the task. They have the data to work out a
| profitable rate.
|
| This gives workers the ability to self regulate how lazy or
| efficient they'd like to be.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Don't know about the US, but it would be illegal in many
| countries if workers don't reach the minimum wage despite
| working full-time. Of course they could fire slow workers (at
| least in the US, in Europe it's often not that easy), but then
| they are back at the problem of the submission: running out of
| workers
| crikeyjoe wrote:
| There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers
| wanting to work for Amazon.
| [deleted]
| RobertDeNiro wrote:
| Its a shortage at a given salary. Up the salary and the
| shortage is not present. So really it is self imposed.
| azemetre wrote:
| It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation
| for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just
| delivery or warehouse).
|
| You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article
| mentions this):
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
|
| The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It
| doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter,
| reddit, or even hackernews about hire to fire, stack
| ranking/pip, and even just general mental abuse.
|
| I mean just read this excerpt from the article about a working
| needing to go see a dentist about an infected tooth:
|
| > The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of
| unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had
| enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the
| company did not pull from that separate bank of days because
| Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance.
| Pagan said he also had a doctor's note but was told the company
| did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been
| excused from work with a doctor's note previously. He said he
| worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up
| one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer
| worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.
|
| At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense
| of decency? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-
| procedures/investigation...
| taway2dfadf4 wrote:
| >> It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a
| reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers
| (not just delivery or warehouse).
|
| Even if Amazon changed their policies, I'd be cautious about
| any AMZN managers or directors. The fact that they survived
| there, or thrived, means they are probably ruthless and I
| wouldnt want to work with such an individual (or hire them,
| for that matter.)
| XorNot wrote:
| Skip sense of decency this is just downright stupid: a worker
| with an urgent medical issue needed time off for it. They had
| accrued leave, but you don't let them take it. They resolve
| the issue, _come back to work_ and then you fire then
| anyway...and what, now have to train a new person up? What
| the hell was gained by any of that?
| russh wrote:
| I have a friend that works in an Amazon data center and he
| describes the work environment as "Have you seen any of the
| hunger games movies?"
| gitfan86 wrote:
| When I interviewed for Amazon, they had an online screen
| that was basically asking which employee should be fired
| based on the metrics in a table. I'm all for firing bad
| employees, productivity matters, but it does seem like the
| culture promotes looking for people to fire.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have
| a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he
| says it's the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He's
| in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His
| schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows
| exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible
| and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn't
| understand the hate aside from lazy people that have no work
| ethic complaining they are being asked to actually work, and
| work hard, consistently. If it was as terrible as some
| articles make it sound, I'd doubt they'd have so many
| employees.
| azemetre wrote:
| I don't need many sides of a story when there is one
| damning example of a human needing to see a medical
| professional then getting fired shortly after because no
| leader at Amazon took 5 seconds to think if this was
| compassionate or not.
|
| Why should I give Amazon the benefit of the doubt when they
| have proven time and time again to be actively hostile and
| dehumanizing? Maybe we should expect Amazon to not treat
| their fellow humans as some flesh automaton and just be
| decent for a change.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I've worked ~5 low skill jobs that meet this description.
| It is the norm, not the exception. At least in Canada.
|
| Jobs advertised as permanent full-time where they can you
| on the last day they are allowed to are also very common.
|
| Also, my co-workers at these jobs were 90% lazy slobs who
| did maybe 25% of the load I would while getting paid the
| same amount. No amount of write ups would alter their
| behaviour.
|
| I'm blessed, truly, to have escaped poverty.
| bcassedy wrote:
| It's also short sighted right?
|
| This was a successful worker that missed a few days of
| work with a medical issue, boom fired. And then we see
| memos like this lamenting that they can't get enough
| workers? By not accepting some productivity dips due to
| human nature, they're shrinking their labor pool both by
| removing people from it directly and with the sentiment
| generated by the bad press of their inhumane treatment of
| workers.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The guy in the parent comments story loved working at
| amazon too, until he needed his tooth removed and showed up
| to work one day to learn that his badge no longer worked.
| alangibson wrote:
| And he'll think that until one day they can him for missing
| work due to a health issue.
|
| This is why I find a lack of solidarity between working
| people to be somewhere between selfish and disgusting.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I find it disgusting that you think you can take
| someone's few sentence anecdote about their cousin and
| think that you know better than both of them about what
| is good for them.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Exactly, it means nothing to me when some workers say
| they're ok with their job when I see evidence dozens upon
| dozens of their coworkers are abused. It means nothing
| because I have no reason to assume they won't turn back
| on their employers once they have a conflict as well. It
| merely signals a lack of solidarity and nothing else.
| batmaniam wrote:
| > At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no
| sense of decency?
|
| We don't need to ask, we already know. Actions speak louder
| than words anyway, and we've all seen how they treat all
| their workers: from warehouse to corporate. One would be a
| bit naive to think only their warehouse workers get treated
| badly, corporate workers are slapped around just as much in
| their own way.
|
| Even in death, Amazon doesn't care and will lie through its
| teeth:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-
| wa...
|
| > Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving
| treatment from Amazon's internal safety responders.
|
| > Bill was laying there for 20 minutes and nobody nearby saw
| until an Amnesty worker with a radio came by.
|
| > A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the
| wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera
| and came down to talk to him about it
|
| > "After the incident, everyone was forced to go back to
| work. No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away
| and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like
| it's fine,"
|
| > Amazon said it had responded to Foister's collapse "within
| minutes".
|
| Amazon will just keep doing what it's doing because it can.
| Like you mentioned, online perception has gotten worse ever
| since that 2015 article, so clearly they just don't care
| about anything other than profit. Warehouse workers have had
| enough, they're pushing back by organizing their rights
| collectively. But so should corporate workers, we shouldn't
| have to keep watch over our shoulders every time we go to
| work in fear of PIP, or even at the interview stage where we
| have to suspect if we're getting "hired to be fired".
|
| It's ridiculous. We should organize too.
| bcassedy wrote:
| Technically 20 is a number of minutes...
|
| But yeah even as a software engineer I'm often torn about
| wanting to work for Amazon. They have quite a few
| interesting projects and the pay is solid, but there are a
| lot of horror stories out there that suggest it is a brutal
| place to work even for engineers.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| One could even say that "they responded in microseconds."
| allenrb wrote:
| Working at an Amazon warehouse sounds terrible in every way,
| but... did you see those spiral package slides in the
| background? Might give up my sweet tech job just to ride on
| those.
| [deleted]
| zwieback wrote:
| Not really what the article says - Amazon's enforced-churn
| policy leads to workers that want to continue working there
| being fired for no good reason.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| You could argue the reason is that they weren't good enough.
| azemetre wrote:
| Needing to see a doctor suddenly means you're a poor
| worker?
| cduzz wrote:
| Needing to urinate while on shift also makes you a poor
| worker.
|
| I see bottles of sun tea piled up in various places
| around town where delivery trucks pause for red lights.
|
| Those are good workers, committed to the job.
| [deleted]
| anonymousab wrote:
| For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah.
|
| For as long as they are (seen as) trivially replaceable,
| an employee that sees a doctor, or has health concerns,
| or uses benefits of any kind, or really has any slip in
| their productivity even to the slightest degree is a
| poorer worker than one that doesn't.
|
| This stops working if you run out of people to hire, or
| if the cost of hiring increases past a certain threshold.
|
| It is the most rational way for the dominant corporation
| in the current economic system to act, if they can get
| away with it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah.
|
| I don't think worker attrition is cost effective. It is
| just less work and lower skill requirement for the
| managers to rule by fear and overwork.
|
| Isn't Amazon paying abit higher wages than the
| competition? They need to pay the bullshit fee to the
| workers.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >" You could argue the reason is that they weren't good
| enough. "
|
| This _is_ a valid possibility. However, companies that
| enforce churn through up-or-out and stack ranking tend to
| end up treating employees ruthlessly in order to satisfy
| the system. There are no shortage of stories where managers
| and individuals backstab and sabotage each other so that
| they aren 't automatically fired as part of the culling
| process. There are plenty of 'just fine' employees out
| there, yet companies like Amazon act like everyone needs to
| be above average.
| lc9er wrote:
| There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.
|
| Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to
| pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting
| workers."
|
| As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands
| wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Have you considered that those customers and workers are
| mostly the same people?
|
| There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See:
| https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/
| corrral wrote:
| Exactly--it's entirely infeasible to live in the modern
| world and keep up with every step of the supply chain for
| every product and service you use, _even if_ the
| information were readily available, which it very much is
| not. It 's not even close to being possible.
|
| That's what laws setting floors on how shitty product-
| safety/work-conditions/worker-pay/et c. can get, are for.
| Doesn't work so hot in a world where we grant MFN (or
| whatever it's called now) trade status to authoritarian
| states with weak worker, consumer, and environmental
| protections, though.
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| True. Same can be said of unions.
|
| Unions were supposed to protect workers, at least in
| theory, but they were more than happy to off-shore
| manufacturing and allow layoffs in the US --as long as they
| got to keep their union boss jobs. Cesar Chavez understood
| this. This is why he did not want just anybody to be able
| to work in the fields.
|
| It's all related. You wanna pay less by offshoring labor?
| You got it! But one day that off-shoring is going to come
| get you and your job will evaporate and you will be happy
| with service sector jobs. And don't complain, you didn't
| want to pay $70 for a shirt and instead went to buy a $20
| shirt and "saved" money but "sold" your job or the
| underemployed person's job now driving a clunker.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest
| possible price even if that means exploiting workers."
|
| This is just wrong. First, Amazon's prices and their wages
| for warehouse workers aren't directly connected. If they
| were, amazon wouldn't have posted 200B in profit in 2021.
| Given the 1.6mil employees, that's $125k per employee of
| profit. Amazon could pay MUCH more, and still hold the same
| prices.
|
| Second, the hunger for cheap stuff is driven at least in
| part BY LOW WAGES. If you're making minimum wage - you're
| going to buy the cheapest things you can find.
|
| edit: i'm getting beat up in the comments because I used
| gross profits rather than $YOUR_FAV_PROFIT_METRIC
|
| I stand by using that number. If you think I am actually
| suggesting they distribute 100% of their profits to every
| employee you're straw-manning my point. I'm suggesting
| cutting a slice off profits, exec pay, and stock grants,
| and giving that to the lowest paid employees - since the
| company would not make that money without their labor.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| AMZN did not have $200B profit in 2021.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net
| -in...
| kennywinker wrote:
| Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a
| 29.28% increase from 2020.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/gro
| ss-...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There is no reason to ignore fixed costs (aka using
| "gross profit") for the purpose of calculating how much
| extra cash a company could be paying its employees. Net
| income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that could
| have been spent.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > Net income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that
| could have been spent.
|
| It's possible gross profit is the wrong metric, but the
| premise that net income is the _right_ metric isn 't
| something I accept. Net income is the money left over
| after it's been allocated out as the company has chosen.
| i.e. all the salaries have been paid, stock grants have
| been made, buildings and utilities are all paid, stock
| buybacks have been allocated, etc
|
| If they allocated a little less to exec pay, and a little
| more to warehouse worker pay, I don't even think they'd
| need to cut into the 33B they have leftover.
|
| But EVEN if we accept the compensation amazon has and
| only allow ourselves to play with net income - 33B is
| STILL $20k per employee. Do you know how life-changing
| $5k/year is when you're making 29k/year? That still
| leaves 15K of profit per employee (or 25B) that can go to
| people who didn't work for it.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Net income is all the money left after all the expenses
| are paid. Stock buybacks have no impact on net income
| (they are part of the cash flow statement, not the income
| statement). Excluding all the things you said to get to
| the metric you like means Amazon can function without
| executives, software developers (no stock grant
| expenses), warehouses (no buildings and utilities
| expenses).... Which is plainly not true.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Yes, I agree, your straw-man is plainly false. Amazon
| does need executives, software developers, and
| warehouses.
|
| Amazon is a functioning + profitable business. If it
| can't continue to be a functioning + profitable business
| if it pays every employee a good wage, it doesn't deserve
| to exist anymore - it needs to die to make room for a
| business that CAN do that. But I don't actually think
| that amazon has to exploit its workers in order to stay
| profitable, and I think the numbers (at _very least_ the
| 33B in net profits) back me up.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You are welcome to start your own Amazon competitor with
| however much profit you would like.
|
| If you are willing to accept less profit than Amazon,
| then you should be able to steal customers and employees
| by offering lower prices and better quality of life at
| work.
|
| Same goes for Walmart/Target/any other retail business.
|
| Maybe all the execs at these established retail
| businesses working for decades know what they are doing.
| Or maybe people posting on the internet know how they
| could be running the business better and delivering goods
| and services at lower prices and paying workers more.
|
| If I were a betting man, I would bet that you would soon
| find profit margins are about as low as they can get for
| retail businesses and the competition very stiff.
|
| > I think the numbers (at very least the 33B in net
| profits) back me up.
|
| That profit is coming from AWS, Amazon video, and from
| the commission they collect from 3rd party sellers, not
| their retail operations.
|
| By the way, I am all for better labor laws and higher
| quality of life at work laws. I just do not see the point
| of criticizing individual businesses, especially those
| running at low profit margins with no moat. They are
| obviously in cutthroat competition already, otherwise the
| profit margins would be higher.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| Doesn't "profit" of any kind have stuff subtracted out?
|
| Yes it does:
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grossprofit.asp
|
| Sales commissions, direct labor that varies with output,
| to name a few.
|
| I appreciate that you provided your favorite metric, but
| gross profit is affected by wages, so it is on point as
| far as I'm concerned.
| sib wrote:
| No idea where you are getting your numbers, but Amazon
| did not post $200B in profit in 2021. The list of top
| five annual _profit_ (adjusted to current USD) by any
| company ever is:
|
| 1. Saudi Aramco (2018) - $120B 2. Saudi Aramco (2021) -
| $115B 3. Vodafone (2014) - $113B 4. Fannie Mae (2013) -
| $98B 5. Apple (2021) - $95B
|
| Perhaps you are thinking about revenue?
| kennywinker wrote:
| > Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a
| 29.28% increase from 2020.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/gro
| ss-...
|
| Gross profits.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Amazon's prices and their wages for warehouse workers
| aren't directly connected
|
| If you can say that, then you can say that Amazon's
| prices and the taxes it pays on its revenues aren't
| directly connected.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I would say that. Raise taxes on corporations. Trickle-
| down economics is and always has been a lie.
| [deleted]
| oezi wrote:
| EBITDA is 60 bn from 470 bn revenue. Net income is 33 bn
| USD.
|
| They couldn't spend 125k per worker.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Did i say they could "spend" that? No. I said:
|
| > that's $125k per employee of profit
|
| And it is. Gross profit.
|
| I could use one of your numbers, $33B net income, or $60B
| EBITDA. But using those number accepts the premise that
| all of that money was allocated correctly, and it's just
| the 33B left over that is free to be distributed.
| [deleted]
| IMTDb wrote:
| A significant portion of Amazon profits comes from AWS.
| If you remove AWS from the equation, AWS does make money,
| but not the truckloads you are pointing. And AWS profits
| are in now way linked to amazon warehouse workers
| salaries.
|
| If Amazon increases wages - and thus prices - what do you
| think will happen:
|
| 1. People will still buy amazon because they have a
| higher wage so they ca afford it
|
| 2. People will buy more stuff from another store that
| provides cheaper prices while exploiting Chinese workers
| instead of American ones.
|
| Of course it's 2.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Again, you're simply wrong.
|
| https://www.shacknews.com/article/128660/amazon-amzn-aws-
| rev...
|
| 17.78B in 2021, or $11k per employee.
|
| That's less than 10% of the per employee profit.
|
| Amazon _can_ increase wages without raising prices.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The numbers you are using are wrong, and that article is
| sloppily written. Revenue and profit (net income) are not
| the same thing.
|
| Redo the math with the correct numbers:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net
| -in...
|
| And note that Walmart/Target/Home Depot/ and all the
| other retail public companies have profit margins of low
| single digits. It is safe to assume Amazon has the same
| low single digit profit margins from its retail
| operations.
| sophacles wrote:
| It's simple, just apply modern capitalism. In this case
| the rule is: Ford was a genius for realizing his workers
| need to make enough to buy his product. Anyone else who
| makes that realization is a dirty commie.
| gruez wrote:
| >Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make
| enough to buy his product
|
| In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k
| (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that
| your company makes? Factoring in margins you need each
| dollar paid to your workers to generate $6.66 dollars
| worth of sales for you for it to break even.
| kps wrote:
| > In what world does it make sense to pay your workers
| $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products
| that your company makes?
|
| A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone
| else's workers can also spend on the products your
| company makes.
| gruez wrote:
| ...except that won't happen because supply/demand drives
| prices, not the inflated wages that you're paying. Your
| competitors will continue to pay their workers the usual
| wages, and laugh all the way to the bank with the extra
| money that they're not spending on wages, or undercut
| your prices.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Supply and demand also applies to the labour market. If
| you pay more, the best people want to work for you and
| you can hire the best people. Humans are not fungible, no
| matter how much businesses try to treat them that way.
| gruez wrote:
| >Supply and demand also applies to the labour market
|
| Right, but for wages (ie. prices) to go up, you need to
| decrease supply or increase demand. Increasing the prices
| you pay doesn't do that.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Supply and demand can "solve" for the price for an HD TV.
| It can't solve the problem of "do I need an HD TV or a 4K
| TV?".
| ipaddr wrote:
| Cars are this big advertising moving billboard. Car
| companies employee thousands who work in cities built
| around these plants. Having employees driving around
| earning high paying wages spending it around town has a
| big influence on the rest of the town/region.
| gruez wrote:
| seems tenuous and hard to objectify. You could also use
| the same argument to say that raining $5 bills from your
| company offices has net positive value, eg.
|
| 1. dump a sack of $5 bills from your office
|
| 2. people associate your company with giving them free
| stuff, thereby giving you positive influence
|
| 3. ???
|
| 4. profit
| ipaddr wrote:
| It can but each situation requires a multiplier. A
| $10,000 cash drop as a media story picked up nationally
| or regionally will be worth more.
|
| In Ford's case he doubled the daily pay to 5 dollars but
| this also provided a steady workforce so it had other
| benefits because a steady workforce means a trained and
| more productive workforce.
| slenk wrote:
| Just have to reply to recruiters saying you don't want to work
| for a company with forced attrition and they shut up.
|
| They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it
| anymore, they just cease communication.
|
| Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as
| forced attrition
| kube-system wrote:
| There are only 9 employers on planet earth with more employees
| than Amazon.
| tomohawk wrote:
| There's something like 200k homeless people in California - all
| those failed policies have put a dent in the labor pool.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| I think the downfall of Amazon will begin from the inside...
| a_shovel wrote:
| Arguably the largest company in the world is depleting its own
| potential labor pool around all of its facilities, due to the
| sheer cruelty of how it treats its workers.
|
| The assumption has been that there's always more workers, so who
| cares if you burn them all out before the year is over? Just get
| some more. But Amazon has unprecedented scale and an
| unprecedented (sustained) attrition rate, which means they are
| heading into uncharted territory. Maybe there aren't always more
| bodies to burn through.
|
| When things like these happen, it's time to consider regularly
| using terms like "megacorporation" in earnest.
| tmaly wrote:
| Would it be so bad to just develop better robots for this type of
| work?
|
| Keynes had a prediction that we would be working 15 hour work
| weeks by now.
|
| In your opinion, why haven't we obtained this?
| svachalek wrote:
| Amazon has flipped the script, replacing inefficient and overly
| sympathetic human management with software-based micro-
| managers. This leaves the rank and file as meat-based robots to
| follow narrowly scripted programming.
|
| They've also automated a lot of the physical work; you should
| watch a video of how their warehouses operate. But as of yet
| many physical tasks cannot be easily automated -- but they can
| be cheaply acquired if you are willing and able to treat human
| labor as machines. Until recently at least.
|
| As to the second question though, I have a completely different
| thought. I think it's just that given a choice, most people
| will choose more money rather than more free time, up to a
| point. I think most people in urban office jobs could find a
| way to work less, earn less, and spend less; I certainly could.
| But it just runs counter to human nature.
| Havoc wrote:
| You know conditions are bad when desperate people say no
| femto113 wrote:
| Amazon's scale encounters limits that most companies don't ever
| have to consider. There's a parallel from 20ish years ago: Amazon
| eschewed software performance engineering with the mantra "if it
| can be solved with a credit card [i.e. you can buy more hardware]
| don't worry about it now". That worked up to the day they called
| the company that made their database server and asked to upgrade
| and were told "you already have the most powerful machine we've
| ever built".
| pojzon wrote:
| In single master architecture this is inevitable. At some point
| you wont be able to throw more hardware.
|
| Thats why multi-master architecture was created in the first
| place.
| toast0 wrote:
| A lot of big companies went through that, I've seen
| presentations about eBay running out of scaling room on their
| Oracle servers in their boom.
|
| Otoh, maximum database server today is a ton bigger. Looking
| at just Supermicro, you can get 8 TB ram in a dual Epyc
| server, and 24 TB in exotic, but still off the shelf systems.
| You can get a lot of qps with 24 TB of ram and a whole bunch
| of cores.
|
| If you go with Oracle, they'll sell you a Sparc server with
| 48 TB of ram, and 384 CPU cores.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| "Running out of people to hire" is a strange way of saying "Not
| offering employees enough to want to work there". To be catty,
| there are plenty of people to hire, but maybe they're running out
| of people to exploit.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| It's not sustainable for them to offer, say, $30 an hour
| starting salary for fulfillment centre employees. As it is,
| they have to subsidize retail with other revenue lines like AWS
| and advertising.
| no_wizard wrote:
| This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the
| tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-
| Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting
| engineers now too
| packetlost wrote:
| Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes
| more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out
| of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for
| _Amazon_ in particular.
| 7ewis wrote:
| From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the
| most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job
| compared to other big tech companies.
| yojo wrote:
| Same. I'm not on Facebook's radar, but I get Amazon recruiter
| spam to my inbox every 2-3 months. This is a far higher rate
| than any other company.
| sefrost wrote:
| I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me
| every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other
| Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time.
|
| They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the
| stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the
| interviews puts me off from engaging.
| jen20 wrote:
| I'm regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always
| decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask
| me to sign a non-compete agreement. They're still not
| hurting enough for that common sense step to have been
| taken, so I will not be talking to them.
| maherbeg wrote:
| I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting
| lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.
| matt_s wrote:
| Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all
| job types. I think this also mimics their other business
| practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of
| longer term practices to build a place where people are
| attracted naturally.
|
| What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff
| engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and
| don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up
| with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage
| level things happen where companies may take their business
| elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball.
|
| Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good
| investment/startup.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an
| engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last
| round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm
| horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I
| think the rest was ok).
|
| I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.
| jppope wrote:
| I feel like this post by Matthew Prince sums it up =>
| https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290
| amzn-throw wrote:
| I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been
| promoted twice. Ask me anything.
|
| Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers,
| because of discussion threads like this where a lot of
| misinformation is shared about what it's like to work here.
|
| Is it tough? Yes. Is it competitive? Yes. Is there stack
| ranking? Yes.
|
| Is it the most fulfilling and challenging and interesting job
| I've had in 22 years of Software Development? (The latter half
| of my career has been here). Yes, yes, and yes.
|
| This is the best job I've ever had and I think it can be for a
| lot of others who want to have disproportionately large impact
| day-to-day and on-the-world.
| xedrac wrote:
| It turns out when you treat your employees as disposable
| resources to be exploited, instead of human beings, people
| don't want to work there. I have several friends that worked
| for Amazon as engineers and from their stories, I don't think
| I'll ever consider working for Amazon. They probably have some
| good teams in there somewhere. And let's not forget their "hire
| to fire" practices to meet their turnover quotas.
| dktoao wrote:
| From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for
| (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has
| made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out.
| Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| I had an internal AWS recruiter message me about a position
| there once; I just flat-out told him that I had heard so many
| negative things about their work environment that I had no
| interest in working there.
|
| (Also, that position would've required relocating to the
| Washington, DC metro area, which would've been a dealbreaker
| even if AWS had a great work environment)
| qbit42 wrote:
| I've heard mediocre feedback about their research groups as
| well, although they do pay pretty well.
| influx wrote:
| I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team
| dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and
| Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of
| fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too.
|
| Downside, there was no free snacks. _shrug_
| dktoao wrote:
| I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After
| all it is a large company with many different offices all
| over that does a lot of different things. However, my naive
| estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of
| these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat
| grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception
| and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.
| influx wrote:
| For sure, it's not for everyone, and I would encourage
| everyone at any job they interview for to also vet the
| people and team you are going to be working with.
|
| Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations
| and on call burden.
| tylerhou wrote:
| implying bananas aren't snacks
| ToxicMegacolon wrote:
| +1 They are horrible to work for as an SDE.
|
| I regret my 3 years at Amazon, and wish I had left sooner.
| When I left for G, ~15 people called/emailed to tell me how I
| was going to a much better company, including my own manager.
|
| People love to say that its manager dependent, but IMO the
| default at amazon is the horrible, employee-exploiting
| culture. So a good team/manager is the exception, and thing
| will eventually turn to shit.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know if I'd make the cut and I'm sure it'd be a
| SUBSTANTIAL pay increase, but I haven't followed up with any
| Amazon recruiters simply because of their reputation as the
| sort of company who's comfortable with employees having
| visible breakdowns.
| jerglingu wrote:
| This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before
| they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive
| literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even
| harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.
| sidvit wrote:
| I'm a fairly inexperienced software engineer (<2 yrs
| experience) and I've been contacted by 3 separate Amazon
| recruiters on Linkedin in the past month alone if that means
| anything
| starky wrote:
| I don't even do any coding and have gotten contacted by their
| recruiter for a SWE position in the past month. Seems like
| their recruiters are resorting to spray and pray when it
| comes to finding new hires.
| leephillips wrote:
| That's nothing. I've never programmed a computer, just
| recently learned how to use an abacus, and been in a coma
| for three years--yet 43 Amazon recruiters email and call me
| seven times a day for a software senior management job.
| notpachet wrote:
| You may be qualified for that, actually.
| robbyking wrote:
| I have a friend who was an engineer at Amazon, and it sounds
| like tech jobs at Amazon are a nightmare, too.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Yep. They keep messaging me. Could double my salary and not a
| chance I would work there.
|
| I know some recent grads that are starting there however.
|
| I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about
| corporate or political values and I just wanted to program
| stuff.
|
| Was so much easier.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > corporate or political values
|
| If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as
| much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice.
|
| I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind
| leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest
| about their mission being to make money.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I'm totally happy to work for a place that wants to make as
| much money as possible. That is a great thing.
|
| Making as much money as possible by milking the government
| or using the government to regulate your competitors things
| is another matter
|
| Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| I can't be the only one who had this experience. I recently had
| the choice between pursuing a cool startup position and an AWS
| position. Once I was emailed all of the AWS interview material
| and the 4 hour itinerary... I just had to ask myself if it was
| even worth putting my time into it. The total comp would
| probably be better than the startup position, but everything
| else (work life balance, risk of being fired, opportunity for
| growth, etc) seemed (probably) worse from what I've heard.
| Suffice to say, I dropped out of the interview process and took
| the cool startup job instead.
| deanCommie wrote:
| "4 hour itinerary" is hardly excessive for a big tech role,
| what are you on about?
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| The point is that the role wasn't tantalizing enough to
| justify taking off a day from my existing job and going
| through Amazon's interview gauntlet. The other job I was
| interviewing for had a much more reasonable interview
| structure, no whiteboard bullshit, no live coding, no 4
| hour sessions. I think it says a lot about the company and
| how they value prospective employees' time.
| lisper wrote:
| > Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse
| workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers
| who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or,
| worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times.
|
| Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the
| _explicit policy_ of _not wanting_ their workers to stay on long
| enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
|
| So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's
| that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out
| that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
|
| Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately
| about how great it is to work for Amazon.
| [deleted]
| madrox wrote:
| This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At
| my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why
| their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are
| so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock,
| employees will naturally want to leave within four years.
| dixie_land wrote:
| ironically in this down turn Amazon offers are extremely
| appealing since your first two years are all cash. So you
| shore up on your cash while your future vesting have an
| upside if the recession is short lived.
| madrox wrote:
| Yes, their comp plans have changed in the last couple years
| because the stock isn't as exciting as it used to be. A
| couple years ago, it wasn't like this.
| hintymad wrote:
| As a result, AWS engineers are very much promotion oriented.
| This leads to two results: title inflation and disgruntled
| employees. L6 used to be a big deal but not any more. L7 is
| now the new L6. The challenge with this arrangement is that
| whoever got promoted early on but stayed in the same level
| get less in return. And apparently it's human's nature to
| compare. When engineers see that their peers get promoted to
| L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach)
| in three years for no particularly obvious reasons, they can
| barely hide their cold anger.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The US military is the same way. Officers get promoted, or
| they retire. I.e. "up or out".
|
| In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled"
| or it's time to leave.
| vageli wrote:
| > In the AF, your performance reviews need to be
| "firewalled" or it's time to leave.
|
| What does firewalling a performance review mean?
| WalterBright wrote:
| All the scores are at the max. "Firewalling" the throttle
| means full power (pushing it towards the firewall).
| taocoyote wrote:
| Firewall fives, I forgot about that, or maybe blocked it
| from my memory. It's the same for enlisted.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Promotion-orientation is bad, but so are promotion levels
| that are considered "almost impossible to reach".
|
| Levels.fyi doesn't seem to agree with your title inflation
| evaluation: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon,M
| icrosoft&trac...
|
| It's only 3 data points, but it seems that Amazon Senior is
| comparable to Google senior, and it's Microsoft that
| inflates the Senior title.
| bigmutant wrote:
| Sort of. The main issue is that AMZ/AWS doesn't
| differentiate (by title) between someone recently
| promoted to L6 (generally ~8-10 YOE) and someone deep in
| to L6 (~12-15 YOE). Other companies solve this with the
| Staff Engineer title, but AMZ doesn't have that. If
| you're an L6 who reports to an L7 Sr. Manager then you're
| functionally a Staff Engineer and supposed to be on the
| Principal track. Mileage varies across orgs/teams.
|
| Gist: "junior" L6 SDE is more like Google L5, "senior" L6
| SDE tracks mostly with Google L6 (or even L7 in rare
| cases).
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to
| reach)
|
| I can attest to this; worked there from mid 2000s to early
| 2010s. Principle Engineers, L7 ICs, were looked up as Gods
| back then. To an extent that a couple of projects by an L5
| where it went through principal-review process was almost
| guaranteed to get them a promotion to L6. Back when I was
| there I thought pulling off L5-L6 required crazy work
| schedule (I couldn't so didn't) and L7 was well and truly
| beyond mortals.
|
| But now I hear they are doling out L7s like candy as they
| are getting increasingly desperate to fill their open head
| counts. How times change!
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Man, I worked at Amazon in the early 2010s, and I
| remember I was an L something and proud of it, but
| thought I'd never make it to L whatever. It was such a
| huge deal and a huge part of my life, and now I can't
| even remember which number it was.. I wish I'd spent less
| time working and more time doing stuff I cared about
| knolan wrote:
| That almost sounds like a cult.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| A cult takes money from you and doesn't pay you a million
| a year or whatever these people are making.
| int_19h wrote:
| How much are they making for Amazon, though?
| woah wrote:
| You need to buy 10,000 hours of self improvement tapes to
| get to L7. Only the most enlightened have achieved it
| ActorNightly wrote:
| In what world is a $150k out of college starting salary low?
| peanuty1 wrote:
| I think their new grad salary is around 120k in HCOL areas
| like SF.
| kache_ wrote:
| In a world where you can get 250
| colinmhayes wrote:
| No one is paying $250k salary out of college. Every one
| of those jobs has similar salary to amazon with the rest
| in stock. Maybe high frequency traders will give you that
| cash, but no one else.
| cebert wrote:
| That sounds low to me
| dasil003 wrote:
| salary not total comp
| capableweb wrote:
| > employees will naturally want to leave within four years
|
| That also explains why the _breadth_ of AWS services keep
| growing, but the _depth_ of the existing ones remains the
| same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people
| with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who 'd be
| able to add new and deep features.
| torginus wrote:
| The number of services is just crazy - I've worked with AWS
| solutions architects in trying to find the perfect solution
| to our particular problems, and even they don't seem to
| know what half the stuff does.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Let alone which ones are the good ones. That only comes
| from experience.
|
| AWS never cancels anything... but they never complete
| anything either and they abandon 80% of their products in
| minimum viable state, where "viable" is defined by the
| PM's bonus packet, not by anyone who has to use the damn
| thing.
| p_l wrote:
| And the level of actual integration of various services
| varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be
| included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then
| there's stuff that will be documented with something like
| one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers
| will never find anything internal about it, so you end up
| building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...
| philsnow wrote:
| What services aren't currently integrated with IAM /
| didn't launch with IAM integration?
| ljm wrote:
| AWS sometimes feels like Debian's APT but everything is
| rewritten in java.
| latchkey wrote:
| Kind of goes both ways, they might not have been very
| good architects.
| nhkcode wrote:
| Maybe they stick around for only 4 years too.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be
| honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the
| features, and by offering as many different services as
| possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions
| that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK
| or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most
| customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't
| actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage
| decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over
| optimization, because the apparent return from optimization
| exceeds the apparent cost.
|
| I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone
| agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots
| of people still do all their shopping from there because
| they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining
| accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different
| websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that
| breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving
| human populations.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| > everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and
| slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from
| there because they're used to it and it's easier than
| maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15
| different websites
|
| Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more
| responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've
| seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of
| inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for
| easy navigation between related products, and displays
| all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it
| doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional
| than the competition.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Though the filtering features are pretty much useless for
| almost every product. Too many products to maintain any
| decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless
| for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit
| products).
| shimon wrote:
| This actually seems like a structural weakness in cloud,
| where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few
| customers who are very deep in their usage. On the other
| hand, you can usually rely on close relationships with
| those customers to identify their significant needs.
| However, it might be harden to implement them without the
| bench of deeply knowledgeable engineers.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It seems unlikely to me that this analysis applies to
| amzn's retail division.
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| If you spend any time reading their retail forums [1],
| you'll see almost everyone lambasting Amazon constantly.
| Either disgruntled sellers who broke the rules and got
| terminated, or normal, hardworking mom-and-pop stores
| that were all but forced to sell on Amazon and
| consistently lose money due to amazon's ever-changing
| policies, poor support, and catering to large retailers.
| Large retailers get a direct line and quality support,
| while most sellers on Amazon get treated like crap.
|
| [1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/
| baxtr wrote:
| Or maybe it's just a tiny fraction of those millions of
| sellers on their platform?
| robocat wrote:
| > Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre
| compared to the competition?
|
| This was Microsoft's strategy way-back-when. You can go
| surprisingly far, especially in enterprise, by covering
| all the basics without excelling at anything in
| particular, and fixing your mistakes.
|
| Avoiding fatal flaws is really really important and is
| extremely difficult to do, so just managing to be
| mediocre at everything necessary is actually quite
| uncommon in my experience.
|
| I have seen this particularly in my limited experience of
| founders and startups: you may need to be great at one
| thing, but you also need to be OK at many many things,
| and you must avoid the infinite sea of fatal flaws.
| mter wrote:
| That's more promotion oriented architecture and design.
|
| New services/businesses are how you get promoted.
| Maintenance or incrementally improve existing functionality
| and you'll never get promoted.
|
| Amazon isn't really alone in that short sightedness though,
| it's just extra noticeable when combined with high churn
| mr_beans wrote:
| Yes- this is real. There used to be "subclasses" to the
| Principal Engineer role and you could pick if you wanted to
| be a Depth Principal or a Breadth Principal, and that no
| longer exists now.
| simonw wrote:
| Was that Amazon or AWS?
|
| I've heard that the cultures are different between the two. I
| would expect AWS to value holding onto their most experienced
| engineers.
| pjbeam wrote:
| There are differences of course, but culturally there is
| One Amazon. Both take a meat grinding approach, even for
| software engineers. Source: worked at AWS.
| swat535 wrote:
| Yes and it has always been like this.
|
| Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority
| of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the
| only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they
| literally can't get away with less. If they could, US
| salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are
| embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.
|
| They will fire you in an instant to save cost, never increase
| your salary and come up with elaborate schemes to basically
| screw you.
|
| I have seen executives try it all: Replace senior engineering
| with students or interns (I'm not kidding), hire from third
| world companies and pay the peanuts, bring in cheap labor on
| visa restrictions and abuse them, low ball you in salary
| negotiations, attempt to pay with "stocks" (I'm talking about
| penny stock companies here..)
|
| To management, Engineering is nothing but an annoying expense
| that gets in their way of profit.
|
| All the free foods, foosball tables, "family" mantra and cool
| hats are designed to distract you from the fact that you are
| being paid in pittance. This is why there is so much
| discrimination against older engineers, because they are more
| likely to catch up to this and demand a fair wage and good
| working conditions. When you are young, naive and hungry, you
| don't think about it much because burning the midnight oil
| with pizza is exciting.
| ljm wrote:
| > If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada
| or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work
| they require.
|
| I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that
| Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our
| work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be
| very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never
| working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being
| forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every
| year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated.
| I don't have to flat-share on 100k.
|
| US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't
| support that lifestyle. If you value your time more than
| your money then it's the US that provides an embarrassingly
| low return.
| doubled112 wrote:
| https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-
| exemptio...
|
| IT professionals in Ontario, at least, are probably
| exempt from most of your list of things you'd think are
| required.
|
| Engineers and engineering students get an even shorter
| stick, in the form of more labour law exemptions.
|
| https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-
| exemptio...
| SonOfKyuss wrote:
| -20% more work for 200% more pay seems like a pretty good
| ROI to me. Especially when I can check out and go back to
| a low stress gig after a few years.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| > less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends,
| never doing crunch time, never being forced to work
| overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year,
| sometimes more
|
| This sounds like 90% of the people I knew at Google.
|
| > US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic
| doesn't support that lifestyle.
|
| This isn't even remotely true.
| raverbashing wrote:
| There has been rumours of engineers "bouncing back" recently
| (they had a better term for it, but I forgot)
| iglio wrote:
| "Boomerang" most likely
| uncomputation wrote:
| Combine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have
| people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares
| vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little
| stability because you will either get torn down for someone
| else's ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any
| means necessary.
| madrox wrote:
| In my experience there, PIPing wasn't any more aggressive
| than anywhere else I've worked. The fighting was certainly
| real, though.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > stock
|
| You left out a big part here; RSU vesting schedule is back
| loaded. It's something like 5-20-25-50
| WalterBright wrote:
| How'd the combination to my safe get on the internet? Drat,
| now I have to change it.
| lbrito wrote:
| It's 5-15-40-40
| peanuty1 wrote:
| It's 5-15-40-40
| georgeecollins wrote:
| To me that is a real tell. New employees are a risk, but
| you can tell if they are going to work out after a year.
| If you are still discounting the RSUs at the second year,
| it is in hopes that some won't survive to the payout of
| the third.
| faangiq wrote:
| Yep it's a churn n burn shop.
| type0 wrote:
| > many commercials lately about how great it is to work for
| Amazon.
|
| South Park had a realistic vision on how it is to work at
| Amazon Fulfillment Center
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc
| lisper wrote:
| Wow, that was really poignant.
| philsnow wrote:
| I dunno, it seemed fairly rosy.
|
| They could have twisted the knife quite a bit more: there
| were a couple 3-second interactions where people are buying
| things [0][1], if they had been denominated in "hours of
| service" rather than USD, with the Company knowing what
| their hours balance was, and having the balance tick down
| and go negative... _that_ would have been dark.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=1m26s
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=2m5s
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, it was understated. Given SP's general trend of
| exaggerating things to extremes I thought that made it
| all the more emotionally impactful. It was like: if we
| exaggerated _this_ reality, it would not be funny, it
| would be unwatchable.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| People need to read some history.
|
| The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same
| stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard.
| There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are
| plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become
| complacent or disgruntled.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Early 20th centruy industrialists also had to deal with the
| looming threat of anti-trust regulations. These days it's
| almost a joke. There is no trust-busting anymore. The
| monopolies control foreign and domestic policy through
| massive lobbying efforts.
| Xeronate wrote:
| Your argument has no relevance to the comment you are
| responding to as the point being made was it is human
| nature for (some) people to get complacent regardless of
| the circumstances.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's also human nature to grumble about one's job. Heck,
| I do it too, even though I work for free.
| walleeee wrote:
| contextualizing a point is just as legitimate as
| responding to it directly and this particular comment is
| relevant
|
| perhaps some people will always grow complacent but you
| could just as easily make an essentialist argument about
| the corporation: maybe some employers will always abuse
| their employees, certainly some deliberately make it
| difficult to distinguish worker complacency from
| legitimate complaint, which bears directly on the
| original claim about human nature
| burntoutfire wrote:
| On the other hand, they could just beat up or kill their
| disgruntled employees... I think things have improved and
| not regressed since then.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-
| bottl...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > People need to read some history.
|
| But they'll get distracted before getting around to it. Gore
| Vidal wasn't kidding when he used the words "United States of
| Amnesia" in his essays.
|
| (Also, "our owners". Good stuff, tangy with aristocratic
| vinegar - acerbic, I believe the tasters call it.)
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| or acetic ;)
| jacobolus wrote:
| These two words (like _acid_ , _acrid_ , and _vinegar_ )
| come from the same root.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Yeah, my first thought when I read the headline was "Oh shit,
| have Amazon figured out they can't treat people like shit and
| not run out of people willing to work for them?"
|
| Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can
| employ.
| charles_f wrote:
| Beyond the "up or out" mentality, the disgust you got from
| considering people as replaceable cogs in a machine and how
| it's done overall, and maybe not applicable to warehouse forces
| ; I think having some turnover in your organization is a good
| thing. You don't get the same diversity of idea and experience
| when people around you have all been there for 15 years than
| you get when they're coming and going. In my experience people
| who have been around for a long time tend to drink the coolade
| much more, and are more complacent with stuff that shouldn't
| be.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, of course some turnover is necessary. You do sometimes
| have to get rid of the deadwood. But deciding that _everyone_
| is going to be treated as deadwood sooner or later (and
| apparently more likely sooner than later) _as a matter of
| policy_ seems ill-advised to me.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| When unpacking the quote I read:
|
| 1) Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but
| replaceable
|
| 2) He feared that workers who remained at the company too long
| would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled
|
| The two statements seem relatively disconnected (which makes
| the "and" a little confusing). Anyway, while I understand a)
| (not saying I agree) and am a little confused by b), how both
| or either would logically lead to your conclusion is not
| obvious to me. Can you elaborate?
| lisper wrote:
| "Complacent and disgruntled" is the problem Bezos was trying
| to solve. "Replaceable" is the circumstance that he leveraged
| to produce his solution: hire a continual stream of fresh
| non-complacent non-disgruntled people and fire them before
| they have a change to become complacent and disgruntled.
|
| Creating a work environment where long-term workers become
| happy and productive rather than complacent and disgruntled,
| i.e. the kind of work environment that their current PR
| campaign portrays, apparently never entered into his
| thinking. Which makes it hard for me to sympathize that
| Amazon is now running out of fresh non-complacent non-
| disgruntled people to feed their process and has to resort to
| PR campaigns in order to attract fresh victims.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > Creating a work environment where long-term workers
| become happy and productive
|
| Is there a large (or even mid-sized) tech company that
| managed to achieve it? I've never heard of one and I don't
| think it's possible. At scale these companies operate,
| senior level jobs are about navigating the organization and
| its bureucracy and there aren't many people who find that
| kind of work fun. Especially people who have an engineering
| mindset.
|
| The tech jobs in bigger companies are mostly meh at best an
| their biggest saving grace is the pay. Bezos realizes that
| and tries to work with this reality. Most big cos work
| because they've found way to extract enough value of out
| their people who'd rather not be there (but the pay and
| stability is too good), and tech is no exception.
| another_story wrote:
| These aren't just tech jobs, though. Amazon employs far
| more warehouse and other non-tech staff.
| lisper wrote:
| > I don't think it's possible.
|
| It is manifestly possible. The Germans do it.
|
| https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236165/german-workers-
| satis...
|
| The reason it doesn't happen in the U.S. is that workers
| have been systematically stripped of all of their power,
| so corporate management now answers exclusively to
| shareholders. Trying to make life better for your workers
| puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
|
| But it does not have to be that way. All we have to do to
| change it is to decide that it needs to change.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| German economy is famous for being based on small and
| mid-sized companies (which are often the best in the
| world at the ultra-specialized thing that they do). My
| post was on impossiblity of high job satisfaction levels
| in big organizations, I don't think it's as bad for the
| mid-sized and small shops.
| lisper wrote:
| There are 29 German companies in the Fortune Global 500,
| each with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_German_comp
| ani...
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Most of those companies are well over 100 years old. I
| can't be certain that Adidas in Germany is a terrible
| place to work but I can say that China HQ is bad enough
| to get workaholics to bail on it, worse than Amazon
| China.
|
| Germany's underperformance in founding new companies in
| the last 50 years is puzzling but I doubt shorter work
| hours really explain it. They're actually working every
| single one of those hours.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is not unusual at all.
|
| My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm.
| Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-
| level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not
| hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few
| years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would
| stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.
|
| The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not
| unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to
| cite when applying for other jobs.
|
| Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has
| minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong
| enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone
| does for a lifetime.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Abuse is OK because some people eventually figure out how
| to get away from it?
|
| I take issue with calling it abuse, but yes -- it's a
| learning experience and a life lesson. I did it, I was
| disillusioned with school, quit and worked in manual labor,
| delivery, and restaurant jobs when I was young. Decided I
| didn't want to do that for life, so I went back to school
| and learned to program computers. Then I worked as a
| consultant, decided that was too many hours and too much
| time away from home, so I found another job that was better
| on those metrics. Decided I didn't like living in a huge
| metro area, so found another job in a small town.
|
| Life isn't handed to you, and if it is, you don't
| appreciate what you have.
| notyourwork wrote:
| We do it in the medical and legal field under the guise of
| "experience" and "career development". Is it different
| because it's blue collar hourly work and not used as a
| foundation for a lucrative career.
|
| I think it should stop in all places but we seem to
| disregard shitty work arrangements for the few prestigious
| and financially lucrative careers and cry wolf for those
| hourly souls.
|
| Why is that?
| Fomite wrote:
| ...this seems to ignore the _huge_ amount of scrutiny
| these kinds of practices are getting in the medical
| field.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Abuse is OK because it's universal? Come on.
|
| > I think it should stop in all places
|
| This is the only appropriate answer across the board.
| lupire wrote:
| Are you saying it's not fair that people who get paid
| less get more sympathy?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Big consulting firms are exactly the place you should avoid,
| especially if you're a developer with plenty of better
| options.
|
| If you like working in the office / overworking just get into
| a fang and get more money. If you want a quiet environment go
| for smaller companies and get the same money as your big
| consultancy.
|
| Nobody cares where you worked unless it's a fang, anyway
| SoftTalker wrote:
| At the time, FNG didn't exist, and Apple was gasping for
| life. It was one of the top paying options for a new
| graduate with no experience.
| noobker wrote:
| > It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.
|
| Quite literally, not with that attitude. So many of
| capitalism's pitfalls amount to no more than self-fulfilling
| prophecies.
| rschachte wrote:
| I think you have little understanding of how warehouses work
| if you think it's just people moving boxes.
| eloff wrote:
| You'd think they'd scrap the commercials and put the budget
| into improving working conditions if they really cared. I doubt
| the cost of the ads, plus the cost of the bad publicity, plus
| the cost of employee churn is really worth it. Why not just do
| the right thing? Even if it made them sightly less profitable,
| so what?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Having warehouse workers is not Amazon's long term plan. They
| will replace as many workers with robots as quickly as they
| can. Their strategy revolves around burning out the entire
| workforce and then perfecting their robots before they need
| to pay truly absurd packages. Since the workers are a short
| term solution treating them poorly and using ads to reel more
| suckers in is a viable strategy. The question is will they
| run out of people before they can fully automate?
| philsnow wrote:
| This sounds so close to Uber's strategy from the
| mid-20teens of having huge incentives / gamification for
| drivers (up to and including offering to finance car loans
| to get more drivers) but it'll all be okay because in Just
| A Few More Years they'll have perfected the robotaxi and
| they can dump all the humans.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Amazon has never struck me as a company that would prioritize
| doing the right thing.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Most companies irrationally value growth.
|
| Most of them are cancerous because of it.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is a retrospective. Priorities have changed, according to
| TFA
|
| > But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some
| inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won't work much
| longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into
| "Earth's best employer," as Bezos proclaimed in 2021.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
|
| That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding
| analysis.
|
| I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if
| a job is a good or bad deal for them.
|
| They have bills and payments that must be made or they will
| suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment
| decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the
| political affiliation of the CEO.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If you can pass Amazon algorithms interview you can get hired
| in any other fang.
|
| Literally all the others are on average better options than
| Amazon for your mental health (even if not by as much as you
| think)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The labor analysis in TFA did not appear to consider
| technical staff.
| rurp wrote:
| I don't know, Amazon's absurdly high churn rate is pretty
| strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in
| one of them. It's not about people being dumb and making bad
| decisions, it's just really hard to evaluate a work
| environment from the outside.
|
| Even for tech jobs, where it's common to interview with many
| future coworkers, assessing the work environment is tough.
| Warehouse type jobs are probably even harder to evaluate.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once
| you're in one of them
|
| Pretty strong evidence that the job is worse than people
| would expect would be an anonymous survey of workers by a
| third party.
|
| Churn can result from any number of factors. It simply
| isn't enough to support your conclusion, and a lack of
| imagination in seeing alternative explanations isn't proof.
| Warehouse jobs have high churn. Yes, Amazon's churn is
| higher.
|
| A pandemic is just ending. Amazon hired a lot of temporary
| staff. Temporary staff are temporary.
|
| As things open people have more employment options. People
| will always go to the best option available. That doesn't
| mean the job they left is inhumane. It means they found
| something better.
|
| Finally, Amazon has a signing bonus. Some workers may be
| there just for the bonus. Once they get it they may want
| something that pays less but is easier.
| jeromegv wrote:
| The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a
| strong evidence in itself that the job is not good. Does
| Ford lose all their workers right now? No. But they are
| unionized and make more money. Of course different
| industry but since Amazon chose to be in the industry of
| razor-thin margin, they have to find a solution to their
| own problem. If their business model relies on super
| cheap labor, then they must adapt.
| nomel wrote:
| > The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a
| strong evidence in itself that the job is not good.
|
| Do we know which positions are leaving? Is it the back
| breaking jobs, or the higher level stuff? I don't imagine
| any the back breaking portion would ever be "good". It's
| seems like fast food, something that should be
| transitory, where you move on to better things (even if
| that's fast food management). Physical labor is a young
| persons job, because bodies break. It's not something you
| could stay with if you wanted to.
|
| If it's the skilled positions, like mechanics, engineers,
| forklift operators, operations, etc, that are leaving,
| then I think that would be better evidence. If it's the
| guys moving boxes, maybe not.
| 99_00 wrote:
| It's a warehouse job. Warehouse jobs are "not good". Most
| people do it for a while and move on to better things.
| skybrian wrote:
| Compare with an "up or out" system [1], which many companies
| have, as does the US Army.
|
| When I was at Google, it was generally understood that you were
| expected to be promoted to senior engineer eventually, but I
| never knew how much it was enforced.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
| pvankessel wrote:
| Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position
| with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program
| to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly
| workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so
| I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at
| which they're operating - they're literally up against the
| constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong
| opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to
| work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did
| sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering
| better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of
| exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job
| the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort
| seriously and it's not just performance art.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the
| labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more
| than a couple years though, because so many people have already
| been there and left -- and that this has in the past been
| intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a
| couple years.
|
| If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the
| combination of having such a large labor force and a strategy
| to intentionally have high turnover combine to exhaust the
| labor supply, sure.
| nimbius wrote:
| "It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024"
|
| yes, by 2024 the number of people willing to piss in bottles for
| peasant wages in unconditioned warehouses with no healthcare or
| time off will certainly become problematic.
| gigel82 wrote:
| I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and
| recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work
| address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one,
| so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere.
|
| The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email
| from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.
| dnissley wrote:
| Not hard to guess in many cases -- especially if you can find
| other people's email addresses from the same company, since
| they are often created formulaically. E.g.
| first.last@company.com or <firstinitial><lastname>@company.com
| wollsmoth wrote:
| If they're using questionable means to get contact info, they
| probably have enough build in layers of buffer for plausible
| deniability. The recruiter may not know, and by design they
| probably don't keep a record of that.
| Joe_Boogz wrote:
| Same here (daily emails).
|
| I've been getting enough of them to start seeing that most of
| the emails from amazon are generated in some form. A generated
| recruiting email is pretty much an immediate turn off for me.
|
| Also, they have been very aggressive... going as far as the
| same recruiter reaching out on a monthly basis despite me
| telling them I am not interested.
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people
| at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled
| by recruiter contractors.
|
| These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on
| commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most
| big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic
| list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide
| net" strategy.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's the same for Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
|
| I've gotten emails from Google about Engineering Manager
| positions for software developers even though my LinkedIn
| profile shows no management experience (I have none) and it
| has that I'm not even currently officially a software
| developer (cloud app dev consulting).
|
| The same with Facebook.
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| More like running out of people willing to work at existing
| conditions, salary and employment terms.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Peter Zeihan on the labor shortage going into the next decade
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXp8Z7_Y4Bw
| rsynnott wrote:
| > An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do
| about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at
| the company in three months, per Amazon policy. "We would love
| you back in 90 days," Pagan says the HR staff member told him.
|
| This is _madness_.
| [deleted]
| otikik wrote:
| - wants to become "Earth's Best Employer"
|
| - tells drivers to pee in a bottle
|
| Doesn't compute
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Destroy all the other companies in the world and then you'll be
| earths best employer, why be better when you have the power to
| make things universally worse.
| [deleted]
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| I quit after orientation, spent the whole time arguing that their
| ten principles were contradictory, whilst the broken remnants of
| Microsoft's silicon valley campus sat there, happy to have
| whatever crumbs Amazon were throwing them. When I told my manager
| I wouldn't be staying, he congratulated me!! Your can see it in
| their products, mediocrity by design.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Increase wage. Problem solved.
| windex wrote:
| They are just running out of clique members to hire. I've had
| interviews at Amazon where the setup was hostile from get go, and
| it was evident the hiring team was looking to recruit their
| friends which they eventually probably did. All the other
| interviews are just padding/process tick marks for that one
| profile.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-17 23:00 UTC)