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Comment by mhneu | Hacker News Reader

These Amazon jobs are most useful to think about by comparison.

Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week.

Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.

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I think the biggest ones are cheaper transportation to and from areas of the world with lower production costs and drastic increases in automation, both which lower the demand for human labor in the USA (and other developed countries).

You can regulate all you want, but it would be better to focus on getting as much of the population ahead of the curve as possible as opposed to leaving them behind. At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, much of the automobile assembly workers, etc.

> At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents,

We keep telling ourselves that, but it's a story. (Presumably so we can feel good about income inequality)

A good secretary, or a good travel agent, are amazing. I'd pay good money to have either one available, and so would many other people.

All we've done is put that work on people who already have another job, the people who used to be customers of that secretary/travel agent. In the process introducing a middle man who makes money off redistributing work. Yes, that middle man is slightly more efficient - but it can only be more efficient because the hard parts of the work are outsourced to you.

The difficult part of booking travel isn't making a flight reservation, it's finding just the right thing. A travel agent was a tremendous help there - you're now doing that yourself. Expedia, Orbitz, etc. are completely useless in that department.

I travel a lot (~150 flights some years) and find that the disadvantages of booking through a travel agent usually outweigh the benefit for business travel.

You usually end up on tickets with very restrictive conditions which cannot be modified other than via the travel agent themselves, often for more money than a less restrictive ticket could be bought directly with the airline. If you are many time zones away and can forsee irregular operations there is no way to pre-empt them until the agency has staff available. In addition, many loyalty programmes (particularly for hotels) do not allow you to accrue or make use of benefits if booked via a third party.

That said, for vacations with a lot of co-ordination involved (think family trips with people coming from different origin points, different dates etc) a travel agent can be useful and worth accepting the more restrictive nature of what can be booked.

Oh, completely agreed. I'm in the same boat, and for "just get me from A to B as cheap as possible", a travel agent is overkill. A secretary - or administrative assistant - is still worth their weight in gold here, though. Plus, the ludicrous "third party" rule disappears, since they book in your name.

But yes, your wider point holds: Travel agents aren't well suited for some kinds of travel. That, I'd argue, is more the business model than an inherent problem with travel agents.

If there was somebody whom you could tell "A to B, next week, one of these three carriers, cheapest price, here's my calendar, buy in my name" and you'd pay them a $20 commission to just make that happen, would you still decline a travel agent?

It's interesting to see this reduction in labor demand is coupled with new lows in the unemployment rate.

There's a shortage of labor but employers don't seem to be willing to pay more to incentivize more people to enter the workforce (which is partially reflected in the so called "shadow" unemployment rate, which is higher). An increase in the minimum wage will cause one of two things to happen, both net good IMO: either employers to invest more in capital / automation or cause them to give all current and new employees a raise.

> employers to invest more in capital / automation or cause them to give all current and new employees a raise

Or more cynically: fire employees and do more with the remaining employees.

They'll need to make capital investments in order to do that.

I do wonder about the shadow rate. My unemployment just ended by running out. Does that mean I'm now counted in that rate? If I had found work, I basically stop certifying for benefits to let them know I'm employed. No one has sent me a letter asking if I'm working or not. I have to assume there are a lot of folks out there in a similar situation.

Because some work isn't that valuable, and if wages cause the price of that product to rise too much then consumers will forego it. Occupations that pay highly are usually more inelastic in their demand compared to price.

If so, why hasn't that work been automated away by now?

It likely will be eventually, but in many cases automation would cost more than human labor, so the incentive is to just pay humans less and insist they work harder, in order to maximize their value.

There's all sorts of costs associated with the latter approach, you need to expend capital on equipment, methods to monitor progress, these workers need supervision, etc. I guess that explains why many firms that take this approach are so chaotic at the line worker level.

In fact a tech oriented PE firm that buys these businesses out, makes technology investments to improve productivity or eliminate easily automatable labor and then use the savings to scale the business further. (Which would result in net more employment.) I predict we'll see more of these in the coming years.

> Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.

I think a living wage is important and ideally Amazon could pay a decent wage plus benefits. That said, I absolutely hate the argument you made and it makes me cringe every time I hear it. It's apples and oranges. There is a world of difference between building an entire company that is one of the largest in the entire world and sorting boxes in a warehouse. We can argue that people should be paid more for humane reasons and that the multiple for CEO compensation vs. workers should be lowered, but Bezos' wealth is based on something completely different than this. I think a case for basic income is getting stronger because the more companies are asked to pay for human labor the more likely they are to do away with it and have it completely automated. What then?

It's not at all apples and oranges. Jeff Bezos became the richest person in the world in a large part due to short changing his employees. The two are linked together.

No one is saying that Amazon warehouse workers should become fabulously wealthy for their tiny contribution to the company's rise. Just that Amazon is fabulously successful and could afford to not treat their workers so badly.

The big difference is that the margin on a car and the margin on shipping a package are different by a few orders of magnitude.

Also many auto manufacturing jobs were actually pretty skilled, so replacing the workers wasn't as easy.

> What is different?

That those jobs aren't reserved for a subset of the population (mostly white males).

Also, I think you're thinking more like 5-6 decades ago, the US car industry wasn't doing so hot in 1978.

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