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Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's PR team really gave this story the green light? Seems a bit shameless trot out the fact that you hire disabled people as a feel-good story. What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?

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What has your company done to enable workers with a disability?

Any company that allows for remote work likely enables a whole class of workers with various disabilities.

Only if you actually follow through and hire them. You can put in a wheelchair ramp and feel good about yourself, but probably should actually hire some in a wheelchair.

You'd be surprised, in my experience, most jobs aren't flexible on schedule or understanding when you have regular doctors appointments. Chronic medical conditions and disabilities can require many regular appointments. I have 2-3 appointments a month and that doesn't include any physical therapy I might have. My Dad has multiple appointments per week usually. Luckily I found a job that let's me work my schedule around my appointments.

Really? You’ve had jobs where going to the doctor a few times a month is a deal breaker for the company?

This type of thing could easily be negotiated early on in all the startups I’ve worked for. Even non dev employees.

Even worse for a remote job?

You have been lucky and have had few low-paying jobs. Most jobs I've worked in the US are like this - you are fully expected to be there 100% of the time the company thinks you should be. All else should be done on your own time around the company time. This is even more true for low-paying jobs.

It sucks for anyone with health problems and sucks for anyone with children. People lose jobs because their children are sick and because they wind up with a major medical thing that happens. FMLA only covers large medical stuff - if you've worked full time for a year for a large enough company.

Some of this could be fixed with laws that protect employees and things like that. I'm generally thankful I don't have to deal with the lack of worker protection in the US right now - it meant that breaking my elbow while working a seasonal job didn't mean I was out of an income, for example.

Someone I know recently interviewed for a company that would give them 7 sick days a year. Being chronically ill, they’d realistically go through that by the end of February. Flex time wasn’t an option either.

Exactly. Threads like this are an invitation for Copenhagen Ethics (i.e. "No matter how little anyone else has done, if you even do a tiny amount for cause X, you will be criticized for all you failed to do.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855

I don't think that's relevant at all... my comment wasn't about the relative merits of doing or not doing something good for workers with a disability. My point was that, in their monthly/quarterly PR pitch meeting, somebody on their comms team pitched 'let's make a big deal about how we're helping disabled people' and that nobody else in that meeting said "oh, maybe let's not use the fact that we hire disabled people to advance our PR goals."

It is or should I mark that as a 'no'?

I've contracted with companies who specifically hire disabled workers. Their unemployment rate is ridiculously high (edit, I've heard numbers of up to 70%) and my leadership wanted to so something about that. I needed web usability experience added to my team, why not have someone with a disability to lead that? Guy was unemployed for a year, had a masters in HCI, this was an easy choice.

My company wanted to include our work in their diversity report, why not? They're specifically reaching out and hiring people who cannot find work, if they get positive PR for that, why the hell should we stop them? It gets more like-minded people in the company and shows others in our industry that they can do this too. It's leadership.

Companies will always do what's best for them too. In this case, the story talks about how Amazon held them to the same standard and they did better in terms of attendance, accident rate, and productivity. Which hopefully showcases to other employers that you can use Northwest and other types of facilities too.

You can expand your thinking a little.

Let's say society as a whole confers a benefit of $x for a 'feel good' story about a corporation doing well. We can interpret this however we want, for example, the propensity to shop on Amazon increases by some epsilon.

This now means companies will try to do morally 'good' things in order to gain these rents.

This is a mechanism in which we reward companies for engaging in socially optimal behavior, and it operates without any central management.

Of course, like all things, this can be gamed. But that's not, on its own, a reason to suspect it's all for naught.

This is an interesting way to look at it, thank you.

However, I do think that there are certain norms, that when violated, deserve to be called out. By calling them out, we help enforce the norms that are important to us.

For me, the norm that was violated here was "don't use the fact that you are treating disabled people decently as a way to elevate your business," which is a subset of a larger norm of "don't use disadvantaged members of our society for personal gain".

Pitching this story to the press (which Amazon certainly did) is different than doing the good deed itself, and the positive benefit to their business for doing this seems like it shouldn't outweigh the social norm that has been violated. Surely there are positive moral things they have done (some recycling initiative?) that don't rely on violating the norms I listed above.

I guess the higher order question we may be disagreeing on is

"Is it okay to use disadvantaged people for personal gain, if in doing so you also improve their state in life?

I would answer (not enthusiastically) that it is okay.

"What's next, a story about how Amazon is saving puppies?"

Maybe they could start with Boxers.

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