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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

What was the point of taking this to shareholders? On what planet would anyone expect them to vote any other way?

That is precisely the point: to externalize and diffuse responsibility on an abstract concept ("the market") rather than hold its creators accountable.

A tiny fraction of shares are probably owned by activist individuals with socially responsible interests.

The rest are employees [1] with self-interest and giant funds with big piles of them whose only metric is returns. Of course they'll all vote for the gain.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052816/top-4-...

~36% of the voting power comes from top 20 institutional/mutual fund holders and about 14% of the vote comes from Jeff Bezos himself[1]. The board of directors recommended all holders vote against this. Even if every shareholding employee of Amazon voted for this, there's very little chance it would've made it past the institutions voting along with the board recommendations.

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/holders?p=AMZN

The point of it was to deliver an excuse as to why their hands are tied, it went to vote precisely because the outcome was already obvious.

Almost all blue collar employees (software engineers) are shareholders at Amazon.

> blue collar employees (software engineers)

Huh?

Working class might've been a better term

SE are not working class. At best they are at the top end of the middle range, and generally above 100k is considered 'upper middle'.

The idea of SE as working class is from categorization based on labor relations, not on income.

In a Marxist-theoretic framework, for example, SE are clearly working class.

Software engineers quite often have and derive substantial income from capital holdings; when they do they are, in a Marxist framework, of the petit bourgeoisie (the middle clsss between working class [proletariat] and major capitalists [haut bourgeiosie].)

But, yes, some software engineers are working class, as well, the profession largely being split between the proletarian intelligentsia and petit bourgeois intelligentsia.

Software engineers are white collar workers[0]. As far as I know, hourly employees no longer get equity[1], and I would guess they comprise most of Amazon's blue collar workforce.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collar_worker

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/amazon-hourly-workers-lose-m...

Sorry, working class (as some have said) or white-collar would have been a better choice of words.

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