Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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If we care about workers and corporate behavior we need to change the law (and elect/appoint legislators and political executives and law enforcement agents and judges who will follow/enforce existing laws) to allow workers to unionize, increase the minimum wage, enforce fairer working hours, safer working conditions, better worker protections from fraud and theft, etc.

If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should have to own the trucks, pay the workers a salary, guarantee them basic labor rights, and so on. Foisting all of the legal and financial liability for bad practices onto fragmented and poorly managed subcontractors who only exist to serve Amazon as a single customer is a tremendous abuse.

Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.

Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy, and we can’t expect consumers to solve this type of problem.

Upvoted, because very valid points overall. That being said..

>Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy

Of course not, however, they don't need full information to hear, at some point or another, that Amazon is a poor place to work.

And it isn't as if the government has a solid track record of producing new regulation lately. Can you name one well-executed regulatory initiative the US Federal Government has implemented in the last 20-30 years? Or better yet, one well-executed major infrastructure project?

I'm genuinely curious, maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was quite effective until its leadership were unlawfully replaced with partisan hacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_...

One big federal problem with antitrust and other corporate–related law is that we have now had an unbroken half century of “conservative” domination of the US Supreme Court. Over that time consumer, worker, citizen, and small-business friendly interpretations of a wide variety of laws have been steadily replaced by interpretations friendly to wealthy/corporate interests.

That control should have been broken after Scalia died but the GOP-controlled Senate broke with any pretense of good faith or respect for norms or precedent and refused to allow even a moderate compromise candidate to come to a Senate confirmation vote. After regaining control of the presidency the Senate then eliminated the filibuster so it could force radical GOP ideologues through onto the bench.

> I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.

This is absurd. The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day. They do their work conscientiously and seriously, largely out of the spotlight.

Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:

https://www.scpr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/10/02/65410/

https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-what-is-the-fifth-risk-with-mich...

>Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:

I'm not sure I need to read a biased polemic about how big government is good and the Trump admin is bad.

>The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day.

I've worked for government agencies, and this is certainly not how I would describe the workers there. I'd say this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805768 would more closely represent my typical experience with civil servants.. rampant incompetence.

Isn’t is possible that government bureaucracy is simultaneously both big, wasteful, and sometimes incompetent as well as necessary and staffed by a core of skilled, hardworking people? I’ve applied for govt contractor jobs and the emphasis placed on checking every box while blindly ignoring any other indicia of aptitude for the job (ie can you prove you have 4 years experience with Microsoft Office?) is infuriating. But its basically a big company- you get good employees with the bad, just harder to fire the bad ones.

This sounds contradictory to me:

If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should [be an even larger monopoly]

...

Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.

Amazon is a monopsony with respect to its delivery subcontractors. They are not real independent businesses in a real market, but are wholly reliant on Amazon, using Amazon branding and with most aspects of their business dictated by Amazon. The only reason Amazon has set things up this way is because it (a) allows them to deliberately abuse their subcontractors’ workers in ways that would be unlawful if they directly employed them, and (b) shields them from various kinds of legal risks which they should be liable for.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Amazon’s delivery network or other business practices. You’d have to ask a labor lawyer for a full account.

Requiring them to follow contractor vs w2 employee rules is not making them any bigger or smaller. Frankly, I'm not sure how they are skirting the law thus far. I'm not even sure they own the trucks that have Amazon branding on them. I have read some claims that the subcontractors have to buy or lease the vehicles from Amazon.

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