Hacker News Reader

Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

You don't need a fair comparison to read articles like https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo... and decide that this is not acceptable. Other warehouses being equally bad - which I doubt - doesn't fly for a company that is that profitable, big and popular.

Being large and visible might be a part of it, but their system being unnecessary cruel in the first place is reason enough.

View on HN

Fair comparison doesn’t matter if we are proposing changing labor laws to solve the issue. A law would apply to all parties, including ones we don’t hear about in the news.

However, many people want Amazon to unilaterally change its labour practices. It’s not fair that they do this, while competing with Walmart the largest company in the world, if Walmart doesn’t need to change merely because they have better PR.

My cynical mind suspects Walmart has better PR merely because it’s part of an establish oligarchy who knows which hands to grease, and owns the media companies.

Hard to write this without using too inflammatory language. It's not an either or, a society can criticize bad conditions while being unable to provide labor protection laws. It says something about the country that is unable to do so, it might say something about the power of global enterprises if it happens in multiple countries, and it definitely says a lot about the importance of unions, how much their diminished power is felt now.

That's not limited to one country - but leads a bit far away from this specific french court decision. On the other hand, all of these contexts play into conflicts like this one.

Which you doubt? Cool, talk to any Kroger warehouse worker. That position is well known to pay 'ok', but will burn you out with awful conditions within a few months. Sounds a lot like Amazon doesn't it.

Don't underestimate just how many jobs countries have to maintain our standards of living.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com