Bye, Amazon
tbray.org
tbray.org
Amazon, MS, Google, Apple, etc. rank among the most wealthy companies in the world and they've each had to deal with internal pressures where their employees voiced concerns about certain things or where there was some kind of whistle blower situation. And they each dealt with it in their own ways.
IMHO firing whistle blowers is the kind of action that should be called out as very negative and not something to be apologetic about.
So, I admire what Tim Bray is doing here and fully understand that he's having a hard time justifying working for what he's diplomatically not quite calling out as aholes; though the undertone is quite clear.
Of course as he is pointing out, he's in a position where he can afford to do so financially. But then, being able to and actually doing are two things and he's showing some back bone here by 1) walking away and taking a hit financially, and 2) writing about it in the hope that leadership steps up and acts to correct the situation: compensate individuals affected, offer to rehire them, and discipline executives involved in pushing this through. Unlikely to happen, but one can hope for someone with a backbone stepping up. It would be the right thing to do. At the minimum, they've just been exposed for what they are and that might have consequences elsewhere for them.
Prominent VCs are calling for people to get back to work every day on Twitter. The rest of the world is waking up to these people, but we have a long way to go before Silicon Valley cares.
It's exactly what you should expect.
do you mean "and something to be apologetic about"? the two clauses in this line seem to be contradictory the way I'm reading it.
Agree 100%. Daylight is the best disinfectant, especially in publicly traded companies. Every CEO, CMO, etc loves white-knighting ("We care about the environment/our employees!") until the shareholders start calling. Then they're the first to start covering up problems.
That's not to say that you can't have your cake and eat it too - the first place to start is that these corporations have to be honest with themselves and their shareholders about social commitments and financial returns.
Shame about all the deplatforming then
Providing a platform for vile attention-seekers doesn't make them less vile. They have no shame.
Its that a dialog can happen and people change there minds.
But sadly like you shown its not about finding a solution but winning, feeling superior and dragging other people down.
What worries me about content policing and deplatforming is that now the companies that run the platform become the de facto police. And as we see in this very post and many of the associated comments that is a very, very dangerous thing.
EDIT: clarity
I'd just want to point out that the workers who are in the middle are the ones who can afford to do so financially and have the power to make management change things. If you're a programmer and make decent money, consider not putting yourself in a position where you must compromise your morals, such as accepting the company you work for firing whistleblowers over poor work conditions. $100k in the bank makes it a hell of a lot easier to decide to organize.
When you pass on working on the new team that uses ML to predict the likelihood of workers knowing their rights based on resume and application cover letter, you may not make the $400k total comp next year, but it's not like you'll be unemployed either. There's plenty of work at pretty normal companies to be done. They won't pay as good, it may not sounds as impressive and you may have to explain at family dinners what your company does, but it's an option.
At a minimum, Facebook, Amazon and Google should be split up.
Apple are trying to kill general purpose computing.
Netflix - well, they're just selling sugar water, I suppose they're the best of a bad bunch.
Reminds of the classic and very public Amazon exec feud, Kivin Varghese v Munira Rahemtulla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716
You can clearly see from the comments that many people here are still very much on the "but they're employees ... why would they have any rights? if they complain just crush them into paste to oil the machines" camp.
The occasional high profile person quitting one of the big tech companies because of their constant illegal employee/whistleblower abuse happens regularly at this point. Is Tim Bray's particularly different in some way I'm not seeing?
I think a lot of people would say that at some level money is moral (don't pay terrorist organizations or render services for them) but that distinction blurs as we get closer to mundane, real-life concerns like spending money at Amazon, Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods. I think it gets blurry because of desensitization and the need for folks to feel like they're not screwing over others during the normal course of their life. But the fact is that capital enables behaviors in a capitalist economic system, so allocating the capital you have control over is necessarily a moral act.
It's become fashionable in tech among a certain crowd to bombard coworkers with divisive messaging about controversial social issues, to leak confidential information to sympathetic external press, and to demonize anyone who objects. This practice must end, and I admire Bezos for having the guts to end it. Companies have every right to ask employees to focus on work at work.
If being one of these "reputable people" you mention requires me to be a cheerleader for this kind of strident and obnoxious internal activism, I don't want to be "reputable".
For those in well paying, white collar jobs with plenty of other opportunities, even in the current climate, quitting with an exit statement is more appropriate than trying to burn it down from the inside.
I respect the exec in question, and the warehouse workers who speak out. The idological opportunists pushing an agenda, not so much.
I’m responding to this claim, maybe we’re talking about different things? My point is really: What if the “work” is running trains to death camps? Shouldn’t employees object? If you believe climate change is as big a threat as scientists claim, I think workers building tools to help fossil fuel extraction have a duty by this historical argument to not “run the trains” or not just “focus on work at work”.
I suspect most of them who know about it appreciate Tim Bray standing up for them and consider it a "meaningful way".
I don't understand what you are saying is a "more meaningful way" than what. You are saying keeping your mouth shut at work and just calling your legislator is a "more meaningful way to change the conditions"?
That's a nice story to tell yourself when you want to preserve your good salary and safe working conditions that the workers in the warehouse don't have. I couldn't really say if most well-paid employees at Amazon agree or not, I'm not familiar with enough of them.
But if we can't learn to protect each other, we've got nothing. This is not a test.
That's not possible, the US has the worst worker protection laws in the world, it's really quite an undeveloped country in that regard.
I'm not taking the claim you replied to at face value (it's exceedingly extreme to even be plausibly true) but they at least included a "probably" to allow for some doubt.
When Amazon employees are frisked at the end of their shift (which is a practice that applies to at least some warehouses), they are not paid for the time they spend waiting in line to be frisked. This is not an anecdote; indeed Amazon fought and won a court case insisting that it has the right to not compensate employees for this time. (See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-...)
And they felt so strongly about this they appealed a case all the way to the Supreme Court... That was the snapping point for me too and I have not ordered from them in a long time.
If amazon isn't paying for your time in line, they have no incentive to make it fast. They can invest the bare minimum to protect their own interests, and fuck over their worker who have to wait in line. If they had to pay workers for their time then there is an incentive for them to make the line move quickly.
I can't imagine a setup that is more hostile to your fellow humans as forcing them to waste unpaid time.
Isn't the purpose of the screens less about catching bad actors and more about cultivating a culture of fear/suspicion, and hopefully getting a few effective informants out of the thing?
If the lines go to 2 minutes, or I get paid while in them, where's my incentive to rat out a coworker?
One of these cases eventually made its way to the Supreme Court [0], but they ruled (in favor of the plaintiffs) about the validity of the collective action, not about whether the Fair Labor Standards Act covered donning and doffing (it does, at least so I believe.)
It seems like donning and doffing is considered as time worked because it's a "principal activity" under the FLSA [1], and that includes waiting time. Seems like being frisked would be a "principal activity" as well - it's essentially doffing - so waiting time would be included too.
Someone could make a pretty penny bringing a collective suit against Amazon over this.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyson_Foods,_Inc._v._Bouaphake...
1. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/field-assistance-bulletins/...
Waiting in line to be frisked is something mandated by the employer. They control whether or not I have to do it, and how long the lines are. Since it’s under their control, it’s their financial responsibility.
It may be impossible in some cases to have short commutes, but if, even by chance, you managed to move in the same building as your office no one would force you to go through the metro.
Commutes are clearly a grey area, waiting times to be let "free" are less so.
Amazon is not allowing these people to walk out the door and go home. That is taking their time for company policies. So that is working.
Of course not.
Once you step into your work, you should be paid for your time. Especially when you have no control over that.
For a fixed location job, the commute is fully under control of the employee and fair not to count as hours.
For variable location jobs like in construction, my view is that potential additional commute time should be compensated.
you mean the company that pays high wages?
The bulk of Amazon's workforce are delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and datacenter rats. They are not paid fairly. It's pretty obvious from the numbers. For more supporting evidence, read TFA.
Also 15 dollars per hour can be high or not depending where you live.
The felt confident that they were right about it and the SC confirmed it. It's classic double standards if you celebrate one winner at the SC and condemn others based on your political/ideological opinion.
It can be both legal and wrong. No need for a "double standard".
Law != ethics
Where is the 2014 Supreme Court ruling mentioned by this article?
Anyway, there wasn't actually a Supreme Court ruling. The workers appealed their loss in the appellate court to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Aside from a few specific types of cases the Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction rather than mandatory jurisdiction. This was one of those discretionary jurisdiction cases.
When they decline to take a case they generally do not give a reason. It may be because they think the appellate court got it right and there is nothing more to say on the issue. On the other hand, it may be because they think the appellate court is not right but what is right is not clear and they want to see the issue arise in other districts and see what the appellate courts in those other districts decide before they take a case on the issue. Or they may be ready to tackle the issue, but they just don't like this particular case as a vehicle for deciding the issue and want to wait for a case that would work better.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-...
Not saying, that you don't disagree with the courts decisions, but I keep getting this feeling especially from the US. Why do people realistically expect a company to not stretch things as far as legally possible? I get why libertarians would see it this way, but everyone else?
In short: It is not ethical to do whatever you can get away with. You can choose to ignore questions of ethics, but if that's how you choose to live your life, expect to have a lot of people hate your guts. People treating you like a monster is a predictable consequence of living like a monster. This doesn't stop being true just because the choices are being made by multiple people under the banner of a corporation.
There is quite the discrepancy for example in European history between royals acting like monsters and people treating them as such. Sure, eventually you'll have the people grab the pitchforks and roll out the guillotine, but you might not want to wait that long.
How much true accountability is there for those people making the choices under the banner of the corporations?
In my opinion, big part of what law should be, whoever is in charge of enforcing it, is a set of rules based on societies ethical compass. If someone can get away taking advantage and abusing others, this begs the question if those acts are in fact unethical, or if the the law needs updating.
It is not about shifting blame for behavior onto the law, but how you decide what behavior is blameworthy and should be punished. And I much prefer having a at least a somewhat transparent formalized system for this over Mob justice.
Look, I absolutely agree that something can be and often is immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it is illegal, and maybe my non-native English is a bit clunky.
But I do not care about having the moral high ground. I care about continued bad behavior having consequences, society protecting itself from bad actors. This can indeed be done trough various means (non exhaustive):
- Create incentives to act in a more desired way
- Call for boycotts and shunning them socially to try to force them to change
- Change the environment so bad behavior no longer provides benefits
- Create / update law
- Actually enforce the existing law
- Having increasingly big protest movements up to revolution / civil war scale
I'm fine with any combination of those depending on context and/or as different steps of escalation. I just think a bunch of people voicing anger at corporations on the internet doesn't do anything and, on the other hand, in a lot of places the situation is not bad enough to justify violence yet. So I lean towards a middle way using the instruments of these supposed democracies to change things.
Furthermore, shaming one company to change its practices voluntarily does little to help workers at other companies subjected to the same thing.
So we really should push to change the law with more urgency than we use to push any give single employer.
However, you DON'T have to maximize your profits above all other corporations. There's no such actual fiduciary duty and there never could be. That's the point the poster is trying to make - something being legal doesn't make it ethical and acting in a unethical, but legal, manner does not absolve you of contempt.
What I expect people to do, what the standards I hold people to are often different.
I expect Amazon to push things as far as they are able. I strongly dislike them because of it. My standards of acceptable conduct are above "barely legal" conduct. My expectations are below legal conduct.
I also can blame two entities for this outcome. The law and the courts are awful for allowing this to stand as the settled law on the matter. I blame them for the situation. Amazon is also awful for pushing the law to this point and taking advantage of it. I blame them for the situation, too.
A bunch of people on internet being mad at them has in my opinion not proven very effective at changing their behavior and making the people in charge accountable for their acts.
Because doing the right thing is different from doing the legal thing.
If you're only interested in maximizing your profits under the umbrella of law, you are, by definition, not interested in acting morally. Which means you're probably doing many things that many people would consider immoral.
It's a mismatch of motivations.
Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility.
This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for.
I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.
I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded "The Big Issue", a magazine that homeless people sell in Britain. They also had to put some rules in place that seem strange, for example the vendors (homeless people) had to buy the magazines they wanted to sell. They are alcoholics, gamblers, addicts, so unfortunately some special rules were necessary to make it work.
I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did.
But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It's also hard when traditional means for acquiring skills, like going to college, no longer have the same returns they used to. All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. So it's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.
I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.
Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently.
> And by all means, if you are capable go for it
And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever.
That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well. One graph does not tell the whole story.
> Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well.
There is not a single graph on this page which mentions rent as a percentage of income. You may see Taxes as a percentage of income[^2], but this does not touch in rent. One graph does not tell the whole story, but you must offer evidence for your argument. You can't simply shrug and say "well I disagree with the evidence!"
> There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker.
That's true for all of humanity. You haven't established that there's a special kind of pressure on low wage earners due to or related to capitalism. Whether you're a capitalist, socialist, or an 11th century peasant, you need to eat, work, pay your taxes, watch your kids and generally live life.
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
I'm not suggesting the system has an intent. But they absolutely do select against subsets. For years we had systemic discrimination in this country, from redlining policies to voting laws, that absolutely selected against subsets. You don't just remove the bad policies and declare the playing field is equal.
Heck, natural selection and evolution are clearly complex systems that obviously select against subsets.
> you must offer evidence for your argument
Here's a source for rent vs. income: https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-...
It's especially impactful to lower class folks. There are plenty of other examples available via your favorite search engine.
Redlining is abhorrent behavior. It's also caused by people. We can look at a specific city where Redlining is a major problem, and pull the rezoning documents and contracts and actually point to specific people who acted with bad intent. We can say "Bob over there is a jerk and engaging in this prohibited behavior" (and hopefully do something about it like punish Bob).
That's not some particular case against capitalism. Redlining occurs in non-capitalist and less-capitalist (mixed capitalist/socialist societies), it doesn't occur in all capitalist societies or areas, and it's not directly capitalist driven (instead having heavy racial and religious discriminatory elements). That doesn't mean redlining isn't bad, it means that it has nothing to do with capitalism being good or bad.
> Here's a source for rent vs. income...There are plenty of other examples available via your favorite search engine.
There's also plenty of examples for my points which I've been carefully citing as we go, and in general it's poor form to leave finding evidence as an exercise up to the reader. I realize it may be inconvenient to you to have to cite evidence for your arguments, but that's the nature of trying to have an argument about a real world thing and not just a partisan talking point.
You'll notice your source stops at 2014 (which, it was written in 2016, that's reasonable) and it doesn't take into account the significant median income increase behavior from 2014-2020 per [^1] above. Yes, rents do rise, that part isn't very surprising in and of itself. Also note that comparing the increases as percentages of each other is misleading - a 130% rent increase compared to a 110% income increase is not 1:1 given the original 1960s figures are dramatically different [^3]. This also doesn't account for the decrease of family size [^4]. In general family units have shrunk, and we've gone from multiple generations sharing a house to people moving out sooner (which would result in median rent increase).
[^3]: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/gros...
[^4]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
But even if we back away from that,
> aggregate behavior emerge that puts pressure against workers upskilling.
That seems the tough point to prove and it doesn't seem a priori true except in such a vague sense (time being finite, life being busy, etc) as to be meaningless. There doesn't appear to be any particular pressure against workers upskilling in general. Learning comes at a cost (time, effort, availability) but those costs are generally constant. When we point to that as the main causative factor then we're dramatically over-simplifying the case.
When I talk to my family and friends who are low wage earners (and obviously this is anecdotal and not necessarily a representative data sample) usually the issues that arise are not knowing that options exist outside of college, not realizing what career paths actually are available, and frequently being discouraged from whatever experience with school they had historically.
This doesn't seem like an emergent behavior problem, it seems like a communication issue at it's root.
It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job. Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless. Who's to say that the criteria won't get even narrower in the future?
Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs, and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.
I have never actually heard this said. Can you provide some sources or any kind of quote for this? I've heard references to this having been said, but never an actual source.
This is anecdotal, but even my older family members saw college as meeting gating requirements for some jobs, not a promise of getting those jobs.
> Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless.
I don't think a STEM degree promises you a job, nor is a STEM degree inherently valuable unless you otherwise have the qualifications to work in a STEM field.
> Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs
They're a form of gating, agreed.
> and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.
That's not clear. For some fields like being a Doctor that seems to be true, but for many fields like being an engineer that's obviously not the case. That being said, I would be surprised if there's a compiled data set that accurately tells us one way or another - the BLS data might be the closest.
I usually heard it phrased slightly differently: "Without a college degree you will be stuck doing low wage work."
This is like asking for a source for the expression "You get what you pay for". There isn't a source - it's a folk saying. That doesn't make it either right or wrong, it's just a thing some people say.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...
A degree was never a ticket to a well paying job. Showing that you have critical thinking skills and the ability to learn and a base level of organization/discipline in your life is what a degree might have meant when they were more rigorous and scarce.
Now that there are a billion schools offering a billion bullshit degrees in exchange for money, one way to cut through that is to bet on people who can do calculus and chemistry and physics, as those are better measures of analytical skills and whatever else employers are looking for.
That's not what OP said. It's not that they are incapable of acquiring new skills, it's that some people are generally more capable to acquire new marketable and profitable skills than others.
I think it's a matter of interest or natural inclination. Inspiring interest in folks who otherwise would never be drawn to a profitable profession is difficult, and without interest it's nigh impossible to get them to effectively acquire the necessary skills to become employable in that field.
I think the most disrespectful thing to be applied to low wage earners, or people in general, is that they have no passion at all for any craft or hobby. I believe that everyone does, and that those things have intrinsic value, even if they may not presently be valuable to the market.
And, I'd like to add a bit more. When I say capable, I absolutely don't mean that in terms of intellectual capacity. I mean it in the context of actual, abject poverty. I'm talking about being incarcerated for a possession charge and having your young life spiral out of control. Or being raised in a homeless shelter while also being diagnosed with severe chronic disease (I've met students like this). Scenarios where there is just so much happening, that the idea of stopping to think about careers, college, or even learning English seems unthinkable. Cases where you have as many jobs as you have mouths to feed (not just children, but aging or sick family).
Peter Temin from MIT conjectures that it takes a person born into poverty nearly "20 years of nothing going wrong" to exit [0].
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...
That's not what the GP said at all. Rather, their statement acknowledges that there are low age earning people who are capable. All they said is that the challenges of daily subsistence in a low-wage situation add a significant additional obstacle to gaining the skills and experience needed to get a higher paying job.
Adquiring skills has pretty much nothing to do with college, some of the most skilled people I know in sales or executive office didn’t even got a high school degree (they’re old, I live in Spain).
They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees.
I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.
Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.
I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.
Anecdotally, I have family members that run a business that require low skilled workers. They don't really need full time workers, so they hire part-time and don't pay a living wage to them, even though it is viable to their business to do so.
So what do they get? They get unreliable people. People who steal from them. People who don't clock out. People who collude with the other employees to clock them in/out. People they can claim "make bad decisions" like buy lotto tickets or spend their paycheck on drugs and alcohol. etc.
It gives them a reason to treat them poorly. I've heard things like "if we paid them more they'd just buy more lotto tickets, so why should I?"
I often wonder how they would act and or who they could hire if they made full time roles, offering health insurance and treating their employees with dignity.
My first job was on a small family farm at age 12 -- we worked very hard but were treated fairly and well. The owner of the business would be hip-deep in the muck with us and was fully accountable for everything that happened on that farm. After that I moved on to different jobs in the mall, culminating in a semi-commissioned sales job that got me through college.
In that environment, you learned very quickly that most of the workers in that mall were completely disposable, and a significant population were discarded when the car that was handed down to them broke down or they were unable to float insurance. No car == bus, and more bus == more late arrivals, which resulted in termination.
The worst employers were run in a hands off way with straw-bosses (ie. people making 7.25/hr vs. 5.75/hr circa 1995) running the place, and the hire/fire decisions were made by an owner or manager at arms length. This was common with the smaller retailers, some behind the scenes jobs, and the food court. The turnover was 50% a week in some cases, and they would just over-hire and fire (or drop hours to nothin). The best paid gigs were janitorial and back of house restaurant workers -- they worked hard, but had steady work and often made off-book money. The easiest gigs were places with a salaried manager, and they usually had a cadre of full-timers backed by a bunch of part-timer people.
In the middle you had places with commissioned people, and there was always a tension between having too few and too many employees. Too many and your best salesmen would leave (and profitability drops, as you need salesmen to move margin enhancers like service plans), too few and you'd lose volume.
Quite possible. "Good morals start with a full pantry" and all. Comfortable circumstances may encourage better behavior, or put another way: treat your employees like shit, and don't be surprised if they behave shittily.
"A 2003 Cato Institute study cites data showing job losses in places where living wage laws have been imposed. This should not be the least bit surprising. Making anything more expensive almost invariably leads to fewer purchases. That includes labor."
Also:
"People in minimum wage jobs do not stay at the minimum wage permanently. Their pay increases as they accumulate experience and develop skills. It increases an average of 30 percent in just their first year of employment, according to the Cato Institute study."
Both of these are quotes from noted economist Thomas Sowell, who has done a lot of research into many studies on actual effects of living and minimum wage law.
As for the people you describe, there are plenty of people who make higher wages and are just as unreliable and untrustworthy. And there are plenty who do honest work for low wages, and work their way up.
I would be curious if there were any other organizations that came to the same conclusions.
“... a number of American cities have passed “living wage” laws, which are essentially local minimum wage laws specifying a higher wage rate than the national minimum wage law. Their effects have been similar to the effects of national minimum wage laws in the United States and other countries—that is, the poorest people have been the ones who have most often lost jobs.”
- Thomas Sowell, referencing the Public Policy Institute of California’s “Scott Adams and David Neumark, “A Decade of Living Wages: What Have We Learned?” California Economic Policy, July 2005, pp. 1–23.”
Being a noted economist doesn't mean that you aren't full of shit.
It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency.
I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
I suspect the real difference here is developers are in higher demand. If we feel the checks becomes to unfair, we can go look for a different job.
If a warehouse worker doesn't like his smoke breaks being monitored, there is little recourse, someone else can be hired who will accept these condition out of desperation for a job.
It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced.
More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.
And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.
You don't know...
> ... but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.
... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely.
I think these biases are the issue being discussed.
Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules.
Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy.
It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.)
I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.
I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine.
On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture.
It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.
Also I have read the one or other thing.
These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done
In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer)
So you don't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong
With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.
Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer.
Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?
With that said, the question of whether the system could improved (and significantly, in a step-wise manner) how it handled this situation remains an open question to me. I don't know well enough what happened in the cases that caused Tim Bray to resign to comment, but it's possible that actions taken by the corporate management, HR and legal have taken backfired in a way that will be looked at as unforced errors. At a company (ostensibly THE company) that prides itself on operational excellence, I'd be surprised if this doesn't end up being the case. High profile resignations like this are sometimes the spark that sets the whole process in motion and the few externally visible signs that you can see later on as evidence. If this was attrition was truly regretted by corporate, and was something that could be prevented ahead of time, it will have been a very expensive black eye, waste of resources and loss of true executive leadership talent. For folks like Tim Bray, the difficulty of filling the organizational void they leave is very high, and potentially not guaranteed.
I guess time will tell.
There have been large, profitable corporations that preceded Amazon and did not need to implement such draconian tracking systems.
Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination.
the amount of brain effort to do this kind of job is close to 0. you need a bit of physical prowess, but this is easily attainable in a couple of week. since the job was basically the least complex job one can ever have, the pay was low. and it made sense back then: you want to move on to a better job/better pay/better conditions? get better qualifications, learn to do a different job etc. of course i can't comment on what happens at amazon, but these kinds of jobs are so easy to do that it's ridiculous they haven't been completely automated till now. i do wonder what will happen to all these people once automation is 100%.
They haven't been automated because it is still hard to do. Simply carrying boxes is easy, but picking up products (of different sizes, shapes, weights, "grabability", etc and putting them into orders is complicated.
That being said, it might be that different companies have different stress and pressure levels and different working conditions.
The whole idea of “this is a low paying job, anyone can do it, I’m paying you very low because you should get a better job” now that sounds like a political problem! It is all the invented justification to keep wages low. It’s also a pretty stupid argument but has weight because an entire political party makes it.
The thinking around these jobs needs to change; you can’t pay people like shit and then expect them to be moral and upstanding workers.
The wages aren’t low because of an ideology, the wages are low because if person A doesn’t agree to the low wages then the employer can hire person B.
Similarly, wages aren’t high in tech/finance/law/medicine because people think they “deserve” it, they are high because those employees have options to work elsewhere.
One employer deciding to be altruistic and paying more isn’t going to fix the problem.
Therefore the solution is to either give people better options for earning income (long term solution involving educating them and more), and increasing minimum wage and especially overtime wages.
This would be true iff the labor supply was perfectly elastic wrt to wages but we have repeatedly seen that this is not the case.
Paying your employees higher isn’t altruism as much as an investment in the health of your business. It’s either that or you deal with higher turnover, insurance security etc.
Wall Street has consistently pressured the larger employers to cut labor costs as much as they can; there is a lot more variation in wages offered by smaller businesses. Wall Street is always focused on quarterly growth and that is the “ideology” that’s ripping apart the middle class across the US as employers fail to invest in the long term viability of the communities they operate in.
And labor supply elasticity shouldn't matter over a span of decades, any mis-pricing would have shown itself, at least in the context of maximizing profits. If anything, the comparatively overpaid US workforce is/was the "mis-priced" part of the equation.
Also, larger businesses can afford to pay more, especially by way of tax advantaged benefits:
https://www.ivyexec.com/career-advice/2015/do-big-companies-...
My argument is that ideology has nothing to do with how much people are paid, it's supply and demand curves (over the long term). If people had better options for employment, they would be paid more. If employers had fewer options for employees, they would have to pay more. The rest of the up and coming world would have taken a bite out of US workers' pay no matter what.
What is society to do with people who don't have sufficient brain power? Enslave them? Throw them in the wood chipper?
I'd suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren't all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring. I can only provide 2 anecdotes, but I can see why people get treated this way after time.
I highly doubt there are many people that just start their management role in a hostile, suspicion, condescension kind of way. Normally it takes something repeated over time to build up those kinds of traits of dealing with something
In college I used to work for RPS (they got bought by Fedex or UPS, I forget) sorting packages. To get the job you had to lift up to 50lbs and memorize the first 2 digits of the zip code (just the region so it was like 20-30 numbers) and you'd stand in front of a big chute and sort boxes onto 1 of 3 conveyors. The amount of anger people would take out on other's boxes was insane. Kicking, punching(??), throwing over the ledge (we were like 3 floors up), or just outright stamping of boxes was nuts. After working there I learned what it means to package something well as I could not count on any package of mine being treated with respect.
The other anecdote are my wife's pharmacy techs she has to manage. Some of them will bitch and moan if they have to remake a drug, sometimes outright REFUSE to make a drug if it means they have to gown back up and go back into the clean room. They will disappear for an hour after delivering a drug (up a few floors). They will take well over an hour for lunch breaks. It is a very maddening situation because all of these actions means the kids don't get what they need on time.
Pay low wage, get low motivation. No one's going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.
My deployment process at work used to require a ton of work, but I spent a few afternoons to automate it and now I get to do much less work.
Clearly you're just like the majority of HN readership: living in a bubble a million miles away from what is reality for very large swathes of the population. Do you truthfully believe that someone flipping burgers in Burger King is capable of inventing machines and automating processes, but they refuse to do it because they don't get paid enough? Do you not see how absurd that sounds?
Also it's hilarious that you, the guy out there roasting all minimum wage workers, is somehow connected to the average working man.
Not absurd at all. The people in the front lines understand the nature of their work better than anyone. When the engineers and the front line workers can actually communicate, and the workers feel like they're being heard, then great things can happen. Not only can productivity go up from making processes more efficient, but the hard-working front line people can feel a certain amount of ownership in their positions. Which will contribute to making them even better.
I've seen this in person. Once worked for a teleco's internal training department. We somehow ended up making quick access utilities for the call center desktops. When we first deployed the tool, it rarely got used. This was because we made assumptions about what they needed. So we ended up talking to the call center reps. The people stuck dealing with the front line calls all day. They had very clear ideas about what they needed and what we should do. We listened. Followed their ideas. Had them give further feedback on the betas. And it ended up probably saving the company many millions per year in terms of efficiency gains. Plus it was a huge morale boost. These people finally got someone to listen to them and helped implement changes that made their job easier. Which gave them a sense of ownership and pride. And upped employee retention.
I mean you can learn to love a job, but that kind of loyalty has to be earned - by good pay, working conditions, career opportunities, and being valued.
But there's too many jobs now - Amazon warehouse employee being one of them - where you are a number in a system, and very much replaceable.
Bring back good jobs. Restaurant worker is not a bad job, but it's underpaid and unvalued.
I'm not sure what the answer to this is (McDonalds Corp will just introduce more automation if they have to raise wages, and a lot of people will go from stressful, low paying jobs to no jobs at all). But I don't think this occupation is in a good place.
I'd say it's more about barriers to entry and the work environment itself.
I've always done what I agreed to do at every job I worked. And I've had some pretty awful jobs. I'm not a hero. Doing what you've agreed to do doesn't make you a hero. It's the minimum requirement if you want to call yourself an honest person whose word means literally anything at all.
Don't do that for anybody else. Do it for yourself.
As often as not, this is a failure of management. Of course no manager wants to admit to this. A great example is the turnaround at the NUMMI GM plant after drastic changes to the manufacturing process[1]. The same employees going from drinking on the job and creating tons of defects to a model of efficient manufacturing in North America.
That's because, unfortunately, a lot of them do need their hands holding. Many of these people have very low IQ and will always avoid work if they can. You can't compare them with the people in the offices you work in who have top 10% IQs. I know it should be like this, and should be like that, but if you would actually expose yourself to the kinds of people who work in these places you will see why these seemingly hostile rules are put in place. But think of it like this: these people get a safe working environment, comfortable lives which no high levels of responsibility, and they get to reap the benefits of living in a modern society. If they were left to their own devices they'd be in poverty.
When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Friday (change days as required). This meant that they were clocking 24 hours / day. The only way this could happen is if they were colluding with their store manager, as the manager was meant to close out the time keeping system at the end of the day.
The stores with employees that abused the system tended to have lower margins. This often led to them being closed down. It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group.
I expect over time (10s of years) the computer industry will get closer to other professional industries as opposed to being the wild west it is today.
The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone.
I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.
I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company.
Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid.
If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust.
This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.
The scale of the employee's greed make it's actions seem tame at a small scale (punching false times...). They justify it by saying they are getting their dues and for once they are the ones screwing and not getting screwed.
The scale and visibility of a company's greed make it much more apparent that it's incentives and moral compass are way off (mistreating, exploiting...). They justify this behavior as helping the bottom line and making the numbers look good to investors.
Until ALL the actors, both companies and individuals start adjusting their 'morality' and integrity this will continue happening.
How is that a bad thing?
But indeed those employees (programmers, etc) saw that as a benefit of doing no more than 40 hour per week.
Sometimes you might fix that one bug that would haunt you over the weekend otherwise, I grant you that. More often than that, feeling that one has to enable oneself to finish stuff at the end of the week leads to fewer plans on Friday nights, too little socializing outside of work, less restful weekends. And those kill productivity and company culture in the medium term.
In the short term I have seen my share of lost productivity because people feel like deploying hardly thought through changes (if only to internal system) on Friday afternoons to get it done that week.
It was a disaster and lead to all sorts of undesirable behaviors and malicious compliance.
"Hey team, we worked x hours this month, and our best employee worked 96 ours of overtime! Amazing!"
In your example, the "individual [having] an outsized effect on the group" is the store manager. They need some oversight to ensure they're correctly wielding their power over the timekeeping system and their employees. You could have the next manager in the chain conduct oversight, but then you might end of with the same issue. Better to distribute power to the employees, so no one person can ruin the store, and everyone feels a little more responsible and important.
If a business isn't capable of supporting it's labor at a rate where their employees can maintain their cost of living, then that business has already failed. It means the business subsidizing the cost of goods and services with the quality of life of the employees providing those goods and services. That's not a sustainable economic model, because it means those same workers are effectively excluded from the economy; they're only able to participate with essential goods and services, which harms the markets for anything else by artificially constraining demand. That means economics of scale won't pay off, which increases the effects of overhead on business.
The reason for that is simple. For jobs with few qualifications, undisciplined people and people who struggle with thinking are in the highest supply. Ask anyone who operates a bar or restaurant what sort of behaviour they can expect from low-qualification employees, hired without significant attention, at the going rate.
It may be a matter of privilege for a lot of people; I know many brilliant and well-intentioned people who have had a hard go of life because they picked up a counterproductive fear, insecurity, or opinion when they were young, but it would not surprise or offend me that their employers would grow to dislike them. I have had some advantages on this, because I was blessed with a referral for my first job, and my first colleagues guided me away from my self-destructive behaviours (I was 17).
That's not to say it's all of them, but if you hire people for work that requires little or no discipline to meet the hiring requirements, you are going to be exposed to a lot of candidates who lack discipline.
There are many people working jobs that have a low- or no-skill entry level, who are incredibly hard-working, disciplined, and passionate; but there are also many who are none of these things.
You can observe a maybe-similar effect with specialized "consultants", who merely have to claim to be able to resolve problems like one you're experiencing; then they get paid for a few months to have a go at it, and it turns out they don't know any more than you do about your problem.
Seriously, next time you get a chance, talk to your local restaurant manager, construction manager, barber shop owner or sales manager, they all say the same things: how difficult it is to find good workers. (and "good" here is a pretty low bar: show up when you are scheduled on time)
Manual labor in many sectors is structurally underpaid. Nobody with half a brain would ever choose waiting tables as a career, even if they enjoyed it. So you're left with people with no choice or with mental-health issues (or both), who often resent having to do the job.
Whether that's by design or a collateral effect of certain societal and economic structures, is open to discussion; but this is definitely the case. Until we allow that waiter and that delivery driver a level of dignity equal to this or that white-collar job, the situation will not change.
I never said this wasn't the case. Clearly, entire industries are fundamentally underappreciated. Or, other industries are way overappreciated. Our system ends up overvaluing a few guys sat in an office who squeeze the last ounce of fantasy numbers out of stock tickers, and undervaluing everyone else.
> left behind since the Bush-Oil eras drove prices sky high.
Sadly, this issue is not limited to the US.
For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was meant to be illustrative, not an exact ratio.
This makes companies take extreme policy measures for the few instances of this that impact everyone, because the financial impact is so disproportionate.
Now, the argument can (and is) made that pay is a factor. "If you pay me more I won't act like this". But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.
Pay might be a factor. I think people are people, and their behavior and beliefs vary.
People "see" the low paid thieves and their impact on themselves and others on a semi regular basis. The once in awhile "white collar crime" you might see if you turn on the news isn't top of mind.
"That guy stole $5 from ME" versus "Wal Mart uses welfare as a way to get corporate welfare and pay their employees less"
One is in the moment, and a purely emotional and potentially traumatizing experience based on circumstance.
One I may not even experience (e.g., I don't work at Wal-Mart).
As for people stealing time, Amazon puts people on PIP all the time.
Believe it or not, finance is under extra scrutiny.
That company has to log all chat messages in order to keep their FINRA certification, but that also means a court can subpoena and display the messages in a public trial. If they're a serious shop they will monitor and keep comms clean to the point of being Orwellian.
Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got caught for stealing bottles of soda to drink while at work...
As for stealing time, that was much more common, but I actually never saw anyone fired for that, no matter how often they took half hour long bathroom breaks, or spent an hour putting away 5 items. I guess Kmart understood they had to put up with something when paying literally as little as possible.
And they did. Sears paid their employees very well, and consumers rewarded sears by shopping at their new competitors that offered lower prices.
The same dynamics exist with Nordstrom/Apple/Trader Joes. There’s a few brands that can afford to offer more quality and better paid workers, but they don’t exist in poorer parts of any city, and there’s only one of each type of store.
Everyone else has to offer the lowest prices.
Lambert didn’t help, but I think we’re still seeing the hollowing out of the middle class causing a loss of customers for places like Sears that could have paid middle class wages and sold decent quality goods.
It's not like anyone was stealing TVs, and that's what blew my mind about the stealing. It tended to be drinks and candy bars, stuff that not only was low value, but just simply wasn't necessary. It was stealing for the sake of stealing, because they thought they could get away with it.
Now working with grocery stores, they commonly tell me how difficult it is to find cashiers. Pre-COVID, I was at one, and they had 10+ cashier openings, and no applicants.
A quick google finds a number of stats referencing what I'm talking about, but probably nothing scientific. Here is an example: https://losspreventionmedia.com/theft-by-employees-more-comm...
Reliable help in "low skill" jobs (although I don't believe they are low skill) can be notoriously hard to find.
https://www.nelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsRe...
https://www.deseret.com/2014/6/24/20543670/wage-theft-how-em...
But how does an individual combat that? I personally just don't shop at Wal-Mart...
Intentionally paying an employee less than a living wage, with the expectation that someone else will be charitable enough to make up the shortfall, is indeed not theft, but it is unethical. There is a popular movement to make that behavior illegal, via reforms to employment law.
The obvious impediment here is that poor employees have little lobbying/campaign cash, as compared with the mega-corporations that underpay their laborers. So I feel confident that "Fight for $15" and similar movements will fail without more unionization.
But at the end of the day, I don't see anything wrong with helping workers take advantage of benefits that they are legally entitled to.
But there is some question as to whether the availability of treatment allows the man to ride the horses harder, with less regard for their welfare, than would otherwise be possible.
Metaphorically, the vet should refuse to treat injuries brought on by recklessness or cruelty, unless the person responsible pays.
Unwinding the metaphor, Wal-Mart should be forced to pay the cost of entitlement programs to the extent that its employment practices make administering those programs to its workers more necessary. There are many ways that goal may be approached.
It's not "theft" by any definition of the word, but when the situation is described to the modal individual, they are likely to say "they're stealing from the welfare system!"
We have that for a reason. But it should apply across the board.
Also, doing the thing that you are suggesting is basically equivalent to saying that all poor should be fired. Because that is what would happen.
I don't think it is a good idea to give companies a huge incentive to never hire poor people. What you are suggesting would just ensure that poor people get screwed over, because they would never be hired.
We are still living the legacy of the Great Depression, then the New Deal, and then also the attempts to unravel the New Deal.
To address your comment more directly, companies can't fire all poor people. They are needed to run the businesses (until their automaton replacements are built). But one of the reasons poor people are poor is that they cannot afford to not work for long enough to make potential employers hurt enough to offer them higher wages.
One point of a minimum wage is to put a stop on the race to the bottom for wages. Raising the minimum wage will certainly put some people out of work, many of them permanently. All those who cannot generate enough labor value to pay for the cost of their employment will lose their job, if they had one, and be unable to find other work.
But companies that require wage laborers will have to pay them enough to live on, without the fear of being undercut by someone more desperate.
But then you still have the problem of all those people who are unemployable economically, because they're just not productive enough to work for an employer, and lack the capital, credit, or capability to support themselves with self-employment.
So you have to pair minimum wage with something, so that those people don't resort to crime, the career of last resort. Whatever that is would certainly be sustainable, if and only if the employers that are setting the prevailing wages were somehow made to pay the costs of the externalities they force upon the society in which they operate, mostly brought on by ruthlessly cutting their labor costs as closely as possible to the bone, and diverting a greater proportion of their revenues to owners and managers. For the most part, for non-luxury goods and services, labor cost funnels into customer disposable income. You can't sell mass-market consumer-grade goods and services unless someone pays their workers enough to afford them.
And that's what the minimum wage does. It forces all employers into a cartel, such that everyone must pay their workers enough to survive on, plus a little extra disposable income to spend on stuff that no one needs, but requires economies of scale to exist. If the rich owner of a business likes blockbuster movies with big production budgets, they can pay the hundreds of millions of dollars all by themselves, or they and all their rich buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $10 movie ticket once in a while. If the rich owner of a business likes fine dining, they can pay for a personal chef and the upkeep for kitchen and pantry, or they and all their buddies can pay their workers enough that they can all afford a $50 meal once in a while. When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement. Their lowest-paid employees can't even buy a Big Mac without budgeting for it in advance, much less go to the movies or eat a steak dinner. Those employees cannot support other types of business when all their pay goes to rent, utilities, public transportation, and food.
There is no need to do some wierd complicated scheme regarding social benefits of people who are working.
Instead of that, if you think that people aren't getting paid enough money, then you should probably just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.
I think you even kind of admitted this when you said "And that's what the minimum wage does".
If this is the case, then that is the solution. Just advocate for increasing the minimum wage.
> When Wal-Mart pays poverty wages, they are reneging on the cartel agreement.
This agreement is called the minimum wage! They are not renaging on that.
If you think the minimum wage is to low... Then the proper response is to advocate for increasing it.
In my experience, "1/2" is too much (depending on how you define stealing). But it was quite common for both employees to steal from their employer, and for employers to steal (wages) from the employees.
It was also quite common for employees to simply walk off when they felt they'd had enough.
Those in power define the rules and define things like 'theft.' Theft in the traditional sense is taking physical tangible resources that aren't yours. When we move to intangibles like time, businesses have defined all the rules around theft, not people.
If a task normally takes 10 minutes, and an employee completes it in five, is that a donation of effort?
Is it theft to titrate the productivity of your labor to fit the rate of pay you receive for it? Employees do not get paid more for effort that exceeds par.
If I get paid $7/hour, I can easily reduce my productivity until one hour of my labor produces $21 for the employer. Or maybe I work two hours to produce $160 and slack off for six.
Two consecutive generations of not being rewarded for contributing additional effort for the benefit of the company has taken its toll, culturally. Nobody is willing to uphold a string work ethic for an unethical employer.
The employers burned through all their credit with labor, and are trying to refinance by redefining all the rules. It won't work. It's time for them to pay up.
Only two? Someone skipped history class. :-)
Prior to that point, increases in worker productivity positively correlate (at least weakly) with improvements in the purchasing power of worker wages. Afterward, working class purchasing power went flat or dropped even as their productivity shot through the roof. The owner class acquired the ability to capture everything, and they chose not to let it trickle down, by the terminology of the time. They didn't spend it. They loaned it or invested it, such that it never fully left their control.
After the abolition of slavery and advent of industrialization, labor movements have occasionally been able to claw back more of the workers' share of trade in the specialist economy, and then keep more equitable sharing of revenues going for a while afterwards, but the working class hasn't caught any breaks for a solid 40 years now, and unions are now relatively weak, compared to their historic peaks.
Prior generations got peanuts for their extra efforts, but they did at least get something.
In practice, the situation is rather gray. Employers will virtually never call the police in a case of theft (or "theft")--they'll simply fire the person involved. Likewise, most employees won't do much if they're stolen (or "stolen") from by employers, they'll just quit.
We're not even consistent in the ways that we think about the topic. There has been talk of a "rent strike" during the pandemic, which amounts to stealing resources from one's landlord (who might be "rich" or might be quite "poor"). Few people would go along with the idea of a "grocery strike", in which those who need food but cannot pay simply shoplift from their local store. Somehow the former sounds more okay than the latter, even though the former would typically involve theft on a much larger scale.
And of course, most of us posting here are "stealing" from our employers in some sense. The better employers typically realize that they're better off looking the other way.
The pure drag of having to deal with this, especially when it comes to all of the paperwork required, by law, to be completed with every single new hire makes this alone a huge expense.
The vast majority of those employees left of their own will, not because they were fired. Usually when the leave, there is no notice. They just don't show up leaving management short handed and wondering whether the employee will show up the next day. Consequently, the policy can be to over-staff so that whenever some percentage isn't showing up the employer can still meet production needs.
The employer cannot simply increase prices and pay people better. For the most part, employers already have prices at the highest their customers are willing to pay. Setting prices higher will result in loss of customers, less profit, then layoffs or business closure.
Employees at this level are astoundingly uninterested in performing well, or, in other words, there is a reason they are working entry-level positions. This makes management yet more difficult because managers may have to become near micro-managers of cat herds trying to get the company to produce whatever it is supposed to produce.
Is it less expensive constantly hiring and training new people than it would be to pay enough to retain employees you already have?
Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.
> ...because the financial impact is so disproportionate...
For who? Bob "steals" an hour of overtime worth $25 but he's still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...
> "If you pay me more I won't act like this"
This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.
> But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.
So why is it alright to allow a failing business who can't create value in the workforce is allowed (and enabled) to stay open so it can ruin more lives and create more misery? Surely there's a decent pizza place around the corner that's well managed, creates value for employees, and deserves the business. Instead we crutch along shitty businesses for no reason. Case in point, at a debate in 2016 a woman asked Bernie Sanders how she would continue to grow her business if she had to offer her employees health insurance. She would have to scrap plans to open a second location.
I'm sorry, but if your first location can't sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.
> Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.
Nevertheless, this is what happens. If you're running a low margin store of 50 employees, as a store general manager you notice one bad employee more and complain upwards about it. Hiring/retraining costs money. Granted this is a long time ago but I recall our training/hiring cost per employee at a Best Buy store to be in the thousands of dollars.
If you're Best Buy you can afford to pay people more (they just are also being responsible to their Wall Street numbers), but an independent restaurant can't just turn the price lever without other impacts, and no, in the cases I'm familiar with, the owner is not making high wage. Some of them are lucky to make over $50-60k/yr and correctly re-invest in their business.
> For who? Bob "steals" an hour of overtime worth $25 but he's still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...
Depending on the company, yes, one employee stealing anything can have more of an impact on your company than you realize. Especially if it goes on awhile without anyone noticing.
> I'm sorry, but if your first location can't sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.
First, health care is expensive. I work for a $4B company and my benefits are not great. My healthcare is expensive per-paycheck in my opinion.
Let's discuss your Bernie example/quote further. Let's say you enforced what you're talking about. Say an independent Pizza shop charges $20 for a large pizza, Pizza Hut/Dominos charges $18. But I can charge $2 more because of my quality, but I still have high food costs because I don't have franchise buying power. But I already have less sales because I don't have brand recognition and/or the marketing power that a national franchise does.
Also, at least in my friend's cases, they also pay their employees more than minimum wage out of the gate. IIRC they get paid fairly well for a pizza place, he also has employees that have been there for years and he pays them accordingly.
OK cool, I'll increase my wage, and I'll buy everyone health insurance. Now I have to charge $22 or $25 for the same pizza. Maybe my customers are loyal and just deal with it, maybe not. What happens if not? Then I close my business, now not only are my employees unemployed but so am I.
Say you make the same change to the big franchise, their costs only go up to $19-$20 for the pizza that cost $18 before. At the extreme still $5 less than I was charging.
Obviously the example gets more complex if everyone gets the same wage increase, right? Then you're just sort of raising the water line.
I think it's super complex, honestly. Especially having managed this on the "Big Business" and small business sides.
That being said:
> This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.
Not in all cases is my point, some people are just awful humans. He's had some of his employees (whom he pays well in comparison) steal food and money straight out of the register.
This is why structuring the economy based on competition is brutal and inhumane.
I tried ordering things from Home Depot for instance (I have extra time on my hands, might as well fix up the house). If it's not available in store, they quoted week+ shipping time.
Amazon had it to me in 3-4 days.
Obviously Home Depot had little to no incentive to do better shipping until now.
The cost of healthcare to employers has more than tripled over the last 17 years[1]. We're not "crutching them along," we are passively watching as opportunities to grow are eroded by rising costs.
[1] - https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BF-AU065A_INSUR_9...
Amazon is not in this category
That's a recipe for significantly increased unemployment which would affect the most vulnerable workers the most.
For most people in a low-paying job, the alternative is no job. If they were able to get higher-paying jobs they would have already done so.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm
In Texas, where the state minimum wage is the federal minimum wage, there are still only about 3% of hourly workers earning minimum wage or less.
In a society with a functioning safety net, minimum wage wouldn't be necessary. That wouldn't only be better for those who can't work at all. All employees would benefit, and eventually most businesses would as well. Here in USA I'm not sure if such a safety net is possible, but I hear good things about other societies.
That was the biggest thing I saw. There was a TON of smaller theft in the form of drivers faking customer complaints so that the order was freed out, even though the driver had been paid cash for the order.
A of my acquaintances from my hometown worked at a large retailer through highschool. They would hide merchandise under skids in the outdoor garden center during their shift, then come back at night to recover it. They would stuff small expensive items (ie: iPods), into the advertisement trays at the front of shopping carts, then recover them once the carts were pushed out into the parking lot. They built a "fort" between two aisles in the back warehouse to take naps during their shifts.
I could give stories like this for a long time. They never got caught (to my knowledge).
Not all low-level employees are thieves. But more of them are then most people realize.
These workers didn't sell products, but did very low level tech work, but the entire operation was mired in drama. For example, we had a strict no drugs policy, and no weapons policy on campus, zero tolerance. So, say that one of your employees comes up crying that she is getting fired because she did heroin during work hours, and she needs to money for her unborn child (this happened!), or a guy gets angry at being fired because he was pulling out his new .45 from his waistband to show his cubicle neighbors. We had a LOT of this stuff, and as a result, many zero tolerance policies.
It's difficult to understand how many hard living, disadvantaged people there are in this country, even in wealthy areas like the Bay Area of CA, who bring their rough living to work with them. What do you do as an employer? Do you tolerate this to be friendlier to the employees, and someone gets killed, making you liable? Do you come down like a hardass and dehumanize them even more, but cover your butt? Neither choice is good, but it's the latter that usually happens.
edit: I am being downvoted and don't know why. Can you please explain what's wrong with this idea? I think the parent paints a false dichotomy.
For example - another option is to deal with problematic individuals on an individual basis. You don't have to ruin the entire company culture.
This may have more to do with the phrasing of your first sentence, which could be interpreted as flippant, or presumptive, or maybe even victim blaming.
[After reading other comments, I think the behavior you noted is most likely to be the result of people engaged in ideological battle. If this is true, I would just keep engaging in good faith, there's little you can do.]
Separately, in the future, you might frame your follow-up inquiry as:
>edit: Can anyone please explain what's wrong with this idea? I think the parent paints a false dichotomy.
Or similar. That is, leaving off explicit mention of your motivation for asking as [discussion of this specific motivation] is frowned upon in the site guidelines.
You definitely need to treat people with as much respect as possible, but in some jobs, you have to have all these rules in place knowing you'll get people who aren't model citizens. I was never in the HR org chart here, never saw finances, but I suspect the people that I mentioned were paid near minimum wage. Few stuck around more than six months, and those who did, moved onto better jobs. It was all very structured and regimented. I would never fire anyone for trying to make their workplace better, assuming they did it in a non-disruptive way.
But I couldn't think of a 'danger' equivalent off the top of my head. What are some examples?
Of course not. Allowing needles and guns at your workplace isn't friendlier to employees in general.
The discussion went from "Maybe we shouldn't fire them for trying to organize so they don't die in a pandemic" to "Whats an employer to do with 33% time thieves and drug users?" embarrassingly quickly.
I think what Tim Bray did is heroic, I think that Amazon exploited workers way too much, all in the name of thinner overheads and lowering prices, which is the only thing their customers care about.
Tim Bray's resignation won't change things, but if we decide that Amazon's unfair and refuse to patronize them because of their employee treatment, then perhaps there will be change. However, I think there are enough people living paycheck to paycheck where that is a secondary consideration after price, and Amazon does have good prices on many things.
I, for one, will be curtailing my use of Amazon. I only used them sporadically anyway, preferring to support others, but still liked the convenience of Prime for some products. For work, I spend six figures a month with AWS, but there's no employee mistreatment there that I'm aware of.
It's a massive derailment from the point that makes it seem like employers are unduly burdened by their employees. It reads as 'Point', 'Counterpoint' but it really isn't -- nobody is going to argue that employees should be allowed to bring drugs and guns or steal from the company.
(Although I imagine "Time theft" mentioned above includes behavior that if high skilled labor did wouldn't raise any eyebrows.)
I have news that might surprise you about how widespread hard drug use in SV programming, finance, or any "startup" area.
Zero tolerance for the phone banks but not for Elon Musk, right?
Tech companies don't understand culture. The same assumption that you give a bunch of kids laptops and they'll just automatically learn to program is the same that if you give people cubicles coffee and water they'll act like docile office workers. There are things that you needed that you didn't have a line item for.
I think it just puts a voice to what a lot of people think, but never say.
[edit] Sorry, to add details, they were trying to increase throughput with the same number of workers. The factory already went 24/7 under EU guidelines, so more hours were out of the question.
Here's another way. As the worker, already working full-time, maybe you have better things to do with your life than working harder. Furthermore, the worker is probably thinking:
"If they want me to work more hours, why not pay me for more hours, including time-and-a-half overtime, per the law? Why offer a profit-share? Answer, mostly likely because the profit-share costs them less, and therefore, pays me less".
In that light, unless the factory management can explain how the extra hours they want people to work is likely to work out better for them then just getting paid for more hours, why should they accept?
* you do lots of work now, up front
* you have no say in the business
* you have no say in the investment returns, for example, if profits are made, management can just give themselves higher salaries that come straight out of your share of returns
* your investment isn't portable or recoupable, if you leave it's nothing
* if management is bad, it's also nothing
* you're skeptical of current management
Should you invest your time in this business?
People who only read about the non college degree people can have some very clueless ideas.
You'd think Amazon treats its "high pay" engineers on-par with other FAANGs? It is not just the warehouse workers that they are paranoid about. They're paranoid about the human nature to slack, to rest, to err, to relax, to let their guard down for a moment, to not care enough at times, to deal with life's other problems, to fail... to live.
> But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.
This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can't afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them right is equivalent to unintentionally saying 'the business can't exist without worker exploitation'. I do not believe that is a defensible position if you don't axiomatically accept worker exploitation.
Maybe any given business model doesn't have a god-given moral right to exist. It does suck if we lose that local pizzeria, but clearly we didn't want the pizza enough to pay what it cost to ethically support such a business. If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.
Yeah, I agree, but I think another false general assumption people might make is "every retail or food service job is minimum wage" and that every owner is just shortchanging their workers to pay themselves more. That isn't the case across the board.
Best Buy doesn't pay minimum wage, heck even when I started there as a part time computer tech in 2002 I was paid $9.50/hr. That being said with the 1 year $80/share price they can damn well afford to pay more.
My friend who owns the pizza business pays more than his franchise based competitors, he has employees who have worked for him for years because of this. So he's not paying close to minimum wage but the "meta market" for a pizza keeps his prices in a certain range. As I mentioned in a below comment there are other market forces at work here (e.g., a national franchise has buying power for food price reductions, etc).
So knowing his very loyal customer base, if he had to increase prices to support extra cost, they'd probably stay to a certain extent, but maybe that results in less employees or hours. Who knows.
> If you're worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It's probably beyond the current conversation.
Yeah, that's my whole point. Any legislation that increases wages has a disproportionate impact based on your business, and SBA says small business makes up 48% of jobs[0].
But like you said, the conversation is a level up from this.
[0]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...
The problem is that once you close the business and fire the underpaid employees, they don't disappear. Now they're unemployed and make $0/hour.
This blind spot fascinates me. The best explanation I've seen is "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". It says that "when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it".
So in this scenario, once you've fired your employees, you are no longer connected to them, and their further destiny is not your fault.
I suspect this is a deep part of our moral instincts, and we have to be aware of it to get to a more rational approach.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
If you google "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", lots of things come up though. Happy hunting!
As long as you treat your employees with respect and pay legal wages, who are we to say that the wages are "poverty wages".
Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.
The problem is that due to lack of other options, many people are crowding out these type of workers and using these jobs as full time, primary income.
If the alternative is no job at all (i.e. "shouldn't exist") then poverty wages sound better than nothing.
When working those wages leave you in poverty its poverty wages.
> Many of these low wage, entry level positions are/were meant to be filled by young people, still living with parents, or part time workers who may have a spouse that is the primary earner.
This is not the case, and has never been the case. The economy is not set up for the benefit of teens on summer vacation.
44% of all workers aged 18 to 64 made a median of $10.64/hr and an annual income less than $20,000. Its hard to overstate how many people across the country are living on poverty wages - the "young people" theory to me frequently only comes about from people who've grown up in affluent areas and had evening jobs at grocery stores. Most low wage workers in this economy are invisible.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor...
You've hit the nail on the head. This position is privilege exemplified, and indicates a lack of empathy for people who do not have the skills, opportunity, or desire to obtain higher-paying positions. Everyone in our society should be able to live with dignity, regardless of their vocation. No one needs to scrape by in the wealthiest country on earth, especially when minimum-wage jobs make so much of our society possible.
I don't blame anyone for having a (relatively) sheltered life, as there's plenty in our life that all of us being on this forum are sheltered from. I consider it a good thing to be sheltered from a lot of traumas growing up. Our children need not feel the same pains we did. But by using a combative tone you're lessening the change for empathy to win out.
Finally, thats not to say that combat (rhetorical, physical) isn't the solution in some cases.
I grew up in one of the poorest counties in America.
I now live in one of the wealthiest. And while the occasional affluent family has a teenager or two that works at the grocery store, in poor areas, lots more teenagers have jobs to supplement not only their own income, but that of their parents.
That's not to say that there are more teenagers working these low wage jobs, it's just to point out that "privlege" in this case is merely a straw man and sidesteps the main thrust of my point, which was, what is better, "poverty wages" or no wages at all?
I respect your sincere intentions here, but I do object to that proposal, and I hope that there can be a constructive dialog on the subject.
I think my primary objection is to the description of the small pizzeria as being exploitative. Sure, the workers are not payed very much, but the power differential is very small. It seems much more likely that the economic relationship is genuinely one of mutual benefit, and I have a hard time finding a moral objection to that.
My other objection is to the ramifications of such a policy on a broader society. It seems inevitable to me that in such a society, everyone would be forced to be clients of large, faceless entities, be they private corporations or governmental entities. That we could rely on either of these institutions to protect individuals from exploitation is highly dubious. To my mind, it is the very existence of intermediary institutions (like small businesses) which are the best safeguards of individual autonomy and well-being.
Irrelevant. I'm not talking about the owner being exploited. We could just be talking about a independent small business that's trying to get by on small margins.
> That doesn't make it ok for them to exploit others.
You're assuming that low pay is exploitation when that is the very notion I'm challenging. The exploitation comes from a power differential that is leveraged to the benefit of one party. If neither party has much power over the other, and neither is benefiting unduly from the relationship, then there is not exploitation.
It may very well be that neither the business nor the employee has much to offer each other. The point is that they're still willing to work together for mutual benefit, however small that mutual benefit may be.
The difference between a job and a career is portability. If you have a career, you can switch employers and they will value your experience. You will make the same or more. If you have a job, when you switch employers you start back at the bottom. Sometimes there is a small premium for experience, but it's nowhere near what you can make at a good employer for longevity.
This is exactly why privilege is not an accurate or constructive term to use in these conversations.
Privilege implies something undeserved. So it sounds like an argument for taking away those bare minimums, so everyone is equally treated with suspicion, condescension and hostility.
Better words are "oppression", "discrimination" and "bigotry". Make it clear that the goal is treating everyone with a basic level of trust and respect, as a bare minimum, and nothing less than that is acceptable.
I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1], and kept the business running as long as possible even after 9/11 + the recession killed the business.
The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”.
People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly, if they see that it’s very much possible for the system to be improved, that’s when the thoughts of “this is unfair” begin to emerge.
[1] My dad was by title the owner while my mom was in the union the workers belonged to. His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers, but far lower than could have been possible had they attempted to fight the union on pay to nickel and dime them.
Showing my work:
> My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1]
>His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.
Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage.
Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).
I'd also point out it's 15% higher than the median. How small do you feel the middle class is? You mentioned "lower middle class"; I only see them mention "middle class".
But even for the lower middle class, it rather depends on how you choose to count it, no? I've seen some economists define middle class as the middle 60%. Given that range (~$46k - $140k), they're in the lower end, if you want to hold them to that statement (that they never made).
My hunch is most people don't base it on dividing the population in to equal fractions, which is kind of how I read your comments.
Even with that there's an awful lot of caveats, though; as folks have noted, regional differences can be huge. The median income in Silicon Valley as of last year is just under $100K (despite the picture that Hacker News can sometimes paint!), but in Tampa Bay, Florida, it was just under $60K.
Secondly, it's much more important to look at local median income and local cost of living. $1000 a week in many areas won't get you far if most of it is taken up by taxes and housing. And before someone pulls out the "well, move to somewhere cheaper", there's no guarantee that a cheaper to live location would necessarily still support $1000/week to the owner, or if there was a commute, that it wouldn't eat significantly into that income (fuel + toll + car payment which may not be required if you live locally could be well over a $1000/month).
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-income-us-city-...
Literally drive down the street and look at those little no-name shops and stores: each of them have owners who employ other people.
The lady who owns the salon and has 10 other ladies + receptionist working there is not wealthy, and is probably taking on a lot of risk.
'Small business owner' is one of the most precarious positions to be in - it's like all the low pay and crap of 'working class' life - but with all the risk and stress of capital class.
I don't know why people do it.
I wonder maybe if this class just 'gave up on it' it'd be interesting to see how we would all cope.
I can't answer this myself, but I've gotten some hints at it over my lifetime of hearing my dad's stories (repeated over and over...)
One is that it's part of the American dream. As immigrants, being able to say that you made it and are self-made can mean a lot.
Second and probably more importantly, successfully running a business, along with all the financial risks included like loans, can give you a leg up in one crucial area that is very hard to acquire as a poor immigrant - high credit score. This let's you get far better loans, mortgages, etc. Having that history where you can prove that "yeah, I make good on my debts" goes a very long way. Especially if you're as savvy as my dad.
My parent's have run a small business for over 20 years. Between 10 and 20 employees depending on the season and the economic situation.
When everything goes great, they can sometimes clear a few hundred thousand in the year. They are doing well and appear wealth.
But then a bad job comes around, and they can lose their shirts. 3-4 times over the last 20 years, a big job has gone south and they have actually personally lost money for the year. One year in particular, they had to remortgage their house to meet payroll because conditions out of their control lost them a big contract. All the employees still get paid, but my parents have to go into debt and deal with the repercussions.
The stress they deal with is immense. I've worked some high-stress corporate jobs, and it still has no compare to what I watched my parents deal with.
Because it's the most common and consistent gateway to actual wealth, which is also non-coincidentally the gateway to independence (at least from a singular boss, there's always some dependence on the system in some way).
This is slightly upended by startups and getting shares for signing on early, but that's really not all that different of a situation (partial ownership for partial risk), it just happens that at this particular point in history it's also applying towards people with a lot of prospects and/or resources so there's less on the line for them if it fails.
Also, others have pointed out many examples where it's possible to hire many workers but still not be in a high income bracket.
>> My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1],
>>His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.
> Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage.
> Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).
Like I said, I'd be happy to edit it (can't because of the time limit). However, you're nitpicking on a single part of the comment that honestly means very little. You're also doing that without even using any numbers or locations.
My question to you is, do you have anything constructive to say in response to the spirit and content of my comment with regards to the discussion thread?
Edit: Also, remember that the "fair wage" is based on what the union negotiated (including raises). We paid on the higher end compared to others in our industry. "Fair wage" does not automatically mean that the workers are middle or even lower middle class. So your calculation is already making a huge mistake there.
If you're going to make an edit that changes the meaning of what other people have already replied to, please say that you're doing that. The best way is to make the edit append-only.
The very least they could do is add some visual cue that a comment has been edited, like showing the header in italics or adding an asterisk.
Your claim regarding others' emotional states sounds like speculation based on insufficient information.
That's terrible math that proves nothing, besides that the owners as a couple is making more (including by a tiny margin) than a couple of workers
The "middle class", i.e., the borgeoisie, are the class of business owners (and/or people who have the ability to start a business, i.e. who have a professional skill that could be sold freelance or with a one-person company "wrapped" around it.) What do you call a lowest-income-bracket-for-business-owners business owner, other than "lower middle class"?
Meanwhile, a laborer—even a rich laborer (e.g. a waiter who makes a lot in tips; or a unionized dock-worker; or a soldier)—is, definitionally, in the lower class. If your professional skills are only in demand in the context of a capitalist organizing and value-adding on top of them, then you're in the lower class. (For example: dentist? Middle class. Dental hygienist? Lower class. The dentist can start their own dental clinic, whereas the hygienist cannot. Even if they both took home the same salary from said clinic, one has access to corporate profits—capital—while the other does not.)
People don't say "upper lower class", but the French equivalent "prolétariat riche" does make sense. (There are whole sectors of the economy that cater mostly to the prolétariat riche. Anything referred to as "bling" is marketed mainly to the prolétariat riche. Nightclubs cater mostly to the prolétariat riche.)
† In English, the terms are mapped to positions on a city's height map (lower/middle/upper), because cities used to be basins of smoke and filth, and the people who could, would move to the outlying hills to be away from it. But this is still a political distinction, not an economic one. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't get away from city life entirely until you no longer need to work for a living at all. Once you don't need to work at all, you unlock the time+energy+liquid assets required to influence politics. It's all part-and-parcel.
One of my HR friends was dismayed at the treatment of warehouse workers at Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217969
The heartbreaking part is that even when GM saw it happen, they couldn't really get it. Manager-labor hostility was too baked in on the management side for them to really change.
Don't forget that it's baked in on the labor side as well. NUMMI was not a 'fix' of a GM plant. It was a new venture started where a previous GM plant had closed.
Back to my original point, GM couldn't adopt the changes everywhere despite what they "learned" without firing everyone at the existing plants to start with a clean slate like they did with NUMMI. Once the relationships are poisoned, both sides need severe restructuring (i.e. leadership changes) to fix it.
I disagree with you that this (or anything) proves "both sides need severe restructuring". It's not like GM's managerial apparatus had a spiritual breakthrough, made deep internal changes, and then worked hard to change the worker-labor hostility that they had spent decades building up. I do agree that starting with a closed plant and bringing back workers made this easier for Toyota to sort things out, but there's no reason to think it would have been an impossible task if they'd started before the plant closed.
As the TAL piece explains, GM never really tried. They ultimately preferred their poisoned relationships and lower effectiveness, just like they had for the decades that Toyota kicked their asses. Toyota's higher per-worker productivity and greater quality goes back to at least the 1960s (per Rother's Toyota Kata), and this became a keen problem for the big 3 starting in the 1970s. GM's managerialist culture means that the managers had all the power to fix this. They never have, even though they were on the road to bankruptcy.
You can't take a system like managerialism, or any system whose purpose is the creation of a power imbalance, and then blame "both sides" its failures. With power comes responsibility.
10 years later, I totaled it and despite being a lot better off financially than I was at 16, I decided to buy another one. It's just such a solid car, maintenance is easy on it, etc. It's sad to me that there aren't more of the solid, low-tech, low-cost cars that NUMMI was so great at churning out.
Maybe one day Tesla can get electric cars to that type of economy of scale, but I think it's going to be a while.
Some people don't. I think you may be underestimating the degree to which A) your parents were good judges of people, and B) having ownership close to the metal can make things work well.
The best way to get people who show up for work on time, don't steal from the register and don't call out sick is to pay them enough to have a life that isn't sent into a stress spiral by an electricity bill thats 10% higher.
Corporations especially in the service industry (Fast food, etc) have tested and to their bottom line workers stealing and missing shifts and calling out every 3 days isn't worth more to them than paying people less. Not because they're unprofitable, but because they can, and there's enough desperate people EVEN WITH FULL EMPLOYMENT to not raise wages as long as none of the other corporations do.
So now you have cargoculting amonst the business administrators that pay as low as possible is the only way to run a business. Except of course, when it comes to business administrators and those who interact with them.
There is evidence to the contrary, as these companies have infact (or did pre COVID) raise their wages beyond the minimum wage they were doing. Some of it is in response to Retail raise wages (i.e Walmart when to a $11/12 nation wide min wage) in response most fast food also had to raise their wages.
Fast food requires almost no skills, and most likely as wages increase it will simply be automated out of existence completely, given that literally almost any human that is breathing can fill the job there is not going to be much that will push those wages up.
These jobs are not intended to be long term employment where a person would support a family on, hell they are not even jobs that should be filled by people supporting themselves, they are tailored to people for their first jobs normally while they are a dependent of another person
There's no intention provided by these jobs - I'm not sure where that would actually come up. 50% of fast food workers have more than one job. That alone indicates that at least half of those workers aren't dependent on another person. Average fast food worker is 29, 50% are over 25. 26% of fast food workers are parents with children.
I just wanted to say that to establish that there are many people who work fast food jobs that depend on it to live. Given that - and that there is no functional safety net to prevent someone from becoming homeless were they to lose their income, and that the minimum wage isn't a living wage, I'm advocating for it to pay a living wage. Its sort of strange to me that people prioritize the needs of dependents and children over unskilled people who are working as much as possible to keep a roof over their head.
If you need to work 2 jobs to make rent, you are not spending much time at all gaining skills to get a better paying "real" job, assuming they're available at all. You're trapped. A living wage would allow people to actually have the time to develop skills rather than trapping them in subsistence poverty. Because one person in 5 doesn't need the money, the other 4 should suffer? Should they not be treated for a flu that could kill them? Does their life have any value at all?
And if that means robots are suddenly economical? Why are they not economical elsewhere, where workers are paid a living wage? https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/li...
> Fast food will always be the lowest paid job in the economy and the idea that work is entitled to a high wage simply because it exists
I'm not making this argument. It is not a high wage, by any first world measure. That most people making that wage are both below the poverty line and get food stamps tells you its not a high wage.
Now, is it most efficient for the economy to be flooded with no-skill workers? Probably not, if there's some sort of floor on human dignity. In any system there will be leeches, people who game a system, etc. I'm concerned about them, but we should start by tracking actual outcomes. This is one of the reasons why the US is one of the least socially/economically mobile countries in the first world. We're closer to Russia than we are to the UK.
Are you speaking from experience here? There is plenty of poverty that doesn't lead to theft of money and time to disprove this as a general claim.
There's more to it than paying people enough.
That's because basic trust and respect shouldn't be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let's focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.
But I believe your specific example here fits the "depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent/advantage that few people have".
Just being treated like a human with independent thoughts and needs is a huge benefit in so many workplaces. There's a level of just violence and mistrust in the "normal" working world that is terrifying if you haven't experienced it, and jarring if you haven't experienced it in a while. The bean-counters who make up the systems where in human labor is a cog are really creating skinner boxes. The larger scale the corporation goes the less emphasis on empathy and human needs. You become a bit that can either do the work or can't.
Our cold "efficient" corporate machines has actively done everything it can to take humanity and empathy away from every process. Consumers are numbers on a dashboard. Workers are line items in an S-1. As much as people like to claim otherwise, the companies actions never take a hit that they know doesn't have a benefit elsewhere. Amazon is a big pioneer in the space - take something and remove all human decision making from it, automate it and then move onto the next thing. Now they apply that against hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees.
To add: from an European perspective, much of US-Reddit/HN and their stories are frankly unbelievable. "Hire at will", bankruptcies because of cancer or people not calling an ambulance even if they are heavily injured because they fear thousands-of-dollars bills, MLMs, robocall terrorism, companies firing people for unionizing - basically unheard of, because there are laws that prevent this reasonably good, and transgressors will mostly be held accountable by courts and public opinion.
It was a culture shock. Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues; and there was no store-front or exposure to customers, it was just what's acceptable in a professional office. Someone quitting with no notice wasn't uncommon. I think the most shocking aspect was most lived in this sort of land of grand illusion, they had no concept that there were non-hourly jobs or workers building the system they used. All of them lived in a fairly delicate balance, a small inconvenience like some car trouble was potentially life altering for them. We did these somewhat terrible Thursday night deployments (think 4 hours most of the time) and more than a few times some of these guys wanted to "help" to get some overtime pay, they were incredulous at the idea that we didn't get paid extra for that. Everyone deserves dignity and respect but it's also easy to see how these untrusting sorts of institutions come to be.
The big difference between ordering on Amazon and walking in to a Walmart is you have to look some of those people in the eye in Walmart. Credit to Tim for shining a little light on this. I've sort of thought that we might be in for a wave of 21st century unionization, I think the floor is a lot lower than that though. It's hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today's world.
That's the norm for many (most?) high-paying jobs, even more so than the typical low-paying job. Tech is kind of the outlier, if you're a banker or lawyer or consultant, you're expected to wear a suit everywhere.
It would have to be a huge cultural shift away from profits being the #1 goal of companies. We need something to replace it.
This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both.
I agree. Anecdote: The difference in treatment between a permatemp ('seasonal' worker at an entertainment facility working more than 9 months per year, later round-the-clock) and F.T.E. is massive.
In the former, you are guilty until proven, if not innocent, then merely suspicious.
In the latter, you are innocent until proven guilty or more commonly incompetent.
I'm glad I work at one of the latter places now.
Maybe people would be less hostile to the idea if you didn't dismiss the fruits of their labor with accusations of "privilege." It's kind of insulting to be told that you effectively didn't earn part or all of your success because of your race and/or gender.
I'm not trying to say that the status is unearned, either, but I see why developers wouldn't want to agree with me. It's not humbling at all, and can appear arrogant.
Assuming this is the real true reason (I would trust Tim, but you never know, so just being explicit here), it takes huge balls to do something like this.
The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth (e.g. if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bank, it's not as hard as if you had zero in the bank), but still... Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.
Again, assuming this is all true, I admire Tim for this move, and plaude him. I had my issues with Amazon when I was there (2008-2014), some of them made me uncomfortable, but I would have never had the courage to walk away.
It also potentially damages Tim's ability to get hired in the future, as some other large organization might not like his behavior with Amazon and be reluctant to bring him on board. At the same time, hopefully there are smaller startups that want exactly this type of courage and rectitude and will hire him for his talents.
Good luck, Tim.
I'd be worried about being sued for defamation, etc.
UK laws are so horrible that the USA passed a law that UK libel judgements are not enforceable here. See https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-10940211 for more.
Canada is somewhere between the two.
Incidentally the country with the worst libel laws in the world is Australia.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fighting-for-jus...
Too bad I can no longer edit my comment
> Filing a report to police is not in itself grounds for a defamation action, but if a rape victim goes public with their allegations, a criminal complaint can be filed against them.
My God, that's horrifying.
Caveat: companies where everyone is a VP probably have another title that denotes senior leadership: Managing Director, Partner, etc.
I think I would agree that making media rounds would be a crude move, but there are actions you can take along a continuum before that (like this blog post) that might help apply external pressure while still having access to the internal levers.
It reminds me a bit of Congresspeople who gain the courage to speak honestly after they've left their government roles. Yes, it's still courageous, and there are good reasons not to speak out while you're inside the system, but damn, you've just given up your best chance at making actual change.
For roles where you are a voice of the company, you need people who will use channels, because the alternative is literally bad for the company in ways that are very concrete.
Put more viscerally, I would not want one of my peers going to the media before they talk to me and give me a chance to address their concerns.
"At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people. ¶
That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned."
No large company keeps its hands completely clean. Defense contracts, Chinese censorship, exploiting addiction, anticompetitive behaviour, sexism, the list goes on.
Having a public figure at your company that's willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when you have a scandal is a dumb idea.
I remember my dad spent all of about two weeks "retired" (resigned in protest in similar circumstances, but from a staff of maybe 100) before finding a part-time job at a local charity he liked.
> Progressive friends, people whose opinions I respect, give me shit about working for Amazon. I claim that the problem is capitalism, flaccid labor laws, and lame antitrust enforcement, not any particular company; maybe I’m right.
And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive.
Show me one corporation that doesn't have some scandal in it. Or even better a multinational corporation.
If you play by the "rules" and don't anger anyone, you're going to lose to everyone not playing by them.
From today's post:
> Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.
In Ontario, Canada, which has a lot of auto plants, there's actually a controlled experiment of sorts that is going on: the unions are in the GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants since forever. Meanwhile they've been trying to get into the Toyota/Lexus plant for a long time and the workers always vote 'no'.
Same industry, same geographic area and culture, different results.
Turns out that if you respect your employees they often respect you back.
Having a toxic work culture in warehouses seems a dumb idea too.
He didn't quit over those. He quit over what seems to me to be flagrant disrespect for basic human rights.
I want to hope most companies who can make use of a person of Tim's skills - and those are few and far between - do not condone that kind of behavior and would appreciate him for it, not pass him over.
You know. But this was a f good post. Yeah. He's friends with Tom Waits, dudes, and tons of other people, he'll get jobs like hell.
Brave move though. I love you Tim Bray been reading the blog for ages it seems. Tim things up. Good luck onwards.
Check out your email signature Tim Bray. Good luck onwards
EDIT: I might be totally wrong but I read somewhere he's friends with yes that guy.
I believe Tim is making a real sacrifice here, which is why it's so rare and impressive.
I'd gladly be radioactive for companies that fire whistleblowers and worker rights activists.
Exactly what this whole conversation made me feel.
I guess people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall. I don't see other reason "western" societies don't change people in power when they actually can.
Self-oppression? Sure. But it does not mean that oppression doesn't exist. It's just that it is self caused, and self here refers to society as a whole. Oppression exists whether it's self-inflicted or inflicted by one/many upon another/others.
See [1] pdf page 10.
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
> people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall.
As if the appointment of people in power was decided democratically.
The only way out is collective social or legal action (often seeded or inspired by martyrs).
Most people think of themselves as fundamentally good. Considering someone who has made decisions based on (well-argued) ethical beliefs to be dangerous would contradict their image of self. And if there's one thing people abhor, it's being inconsistent in their believes about themselves. Ergo: nobody not working for Uber or Facebook is going to have a problem with a do-gooder.
If you don't believe me, consider this: Do you believe this guy, Tim Bray, had both the power as well as the mindset to hire someone who had made a similar stand at a previous job?
Or consider the overwhelming majority in this thread seemingly supportive of this action, and registering disagreement with the idea of not hiring such people. Do you believe they all change their opinion if they are ever promoted into management? Would you?
There is also a vast universe of companies that just aren't in a position to generate the sort of ethical controversies Amazon invites, either by being small or by selling innocuous products.
As a cultural phenomenon, this idea is similar to believing that corporations never do anything that isn't in direct pursuit of shareholder value (they frequently do, sometimes even quietly where it doesn't even generate positive PR).
In a certain sense, these are examples of Keynesian Beauty Contests, where everyone considers the girl-next-door type to be pretties, but bets on the blonde playmate with fake breasts to be chosen by the majority.
Everybody thinks they are the hero of their own story. In fact, its almost required that individuals view themselves in this way. If you think you are evil and cannot justify your actions, it is really hard to get out of bed in the morning.
In the first case the President put in quite a lot of effort and determined the person probably acted ethically before extending the offer. The individual (later proven correct) was exceedingly grateful and has since been incredibly loyal to the organization. He absolutely could have been recruited away a thousand times since but he hasn’t left because they gave him a chance when no one else would. His hiring has been, without a doubt, an excellent investment.
The second case was more or less the complete opposite. The CEO hired a friend who had been a “whistleblower”. His claims against his prior employer weren’t entirely without merit but it later became clear they were... tenuous. And it turned out he was a giant headache. He was difficult to work with, made mountains out of molehills, and didn’t last long at the company. The company lost quite a bit of money getting rid of him, the CEO lost a lot of respect internally, and he lost a friend. I think it’s unlikely the CEO would ever consider hiring a whistleblower again.
I don’t think companies or hiring managers see a whistleblower and are immediately turned off by the prospect of hiring someone with morals. It’s more that there are two sides to every story and they often don’t think it’s worth the effort to get the information necessary to make the decision: is this person a problem-solver or a problem-starter? If there’s another candidate with 90% of the qualifications that doesn’t require similar vetting it’s just easier and less risky to hire that person instead.
That being said, I’ve seen first hand that if you’re willing to do a little due diligence a recent whistleblower can be a really fantastic hire.
Even so, good on him for speaking out.
That definitely puts things in a different perspective. It can't really damage his career much when his career is 20+ years old. At this point, if he doesn't have his own side gig, lots of companies, big and small, would still want him.
"See? You can trust us, otherwise Tim Bray wouldn't still be working here."
No. A couple of more questionable companies may choose to stay away, but the majority of companies would love to have Tim on board. Even if just for a few years or part-time.
Most employees and owners think of themselves and their company as good so will not be concerned with having a man of moral as their employee. Not that they all are 100% "good" but most think they are.
Also, Tim Bray is well respected and most companies know they can gain a lot by him helping out, and they know that.
The business owners I know frequently complain about how difficult it is to fire underperforming employees. Trying to ensure they're legally protected from lawsuits requires keeping the inadequate employee on payroll for months in order to collect documentation that shows the employee is not fulfilling their contract. My guess is most business owners would be loathe to hire anybody with a history of making this process even more difficult for their employer.
Merely quitting would be one thing, but when you publicly excoriate your former employer like this (including allegations of racism and sexism without evidence), you become a massive liability to future employers. Quite frankly, I would never hire this man if I were a business owner. And the fact that the leadership of a left-leaning company like Amazon also seems to disagree with him makes me think I'm probably not alone.
One of these is not like the others. What in the world is dirty about working on national defence? It's a positive thing, IMHO.
Start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Engineers at companies that sell missiles to Saudi Arabia have to take a more nuanced view, or a more laid-back view. As these are not universal, they have to be selected for at hiring time.
The careful planning to ensure that every possible Congressional district gets a subcontract under the F-35 program is a blatant signal as to how this all operates.
The part of the DoD that actually gets things done despite the red tape, obstructionists, career ass sitters, grifters and outright thieves, has my eternal respect.
That our military manages to project power even though there are ten thousand competing agendas is a miracle of the modern day.
former FT2(SS)
There are bound to be employers who would like to be seen that way.
He's also 64, not far from retirement age, he may not want to work again and instead devote himself to passion projects and being with friends and family, and who could blame him?
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.
A good number of engineers refuse to even interview with FAANGs and other nasty companies on principle and they don't get any public praise.
Also the turnover of engineers in Amazon is among the highest in the industry and only a few stay beyond 5 years.
In comparison, refusing to work for some FAANG takes 10 times more courage for someone out of college and without saving.
The RSUs are essentially going to show up as long as you stay employed. The same is not true of your salary (as a lot of people are learning first hand during this economic downturn). The value of RSUs changes with the value of the company, which is also not true with salary. While you could argue that RSUs granted at hiring might just be part of your comp, refreshers are generally seen as having been earned based on past performance, with income deferred to encourage retention.
As a consequence, when you leave a job and go work somewhere else, it's far more likely that you will find a commensurate salary somewhere else than something commensurate with unvested RSUs; even if you get something to match the RSUs, it's likely not going to "vest" on the schedule you once had.
Huh? I'm pretty sure they have to pay you a salary to keep you employed.
> refreshers are generally seen as having been earned based on past performance, with income deferred to encourage retention.
If they won't pay you money until you do X, then the money is payment for X, not payment for previous work, even if they try to market it as "deferred" payment for previous work. Gotta be clever enough to see through the doublespeak.
Future salary: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
Unvested RSUs: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
See the similarity? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck etc.
The whole concept of unvested RSUs is basically a clever psychological trick to exploit the endowment effect to make quitting seem more punitive than it actually is. People react more negatively to losing money that is "already theirs" than losing future income. If you trick people into thinking their $1 million of unvested RSUs is "already theirs" then they are more averse to quitting and losing that $1 million then they would be to quitting and losing the same $1 million in future salary.
> As a consequence, when you leave a job and go work somewhere else, it's far more likely that you will find a commensurate salary somewhere else than something commensurate with unvested RSUs; even if you get something to match the RSUs, it's likely not going to "vest" on the schedule you once had.
That's obviously not true, since people in RSU-ville switch jobs all the time, which they wouldn't do if the new job weren't at least matching their old RSUs.
That is pretty much in the definition of employment. However, what is not in the definition of employment is how much salary they pay you.
> If they won't pay you money until you do X, then the money is payment for X, not payment for previous work, even if they try to market it as "deferred" payment for previous work. Gotta be clever enough to see through the doublespeak.
Right, but the "gotta do X" in this case is, "still come in to work".
> Future salary: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
So that part isn't true, as many people have recently discovered. Your salary can be cut, either explicitly or implicitly by inflation.
> The whole concept of unvested RSUs is basically a clever psychological trick to exploit the endowment effect to make quitting seem more punitive than it actually is.
I think you misunderstand the value of RSUs. The trick you are listing above could be handled just as simply with "bonus cash payments". RSUs have other attributes beyond the simple endowment effect.
> If you trick people into thinking their $1 million of unvested RSUs is "already theirs" then they are more averse to quitting and losing that $1 million then they would be to quitting and losing the same $1 million in future salary.
I've never seen that play out. If anything, I've seen, relative to their value, people pay more attention to their future salary than their future unvested RSUs. Pay someone more than their market rate in salary, and it becomes amazingly psychologically difficult for them to step away from the job.
> That's obviously not true, since people in RSU-ville switch jobs all the time, which they wouldn't do if the new job weren't at least matching their old RSUs.
You may not have seen it, but I certainly have... first hand.
There's this reality that as you get farther away from the time of issuance, if the company is growing and doing well, the value of the RSUs go up. It can consequently become very difficult for a prospective new employer to match the value of the RSUs, as they effectively become worth more than the market value of the employee's skills. The employee might hope that new employer RSUs can similarly grow in value like the ones they have from their current employer, but the same growth could happen with their extant RSUs. This is a key aspect of how RSUs can be different from "future salary".
The key to golden handcuffs is that they get tighter as time goes on.
RSU values will also go down if shares prices go down. In practice they are much more volatile than salary, people's RSUs fall in value by >50% all the time, but it's pretty rare for people to get a >50% cut in salary.
Tim, being a distinguished engineer, likely got a lot of RSUs. So while true his initial sign-on RSUs likely vested already, a sizable chunk did not fully vest yet.
So yeah I'd wager he still walked from ~1 million.
Sure, rationally it's easier to quit. But humans are not perfectly rational spherical volumes. Quitting means not having a place to go every day, not seeing the tribe you're used to spending most of your day with, not knowing what "normal" will look like tomorrow, and signing yourself up for making a series of very difficult, stressful executive decisions around what to do next.
That's a bit patronizing. I quit Amazon myself.
Edit: don't you think some liberal leaning corporate behemoth would want this guy whoever he is to use as a pawn because he took an ethical stand and can lend a patina of legitimacy to their gray area shady dealings? the world has suddenly become too complex for the IT crowd it seems
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bjpj/amazon-vp-tim-bray...
Look it's made the cool kid news
Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state unless we drastically work against that tendency
As systems professionals we should know that by now but we collectively turn a blind eye need I remind you who was selling counting machines to the bad guys during that war in Europe all those years ago? How many engineers had the courage to step into their 1:1 and indict their managers for treason back then?
If you haven't become a corporate outcast by 40 you're a traitor
Edit -- before you say it's my way of claiming sour grapes for my failings as a software engineer you shouldn't be surprised that every corporation is essentially the same corporation with different plutocrats at the helm repeating each other's tired monologues to the same masses of unwashed pizza eating feature trolls
It's the same in north America as it is in socialist dictatorships only here the managers pretend they're our friends and there they're our dads
The first one was a large bank doing agile by coercion aka forced sprints to hell
A bunch of diddling directors convinced an airhead VP that it would boost productivity and then they got an army of middling managers who weren't at all invested to do their bidding
I was there for a year raising a fuss until I was let go and some of my code is still running in production
The things I've seen would make your skin crawl as a client of the bank but you've probably seen your fair share estimating points as days was the least of it and this is from people who call themselves university graduates and senior developers
The next was the largest private software company in North America a telecom giant again with the forced agile shit but with a different spin the motto here is 'initiative is punishable' but I just can't picture myself getting old with this tshirted bunch of wannabe googlers I went on the warpath and was personally let go by a VP how many of you coffee2coders have even sat down with a VP much less been sent packing by one?
I got what I wanted out of them though the memories are priceless including trips to California and Vegas the type of shit that being pliable and compliant never nets you
Finally an agency back home a notorious shithole of a ne'er do well agency so full of their own leadership bravado and entitlement that it somehow manages to hoodwink all sorts of rich clients a perennial start-up with no long term vision except selling out I had the distinction of being let go after showing them all up and walked away from the game with a master's in how false conspiracy has ruined software
A lot of us seem to believe we need to check our emotions and enhics at the door but it didn't work in that great war and it won't work here either
> Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state
You seem very confused.
Tell me O noble throwaway warrior
Edit: Fuuuu this is the comment that brought you out of hibernation? Geez welcome back to the land of the living
On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.
(For avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying either is the case here.)
What is impressive here is that he make his decision public. Plenty of people have moral issues with their company and just say that they "Retire" or "Want to spend more time with the family" rather being honest about why they are leaving.
One might be disappointed how effective this technqiue can be.
Now imagine you have car payments, a mortgage, and a family to feed.
More than likely, if you can afford another lawyer, you'll find one.
I drove my upset and blindsided friend to her first meeting with her new divorce attorney after her husband left her. We were early so were sitting outside the Palo Alto firm in the parking lot when a pearl-white Mercedes Maybach rolls in with R&B music bumping and custom plates "MKHMPAY"
She seemed like a very good attorney, but my friend ended up going with another firm because that lady was too expensive ($1500/hr). Even the paralegal there was $500/hr.
Ultimately, my friend told me her divorce was 2x as expensive as her wedding.
One wonders what this characterization is meant to imply.
He charged a healthy but not exorbitant amount for his legal services, and made no secret of the fact that he liked to go for a hike during his lunch hour and return to his exurban house on a few acres to do a bit of gardening and animal care after work each day.
Dude was calm, professional, and utterly ruthless about protecting our business interests while not putting on any pretense of being a slick trial lawyer.
Law is not inherently a "flash" field any more than sales is, unless you actually spend all day every day in a courtroom before a judge.
My employer and co-workers also all see me driving to/from work everyday, so they know when I get a new car.
It literally is. The post-war housing boom was meant to discourage activism by having workers tied to something they could lose.
Hearing all this, and hearing that homosexuality used to be tolerated, it's scary to wonder how much of the status quo is not just _a_ social construct, but purposely constructed for someone's benefit, and recently. And we're expected to presume that it's natural, or at least old, and therefore correct.
Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.
When most people cannot afford to express morals, you have a host of hungry attack dogs. Some of them start to rationalize that having morals is wrong, that caring about people is wrong because, after all, they can't afford it, so the government can't either.
And if there weren't people desperate for careers and education, the military wouldn't get enough volunteers. So it's very convenient to that whole system.
Propagating the myth of houses as an appropriate working-class investment also sustains this. Index funds are far more liquid, far more diverse, and don't require debt or even a large amount of cash to start with, but a large mortgage is a tight leash.
As usual, this seems to be partisan politics at work. Though I don't really understand why the right portrays universal healthcare as socialism when it's so clearly more "free".
What the right really does in the US is protect massive wealth transfers from tax payers to corporations by restricting Medicare and Medicaid in ways that makes it impossible to make them cost effective.
It seems the default assumption is that the US government could never run something efficiently, but this is said in the same breath as claiming the US as the greatest country on earth. One of those things must therefore not be true. For a country with the resources and know-how of the USA to not be able to run a health service is not in doubt, what is in doubt is whether bad actors will deliberately underfund it and try to point to it as being badly run as a result.
Americans pay twice: Once over the tax bill for a system that aims to provide some coverage, and then again for private insurance.
If the US regulated healthcare properly, they could extend Medicare and Medicaid to most of the population without increasing taxes as a starting point.
Part of the problem is absolutely ludicrous limitations such as actively restricting Medicare from using its market power to negotiate drug prices the way the NHS does, for example.
It's massive corporate welfare.
EDIT: Here's a factcheck on a claim relating to prohibition for government to negotiate for a small part of Medicare as an illustration of the kind of messed up policies that drive up these costs: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/17/tammy-bald...
Easy to give an (incorrect) answer if you have an entire propaganda arm willing to support you.
at least in principle, I am convinced by the argument that single-payer healthcare is cheaper on average. I do have my doubts that partisan politics in the US would actually realize that potential for efficiency, given the usual sabotage of public services in this country. I also doubt that my income bracket would end up saving much even in an optimal implementation.
so at the end of the day, I don't oppose some sort of national healthcare, but I don't really see any personal incentive to rock the boat. possible outcomes for me range from "about the same" to "a lot worse".
But there would be no premiums.
This answers southphillyman’s question about why people like their employer health plans. Because they don’t want to help pay for other people’s healthcare, especially the sicker population that isn’t condoned off into white collar employer health plans.
The tax advantage is also a handout to big businesses, that people who are lucky enough to be employed by them get to enjoy and support, at the expense of the rest of the country.
So summary of US healthcare political situation is everyone is all talk, but when it comes time to vote, nobody wants to pay more in taxes in case someone else gets to benefit more from it than they do.
I'm not sure you understand the peace of mind that comes from being able to go to hospital or use other healthcare facilities without even having to think about the cost, because there won't be one.
I'm not arguing against national insurance, just trying to explain that the personal incentive isn't really there for a lot of professionals. I wouldn't vote against a candidate just because this was part of their platform, but it also isn't enough to make me overlook parts of their platform that I actually oppose.
What's strangest to me is seeing how many of the Americans whom I'd expect to benefit from single-payer health insurance seem to be the ones most wary of it and who argue most loudly against it.
Bought a house cash last year in an extremely low col area and honestly I think I might be _too_ uppity now. Find myself commenting how sad it is that people more senior than myself work on weekends (for the usual meaningless bs reasons). The freedom from having a roof over your head that is security for no loan, and affordable health insurance (about 200 eur a month for a family of 4), is amazing.
This was a at a medium size traditional corp along the metro-north line of coast of Connecticut. By all accounts and my own experience was a pretty good place to work, with minimal (but some) scum baggery, good but not FAANG level salaries and excellent healthcare benefits.
Six years ago I was cut to part-time but a year before that I got a raise. The raise wasn't a fortune just double minimum wage in my region. But after my hours were cut I was making essentially minimum wage with a few benefits (my country has socialized medical system).
There I was not really financially bad I had a lot of savings and a job. But going from 20 hour days, shift work, sometimes overnight, to four hour week days it felt like retirement.
I was loyal because I was at the company since day one. I ran network cable, set up equipment when the building still didn't have power or heat yet. But I didn't see the company was Theseus it was the same company but its bones were replaced many times over.
Anyway time for yourself is great intuitively people know it. But until you get to experience it you don't understand how much you're missing.
he's 90 and works in finance managing money for other millionaires.
But after you can afford having savings as well as a desired lifestyle it always struck me as odd to still have money as the main factor on deciding where to work and why you would ever want to deal with a workplace you actively dislike.
I don't have a way to give you data about it. My feeling, based on experience and several conversations I had with colleagues and friends over the years, is that this is NOT happening often. But I don't know if this is a general rule, or not.
I’ve found it invaluable to copy comments I like in to my quotes.txt and use them as inspiration / paraphrased / cited when I want to say something similar myself.
We model our behaviour on those we like.
Really, the main reason you don't see stuff like this is because those people wouldn't work for Amazon to begin with.
Anecdotally, I would say it's extremely rare for people to voice disagreement with their company's management by leaving. The most common way to "stand up" to leadership seems to be to grouse about it with co-workers at lunch.
I think assuming this is revealing of one's own attitude more than anything.
I also feel like big companies have people convinced that they're being paid a lot because they're exceptional or special in some way. Really, they're being compensated for either stress or location or working more than 40 hours or giving away their morals.
I say this because I know a few people who made this kind of decision. And speaking with them about it, it wasn't difficult. They just had a more complete compensation model to evaluate against.
Losing money is hard, but if you reframe it as being rewarded $1M (with pretty low marginal utility after $10M) by losing your freedom, then such a choice is only rational.
Agree:
People can quit and say what they want.
People in high paying jobs can quit and often find an equivalent replacement; perhaps have one lined up before they leave; in such a case the impact is limited.
But if you quit on principle and take a public stand on it other large companies are more likely to treat your decision as a sign you are dangerous. So it takes not just the ability but also the willingness to take such action.
Well, shittier.
Anyway, this is what a principled tech leader looks like.
I'm also glad he is making clear these policies come from the top at Amazon so that people can't claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn't involved in any of this.
These are the most important things to me. People with principles are rare these days. And people here can't just spin these stories into something else now.
> It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.
So clearly he's had other issues and encounters with the toxic work culture there.
It really shouldn't be any surprise that people usually have multiple reasons for quitting their job.
> people can't claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn't involved in any of this.
All of this assumes that people will believe Tim. People still can claim those things simply by saying they don't believe him.
I have tolerated a lot of evilness from Amazon and justified it as a “different organization”. I work in Amazon Music which isn’t responsible for facial recognition or warehouse abuses.
But seeing them fire whistleblowers... that’s just heartbreaking to watch. Makes me want to quit too. The only reason I haven’t yet is to keep up the activism.
But that it's repeated again in the 3rd paragraph, and that the final paragraph then mentions that it'll make Tim "hard to hire"?
There's no basis in evidence: Tim's wikipedia page shows a history of activism consistent with taking this kind of stand, and a staggering resume that indicates it's unlikely he'll have any trouble finding work if he wants it.
I'm pretty disappointed in HN that this is the top-voted comment on this article..
It's hard to rise to the top in a morally lax organisation without making some compromises on the way there.
Furthermore, it's easy to take a stand when you're financially secure because of those compromises.
So in my opinion the OP is right: it's good for Tim to take a stance if truly, deep down, he feels this is morally wrong, but ultimately him being outspoken means little when compared to those who did the right thing from the start and as such never got a position to make a headline on HN in the first place.
Tim is assured of a cozy job with a "good guy" startup regardless. If genuine, it's certainly a personal victory for him, but it doesn't mean much for the rest of us (except, cynically, that selling out and then raising your profile by denouncing the party you sold out to is a valid career path).
No shit. Cognitive dissonance (in justification of Amazon's policies) even from some of the smartest people I know is a sight to behold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249272
For what it's worth, I'm sure he would consider this a feature. Given his already stated beliefs, I'm sure he wouldn't want to work at a company that would be turned off by this. (just to be clear, I don't actually know Tim. I've never heard of him before this).
Some people are wise enough to understand that having 20 million vs 10 million does not actually do much to improve your quality of life.
> It also potentially damages Tim's ability to get hired in the future
Can confirm that it'll have zero effect. I know a guy who, when he left Amazon, sent an e-mail to about 5,000 people parodying the scene from Half Baked where the guy curses out his coworkers and quits. Amazon's HR was furious with him, but all that came of it was that they didn't give him severance pay. He didn't have any higher purpose in quitting either, he just wanted more money and to work on something more interesting somewhere else.
Apparently he's on some sort of blacklist within Amazon, but he's been doing fine at another FAANG company for years.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'd like to think at least when you are talented enough, sticking true to your nature probably serves you better than to do otherwise.
"The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls."
What about these people that were fired? When people get fired for whistle blowing, what does that mean for their future job prospects? Does it severely hurt your chances at a faang?
As a PhD student of color guided by a moral compass who has to make employment decisions soon, this is an important question for me.
Is race as issue here? I thought they were fired for whistle blowing? Is he saying a white whistle blower wouldn't have been fired?
I've never met Tim and I will probably never meet him, I only know that he was one of first programmers/computer people whose blog I started reading back when I got into programming (more than 15 years ago, closer to 20) and as such one could say that I looked up to him. I'm glad that I chose the right person to "look up to".
There’s also the fact that these companies are so big, they have a lot of variation inside them. For example at Amazon Music, there really isn’t a lot of evilness there, it’s just getting people to pay up for music streaming. Still some unfairness in the music industry for smaller artists, but that’s often the labels stepping on them.
A lot of us at Amazon knows this company is kinda evil now. I was thinking about resigning over these recent firings, but another activist convinced me to stay so we can continue pushing the company to be less evil.
Essentially if we are willing to resign from a job, we have nothing to lose so we can take bigger activism risks.
This isn't to discount the amazing engineering work that these orgs tend to do. But look at their workforce numbers and tell me with a straight face that all their engineers are working on solving tough engineering problems and not just a cog in the optimization machine.
Facebook/Google/Amazon aren't really cool in colleges anymore either.
Plus, oftentimes the job app requirements are pretty general and loose, as opposed to all those shitty firms that want entry-level engineers to have graduated in the past 6 mos, and have experience with 10 different Javascript frameworks. (And then underpay them and work the hell out of them.) I know I saw a lot of those when I was leaving college in 2017/18.
They're kinda the main thing I'm talking about here. Everyone knows perfectly well you can gain huge amounts by working at FAANG companies, that's not in doubt. The question is at what cost, do the people doing it see their companies for what they are, and why do people continue to work there if they do. I'm sure being CEO of Phillip Morris or Palantir or Exxon-Mobile is quite lucrative, but I'll pass.
Many people just need a job, and I don't begrudge anyone taking a job they need to support themselves or their families. But the kind of talent FAANG companies hire can likely work anywhere and are higher up the socioeconomic ladder. They have choices most others don't. And too many, in my opinion, work to get people to click ads and sell people's data.
So much of the Internet as we know it is built atop AWS. Many people are able to shelter in place with minimal impact largely because of the groundwork laid by Amazon, during more than a decade of not being profitable. That includes ordering equipment to work from home, ordering home goods to avoid going out, running the compute infrastructure that powers teleconferencing tools like Zoom, providing entertainment options through Prime Video, etc. etc.
How many families are staying in touch through Facebook Messenger, video chats, and just plain old photos? How many grandparents feel less alone because they can see their family members and a wealth of photos every day? How many old friends reconnect because Facebook exists?
Google makes the world better in so many ways that I can't even pretend to address it exhaustively. I personally have been able to experience remote places thanks to Flights, Translate, and Maps. I use Search hundreds of times a week... the world's knowledge is more accessible than ever before thanks in part to Google's efforts to organize it.
I think it's totally right to call out companies where their behavior is poor. I think we need to demand—both through social pressure and through laws—that companies respect privacy, treat workers well, and minimally impact the environment. But I think it's taking it a step too far to claim that the world is worse off for the effort of FAANG employees. Even those working on ads... if there's no ad revenue, none of those other benefits exist.
Amazon at least provides useful services. They do it on the backs of underpaid and poorly treated warehouse workers, but Prime shipping is sweet! Treatment of those interested in unionizing is about the biggest indicator of a company's values, and Amazon is quite clear on that point.
My main point overall is why work for a company like that when there are others doing the good things FAANG companies pretend to be providing?
It's not a black-and-white choice between "goodness of their hearts" or ruthlessly exploitative capitalism. There's a huge gray area in between, and that's where social and legal guardrails (for better or for worse) have to help ensure that companies act in a socially responsible way.
I don't have experience with Facebook specifically, but I have worked with Google's security team. From what I've seen, Google truly cares about securing their users' data in a way that exceeds the standards of other large enterprises that I've worked with. I get a ton of spam emails and phone calls every day, and never once have I suspected that it was because Google or Facebook violated my privacy.
I'd rather focus my ire on companies like Equifax or popular browser plugin acquirers or the debt collection system or even mall sweepstakes. All of these entities egregiously violate privacy by blatantly sharing user information, auctioning it off to the highest bidder, or recklessly failing to secure it.
It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world but as a company that has treated its employees (both hourly and salaried) with contempt, driven independent stores out of business and refused to play on a level playing field both through its shady business practices or its refusal to pay tax.
Well done to Tim Bray for acting according to his conscience. Hopefully this sets an example to other Amazon employees and other tech workers working in similarly morally compromised organisations.
>its refusal to pay tax.
What do you even mean by this? Companies can't refuse to pay tax. They have to pay tax as per law. If you mean they are using legal mechanisms to not pay their maximum possible tax, how is that different from Apple or other big tech keeping money in tax heavens.
> driven independent stores out of business
And which big/successful comapny doesn't drive out competitors out of business? Google/FB have driven local newspapers out of business by sucking away all the ad money. MSFT squashed all the competition by extremely evil business practices.
> It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world
Again, which is the mythical company you are using as a benchmark here?
I would generally argue that your ability to change your org is somewhat limited by your profit margins. It is hard to pay warehouse workers more, for instance, if your margins are razor thin. While AMZN's profit margin is not quite the 0 it used to be, it is certainly not stellar by any means. And it is certainly not as good as many, many other companies.
I will set a basic standard: Our employers ought not to knowingly violate human rights. Here's a list of some of Amazon's more notorious violations [1]; among the ones that concern us in today's thread are labor rights like the rights to organize, take breaks, be well- and fairly-paid, and work in safe environments.
The point of my comment is not to ask you to defend Amazon, but more to point out the flaw in your worldview to future readers. I admit that I could have dropped many more citations explaining Amazon's poor behavior, but again, that's not the point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
[1] https://www.greenamerica.org/blog/10-ways-amazon-violates-hu...
Companies exist to make money period. Look at the most powerful companies throughout history (British East India Company, Standard Oil, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, IBM, Facebook, Google, Apple ect). Do any of these have as good of a record as Amazon? IBM for instance played a major part in the Holocaust. Goldman Sachs was involved in the scams crashing the world's economy. Facebook and Google prey upon people's addictive behavior and use it to sell adds. Apple simply has all their employees run out of sweatshops in China, and has all their tax havens in Ireland.
I'm for workers rights and for people getting more pay, but let's be honest, expecting Amazon to fix our inequality problems is astonishingly naive. If Tim Bray wants to leave to have a good conscious about it - that's fine. I myself would never work for Facebook or Google because of how they addict people to their phones. We all have our own standards, but not our own facts.
That's an easy one: Costco. Do a cursory Google search and you'll generally find positive stories going back years. There's nothing "mythical" here, it's a matter of explicit policy difference between the two retailers.
this is the key - the bigger the organization, the further removed the workers are from the leadership. Consolidation and expansion removes a company's humanity. There's tons of examples of smaller companies that treat all their staff well. There's no examples of huge conglomerates who do.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-thr...
https://www.kuow.org/stories/costco-tells-office-workers
https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-workers-stressed-coro...
Furthermore you have a ton of full time employees who will sing praises about the company. However part timers get shafted hard. Oh you can't work 3 days a week due to school, okay enjoy barely 8 hours a week. There were a lot of people there who had to work multiple jobs simply because they could not get enough hours.
Unless you are fully willing to commit to them it isn't a great place to work.
Exactly. These kinds of criticisms are useless without a benchmark. Is Wal-Mart better, for example?
Corporations change, just like people. I'm not sure if thats something that can be avoided. Maybe Valve is an outlier, perhaps. Size seems to be the factor here...
Articulating why I left has not been easy, but Mr. Bray touches on some of the issues that resonate with me.
Including this bit is interesting. So he is accusing Amazon of being both sexist and racist in addition to treating workers poorly.
In this case: one of the biggest benefits of hiring minorities... ending up being the reason you fire them.
Also my personal observation: an incompetent person from a minority group is likely to see a failed transaction through their own colored 'minority' lens. Eg. a woman who has been turned down for a job will attribute it to her being a woman and no other reason. For a white guy who has been turned down - it's life as usual.
Second, it's my personal observation that 'many companies' don't end up with 'incompetent minorities', because, anecdotally, I and everyone I know who has worked with 'minorities' at multiple jobs has found them as competent or more so than their 'majority' peers. But a 'colored lens' is what takes your personal experience and turns it into whatever you want to see, not necessarily what is actually there. So who knows if either of us is right if all we're doing is looking with our personal biases?
It's best to avoid making generalizations about people based on the color of their skin - even when you think it's a compliment.
The decision making might not be explictly sexist/racist, but that feels like hiding behind an excuse. It is exactly a power dynamic.
If not, this is just race/gender baiting and it detracts from the broader issue of worker treatment.
I guess this just may be a difference in definitions, but I think when most people are talking about racism/sexism on a macro level, they are using this definition.
You're right, the broader issue is worker's rights, but it's definitely worth pointing out that among workers with the least rights, minorities are overrepresented at Amazon.
To be meaningful, conventional racism has to include damage. Its an old debate technique for racists to complain that affirmative action is 'reverse racism'. Because, you see, it sees race and takes action.
"you guys"?
If the problem in this case is a lack of warehouse worker bargaining power vs profit motive, then solutions to a prejudice problem will not be helpful to the workers.
"Spot a pattern? · At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength."
Pretty clear where the bottom of the power balance is... Sadly, sexism and racism is an inevitable fallout of that in contemporary American culture...
I now run my own business and pay everyone fairly and treat everyone well.
When company the size of Amazon can get away with this kind of heavy handed employee treatment, the results are affecting many, many more people that it might seem on the surface.
If Amazon condone and even enable employee activism, what bad things could that enable? I don’t mean unions. I mean a group of say 20 employees trying to bring about a change they truly believe in.
Amazon has over 500,000 employees. Think of the number of edge cases. You agree with these good folks that were fired. But what about carrying guns to work? Conservative or liberal issues if you’re the other side of the table?
That employee base is a small city. Is every warehouse a town square with freedom to assemble? Every office?
Fighting the good fight is often necessary. But it’s also a seductive idea until it’s not your fight and disrupting your day - or worse, something you vehemently disagree with and is causing you distress.
Is there another side to this argument?
(Edit for spelling)
The only downside to this approach can be that democracy has its faults and a simple majority-rules approach can prove problematic (see elections going wonky these past few years while ignoring all the shady stuff going on). Its worth it.
I think your argument can be made simpler: why should we trust people to be allowed to decide for themselves? Won't they decide to do stupid and harmful things? Won't they decide to hurt eachother? Won't they decide to steal from eachother, and murder eachother?
No, is the answer, because laws were created somehow, right? We don't trust the government to babysit us - we created the government so we wouldn't have to babysit eachother.
We don't need the board to tell us what we can and can't do - we can figure that well enough on our own. What we don't need is a board that assumes it knows best. It doesn't, it can't possibly, in fact it is existentially unable to do anything but raise shareholder value. So, the more employee self-determination, the better.
I think it's very unlikely that employees will decide they want to have guns at work instead of, say, a security system, or maybe offices in places with low crime, etc. I think it's very unlikely that employees will decide, I dunno, that they want the right to shit on eachother's desk, or whatever other fairly-objectively-negative thing you can think up. The right to paste racial slurs all over the office, maybe? Bigotry, bullying, and hatred are swiftly becoming a minority, and a fair system almost universally causes those minority viewpoints to lose power. They only maintain it in imbalanced systems...
And worse case scenario, if Amazon turns into the kind of office where you have to shoot your way in just to get to your desk, we can have the government intervene and shut the place down (with our labor laws), and maybe someone can set up a better business where you don't have to shoot your way to your desk.
I think his point is that carrying guns to work is not a fairly-objectively-negative thing for the 1/3 of America that owns guns.
Specifically, Tim is pissed because Amazon fired some whistleblowers. Not just once, and it sounds like it has happened over a period of time. In other words, there were workplace violations happening, people tried to go through proper channels, and then reported it when that didn’t work, and then they got fired.
HOWEVER, that still does not make Amazon right in this. Sure, they followed corporate bylaws and did the things to legally cover their asses, but that doesn't mean they're wearing a white dress here. There are certainly systemic problems within Amazon the lower down the payscale you go, and Amazon trying to silence attempts to bring attention to that is more damning than the problems themselves in my mind.
Is this (what the whistleblowers did, and Mr. Bray is implicitly supporting by quitting) even activism? They were afraid of the well-being of the Amazon employees.
Is it comparable to complaining that the wooden stairs to go into the office is rotten and may fall at any moment? That's not activism, it's just basic workspace safety.
For local hot button issues the best a company can do is act locally on those issues and in line with local law and legislation. But what really matters to a global company is what its global potential client base thinks and this will trump local issues if they cant be accomadated.
Hope to see more individuals in tech standing up for what they believe to be right, willing to make sacrifices or even walk away if needed, and ultimately tell their story publicly. This is how you do it!
From a place for renegades, the valley has quickly become a safe place for "yes men", that all they do is to obey to their corporate overlords.
Legislation or unionization. Any other routes?
A basic income that doesn't cover those things might instead just make it easier to pay workers even less.
Think of what some restaurants do when their employees get tips: they pay less than the legal minimum wage because they expect tips to "top off" worker earnings until they meet minimum wage requirements, so they explicitly pass that tip from customers into the business's revenue stream, skipping the intended tip recipient altogether. If we don't protect recipients of UBI, their employers can do the same thing.
I am confused why there weren't wholesale strikes in the grocery, retail, warehouse, gig workforces during the shutdowns. Workers had complete power to force change.
Walmart: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/how-wal...
Whole Foods (post-acquisition): https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/27/amazon-whol...
Uber: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/22/uber-lyft-ip...
Amazon: https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-re...
This is not a new problem; low-wage workers have always had the collective power to force change, and businesses and business-friendly have always worked tirelessly to disrupt that collective action.
The joke being "ally" is a term used by those fighting against the injustices of capitalism, and this dude has millions from literally being the Boss and accrued from exploitation. Of course that doesn't matter as he's now a good guy speaking up for the oppressed. It's quite amusing if you believe in anti-capitalism.
To clarify, it's not bad what he did, he is the good guy now. To put him up as an example of anti capitalism in its own right (even discounting the fact that the warehouse workers who were sacked are not) is hilarious.
Edits - As most comments in the thread suggest, most people are not seeing this as a form of anti-capitalism at all.
>At the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response,” ... “It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.
how is it "hilarious" to take this sentiment as anti-capitalist? how could this be interpreted another way?
He worked there 5 years, I'd imagine he already made one or more millions.
I went on an amazon warehouse tour in Tilbury, UK. (1).
It was a tour of everything they do, at one stage they asked the guy stowing to do a demo and he flat out refused because he had to hit his targets.
(1) Amazon UK Services Ltd. Tilbury - LCY2
London Distribution Park, Windrush Rd, Tilbury RM18 7AN https://g.co/kgs/8E4bgd
(On the other hand, I highly suspect that you yourself have "other" reasons to cast doubt on Bray's claims. I have as much reason to doubt your motives as you do to doubt Bray's, right?)
And you can say "guess" all you want. There was nothing in his post, or any other article I know of, that indicates Bray's motives were anything other than what he said (and backed up with extensive supporting evidence). So your motivation to "guess" doesn't come from the article itself, nor from any competing evidence (which I doubt exists since you would've already posted it).
"I don't mean to specifically call out kjgkjhfkjf, but my guess is that he feels compelled to downplay legitimate criticisms of Amazon, and he used the well-known techniques of ad-hominem and FUD as a means to defend Amazon without actual compelling counterarguments." <- I assume you agree with that sentence, since it uses all of your same rhetorical techniques.
How do you get another job?
Do you tell your potential employer you quit because of (your) principle? That you fundamentally disagree with your previous company? How will the new company judge you?
Now of coz if you are in the market that is chasing for talent ( like programming and tech ) this wouldn't be a much of a problem. What if you were the Amazon Warehouse Manager? Which is probably 100x more replaceable than say a software engineer?
Most business seems to operate with talent are everywhere, opportunities are scarce mentality. They would much rather they hire a class B employees than a class A activist.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik...
The specific incidents Bray discussed seemed to be on a private internal list, and specifically related to AECJ so probably not this issue - I doubt anyone will leak it as unless there's something especially egregious (not just specious justification, but something like a racial or sexist slur) it doesn't really benefit either side.
"Amazon fired the warehouse worker Smalls on Monday, after he led a walkout of a number of employees at a Staten Island distribution warehouse. Amazon says he was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.
Smalls says the employee who tested positive came into contact with many other workers for longer periods of time before her test came back. He claims he was singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick."
Perversely, I actually think that's more honest and more likely to bring about changes to actually help workers...
>Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.
This was not and (as far as I keep in contact with old coworkers) is not the case for people working in the data centers operations department. I imagine that area shares similarities with the average warehouse environment. There is a quick turnover (a year on average), a dependence on contracted workers, demanding physical labor, untrustworthy managers, and most of all, the dehumanizing metrics. I remember most of us had dreams to transition to cloud support and get away from the lonely and stressful life as a data center tech.
I think the only people feeling okay at Amazon are corporate and/or AWS software engineers. The rest are feeling the full effects of Amazon's corporate culture. Which is to say, the full rod of Bezos' sadistic corporate philosophy.
As a former employee of AWS, I can vouch for this. AWS and Amazon.com should be looked at two totally different entities in terms of employee experience.
They're totally different cultures. Weren't talking about two different classes of people. And unfortunately you can't expect the same standards and rules to be appropriate for both groups.
He has every right to filter negative comments, but it makes me not want to read his site further if all he does is post non-contrary opinions.
AWS spending and consumers turning a blind eye enables such issues to arise
These things are fueled not just by desire for profit, but also our own materialistic focus. If we buy into the latest and greatest products, rather than where they came from, then to some extent isn't it we who have enabled these rights abuses in various countries and companies, to support our own appetites?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200504093003/https://www.tbray...
Fair play to him for standing up for what he believes.
I do wish people pushed for more democratic decision-making in their places of work, though. I've read that in Google's early days people were mainly promoted by peer-evaluations, and there was a mechanism to remove a manager from power if they lost the confidence of most of their subordinates.
It is very important to figure out what class you belong to in a company. Some try to boil this down to ‘cost-centers’, but it isn’t always that simple.
Warehouse workers are second class citizens at Amazon. This can be true for a developer in certain environments, it can be true for designers, etc.
I’ve worked at places where developers are second class citizens compared to Project/Product management, and then I’ve seen where designers are second class citizens to developers. It can be even more granular where frontend is second class to backend, or vice versa.
However you figure it out, if you find out you are a second class citizen there, you have to move on, as your potential is capped by the business priorities/culture/structure. It’s never a good fit.
This part of the article jumped at me -- If this is true, then I'd have to say "yes, coincidence". No company (let alone one as large as Amazon) would be that stupid in 2020.
It's possible that they spoke up because they thought that 'no company would be stupid enough' to fire them but miscalculated.
At the same time white males kept their mouth shut because they knew that 'no company would be stupid enough' doesn't apply to them.
Need more data.
This morning I attempted to renew a domain at a GoDaddy subsidiary, and as I scrolled down to look for the contact information I saw that GoDaddy appears to be registered in the Cayman Islands.
I'm genuinely curious (I mean that) to ask if the same question is asked of companies that go offshore. Isn't this all about tax evasion? And, shouldn't they be asked to fight for change from within in the same way?
I honestly think many people on HN would support overhauling our tax code alongside a corporation with deep pockets. So why not?
One nit to pick: "Climate Change" groups, and the like should keep their focus narrow. I have trouble getting behind many groups because they seem to need to have a position on every "progressive" issue. The Climate Change group should have stuck to climate change, and another employee action group created to make sure the needs of all the Amazon employees across the company are being taken seriously.
5.5 years means more than fully vested and probably time for a change anyway...
They probably get refreshers along the way too
Amazon is near the top of mine for its harmful business practices and open contempt for its workers. The former Amazon employees I know tend to describe the experience of being an engineer there in less than favorable terms (and as engineers their experience is obviously going to be much better than a warehouse worker's).
Maybe if companies like Amazon which treat their workers poorly were to face a kind of engineering labor boycott, they could be forced to behave more ethically.
but startups might still be interested
I find it very difficult to reconcile this statement with the fact that AWS provides services to the US military to help them perpetrate mass murder more effectively and directly vends to the suborganization inside the US government that operates concentration camps for children. It's fallen out of the news cycle, but this is still happening today, and AWS is still accepting money to help them carry out their crimes.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/training-the-warfi...
https://www.govexec.com/sponsor-content/enabling-the-warfigh...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/22/139639/amazon-is...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sex...
These are the people AWS collaborates with. That's not ethical under any framework of ethics I've ever heard of.
It's not even like they just happen to serve the military along with all comers: they voluntarily built a special set of datacenters with racist hiring policies just to court government work:
https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
It's almost as if people have a gigantic ethical blind spot just so long as it's the state doing the mass killings and torture of children.
> With the agility, reliability, and speed of the cloud, teams can quickly build, experiment, and launch new services to provide immediate value to the warfighter.
And while I won't speak to the two that the author cites as their impetus for action, I absolutely respect someone who quits over a moral stance, and writes an exit statement.
Not everyone needs to quit and leave to speak out. There's a lot of gray. If just prefer to see sane actions and reactions in general.
...
> The average pay [in his group, AWS] is very high, and anyone who’s unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.
Not sure how to square these two statements. Is the lost money all in stock vesting? If so, why bother mentioning the salary? If not, how does that fit with his claim about AWSers being so readily employable?
Not saying he isn't losing money here, just that it's a little odd to make those two contradictory statements without any explanation.
AWS is a part of this unethical beast, GCP is a side project of a huge advertising company, Azure is under the wing of a major monopolist.
I guess there is Linode, but their services are more of a traditional VPS than a cloud host.
It's kind of crazy that most of the net income of Amazon comes from this business, but we've accepted that a stand alone cloud business won't work for some reason.
Are people flagging this story? It would be interesting to be able to see the number of flags a thread attracts on Hacker News.
I wonder if there'd have been utility to attempt to change the system from the inside out.
I guess there wouldn't be. Then this would be the only option left.
That said, it doesn't sound like there was much more he could've done to change things from the inside-out; and even though it might not be the intention, this public statement does sound like it might contribute to changing it anyway.
I think he did everything he could think of to change things:
"At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people."
with no result, and no evident likelyhood of positive change.
Which is why he had to quit.
link to original article
Then you start getting bad reviews. Colleagues speak of you as being "difficult." You are passed over for involvement in important initiatives.
You quit in disgust, but now they leak that you are a poor performer who is no longer relevant, and your speaking out about worker conditions is just a poor performer trying to distract everyone from their inability to get things done.
It is very, very difficult to win some battles from the inside. Toxic cultures are ruthless when defending themselves from change.
Ask any woman about challenging inappropriate sexual behaviour. I believe we'll hear the same thing.
I'm not sure this is worse than quitting in disgust and then publishing drama and negative opinions about your past employer. At least the poor performance claim can be countered with actual past reviews.
> It is very, very difficult to win some battles from the inside
It's even more difficult if you don't even try and when everyone who wants to and could do it just leaves.
> At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.
And it seems that failed. What's left to do at that point? You can "sabotage" - in the sense of refusing to do your job. You can participate in a system you think is heading in the wrong direction (and with the knowledge you can't really change it). Or you can quit.
The Amazon warehouse workers certainly don’t have the power in the organization. And they don’t have the representation at the highest management levels of the organization. So if the ones that do in the VP and Director roles leave, who will standup for them?
You are courageous and have taken tremendous sacrifice. Although it is not much a condolence, it makes me happy to hear there are people to stand their ground for well being of others. I do not know the whole situation, but, I can hear it was against your own moral / core values. And I feel you are a great leader for what I believe, you are protecting, those around you. And your leaders have failed which resulted in this outcome.
I wonder how many people have been in similar situation and decided to leave a job (or an excuse, for one). Reminds me of Nasa's launch when there were safety concerns (e.g. "On January 28, 1986, as the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up over the Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into its flight, Allan McDonald looked on in shock -- despite the fact that the night before, he had refused to sign the launch recommendation over safety concern ..." ) -- as well other situations which may rise from privacy concerns, security concerns, etc, and with pushbacks with "Do you have proof? Have data to support? Is it reproducible? ...). Today, I wonder with COVID-19 if there are pressures to release Test Kits / vaccines to market before it is ready or skipping of any processes necessarily as another example.
Great letter. I struggle with the contradictions every day."
Either that, or the strongly worded anti-defamation language found in Amazon's employment agreement has come into play, forcing it to be shutdown.
> Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.
I wonder if there's any future opportunity for him in the existing set of well known names or large enough companies. I can't think of any widely known tech company that doesn't do "21st-century capitalism" (treating people as disposable cogs). Seems like getting into some non-profit that also has a decent track record may be the way to go for him.
He'd be quite happy (as are we all here, if we are truthful) making more millions in other more worker-friendlier ways.
Quality content.
People born with a silver spoon in their mouth are so predictably 'shocked' by how the rest of the world functions. People are mistreated? People are fired? There is injustice in the world? Oh my, I'm going to blog about it!
Have you heard of Buddha? You're in that stage of discovering old age, sickness and death by wandering outside your golden palace walls out into the streets.
This type of business practice is a big threat to capitalism. Bottom-line thinking is over-optimization w.r.t. to revenue that doesn’t even consider those who generate the revenue. It’s a local maximum that makes crummy business people look smarter than they are. Conscientious capitalism is not a socialist concept, it’s a human concept. If the leaders have no empathy, people will leave, revenue will go down.
To provide a counter to Tim's account: Chris Smalls was told to quarantine himself and not come to the work site because he was in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 (https://thehill.com/regulation/labor/490805-fired-amazon-str...). He came to the site anyways to protest. Why wouldn't he get fired for putting others at risk? People who think this firing was malicious are speculating. If this was a topic that Hacker News readers had a different group perspective on, they would call it a conspiracy theory. Someone would surely be quoting Hanlon's Razor by now.
Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham were the most visible ringleaders of activists pretending to be employees. They clearly were not doing their job as well as they could, because they had time enough to engage in lengthy political discussions on mailing lists during the workday. They were also repeatedly disrupting everyone else's work. They, and others from their group, would spam hundreds of company mailing lists repeatedly. They would send long political rants, links to activist events, and even solicit employee information. It was very over the top, and pleas from list moderators to stop spamming were ignored or met with baseless accusations of racism (or another -ism). That reaction, to shout down opposing views with absurd justifications, is the mental gymnastics of intersectionality at work. It's the unfortunate culture of intolerance that this aggressive flavor of progressive activism has taken on in workplaces like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
I'm also dismayed at the public reaction to these events. For some reason, the general public simply craves stories attacking winners, and the same is true for Amazon. If you want to balance out the info you've been exposed to, check out Amazon's official blog on the large number of changes they've made in response to COVID-19, at https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to.... Were you aware that Amazon set up a nonprofit COVID-19 supply store for healthcare and government organizations (https://business.amazon.com/en/work-with-us/healthcare/covid...)? What about Jeff Bezos's statement on the expenses relating to COVID-19 (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-ceo-tells-investor...)?
Tim Bray quitting is his personal choice. I respect that he has the right to make this choice. But he's not a hero, and the HN crowd would do well not to immediately put him on a pedestal or to take all his opinions and claims at face value. When it comes to those fired employees he is standing up for, Tim is willfully overlooking their clear abuse of Amazon's employee rules, company resources, and other employees. I don't think it's an accident that he's leaving all those details out. He may be calling Amazon a 'chickenshit', but I actually think he's the coward in this instance.
If you think climate change is a ticking time-bomb and needs drastic action, great, go to a climate rally in your free time and protest for more environmental laws. Some of your coworkers disagree with you, they just don't say anything because they want a good working relationship with you.
That's the part that scares me - it's not just Amazon. Automation hasn't even kicked off properly and we've already got humans being replaceable at best
I'd prefer the "full automation" route, as I think it would be better for humans to not need to perform these jobs. But until then, isn't it a good thing that jobs which require no skills exist? Since there seem to be many people with little-to-no skills?
Depends on how this plays out. Either some sort of UBI future...or potentially dramatically increased inequality and much suffering by a big chunk of humanity that can no longer economically compete at all. Could go either way I think.
Sorry, but none of this is new in "the Covid-19 era". There is a long Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of Amazon detailing decades of criticism of how Amazon treats its workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
Better of Tim to exit late than never, but let's not pretend that until recent firings and this blog post we all thought that Amazon was a nice and cuddly company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray says he started there in December 2014. He must have known at that point what he was getting into. For reference, here's the state of the criticism page at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_Amaz...
We didn't think Amazon was nice and cuddly - but this is a good point for Tim to exit.
Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical. I think we can criticize Amazon's long history of being repressive without shaming someone who publicly did the right thing.
Very specifically, yes. A bit more generally, it's not different from a pattern of conditions like "heat so extreme it required the regular posting of ambulances to take away workers who passed out, strenuous workloads in that heat, and first-person reports of summary terminations for health conditions such as breast cancer".
> Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical.
I don't agree that doing one good thing undoes bad things that went before, and that it absolves one from criticism.
This seems a straw man argument. I don't think the author was saying that before Covid-19 Amazon listened to their workers.
On the contrary, one sentence before what you quoted ("Fast-forward to the Covid-19 era"), the article describes how activists were threatened with dismissal.
More and more victims of trickle down economics.
>Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.
Having worked there, I 100% agree with this statement. I'd go so far as to say that the blame for this toxic and intolerable atmosphere lies with a single person who is not Jeff Bezos. His name is Dave Clark.
When I was in his org, I regularly interacted with FC General Managers, Ops Managers, and Area Managers. There was a humorous nickname that quite a few called him behind his back, and I think it fits him perfectly. It was Dave Mussolini. Not so much a nazi in his evil, but rather someone who desired and cultivated and enforced a pure cult of personality for his own personal ego gratification and career advancement. Amazon's "Disagree And Commit" leadership principle gets thrown out in his org and becomes "Disagree amongst yourselves if you want, but never ever disagree with me, never do anything that I do not approve of, and kiss my ass any time you are around me". Subsequently, all of his subordinates adopt the same attitude, and becomes a culture of complete subservience to your master, no questions asked.
I have personally witnessed people get fired within 10 minutes of sending out an email making a suggested path that Dave Clark had already decided. The email came out, Dave Clark walked into his managers office with an HR rep, and literally within 10 minutes they were packing their things and saying goodbye.
I have been in an elevator which opened up to him and his EA, and instead of getting in and going to his floor, he told us we needed to step out of the elevator and get a different elevator because he needed to talk confidentially. He couldn't wait to get to his office, he had to make one of his lemmings take the long way to accommodate 10 seconds of his time.
The Kiva acquisition was something he pushed for extensively. They weren't even Kiva customers at the time, he just jumped the gun and bought the company. It turned out that Kiva's productivity improvements didn't scale very well at Amazon's level. They really worked well for much smaller companies, but in large FCs, their optimization and routing algorithms hit NP Complete complexity bottlenecks, resulting in much lower productivity than had been advertised to them. But instead of taking the blame for his lack of due diligence, he created a hellfire and damnation environment, regularly storming into their offices and throwing Steve Jobs level temper tantrums. He made the entire place so toxic that half (not exaggerating) of the Kiva engineers that were acquired had left the company before their very lucrative aquisition stock grants could vest. We're talking hundreds of engineers who would rather give up hundreds of thousands of dollars than deal with Dave Clark (Mussolini) for one more minute.
Dave Clark is a toxic asset. He is failing at his job. Fulfillment costs are skyrocketing, inventory turns are tanking, and profitability of the retail division is at an all time low, despite all time high revenues. He has burned through staffing so heavily that they have had to abandon entire fulfillment centers because there aren't enough people in these small blue collar towns that are eligible to work for Amazon anymore because they've all been fired. He is a constant PR nightmare for the company. I have no fucking clue why Jeff Bezos hasn't fired him yet.
FWIW (not much, there isn't an excuse), I was going through an extremely rough time in my life. I had recently been disowned by my family for leaving their religion, and I had just begun to work for the guy I was talking about in this thread. I was generally a miserable prick back then, and while I can't say that I have eliminated that tendency entirely, it is something I have been consciously working on with the help of a therapist for about 4 years now.
It's possible some Amazon Warehouses are run better than others. A friend who recently got a job (5 weeks ago) at one of Amazons warehouses (NJ/NYC area) has only praise for the way things are run. They take his temperature 3 times a day, provide a mask, constantly monitor social distancing, clean washrooms every hour, enforce social distancing in any break rooms, work areas, etc. He says it's never an issue with breaks, lunch, etc. He has mentioned that they encourage him to keep an eye out for other positions he might have an interest in since he is eligible (after 30 days)to apply (he has some skills that can be more useful to Amazon).
I was always under the assumption from what I have read that Amazon was a sweat shop. It seems that at least his facility is run very well.
Though it's possible that the parent was referring to Amazon warehouses where workers had to pee in a bottle to keep their productivity points above the cutoff level.
Also, why should they have means to influence the future of the company? They're hired voluntarily to do one job, not to lead the company.
Yes, workers should be able to influence the future of a company they invest their lives in, the same way citizens can influence the future of their countries. The incentives of workers and shareholders can be aligned, when greed is kept in check.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/14/politics/bernie-sanders-w...
You want people to be able to renege on contracts they explicitly agreed to under no duress. This position is not supported by the country and has been rejected countless times. Even unionism as a whole has been rejected. I would not join a union even if it was free, absolutely never.
Why should they have means to influence the future of the company? That's been repeatedly proven in court and enshrined in law.
>I soon learned that only difference between an Amazon warehouse and a third-world sweatshop were the robots. At Amazon, you were surrounded by bots, and they were treated better than the humans.
If you read the article with the example that was asked for, you'd see the examples of how it's sweatshop conditions.
Long shifts on your feet, physical labor, short breaks and no cell phones. Precise tracking of performance. Does it sound like fun? Hell no. But it seems like decent pay for unskilled physical labor, and I haven't read anything that sounds like sweatshop conditions.
If she told you there were sharks with lasers on their heads would you have believed that too? The article is literally unbelievable.
>"I was really upset and I said, 'All you people care about is the rates, not the well-being of the people,' " she said. "I've never worked for an employer that had paramedics waiting outside for people to drop because of the extreme heat."
There were so many reports of workers overheating that OSHA had to get involved: https://www.mcall.com/news/watchdog/mc-allentown-amazon-comp...
That, along with other conditions reported, make it a literal sweatshop.
They risk bringing the coronavirus home every day to their families. Their bodies are chewed up over the course of months until they start falling apart from the stress and wear. "short breaks" usually means something like "you're only allowed to go to the bathroom twice" which is technically illegal but Amazon spent a lot of money asking consultants and lawyers how to circumvent that.
Not to mention they don't get paid while they're standing in line for 20+ minutes to get frisked before they leave.
- No chairs for a 12-hour shift
- Time spent going to the bathroom gets removed from your break time
- 30-minute lunch includes a 30-minute round trip to get to the lunch room
Other things seemed like unrealistic exaggerations. Like a 15 minute walk to the lunch room and barely having enough time to eat a sandwich, drink a soda and smoke a cigarette during the 30 minute break. Doesn’t add up.
And stating it felt like 150 degrees and no fans were allowed because “robots don’t like the cold”. What robot works better in 150 degrees than 70 degrees?
The stories don’t ring true to me and the pictures through the article from labor organizers tell me at least why the stories are being told.
By firing them, they discourage others from coming forward so it’s not really possible to get a good picture of the situation.
You are begging the reader to throw out any knowledge of the company and the country it's in so that they can arrive to a conclusion of "We don't have all the facts!!!!". That's not going to be very effective.
1. News outlets have a huge incentive to report on anti-Amazon facts, but little to no incentive to report on pro-Amazon facts. "Megacorp is imperfect, but mostly okay" is not a headline that generates clicks.
2. Amazon has a huge incentive to ensure that they comply with the law. Every labor lawyer in the country wants to take them to court and extract a settlement. And there are plenty of politicians that would love to make their career by bringing Amazon to heel.
Your implication that the media is an anti-amazon conspiracy is absurd. The truth about bad actors is not kind to them. That doesn't turn truthtelling into a conspiracy. I seem to remember some positive reporting on Amazon recently, when they promised higher wages and more PPE for warehouse employees -- how does that fit into a conspiracy?
You are aware that Bezos owns one of the world's most influential news organizations, right?
Also, no, they don't. There's more money in sponsored puff pieces about how Amazon is tackling this or that recent controversy.
>At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.
End this solipsistic tripe. Or else drive down to your nearest fulfillment center and start interviewing folks.
It's possible that if every Amazon warehouse were run as well, those organizers would not have arisen, but it's Amazon nastiness toward them that's most alarming.
It goes on to give tips to managers for spotting union activity. “Make it a point to regularly talk to associates in the break room. This will help protect you from accusations that you were only in the break room to spy on pro union associates,” the video says.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/how-amazon-is-fighting-back-...
On internal company email lists and chat groups on Thursday and Friday that Recode viewed, Amazon white-collar workers expressed dismay over a report from Vice News that the company’s top lawyer had referred to a recently fired warehouse worker as “not smart, or articulate” and implied that executives should use that to help squelch worker unionization efforts.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/5/21206385/amazon-fired-wa...
You literally are the reason why poor publications like Vox get a free pass. Here, if you don't believe me, read this thread and check yourself (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1228447944287932416?s=20). And don't tell me now that Balaji is not trustworthy. He is 100x more trustworthy than a random HN user like you.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/amazo...
https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment...
And the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
He mentions petitions with thousands of signatures. Are all of those people just…I mean, what?
If they were lying, then Amazon could easily come out and say, "They're asking for regular breaks every four hours and we literally give them that. They ask for PPE and every employee is given X, Y, Z. They want us to reduce our carbon footprint by 10%, here is an independent audit showing 12% reduction." (etc.)
In situations of extreme power imbalance, it's not unreasonable to default trust the person not in power who is taking far greater risk.
Sometimes you'll be wrong! But the burden of proof is on people in power.
Warehouse stocking is not a career. Most of these people are hourly workers with little to lose. You can't apply the same standards to white, blue, and no collar workers because the nature of both the work, the people, and the culture are totally different.
If that statement shocks or offends you, I encourage you to take a temporary job at a place like Walmart or visit an oil rig and experience the differences yourself.
Corporations are at least some kind of good. Otherwise, we would need to all form our own little businesses, and have everyone redo a whole lot of common tasks. Corporations are the economy's approach to DRY.
The signatory names and titles are available publicly: https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/public-let...
Definitely not a corporation mistreating its employees. I don't know why this is portrayed as such. If employees want to force their employer to follow some agenda the employer does not agree with, I don't see a problem with the corporation firing the employees.
Since we're not talking about somebody adrift in interstellar space, your argument makes less sense. Instead you have to argue some variant on a) not everybody deserves a reasonably safe job, or b) people do deserve that but we as a society can't afford it.
(I don't think either of those is true, but at least they'd make sense.)
Even having a society does not make wonders: we don't have a cure for cancer, we don't have a vaccine for Covid, having a functional society does not mean you can obtain everything, including safe jobs and decent lives, especially when the definitions of safe and decent are moving targets: versus 200 years ago we are living an utopia of safe jobs and decent lives. Just think logical, not only emotional.
I think that's wrong. We of course can't afford everything, and I never said otherwise. But what we're talking about is "a safe (as possible) job". There's no particular reason to think that if Amazon takes proper worker safety precautions, suddenly they'll be out of business. Might Bezos be marginally less rich? Sure. Might Amazon customers pay a smidgen more? Sure. Will society collapse? No. Will some other workers suddenly not have a safe workplace? Also no.
We can afford it.
I don't care about how rich is Bezos, it is not my problem (or, more exactly, not a problem for me), but the blanket statements like "everyone deserves X" and "we can afford Y" are a problem: we don't simply deserve and we cannot afford most things.
But would it not be nice if it were society, us humans, who would provide the right to a safe job and dignified life?
That's not an argument against a safety net, just the opposing force that makes the correct (and possible) solution somewhere in between [UBI, euthanization), and different for each grouping of people.
By the way, I find the notion comical that in a capitalist system, you are not compelled to labor for others. In practice, that is.
And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions?
Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight?
Does Amazon really need your support, or are the workers one paycheck away from homelessness in need of it?
Union representation and improved compensation and employment benefits.
Not to say either party is being honest or being dishonest. But it's clear there's plenty to gain on both sides by, on the one hand, painting organizers ad bad employees, and on the other hand, painting working conditions as worse than they are.
Software engineers at Google were fired (allegedly) for attempting to unionize (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/06/ex-goog...). Google jobs are some of the best jobs in the industry, in terms of benefits, base salary, and stock compensation.
Unionization isn't always about jobs being good enough. It's also about being able to set up a collective front for the workers to negotiate their arrangement with company owners. That's something every employee can want and can benefit from.
> Union representation and improved compensation and employment benefits.
Getting union representation requires, in jurisdictions I'm familiar with, at least a 50% buy-in from other employees. You're not going to get that by lying to them about their own working conditions. This kind of dishonesty can attract some fist-shakers on the internet, but they don't get a vote.
Pay raises, more time off, better benefits. A newly hired employee has very little to lose by supporting unionization.
>And why, if organizers are lying, can't Amazon just disprove them by showing to the public their perfect working conditions?
Because when Amazon shows good conditions, everyone says that it's a manufactured scenario or just an anecdote.
>Finally, isn't it a natural instinct to side with the weaker element in a fight?
Which is precisely what organizers want to exploit with publicity that could very easily be taking things out of context. A union organizer has almost nothing to lose by massively exaggerating.
>Does Amazon really need your support, or are the workers one paycheck away from homelessness in need of it?
Depends on whether or not you care about being manipulated into supporting something that could be a lie. It's not even "support" of Amazon, it's just questioning of the accounting of one side of a debate.
And those are bad because?
> A newly hired employee has very little to lose by supporting unionization.
And yet, most don't. The mind boggles.
Both sides face similar issues related to terminating their mutually agreed to relationship.
I'm not against these things for warehouse workers at all, but just to answer your question, potential downsides include:
1. The money has to come from somewhere. Since Amazon keeps fairly small profit, this would likely come from passing costs on to consumers, and reducing Amazon's investment in future growth, which ultimately costs their future consumers. This increases cost of living for non-Amazon workers, and since Amazon is a good source of cheap items, it may disproportionately burden poorer people.
2. Where I am, Indeed.com says Amazon warehouse workers are paid slightly above average ($16/hour). If they were paid significantly above average, it can make it hard for small businesses to keep their workers.
> And those are bad because?
They're not bad. But them being good for workers is not an argument for why workers should receive them.
They promised the earth on privacy and after a few month suddenly pulled a bait and switch on that.
For me that was such dishonest behavior that I pulled my business from them and never, ever ordered anything else.
A fulfilled, satisfying life is not dependent on being an Amazon customer.
Yes.
As an example:
> We’re already seeing devastating climate impacts: unprecedented flooding in India and Mozambique, dry water wells in Africa, coastal displacement in Asia, wildfires and floods in North America, and crop failure in Latin America
That is so far removed from a company that provides web hosting and handles shipping logistics.
What does transporting a cardboard box have anything to do with flooding in Mozambique?
While it's unfortunate catastrophes happen. Let's be generous and assume those events are due to lax environmental regulations (0.001% to 90%).
Amazon is just 1% of whatever that is. So, if these activists wish came true - and ultimately a drop in the bucket.
A competitor without the hindrance could likely make up for any pollution they don't create.
If you want to shape ecology, you do it through regulations (statutes). And all countries need to be on board with it.
I'm going to have to go with management on this one - the exaggeration of Amazon's impact on the issue really hurts their credibility. Nothing wrong with climate change - but really against disrupting organizations needlessly.
And the burden of proof rests on the organizers to prove why this is worthy of prioritization above other problems.
While I like the sentiment and aesthetic of being courteous, I don't see anything demonstrating a binding rule or contract could come out of it. And what's the benefit again? If Amazon followed through, would the flooding and droughts cited in the original post stop?
The problem is - it just seems contradictory to me. I can't put my finger on why. I think supporter's heart is in the right place. But people are struggling a lot in life and this world in various ways, is this really the most optimal way to alleviate suffering?
Why not save the pay check and put it into lobbying, or NGO type stuff to advocate the cause? Or maybe even into studies or stuff more urgent that climate. For climate stuff to work, people in society have to have more harmony / generosity / collectivism universally.
Until people start getting along and addressing universal human needs and fixing those, it's really hard to do cooperative endeavors like this at scale. Just my opinion! :)
25% of the US's carbon emissions are from transportation.
> Amazon is just 1% of whatever that is.
Everybody works somewhere. Workers have more power over their own companies than they do over others. It's great that Amazon workers are trying to use that power for good.
> If you want to shape ecology, you do it through regulations (statutes).
That's one place to push. And you know who'd be good at pushing for regulatory change? Organized workers. Large companies that have decided to minimize ecological impact. Industry organizations made up of those companies.
But that's not the only way change happens. It's a big problem with many fronts. If you think you can best use your time and money by calling up your reps, go to it. However, these people have decided differently. I'm willing to trust that they know best how to achieve their goals.
To pretend that unions (leadership) haven't become just as obsessed with growth and power as corporations are, misses a huge part of the various incentives at play here.
Do you have any evidence to support this? Anecdotal evidence will not suffice here. Calling this a 'huge' factor demands empirical evidence.
So what justifies this assertion?
It depends where you read. HN, and a lot of places that might be reporting/commenting on amazon normally comment on tech companies. Amazon runs warehouses alongside a tech shop. Comparatively, a warehouse is a tech shop. It's the clash of worlds driving the notoriety.
> On the other hand, Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety. I actually believe this: I have heard detailed descriptions from people I trust of the intense work and huge investments. Good for them; and let’s grant that you don’t turn a supertanker on a dime.
> But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.
He concluded the piece with:
> ...it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.
Tim Bray quit over the way Amazon treats labour organizers, not the fact that they protect the health of their workers during a pandemic.
Still in the honeymoon period, give it time.
It would be like it is now, if it hadn't been workers organizing and speaking out.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/response-tim-brays-departure-...
It's these strange ways that COVID is changing our economy that make me very bearish long-term on the economy. Businesses around here can reopen legally but many are choosing to stay closed. The customers aren't back yet and they can't pay their regular staff. If they reopen, the staff can also no longer collect the massive unemployment benefits.
It's a fucking shitstorm and it's hitting the highly-paid as well, I guess.
Good luck to OP.
Your question is one where both possible outcomes result in attacking the messenger instead of considering his message.
At a stock level, I imagine their longterm plan is to replace warehouse workers with robots anyways.
but somehow think that won’t happen :)
Stung me the most. Capitalism seems to have such an increasingly firm grip on the world that I'm starting to think the only way out is from some drastic worldwide event (Corona?).
Seems to me, this is the story of the industrial revolution and arguably all civilization pre-IR, when serfs were fungible labor units to the landed gentry. Standardize the design and production of something, then bring in labor to produce mass quantities to a certain level of quality.
Coronavirus won't change this: with 8B people on the planet, we've come to depend on industrial production for food, medicine and more.
Does it matter? We can't change the 19th or 20th centuries. Perhaps we can change the 21st...
And what does it have to do with Capitalism. You think under Socialism they would care about your individuality? No they wouldn't - Socialism is a Collectivist ideology, after all.
The way to strengthen workers is to increase demand for their work, or find ways to make their (limited) skills more useful, or give them new skills. Those are all compatible with Capitalism.
I am really tired of all these off-hand attacks on capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system. It is characterized by private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. If you prefer a centralized or shared economy, that is fine, although I was born in a communist country and I bet you have no idea what you wish for.
Capitalism is not responsible for some local injustice, corruption, or mistreatment of workers. If you think there is no corruption in a dictatorship or that communism is a worker paradise you are grossly misinformed. Europe runs on capitalism too, but Europe also has strong worker protections and ethical norms.
The government intervenes in the market all the time, especially now. Nothing big is allowed to fail. $Trillions to keep the party going.
That's not capitalism.
Even Buffett is sitting this "recovery" out because he can see the lack of a free market.
There were specific kinds of corruption and abuses that the Soviet system encouraged and abetted; there are specific kinds of corruption and abuses that the current American system encourages and abets. The system is indeed responsible for those abuses, just like any other system.
Amazon culture then? It was sad. Workers are pawns. The dreams of the Internet startup culture dashed and dying. I was on the team w the first Infosys flood.
Amazon is a place to make money. That's it. It's a strict military hierarchy like all US corporations. No real culture of betterment for humanity. Quite the opposite. Yes, those that got and kept their options possibly doing very well. Yes, if tech is what you live for, yippee! A better future for all of humanity: strong "no!". Stormtroopers and low flying helicoptors for any that dare organize.
Didn't you see the HR video where a plastic Jeff spews all the corporate lies and BS? Made me sick back when. I was an idealist. You were probably spared the worst and protected, given the humanist version on the surface.
There's a culture of trying to get rid of people after a few years. Not many make it over the 3-5 years mark, right? Policy of "fire the bottom 10%" thing every year, so trump up some lies to have excuses.
Anyways, better you got out before the rot set into your heart. No idealists there. The top guy is obviously quite extraordinary. Thanks for making a statement. Maybe something will break one day.
Whistleblowing needs to be kept alive. It's our only hope.
What does he win doing that? One publicity stunt. Thats it
He could have done much more inside Amazon and get fired later.
Congrats that you did the right thing, but no one should care how much it cost you to be ethical.
Well, sure, no one should care, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, privileged people tend to hold in higher regard the actions of other privileged people. Sad, but it's how systematized injustice self-sustains. And if Tim including that detail makes even one other highly compensated executive, somewhere in the world, treat with just a tiny bit more respect the concept of walking away from golden handcuffs to push for ethical change... it's worth Tim treating that detail with gravitas.
> I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?
I hope this guy got permission from these people to post their names on a public forum. Also, there's really nothing in those names to tell if someone is a PoC or not. At least one of those names is both a male and female name.
And at that point the author lost my respect. Sad, since otherwise he's making good points with a lot of merit, but if he's making that "argument" I don't even want to know what more vocal "activists" were saying.
This comes down purely to cost and slow moving rock on the Amazon side.
I also think Amazon a right to expect its employees to abide by its rules. Individuals have a right to organize and to protest, even when they're supposed to be at work, but companies have a right to want to discontinue their business relationship, that is fire, their employees, especially if they're not working when they're supposed to.
Ultimately the employees made the mistake of organizing and being loud before they had the critical mass to have the leverage needed, and they outed their organization leadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting#United_States
Therefore, the employees made no mistake if Amazon breaks the law by firing unionizing employees.