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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

i worked in a warehouse carrying boxes around right after high school.

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%.

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Just because something isn't skilled doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't bring value. The people who do these jobs deserve a decent wage and respect, not psuedo-wage-slavery

That’s a political problem to solve with higher minimum wages/max work hours or universal basic income and universal healthcare.

Well not quite. It’s an economic problem in that if you don’t pay your workers decent livable wages then they won’t be able to continue to do a decent living while working for you.

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.

It’s a more immediate economic problem if paying employees more than competitors causes your products to become uncompetitive and you lose business because people shop elsewhere where prices are lower.

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.

> 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.

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.

We have decades of evidence where companies that opted for lower labor costs were more successful than their competitors. There's a reason all manufacturing moved to China, and there's no more mid market retailers left in the US.

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.

You're right, they're not complex. For a person

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.

It's not that complicated. If you look up Ocado, they have entirely automated their warehouses.

What does entirely automated mean??

So your perspective is that only employment which requires advanced thinking deserves good conditions and a living wage?

What is society to do with people who don't have sufficient brain power? Enslave them? Throw them in the wood chipper?

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