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Comment by mercury_craze | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the bad faith questioning, I dont have to provide a gold standard in order to criticise Amazon. Everything I've said is extremely well documented.

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The only reason that the other big tech companies don’t get criticized for the way that their low wage “employees” are treated, is because they are subcontracted/outsourced either locally or in manufacturing plants in China.

Off course, you don't have to provide any standard to criticize whatever you deem fit. The point of my comment is not to ask you to provide a benchmark, but more to point out the flaw in your arguments to future readers. I admit I could have done this in a better way. But my point is without a relative benchmark, one can criticize anything and everything, even though the criticism encodes very less information. To brand something evil, it has to be compared to it's peers in it's time frame. Or else I can brand every single company and human being on the planet evil for n number of reasons, e.g, for not paying their lowest paid workers enough, or for not doing enough to combat climate change. These will apply to every single company for some definition of "enough", and if I don't have to provide a benchmark, I can set enough at any point.

This is one of the largest company in the world, it is normal that they get criticized more than smaller companies. They have more resources and abilities to make changes than most companies. And I disagree, we can criticize a company regardless if we provide the example of a better company or not. When it comes to workers abuse in the middle of a pandemic, "everyone else is bad" is not a good answer, i'm sorry. That's just a recipe for never changing anything. One can hope for better worker treatment regardless, this is how progress is made.

Does AMZN in fact have more resources to make changes?

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.

You may be interested in the Repugnant Conclusion [0]: At large-enough scale, every tiny movement of massive actors is consequential to those around them. This is not merely a utilitarian curiosity, but highly relevant to how states treat their subjects and how corporations treat their employees.

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...

How are these questions in bad faith?

Internally accusing people of bad faith can be a mechanism for dealing with cognitive dissonance. Publicly accusing people of bad faith, with no evidence or justification, can be a rhetorical tactic.

That was not bad faith questioning at all. He was making excellent points that you refused to answer.

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.

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