Comment by graphe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graphe | Hacker News Reader

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Jacobian is a biased publication and I have read other untruthful biases they presented. I do not trust it.

Dariusz worked himself to death, thanks in no small part to Amazon. Some people can be coaxed into working to death, I've known several people that have died in the restaurant business, they put themselves in that situation, they knew it was bad for years and they are a victim of circumstances just as Dariusz was.

Where do you draw personal responsibility? They had been complaining, they did the same work or more, it was dangerous and bad. We don't ban jobs like roughnecks and our culture of rewarding working too hard is a problem. Some people love the high pressure tough on your body jobs, play hard work hard lifestyle. Even in programming there are people that work themselves to death.

I know he worked too hard to his death and knew it was bad for a long time and continued to work there. There is no political statement besides the always work harder ethic which I don't agree with.

> Where do you draw personal responsibility?

That depends on the power imbalance.

The power dynamics in a job market are not symmetrical. The employees and employers are not on equal footing and don't wield the same power. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced the lower you go in the pecking order, with blue-collar laborers being the lowest rung.

In short, the more an employer is in position to exploit their workers, the more responsibility they should bear. That's one of two ways to prevent exploitation. The other way is to shift the power balance back, by organizing into unions, which is why Amazon, Starbucks, and similar companies have been engaging in union-busting quite a lot.

> We don't ban jobs like roughnecks and our culture of rewarding working too hard is a problem.

That's one part of the cultural problem. Another important part is the constant indoctrination, from a rather young age, against workers' rights and in favor of exploitation.

That's how we end up with so many people who are biased towards corporations and always looking for ways to absolve them from their wrongdoings.

> There is no political statement besides the always work harder ethic which I don't agree with.

Of course there's a political statement there. The political statement is right there in assigning disproportionate blame to the worker who has repeatedly requested to be treated in a way that would not lead to his death, and not enough blame to the employer who refused to consider those requests.

That's what politics are -- or should be -- really about: real lives of real people. We're all used to looking at politics as machinations of the political class, but that's not how things are supposed to be.

>The power dynamics in a job market are not symmetrical. The employees and employers are not on equal footing and don't wield the same power. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced the lower you go in the pecking order, with blue-collar laborers being the lowest rung.

Many other workers quit. Years ago. If he was not able to, why not? Why did the writer choose to stay for years knowing it was a poor work environment? The context matters. Was Dariusz was unwilling to find a job, indentured to Amazon, unable to find another job, or was it another factor? Self preservation is always everyone's right, lawless or not. Addressing it is difficult.

> The context matters. Was Dariusz was unwilling to find a job, indentured to Amazon, unable to find another job, or was it another factor?

No, it doesn't. Not for what you're arguing.

You made a claim about personal responsibility. I replied to it by pointing out the power imbalance between the employer and their employees. You took it to mean that the power imbalance between the employer and each individual employee matters.

It does not.

Think, for a moment, about what you're arguing here. Dariusz has repeatedly requested changes to his working conditions, because those conditions were too exhausting for his health. Amazon repeatedly chose to not grant any of those requests.

The argument you present here is that whether Dariusz was unwilling or unable to find the job should somehow change the responsibility that Amazon has towards making sure that the Dariusz's working conditions wouldn't end up killing him.

If that is your position -- and I suspect it is, given all the replies on this topic where you characterize Dariusz as a person with subpar mental health who lack self-preservation instinct -- then we have reached a fundamentally irreconcilable disagreement of a moral/ethical nature.

Ah, so here it comes out. You don't like the publication, so instead of just ignoring it and finding a better source, you make up some other bizarre, unlikely narrative just because you have a bias against the author.

I certainly agree that there are people who will work themselves to death. But:

So what? Any work culture or organization that puts someone in that position is the one primarily at fault. It's not like Amazon was saying "oh, stop working so hard, you're going to kill yourself" but he ignored that and kept working. They were intentionally removing staff that did the same work he was doing, and constantly piled up more work on his plate. And it's not like he was ok with it! He complained, and his requests for help were ignored.

Even in the extremely unlikely event that he had some sort of mental illness that caused him to ignore the signals of overwork his body was giving him... nope, still not his fault. Still Amazon's fault.

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