I think people forget just how precarious the ever growing precariat class is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
I suspect is the future of employment for everyone without organized labor fighting back for their own interests.
Money. Lots and lots of money.
Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.
And a huge number of people just don't care about these issues like you do.
And, I feel like this is sort of what we get as a society and marketplace that doesn't value ethical or enforce business practices. There is no penalty for acting unethically and there is a profit penalty for acting ethically - so the top performing companies are likely to be those that decided to ignore ethics and pursue the dollar.
Google, for a while, was an exception to this rule by pure luck - they so fully dominated search when it was just becoming a thing you could actually monetize that they had bails of money they could use to operate ethically and at a large scale... but they've since course corrected to be an unethical as anyone else.
Targeting Amazon just because it's a household brand simply makes an uneven labor playing field - sure, amazon workers might get paid better after your protest, but J J Doe and Sons Glassworkers won't change their ways. Nor will the no-name Ebayers.
However, for me, I realized that
1) I am fortunate enough that saving fractions of my order will not make a material difference to me (the amazon cancellation page informed me that i had saved 140 dollars in shipping using prime over the last year)
2) In the current environment, supporting local and/or smaller businesses is more important to me than saving a day of shipping time, or 10% off my order
3) Even if your alternative retailer is equally unscrupulous to its warehouse employees, for instance, a shipper that uses UPS, which is unionized labor with benefits, as opposed to amazon's own courier service which is contract labor with no benefits, can be a meaningful difference.
For me, the above 3 made me realize that I could do without amazon prime despite being a prime member for 10 plus years. For household staples, I am a costco member, and I feel much better about costco's relationship with their employees than amazons. For other purchases, it makes sense for me to consider local alternatives. And I can always use amazon if I need to, I'll just pay shipping.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can push for legislation AND cancel your Amazon Prime. Both are valid strategies for letting your voice be heard.
If an amazon worker gets paid and treated better, then other employers will need to do the same if they want people to choose to work for them.
If there is a purity test, to gauge your alignment with the internal company rules associated with every goods + service you rely on, then there needs to be transparency across the entire world economic landscape.
Why cherry pick? Just because media decided to bring it to your attention?
So you canceled Amazon Prime, everything else in your life was produced by some other entity. Do you go insane because you haven't vetted those sources?
If you want a better reason, it can be as simple as, Amazon is the 13th-biggest corporation in the world by revenue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...), and someone simply doesn't want to confer any further advantage to them or support that level of wealth concentration.
It's not cherry-picking unless you know that's the only company being avoided. In my case I've significantly cut my direct reliance on the top 12, quite unintentionally, just by
- not shopping at WalMart
- not living in China
- not owning/driving a car
- not using Apple products, and ironically
- using Amazon
Yep that's right, ordering from Amazon keeps me from being tempted to fall back on numbers 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 which are all petroleum and car companies. I guess I'm going on the theory that a delivery truck making the rounds to 20 people is more efficient and less damaging than 20 people driving their own cars to various stores. On the other hand, if it's me we're talking about, I would be biking to the store. So already I'm not totally consistent, and I might be further inconsistent tomorrow and decide to boycott Amazon, especially if they don't get their act together on the labor side!
Whether or not you feel it applies specifically to this case, that doesn't make sense to me.
> Why cherry pick?
You have to begin somewhere. You could always ask "Why begin here? Why not elsewhere?". A fine response would be "Why do you care? Where have you started? Oh wait, you haven't, and you aren't even making it clear you intend to. Bye."
Alternatively, "perfect is the enemy of good".
The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers. An Amazon warehouse worker in Canada makes just a little more than minimum wage. Even if it might be a nice company to work for if you're in an office, it may be a very different reality for the majority of workers.
You're probably running into the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...): an initial wave of comments making objections, followed by a wave of objections to the objections, which the community then upvotes heavily.
What determines the initial wave of comments is not community opinion—it's what's the easiest thing to make reflexive objections to.
In the US, Amazon warehouse workers make more than double the federal minimum wage. They make, at minimum, more than double the wage of an average McDonalds worker. They make more than Starbucks store workers, more than most construction workers. Even in Canada, Amazon warehouse workers make more than your average Tim Hortons worker.
Warehouse workers also get the same health insurance that Amazon SWEs get, which is better health insurance by far than even most white-collar American workers have.
>The majority of their employees are unskilled labour.
Unskilled laborers getting double minimum wage and great benefits seems to me to be a good thing for society. It baffles me that people are trying to decry this.
It's not a good enough reason to not form a union.
Pay is only one piece of worker treatment, and when you're talking about hard manual labour, it's really not the most important piece—workplace health & safety is. Doesn't matter how much you were paid while you worked there if you get killed or crippled because the employer skimped on safety, either in equipment or in allowing you to take your time on dangerous tasks.
And that US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, $15,080 for a years worth of work. That is not a livable wage in almost any area of the country, especially the population centers the Amazon warehouses are located in.
In that sense $15 an hour is nothing to be proud of, from one of the largest and most successful companies in the country, run by one of the wealthiest people in the world.
I also would be shocked if your average construction worker or Starbucks is getting federal minimum wage, I have a feeling they are closer to $15 than you would think.
One question, do you work for Amazon? Your history consists solely of comments defending Amazon and their labor relations. If you do, it would be nice of you to disclose that before posting about your company.
And what does minimum wage represent? A livable wage? An inflation-adjusted wage? Some random number that has no basis in real-life living and expenses?
If you chose option C, congratulations, you probably won't be basing any arguments on a number that only represents (if it represents anything) the stinginess and or fossilization of American politics.
You can have good wages and benefits for this kind of labor without firing organizers, plotting to smear them as “inarticulate” in the press, and exposing workers to undue injury and disease.
Just think about you and your colleagues being seen with a very narrow dismissive lens.
I've never really liked "skilled" and "unskilled" label classifiers because it implies a relationship between compensation and skill. I'm aware you didn't say this but I see it far too often.
I've seen a lot of fairly low compensated work that I know for a fact I can't do. We need to stop dehumanizing people with 'skilled' and 'unskilled' labor. A lot of it just depends on what people choose to do and what demands happen to arise.
I acknowledge there's a full spectrum between they points (e.g. painting, where anyone can do it, but professional painters have many skills developed over years to make them both more efficient and with a better outcome).
Perhaps the problem with the label is that it's being attributed incorrectly? I don't think it's saying the person is unskilled in general, just that the person is unskilled in this job. There are plenty of instances where people that are skilled in one area but unable to find work in that area get a job in another area they are unskilled in to make ends meet, and I think those jobs are generally for unskilled labor. In those cases, they likely are unskilled in the job being done.
"We are now hiring for X. [Insert some pay, benefit information here]. Apply online. No interview required. Start tomorrow/this week."
At that point, you really are looking at 'unskilled' or at least 'not specifically skilled'.
It's difficult to push for higher wages or better working conditions when your productivity after 5 years is only 5% more than someone that started a month ago, but that's reality for unskilled work.
As it is I fully expect to hear talking points that "responsible" workers wouldn't strike or try to organize, or that there should be a law against unionization during national emergencies.
his party isn't in a position to throw up a challenger so the Rs are stuck with him, from my point of view: if desperate enough, who knows what he'll try?
Is that true? Increased tariffs, renegotiated trade deals (increased tariffs), attempting to tighten immigration, lowering taxes on repatriation of cash. Those are all pro worker.
Amazon has been a subsidized american corporation servicing chinese interests for 2 decades; the US goverment recieves hundreds of billion in chinese bond purchases a year and for the privelage of having this subsidy the Federal government the federal government in turn provides a subsidty to amazon in the form of forging anti-trust prosecution against amazon for running a retail division that ran a loss for 2 decades while prosecuting wal-mart.
End of the day, best way to handle this is to make an app for it. People run it on their phones which everyone has, and they co-ordinate and vote that way as a single block and as seperate groups.
There is good reason to have these discussions in a place where Amazon's management is not in control.
Blind is based in South Korea. (Disclosure: one of my parents is ethnically South Korean, and I have very high regard for South Korea and its citizens.)
Given the stakes involved with workplace organizing and the opacity (from a legal perspective) of a South Korea-based business, Blind may not be the right platform.
At the very least, some US workers may be reluctant to open up on a platform not subject to US labor law.
Are you quite serious?
With Walmart, people will both be mad at them and oppose their stores, warehouses, etc.
With Amazon, anger stops at stage 1 usually.
Plus there's a class aspect (People of Walmart) that made it easy for people to proudly say they're boycotting Walmart when they would never shop there anyways.
This was true maybe 4-5 years ago when Amazon was the "darling" of the online retail industry. Those days are long gone.
This seems pretty draconian to me, if it's true.
You wouldn't even need a human to do this.
It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.
There are plenty of non-evil companies that will pay you well to do interesting work.
Even in your "FAANG" list, Netflix just makes entertaining videos. Apple makes pleasantly overpriced hardware and competes on privacy in software.
Apply to them, instead of ad-tech and sweatshops-as-a-service.
The lock down also signals weakness and insecurity. Amazon pays at least market rates and people want to work there. In case of a strike, they can hire new people with no training because workers essentially shop all day, a skill that is ubiquitously available
What do they fear?
As for discouraging unionizing via official company communication media, it probably has more to do with discovery and access than wanting to block the communication altogether. Of course they realize people can use Whatsapp, text, online forum, etc. The thing is there needs to be a way to discover a large community of workers on some other platform. That's much harder than going through a company directory or blasting out emails to entire divisions. They don't want to provide easy discovery and access to people who would potentially join a union.
That requires employees to sign up to a service and/or Chanel they don't subscribe, or try to jump-start communities from scratch.
These actions are targeted at censoring pre-existing communities that are naturally and passively formed.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-interna...
I once had all of my lunches turned into safety briefings with some slimeball in a suit lecturing us on the evils of unions for an hour. This prevented us from discussing unions favorably during our only time off during the day, so we decided to start an after-work club at the local pool hall. Less propaganda, more beer and real talk.
Try taking your messages out of the office. Find some place the boss doesnt control and believe me, this will help a lot. You're still going to get flyers, phone calls, letters, and even doorstep visitors if you push for a union but just remember: its all bullshit at this point. Remember why you wanted to do this, and keep a running list of issues the company has not addressed. Remember: a union gives you fair bargaining for anything else you want or need for the company to succeed and you to do your job in the future as well. Some of the handouts now might seem generous but believe me, if you back down, the company will fire absolutely everyone they can identify as an organizer that hasnt been let go up till now.
Google did a similar thing in November [1]. This is starting to feel like a trend for tech companies reaching a certain level of size/maturity.
Now this may be a contrarian opinion, but I actually think this has the potential to be a good thing if you're on the side of workers. Here's why.
If you're organizing a union, trying to reveal "evil" projects, or otherwise trying to be a force for good in the company, as long as you're doing it on internal message boards everyone's still halfway-careful of what they say, and big movements/protests are less likely to happen.
But by shutting them down or forcibly moderating them, that will hopefully be enough of an impetus for employees to start using third-party forums, where they can "approve" each other through invites, and everyone can speak and organize freely (and with more anonymity if desired) and accomplish perhaps far more than they have so far.
As political scientists know, repression of citizens brings short-term stability at the cost of an increased long-term threat.
Obviously you can't know for sure... but this feels like the kind of thing that's going to backfire for Amazon (and Google), leading to more and stronger union organization, not less.
[1] https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles...
"We have always had the rule ready, in case we needed to start enforcing it."
Yes even your very employee-friendly workplace with image boards that would never stoop to those kind of tactics.
