
What Amazon Does to Poor Cities - prostoalex
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-warehouses-poor-cities/552020/?utm_campaign=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nuzzel&amp;single_page=true
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majormajor
The headline suffers because it's a lot less nuanced than the article. Amazon
exploits the lack of any better opportunities, but does not create that
situation. Better than nothing, less than ideal, is the theme, but we can't
expect the benevolence of corporations if we want to get the world closer to
"ideal." They focus a lot on one nicer alternative - Stater Brothers - but
acknowledge that they aren't of the same size and aren't in a position to
replace all the Amazon jobs. Any debate over "will people vote with their
wallet to punish ruthless businesses," that might've been started long ago
with Walmart or foreign manufacturing or anything else, is long since settled.
Someone is going to offer people shitty jobs as long as there is no better
alternative, so direct the focus to fixing the system, not the single company.

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natecavanaugh
> Better than nothing, less than ideal, is the theme, but we can't expect the
> benevolence of corporations if we want to get the world closer to "ideal.

But maybe, we can encourage and highlight the ones that are willing to provide
social good beyond profit extraction?

I understand how the world's top companies become so cut throat, especially
those that are publicly traded. But that's not most companies, at least not in
the US. Most of them are reasonably sized, privately owned, and most likely
the investors are the members of the board.

I'm thinking out loud here, but perhaps if cities played the long tail and
offered incentives to the small companies, or those with compensation that is
within the top tier, maybe it would draw not just existing business but also
spur the creation of new ones that will pay taxes, hire people who will also
pay taxes while the company also pays taxes on the employees. It seems like a
city diversifying that way (and perhaps accentuating their competitive
advantage) would make for a much more stable economy overall.

I just feel think that capitalism and business itself have so much potential
for long term good and helping folks, and maybe we should, culturally, shift
our incentives and thinking about what those priorities should be. Of course,
competing globally, this becomes _much harder_ to execute, because you will be
tempted to race to the bottom.

But personally, and am only going off of hunch and absorbed anecdotal info,
but I don't think that most of the businesses in any community are competing
globally. I tend to think that most economic activity happens locally, be that
city, state, or national.

And perhaps like a lot of things in the US, maybe we should treat this as a
health issue. Long term company health, and not try to soak anyone dry just
because our stock price will go up 0.0002% this quarter.

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xt00
I think amazon can come up with a way to make the job less stressful and all
that, but I think the articles point that amazon comes in and replaces jobs
that were unionized basically misses the point. Over the past 20 years tons of
factories shut down because they realized they could get the same thing built
someplace else for far cheaper — in many cases unions had helped the people
get paid more and more for the same-ish work for years. So the delta between
what the factory in Mexico or China would cost could be massive. So in the
case of amazon they are not a factory and they can’t really be moved, but they
can decide to contract out their fulfillment to another company who is willing
to do it and reset the game by bringing in a new workforce that gets paid less
again. So it would seem like the smart thing to do would be to keep the
pressure on amazon and target specific things they don’t like, but getting
unionized and then demanding way more pay and easier conditions will basically
drive amazon to contracting out the fulfillment centers to somebody else and
you are back to where you started..

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gt_
Why doesn’t ‘Stater Brothers’ (the other warehouse in the article) outsource
like you say? ‘Stater Brothers’ is paying their unionized employees double the
hourly wage with extra earnings potential and significantly better benefits.

Are you saying Amazon’s ability to relocate the jobs makes outsourcing easier?
I can’t think of much else.

What is the difference between unionizing and “keeping the pressure on amazon
and target specific things they don’t like”? One begets the other. And do we
have any evidence there is any pressure on Amazon to begin with?

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xt00
The size of the stater brothers operation sounds much smaller than amazon’s.
So I would assume the potential upside would be small for somebody to come in
and compete. But good point. I’ve been following the whole union thing with
Boeing for years and the situation I described is exactly what happened with
them for both the machinists and the engineers. Both groups are heavily
unionized for Boeing in the Seattle area. After years of the union
continuously pushing Boeing to improve wages and benefits, and that made
Boeing start looking for a way to get around the union.. moved to “right to
work” states, moved head quarters, outsourced to other contractors.. basically
the unions pushed the company to diversify their options for building planes.
And this is in one of the most expensive product categories you can imagine.
So in low margin industries, unionization is without a doubt risky for the
future of those workers. You may say I’m speaking the company line but a
review of history in the factories in the US shows that unless the company can
directly compete with the overseas competitors, they are run out of business
by people buying the cheaper and often similar quality product. There are many
people in China right now trying to automate as much of their business as
possible so that people in more developed countries cannot undercut them once
they figure out how to automate before they do.. and if a particular factory
in China decides not to do it to help keep their workers, somebody else will
do it that currently is not rich and doesn’t own a factory.. why should they
let the other guys who already own the factory be the last people to own a
factory and no innovation after them? So yea they will get funding and start
their own automated factories. So it’s a continuous race to the bottom and
every time people say “oh hey stop, we are good” somebody sneaks past them and
keeps the race going.. I think the real take away is we need to figure out how
to have something like a union that helps people but doesn’t basically hurt
the companies competiveness globally.. maybe having the people get paid the
same but the robots do more.. the people should push for that instead of
unionizing and asking for more money to work less.. because let’s not kid
ourselves, that is what people that are unionizing are hoping happens..

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xt00
I should also mention, one thing that doesn’t seem obvious to me is why rich
companies don’t actually just pay their fulfillment employees more? I’m
assuming they are worried that they may not be able to expand their operation
due to costs if they have set wages too high. I mean basically somebody is
punching numbers into spreadsheets for lots of big companies and saying if we
pay X then it means we have operating expenses that are some fraction of
revenue and that is “bad”.. but I would imagine having people excited to work
there because the job pays well and they can see them doing it for 10 years is
probably much better than burning people out in 1 year.. it would be
interesting to have somebody who sits in front of one of those spreadsheets to
explain why they don’t think it works out that way..

My understanding with people in Germany working at various technical jobs like
the automakers and suppliers to the automakers, they don’t get paid too much
but have lots of vacation time and a nice quality of life. My take is that it
is equivalently in the US would be like getting paid 50k per year but get 40
days of vacation per year that are paid. So the net result is the company
employs more people to cover the workload. And have like 32 or 36 hour work
weeks.

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xt00
Just thinking about it actually, I just realized.. if Germany has free
healthcare then that takes a big chunk out of the spreadsheet. Companies
adding more employees don’t have a fixed per worker cost that is as high if
the government pays for healthcare.. basically adding more people and lowering
hours everybody works is easy math if the fixed per worker costs are small
compared to wage costs.

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prepend
“Workers say the warehouse jobs are grueling and high-stress”

It’s a warehouse job constantly on the move, stocking and filling orders. I’m
not sure what expectations employers have or why they are surprised. I wish
the article went into this a bit more to explain the disconnect between
expectations and reality. It sort of touches on how it’s not information work,
but do these areas think that fulfillment centers employee the same as
engineering sites? Or if they did, they would hire unskilled labor?

~~~
jedharris
The comparison with the brother's job at the Stater Brothers warehouse across
the street is pretty clear about this.

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prepend
But they are nowhere near the scale of Amazon. It’s like comparing an Etsy
seamstress with a Union clothing maker.

