
Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day - pmoriarty
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48990482
======
enlyth
I agree with the worker in the video, they should be treated as human beings.
One of the issues is doing a simple, monotonous task every 8 seconds, 10 hours
a day, 5 days a week, without creating anything of value, is going to be
dehumanizing and unfulfilling regardless.

Robots carrying out this work would probably be for the best for everyone
involved, although Amazon should do right by the workers carrying them over
this difficult transition period where they're still required for part of the
menial manual labour tasks. The compensation should reflect the mental and
physical stress they put people through.

~~~
mdorazio
> The compensation should reflect the mental and physical stress they put
> people through.

As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should
reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market. The fact that
Amazon can _easily_ hire as many workers as it wants at $15/hr says that they
are paying their employees plenty already. It bothers me that people are
constantly demonizing Amazon for their labor practices rather than demonizing
the market conditions that have led to Amazon warehouses being a place _people
are willing to work_.

~~~
JudgeWapner
> . It bothers me that people are constantly demonizing Amazon for

Why does it bother you when people empathize with the poor and castigate
billion dollar corporations that don't even allow employees enough time to
urinate without it harming the employees metrics making them slip towards the
back of the rank and closer to being fired? That _bothers you_...think about
that.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
While I voted you up for the general point, I also think that perhaps cutting
off the parent quote where you did is a little unfair:

> rather than demonizing the market conditions that have led to Amazon
> warehouses being a place people are willing to work.

It's appropriate to "demonize" Amazon, but isn't that observation _also_
correct? Amazon's taking advantage of desperate people, and no matter the job
market conditions, it's unethical for them to do so. But doesn't the fact that
they can treat workers this way and still _have_ workers suggest they're
taking advantage of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed?

~~~
untog
Both observations are correct. There's no need for the "rather than" either/or
the OP presented, though. We can protest both.

~~~
derefr
Not if people only have so much time+energy+motivation to protest things.
Attempting to get people angry at one thing is implicitly an attempt to
"spend" the limited currency of their motivation-to-make-the-world-a-better-
place.

Righteous indignation works similarly to the "warm fuzzies" that cause people
to donate to charity. Each person craves some set amount of these resources;
once they have enough, they're satisfied, and they stop bothering to do things
whose only reward is more of that resource.

~~~
akudha
One of the easiest and best forms of protest is to stop spending money with
Amazon, Walmart or <<insert some company here>>

Sometimes it is difficult - if Comcast is the only game in our area, then we
don't have a choice. Otherwise, this hits these companies where it matters
most - their profits.

~~~
foobarchu
I think it's correct that doing that is the most effective direct action, but
the problem is that one person doing this is totally ineffective, it's the
"drop of water" problem.

Raising a ruckus, strikes, etc are useful because they trigger people to
become aware and concerned that this is a problem, causing more people to stop
giving the company money. The ruckus is _essential_.

------
BurningFrog
Since Amazon easily hires and retains people at these wages, there very likely
isn't anything wrong with these jobs. At least not compared to similar jobs
for the same segment of the work force.

What I think is really going on here is that Amazon has a PR vulnerability
that can be exploited. With enough videos and testimony produced contrasting
the plight of the poor oppressed workers with their boss, The World's Richest
Man, Amazon will need to do something to make this go away.

Or at least that's what this campaign hopes.

~~~
dymk
When you employ hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not hard to find
hundreds who are incredibly unhappy. Sure, this only represents 0.1% of their
workforce, but news agencies don’t care about that. People just want something
to be angry about.

They’ll continue to ignore that $15/hour is within “living wage” for the low
CoL areas that Amazon fulfillment warehouses are located in.

~~~
dehrmann
This reminds me of the Foxconn suicides. Lots of press made it sound like a
major problem, but the actual rate was lower than both China and US averages.

~~~
vkou
The averages include non-functioning alcoholics, drug addicts, retirees with
no money to live on, who don't want to be a burden on their children, chronic
gamblers, people in serious debt, people who are terminally ill, people who
are too depressed to hold down a job, veterans with PTSD...

In short, not the same demographics as people holding down 'decent' jobs for
the area.

------
oneepic
Just a little reminder that many workers in fact do _not_ get treated well
just because their company thinks they do.

~~~
luxuryballs
I think it should also be noted that the best way to show an employer that
they need to do better is supply and demand, quitting entirely and working for
someone else is not only more effective than simply demonstrating or slacking
off, it’s also many magnitudes more professional and better for your career.

~~~
vageli
> I think it should also be noted that the best way to show an employer that
> they need to do better is supply and demand, quitting entirely and working
> for someone else is not only more effective than simply demonstrating or
> slacking off, it’s also many magnitudes more professional and better for
> your career.

If the goal is to get the employer to notice the issue, leaving and hope they
get the idea, when the pool of applicants is essentially unlimited seems like
a poor way of articulating a position.

Amazon is a captive audience in this protest and by not just outright leaving,
the employees are forcing Amazon to consider their situation, rather than
write it off and bring in a new batch.

------
xtracto
Between this and the Mechanical Turk article I read earlier today, I am left
thinking about these type of jobs. There is this "chasm" of things that
machines still cannot but that are repetitive and boring for humans, for which
the value to human-effort ratio is small.

I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of
these types of works. Now, the interesting thing about some of these jobs is
that they cannot be moved to places where the payment to cost of living ratio
can be improved. Some Mechanical Turk tasks could (if the language allowed it)
but the Amazon warehouse jobs would be impossible to move.

Unless, Amazon opens a chain of warehouses in Mexico's cities that border the
US (Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, Sonoyta, Nogales, Cd Juarez, among all the
others) and then dispatches the goods from there. That however would need to
include a very good import/export deal.

~~~
tachyonbeam
> I foresee that in the following 10 years, we will be seeing more and more of
> these types of works.

On the other hand, people are hard at work trying to automate these jobs.
Amazon would love nothing more than to have a completely robotic warehouse and
a fleet of delivery robots that run 24/7.

------
dhruvrrp
> He says he has to pick an item about every eight seconds, or 332 per hour,
> for a 10 hour day.

Ignoring the math, it’s hard to imagine that pace. Are they forced to
continually be moving? Or is the person counting picking up, say 15 usb
chargers as 15 separate things?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Yes. I read an article last week about a guy who got fired for "unnecessary
motion." (will update this comment with a link if I can dig it up.)

Here's a story about a patent on a wristband that enables this kind of
tracking: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-
wa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-warehouse-
wristband-tracking)

It is humanly possible. As a teenager, I worked at UPS, where I was expected
to stack boxes real-life-Tetris-style into a van at a rate of 45 per minute.
They could get as heavy as 30 lbs. I actually got to enjoy it after a while
(biceps!), but I could never get the hang of memorizing the zip codes (every
truck has a list of 1-30 that we were expected to memorize instantly).

~~~
reroute1
I also did this and have younger friends who still do. I much preferred that
job to a customer service one where I had to deal with angry people all day. I
was also sorting via zip codes and enjoyed the physical work... I don't
understand what people accepting a factory job expect. It is repetitive, non-
creative, work. That is the idea.

~~~
apendleton
I'm sure they expect it to be miserable, but expecting a miserable job and
being happy about it needn't align. They might not have the necessary skills
to be employable in not-miserable work, and might not have the necessary means
or time to acquire those skills.

What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is: we have enough wealth as a
society that if we wanted to, we could allocate resources and labor in such a
way that nobody (even unskilled workers) would have to do work that miserable,
at that pace, for that low compensation. But it's not an emergent property of
the market, and we'd have to sacrifice some economic growth, and some payout
for people higher up the ladder, to do it. We have to collectively decide
whether that tradeoff is worth it, and these folks (understandably) are
arguing that it is, and asking the rest of us to have some empathy.

~~~
malandrew
> We have to collectively decide whether that tradeoff is worth it

We do exactly that every day. Price discovery in the market is the result of
collective actions that determine if a tradeoff is worth it.

~~~
apendleton
This would be true if all consumers were rational actors and thought through
the labor market ramifications of each purchase they made before they made it,
but they're not and they don't.

------
Havoc
Honestly it's been underwhelming anyway.

The vast majority of the deals are re-runs of ones in past 6 months...just all
at same time.

I buy a lot of amazon stuff, but this barely shifted my day to day pattern.

I did find out that you get wifi power plugs that are controllable _and_
measure electricity usage. That's pretty cool...just not sale related.

~~~
wingworks
Do you have a link/name of the wifi power plugs? Sounds intriguing.

~~~
Havoc
TP link one

...also saw some random github-y thing while googleing the model number which
hints at some level of hackable/api-able interfacing which made me click the
buy button. That's sketchy info though

[https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GWWRK1C](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GWWRK1C)

[Please bookmark & make use of smile.amazon.com/co.uk thing...it's amazon's
corporate charity thing - free 0.5% donation]

~~~
wingworks
hmmmm, thanks! Will need to find the NZ/Aus version. And yes, I already use
Amazon Smile on the US version, great idea.

------
beecat
If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click
through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k
a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business
intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the
financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence
to enter our market and outcompete us.

Jussayin'

~~~
friendlybus
Glad someone finally said it. What's stopping these data collecting companies
from cornering a huge amount of markets?

~~~
WengerPen
When you reach that size, you are not looking for investments in the millions,
you are looking for the billions.

------
15engineer
Reading through these comments I find myself rather dazed at all of the
complaints regarding $15 an hour salaries, I'm a software engineer with 6
years of experience in a first world country and I make less than that before
taxes.

~~~
thundergolfer
Which first world country is this? I made $30AUD as a waiter in 2015. An
Australian software engineer with that much experience getting paid almost
half that ($15 is USD yeah?) in 2019 would be absurd.

~~~
15engineer
Hong Kong and yes USD.

------
rstupek
Cue Amazon putting in more robots!

~~~
throwaway2048
The amount of smug proclamations about how all these workers are going to be
replaced by robots in these threads is really gross.

Nearly everyone that posts on HN is in a situation where their employer holds
vastly more power than themselves in their employer/employee relationship,
statistically are you likely being screwed, and you aren't going to be Jeff
Bezos one day either.

~~~
nerdjon
I mean... it's happening.

So either we continue to deny it isn't or we actually start those
conversations now and figure out how we live in that world.

And there is a correlation between actions like this and the desire to have a
more automated workforce. Not saying that as blame because there are many
other reasons and you can look at the reasons their jobs are so bad right now
anyways.

But we can't ignore it.

~~~
Amezarak
Or we stop it from happening. It isn’t inevitable. We are all of us making a
choice to allow it.

~~~
_iyig
You’re right. We could also make the choice to smash cars, because they take
jobs away from the horse and buggy industry. We won’t, because the problem is
not humanity’s total productive output growing larger, but how this output is
managed and distributed.

~~~
Amezarak
There are things much more important than humanity's 'total productive
output', which is anyway not guaranteed to _ever_ be managed and distributed
in a better way. Human beings are not economic production units. The economy
is a means and not an end.

Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any
problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we
appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization
full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will
trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if
there isn't one within the next two centuries.

Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be
stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd
be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of
CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying
environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and
disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death
would be eradicated.

Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to
fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold
death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most
subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)

Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching
fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating
dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of
the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now.
We could have stopped it and we still can.

Or we can bury our heads in the sand.

------
Animats
Yes. Don't be a scab and cross the picket line. Don't buy from Amazon today.

~~~
Wohlf
Scabs are workers who cross the picket line, not customers. If you think
boycotts are a good idea, ask the auto unions how well customers not buying
cars worked out for their members.

~~~
astura
>Scabs are workers who cross the picket line, not customers.

That's not the way unions themselves use the word.

[https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24904995/boston-union-
ca...](https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24904995/boston-union-calls-
yankees-scabs-crossing-hotel-picket-line)

"Boston union calls Yankees 'scabs' for crossing hotel picket line"

~~~
mc32
Only because it's a way to use and coöpt language for your cause, not because
it's the way the public understands it. It's like AOC insunuating Pelosi
racist. It's used for effect.

Or, imagine a nurses' strike, but I as a patient don't honor their strike, am
I a scab?

~~~
SauciestGNU
If you're a patient for something elective that could be delayed until after
the conclusion of the labor action then yes, you're a scab. For emergency
care? Probably not.

~~~
filoleg
A strikebreaker (sometimes derogatorily called a scab, blackleg, or knobstick)
is a person who works despite an ongoing strike. [Scabs] are usually
individuals who were not employed by the company prior to the trade union
dispute, but rather hired after or during the strike to keep the organization
running.[0]

The parent comment was absolutely correct in saying that you are trying to co-
opt the actual definition to serve your goals, as the word has nothing to do
with being a customer.

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker)

------
povertyworld
Oh, it's so nice to see all these rich tech guys are concerned about the
plight of Amazon workers. Suppose if one of these Amazon workers applied to be
a programmer at your company even though they didn't go to a top twenty school
or have 5-7 years experience with the trendiest stack, but merely did a
bootcamp, and published some apps on their own, would you hire them and spend
your money (as opposed to Jeff Bezo's money) to better their lot in life? Or
would you hit delete the second their pathetic resume touched your inbox? At
least Jeff Bezos is making it possible for people to pay their rent and not
end up yet another homeless guy on the San Francisco sidewalk.

~~~
noicebrewery
"At least" is right; he is doing the very least he can. If they are working
for the wealthiest man on the planet he could afford to pay them a decent
wage.

------
capkutay
Slightly unrelated but there is something weirdly consistent about how Amazon
treats their workers and people who have to work with them. I remember just
exhibiting an AWS conference was the most time-intensive grueling event I've
ever worked in the tech industry.

Obviously not as hard as a factory-working job, but they hold the only event
in the industry that has you working from 7 am to 7 pm w/ no break if you want
to exhibit.

~~~
icelancer
...aren't most exhibits/conferences like this? All my trade shows events are
at least this grueling, and I no longer work in major IT.

~~~
misterprime
Ew, no. That's horrible. The company I work for does a lot of shows. I
generally do about 22/year. A common range is 9am to 5pm, but 10am to 4pm is
not unheard of. 8am to 6pm happens from time to time and feels really bad. I
think out of 60ish shows that I've done only one was 7am to 7pm.

~~~
capkutay
Yeah the best ones are 11 to 7. No one wants to network at 8 am before a bunch
of keynotes and presentations. Lunch and after event mixers are the best.

7 am to 7 pm was terrible. everyone was sleepy in the morning (pre caffeine)
and completely worn out by the happy hour/closing time.

------
SmileyRedBall
What would it effect Bezos Net Worth to double the warehouse operatives hourly
rate to $22?

~~~
honopu
not relevant, free market, they decide to work there, or not.

~~~
SmileyRedBall
> not relevant, free market, they decide to work there, or not ..

Yea they can decide to move to the next low-pay job, zero-hour contract, no
benefits, wages barely pays the rent, on food stamps ..

~~~
switch007
Exactly. The implicit argument is that there is always some magical high-
paying job with awesome benefits just round the corner if they just simply
make the simple decision of switching jobs and/or pulling themselves up by
their bootstraps. Right...

------
codeforces
996.icu did not only happen in China, it is happening everywhere on this
planet.

------
topspin
Off topic: I've been seeing Prime Day ad notifications in Brave. Thought that
was interesting; about the most 'mainstream' ad I've ever seen in Brave.

------
40acres
Marx predicted this with his theory on Entfremdung (alienation), in a system
of highly optimized division of labor those laborers are going to be for a
lack of a better word: bored.

~~~
thundergolfer
Also knew that capital is indifferent to the lived experience of labourers.

------
eatonphil
Thaneks

------
eatonphil
D and

------
eatonphil
s

------
jeanl
I've been boycotting amazon for a long time. Waiting for "democracy" to solve
the problems of unabated exploitative capitalism is a cop out. I put my money
where my mouth is. I pay more, wait longer, but shop at places where I know
people are treated _at least_ decently.

------
kome
way to go!

as consumers, we can help by boycotting amazon.

~~~
jonknee
Yea so that way they'll have no jobs at all!

~~~
deogeo
Or they will have jobs at other retailers, that will step in to take Amazon's
market.

~~~
jonknee
They'll be in for a rude awakening when they find out other fulfillment center
jobs are just as hard and pay equal or less.

~~~
deogeo
Other jobs are just as vulnerable to protests, strikes, and boycotts, so I
don't see why they couldn't all be pressured to treat workers better.

By your logic, workers should _never_ fight abuse, as they'll "just get
another job that's just as hard". But the history of labor shows this to be
false, and that collective action can achieve improvements.

------
f00zz
I'll get downvoted to hell for saying this, but $15/hr is upper middle class
pay here. I made less than that for much of my software development career...

~~~
thundergolfer
You’ll be getting downvoted because what you make “here” and it being upper-
middle class pay is not relevant at all to these workers, unless you want to
make a disingenuous suggestion that they move countries to “here”.

~~~
f00zz
Of course I understand that. I just find it very hard to sympathize with the
plight of someone making $15/hour. It seems high, even taking differences in
cost of living into account.

~~~
thundergolfer
> It seems high

Senior FAANG engineers make ~$200/hr. How does $15 seem at all high?

------
_zachs
"I have to pick an item every eight seconds, or 332 per hour, for a 10-hour
day"

No, no you dont

~~~
lonelappde
It's not a paradox as stated, since "or" has ambiguous meaning, but it does
look suspicious, since 3600sec/8sec is 450, and 3600sec/332 is about 10.8sec.

