
I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them - kanelbullar
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/amazon-warehouse-bernie-sanders
======
sokoloff
IMO, it is _never_ proper for the legislature to target an individual or
individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA,
IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who
have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the
force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.

If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain
wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of
social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so
long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold,
it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.

When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain
you've left the path of light and reason.

~~~
will_brown
>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual
company.

In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is
unconstitutional.

Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn’t exactly
sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being
proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the
government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon
there is a problem, but that isn’t likely.

Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to
subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of
20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem.
Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer
moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.

Shouldn’t lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow
certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate
welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen
loopholes? I don’t think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying
how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are
not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re-
evaluated.

~~~
faster
The idea of employees receiving food stamps seems like a clear case of
manipulating the system. But I think there is more nuance than the 20%/$14B
numbers describe.

Imagine a single mom who wants to be home when her kids get home from school.
She's working part time, and not making enough to feed her family. Who is
responsible for her shortfall?

In a community where Walmart is a big employer, many people may work part time
and one consequence of that is that more people have jobs. Walmart benefits
from that but so do those employees, even when they don't make enough to eat
well.

Sure, the system can obviously be manipulated. Yes, people (and company
leaders) make bad choices. Who decides who pays?

~~~
geezerjay
I woukd also add that it's hardly reasonable or desirable to dump on employers
the responsibility of providing wellfare assistance. If the people,
collectively, don't want to provide that service through state institutions,
why should they dump that responsibility on someone who thought it would be a
good idea to creatr jobs in a town?

------
Rotdhizon
A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers
fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take
down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their
limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of
the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in
these cases though, they are at least treated like humans. The atmosphere at
some of these Amazon warehouses serves to dehumanize the workers. You are not
a person, you are an object that is expected to obey very strict rules like a
dog. The management at these warehouses is even worse, because it's often very
abusive people who wind up in those positions.

~~~
grecy
So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this
treatment is legal?

Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their
workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.

~~~
LitFan
As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of
Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years.

The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that
they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only
afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their
expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people.

Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and
that's what's happening here.

Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing
poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to
maximize profits.

If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most
lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class
would be unaffected.

~~~
grecy
> _If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most
> lower to middle class people would drop substantially_

I see so many discussions in US politics that go around and around and bend
over backwards to never, _ever_ propose the extremely simple and obvious
solution....

(...drum roll...)

Companies simply lower profits.

Conditions for the workers go up with better conditions & higher pay. The
prices of products and services need not change, so consumers are not worse
off.

It appears that what I'm saying is tantamount to blasphemy in the US, nobody
is even willing to suggest lowering corporate profits as one possible option
with associated pros and cons.

~~~
LitFan
Lowering profits means reduced shareholder value and a lower market
capitalization. Every company is interested in providing as much value to
shareholders as possible.

I don't know all the ins and outs, but I believe public trading and
shareholders are to blame here.

And again - the middle to upper middle class people who rely on returns from
their investments in companies to support their standard of living think the
company-shareholder relationship is entirely healthy.

A shareholder provides no value to the good or service being delivered, they
exist only to make profit off a transaction they have no stake in.

My views here could be totally off. I welcome discussion on the topic.

~~~
snarfy
It's not that they are interested in providing as much value possible - they
are legally mandated. [1]

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co).

~~~
jcranmer
That case doesn't mean what most people who bring it up want it to mean,
particularly as has been interpreted by 100 years of intervening case law. In
that case, Henry Ford had more or less admitted that he was attempting to
screw over specific shareholders.

As it is applied in modern practice, a corporate officer merely has to
articulate a rationale of why his/her actions benefit the shareholders. For
example, deciding to double every worker's salary, on the basis that it would
improve morale and productivity, could be seen as ultimately benefiting
shareholders, even if it tanks profits and dividends in the short-term.

Pretty much the only way you could actually get the Dodge v Ford case invoked
in precedent is to have someone on the stand admit that he/she was trying to
screw over shareholders (which is basically what Henry Ford did, and why he
lost the case), which should be impossible if that person has competent
representation.

------
archi42
That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It
might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes
big enough for a change of policy.

~~~
LitFan
Why is this downvoted? The only way to make this change is for people to
boycott the service.

~~~
swarnie_
I'm not even sure why people work there. The warehouses are universally known
to be shitty places but people sign up anyway.

Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or
pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?

~~~
maxxxxx
A lot of people don't have other options so they take whatever they can get in
order to survive. Why don't victims of domestic abuse leave immediately but
stay for years?

~~~
swarnie_
> Why don't victims of domestic abuse leave immediately but stay for years?

Yeah never understood that one either if i'm honest.

~~~
PostPost
When Kanye West publicly wondered if slaves in the United States made a
"choice" to stay in slavery for hundreds of years, he was rightly mocked for
being a moron.

It's pretty depressing to see the same lack of empathy and critical thinking
on hn.

------
ElBarto
"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to
pay their workers higher wages."

Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual
root cause here.

If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage
still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and
those who set them... Politicians.

~~~
xamuel
Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps.

Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers
whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces
would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them?

This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare
was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make
jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less
and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to
do welfare.

~~~
adjkant
> Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food
> stamps.

Revised:

Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food
stamps without housing.

In order for the not working stipulation to work, the social safety net would
actually have to be expanded to cover housing as well, since I would much
rather have a job where I can have housing and ramen every single meal than
slightly better food but homeless.

~~~
xamuel
Thanks, I edited my last paragraph to say "welfare" instead of "food stamps"

------
nemo44x
The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong
case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for
it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually
but it's not as close as people think.

This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.

~~~
free652
Amazon can afford to close warehouses where workers are trying to unionize.
Walmart does the same:

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-
ove...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-
activism/)

~~~
FullMetalBitch
How are the conditions through Europe? I know they went on strike or were
about to in Spain, any news from other countries?

~~~
apexalpha
Germany did as well. I wish Bezos the best of luck if he thinks the EU unions
are as easy to beat as the American ones.

~~~
xyzzyz
That’s why Amazon already operates a handful, and opening new warehouses in
Poland. Amazon doesn’t even sell in Poland, everything sorted and packed in
Poland is shipped back to Germany. Beating EU unions is very easy, you simply
move to the next town over the border.

------
andrewla
There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target.

One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing
bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The
latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage
floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire
employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same
wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a
higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet
their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing
worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.

The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called
SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure
how to interpret it.

Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is
there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those
who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary
source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2]
chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able
to get information for.

Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it
ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous,
because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest
strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or
even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that
their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same
total spend.

[1] [https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-
states...](https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states/)

[2] [https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...](https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-enrollees-647x1024.png)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called
> SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not
> sure how to interpret it.

You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the
left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness.
Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public
authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the
feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.

~~~
andrewla
> corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness

Is there anything about Amazon being a corporation that really touches on
this, as opposed to their simply being an employer? I feel like an analogy
like this is of limited utility anyway. It's too easy to point out all the
myriad ways that the existing system is different from feudalism, and it's
unclear whether the negative aspects of feudalism continue to apply after
having undergone such a radical transition.

> Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public
> authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the
> employer to whom employees are bound.

I mean, isn't the point of feudalism actually the former -- that the public
authority (the feudal lords) address the basic needs? It is much easier to
switch to a different employer than it is to switch to a different public
authority. So it seems like what you are advocating is a return to feudalism,
rather than trying to remove it.

~~~
merpnderp
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're saying the
modern welfare state is feudalism.

~~~
andrewla
I think comparing anything in this conversation to feudalism is an empty
rhetorical device. A metaphor or analogy can be useful when it motivates a
proposed solution or underlying cause, but in this case it's being used as a
vacuous claim in order to create a sense of guilt by association -- "hey, this
thing is like feudalism, and therefore bad, because feudalism is bad".

------
geggam
If you have a business in a country and cannot afford to pay your workers high
enough wages that they can afford to live without society subsidizing them.
Then you cannot afford to run your business and are stealing money from the
society you are in.

This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect.
Their employers are the welfare bums.

If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough
to live.

~~~
jnordwick
It isn't the businesses fault that people don't have high margin skills. There
effort should be on improving workforce skill and productive. Not villianising
those who employ them.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You are assuming they don’t have the skills and that hiring is a perfect, fair
process. This is not so.

There is clear evidence that even something as simple as being black might
prevent someone being rejected over a less skilled white applicant.

------
devit
The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal
basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't
provide an equivalent payment.

If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to
work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to
either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much
less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).

Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what
about those who can't find work?

~~~
EpicEng
>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an
equivalent payment.

Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit
freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

~~~
devit
I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no
matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on
society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good
standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a
right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become
criminals and harm others.

The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but
are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially,
so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have
an abortion).

That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't
or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required
anyway.

~~~
EpicEng
>the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have
an abortion

Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for
stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so
because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see
any positive outcome from a government telling people under which
circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights
(e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not
going to be there any time soon.)

------
unstatusthequo
My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses.
Then people will complain they lost their jobs...

~~~
docker_up
Full automation is likely impossible. Ask Elon Musk about his problems with
trying to fully automate Tesla production.

~~~
y-c-o-m-b
Full automation is not necessary. That's one of the easiest oversights I've
ever seen in the business world.

I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance
testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They
were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount
- because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we
could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people,
they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just
common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the
goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people
doing manual work.

------
gagege
Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When
the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair
trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after
all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop
working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.

The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in
and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps,
etc."

Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut
corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."

So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25
back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job
because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.

~~~
archagon
"Why does everyone ignore the fact that <selling your kidneys> is voluntary?"

Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they
are "fair".

~~~
LyndsySimon
I'll take that bait.

What exactly is immoral about selling one's kidneys? Do individuals not own
themselves? Are they capable of using or disposing of their own property as
they see fit?

If your argument is that people who are forced into such decisions by economic
necessity are not capable of making rational decisions, then what criteria do
you use to determine if someone is able to make such decisions for themselves?
If they fail to meet that bar... who makes those decisions for them?

~~~
jahaja
Why do you think it matters if a _forced_ decision is _rational_ or not?

------
jnordwick
Umm... None of his complaints are about pay, which is what Stop BEZOS act's
largest piece.

The article is a massive non-sequitor.

------
llamataboot
You get the society that your systems incentivize. There may very well be a
perfect version of capitalism and a free market that allows for free movement
of employees between firms and a virtuous circle. Instead, we see a vicious
spiral of incentivizing externalities (including treating workers like a
never-ending powerless resource you can run into the ground and break and then
find new ones) and a person with more money than most of his laborers put
together.

Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of
having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does
really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global
standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially
when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't
think we'll solve this.

(Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could
opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
What's funny is that the system encourages this society and those who are able
to take full advantage of it become so rich they are able to completely opt
out. The goal of capitalism, of supply and demand, labour and capital, is to
have so much that all goods and services are within your grasp for no effort
or time.

------
0xmohit

        Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took
        a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite
        notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift
        that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the
        doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how
        they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished
        people for being ill. “It’s what Amazon have always done,” he
        replied blandly.

------
bensonn
A few unrelated points-

1\. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research
for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously
going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six
months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is
would be bad marketing for a boring book.

2\. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace.
These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in
Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart,
etc.

3\. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make
$1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots
of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay.

4\. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on
Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to
pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This
isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me.

5\. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This
isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things.

Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am
not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and
satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that
I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills
with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too
hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car
insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay
any of my bills or give me an allowance.)

$1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can
live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of
debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst
scenario.

------
paulus_magnus2
FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the
decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers
beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager
wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top
down opression.

~~~
camtarn
From all the stories I've heard, it seems to be a combination of the two: most
of the really inhumane stuff comes from local managers rather than global
policy. However, those managers are just acting to meet unrealistic targets of
their own, and when they're reported, nobody above them in the hierarchy seems
to care.

------
ousta
I guess people just realized that blue collar jobs were horrible? Guess what
it is same for many other of those jobs , construction, healthcare, army,...

~~~
LyndsySimon
It's significantly more difficult in some cases.

I grew up (and have moved back to) a very poor area. I've always been a nerd,
but had some mental health issues after high school that led to the loss of my
college scholarship and I spent several years afterward working traditional
blue collar jobs - stocking, loading and unloading trucks, farm labor,
construction, electrical, etc.

It was a rough time in my life, but I can honestly say I'm thankful for it. It
played a big part in making me who I am, and it's always somewhat shocking to
see how much the perception of those around me now who have never experienced
such things differs from the reality of most of the country.

I can only assume that my own conception of how things are elsewhere in the
world is similarly incorrect. I look forward to getting to the point in my my
family and financial life where I can spend some time traveling and seeing how
others live first-hand.

------
perfunctory
How can anyone be so naive as to believe the bill would target a single
company.

------
la6470
TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book
to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to
market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an
exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply
resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn’t it? Why is
minimum wage still so low and why are all political parties not coming
together to raise it?

~~~
wetpaws
Just because you don't like it it does not mean this is not true.

~~~
zaroth
That’s just a jab with zero informational content.

It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author’s book on
low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so.

I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the
warehouses, but it’s really hard to find a neutral source who doesn’t either
have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind.

I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should
be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog-
piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.

------
dreamache
Do you want to pay more for Amazon products? Because that's what you'll get if
Mr. Socialist Sanders has his way.

------
_zachs
"Stop Bezos Act"...are you kidding me? If you support a bill dedicated to
targeting a single company...please get out of government.

