Sounds like an FMLA violation. Did you specifically say you would be taking leave? Not already on a "performance improvement" plan of any sort? Was anyone else let go on Friday?
I don't know how hard this sort of thing is to litigate, "at will" employment covers a lot of abuses, and honestly why would you want to stay at an employer who treats you like this? Probably best to spend your energy finding a new job.
Edit to add: You could report this to the Department of Labor. Not sure you'd personally get any restitution but if your employer was willing to do this kind of thing, you are probably not the only one they have screwed over. If an employer has a record of complaints they might get audited which could cost them a lot in penalties if they are violating the law.
FMLA only covers companies with 50 or more employees.
A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.
Dno. The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes, it’s beautiful, the air and water are clean, and so on.
Everywhere has plenty of things to complain about. I’d like to spend less in taxes, always.
But at least it does feel, objectively, like we live in a mostly lovely place that actually does protect employees, have access to great healthcare, great roads, great charging infrastructure (relative to the rest of the US) and so on.
Anecdotal, but I have driven across a majority of US states, from Florida to Alaska (and also, on both the East and West sides of Canada) and haven't noticed any strong correlation between the quality of the roads and how high a states taxes are.
Did you drive between Texas - Louisiana? It is a massive difference almost immediately. You go from 55mph top speed limit with many potholes in LA to smooth 75mph Texas roads. Texas roads are much better and I have heard the same opinion many times from people making that drive. Louisiana makes their roads cheaper by making them much more thin, and they don’t get repaired often in rural areas.
That might be part of it, but far and away the main reason for that is to offset the state’s ability to tout about having no income tax.
There’s a list floating around by some personal finance blog that ranks the states based on effective tax rate across most taxes citizens are subject to and Texas consistently ends up remarkably high on that list due to the other taxes being relatively high.
Texas is essentially the personification of a low sticker price with hidden fees (e.g., “starts at $0”).
There's probably a lot of noise in the data. Off the top of my head, climate (whether roads are exposed to freeze-thaw cycles) and population density/clustering (how many miles of road do you need to maintain per person), are probably more strongly correlated with quality than taxation levels.
Since you mentioned Florida, the roads go from good to bad as soon as you cross the border into Alabama, which is a really interesting experience on the interstate. But yes, the roads are bad in Deep South states, although the taxes aren’t really that low either (just people don’t make much money to get much out of them).
For a state that often bemoans the federal government and its out of control spending, Texas takes an impressive amount of funds and puts it into a very high-quality and modern interstate system.
Texas will receive over $27 billion (with a B) over the next ~5 years in federal funding for highways and bridges alone. $10 billion was allocated across 2022-2023. Many of their roads are quite nice and only going to improve. Thanks, Uncle Sam!
Texas has high property taxes. It's actually not a low tax state as measured by overall tax burden. Texas is also very proud of its massive, well-resourced public schools (and their football teams!), and pours a lot of tax revenue into them.
It depends on your income since income taxation in California is extremely graduated. If you make less than $60-70k, you’ll pay less in CA, otherwise you’ll do better in TX.
I don’t notice much going between the two on I-80, well except you go from pretty straight desert roads into a freaking mountain range. Are mountains involved in the border at I-15 also?
California is rated poorly on roads on average because they have a lot of rural/mountainous terrain to cover. In the cities where most people live, the roads are actually pretty good.
I’ve driven track cars with bone shaking suspension from LA to Vegas and honestly don’t recall any difference.
Funny, because it's in the Las Vegas newspapers every six months or so how the mayor of Las Vegas and the governor of Nevada are always begging California to upgrade its side of I-15.
Almost every month there are 14-hour traffic jams on Sunday night as the SoCal crowd scurries home only to hit the bottleneck at the California border where I-15 goes from six lanes to four, then twists its way through the mountains.
I've driven it many dozens of times in the last ten years, and it's well known among people who live in Nevada.
Maybe Nevada could provide the money for it? Building roads on flat ground is easier than a freeway through the mountains is it not? And the primary beneficiary of the road is Vegas? Why would I want California taxes to subsidize Vegas gamblers? A road that is totally fine except Sunday night? Think about the two bits of road you are comparing: they are not representative.
Cross from IL to WI on 94. The toll road ends and the reads are so much better. Of course WI will pull over any speeder with out of state plates. They even take credit cards to pay your fine on the spot.
I grew up in the suburbs. My town had pretty much no commercial base. The next town over had a huge mall. They had much better roads, a much better library, a sports complex, a swimming pool complex, the list goes on. It was obvious to a 10 year old how much of a difference the tax base made.
Of course, we just got a library card in their district and I enjoyed the use of the nicer library as well. But still.
I noticed an immediate degradation in surface quality on the interstate when I crossed into Alabama. Aren't the states responsible for upkeep using federal dollars? Some states are better than others at this.
Initial roadway construction is using primarily federal dollars, but long-term maintenance is usually primarily funded by the state or local municipality.
Tell that to Mississippi which has s*t roads and no winter freezing/thawing or salt to consider. Broke ass red states can barely afford to keep their roads passable for the most part. There are a couple of exceptions where the states are willing to starve their children to keep the roads up, but most red states fail at both feeding kids and maintaining roads. If it wasn't for the cash infusion from the well off blue states, the red states would literally be third world.
It truly depends within CA. San Diego or suburbs of LA? It's pristine. Bay Area? The roads flood with the slightest bit of rain and have potholes the size of a basketball.
My experience is that the Florida roads are significantly better than the roads in the bay area. And Florida has no income tax and lower sales taxes than California.
Bay Area, but I’m from NYC, so my standard for “bad road” is relatively high - there are a lot of potholes right now from the rain, but in general they get fixed quickly, the roads are wide and many-lanes, and generally don’t do insane things like loop back on themselves or anything like that.
I disagree with this. I live in SF and the roads range from terrible to just-ok. And not just in the city; US-101 is just kinda ok (despite vaguely-regular maintenance), and many local roads I see in nearby smaller towns and cities (South SF, Daly City, Belmont, San Mateo) are -- at best -- just ok. Similar situation when I drive north toward Sonoma.
A major issue in SF proper is that crews are constantly digging up parts of roads to work on pipes or whatever, and then patch them in a haphazard, crappy way. Roads get fully resurfaced rarely. As an example, there's a super nasty patched and re-patched and re-patched and re-patched section of 18th St (between Minnesota and Tennessee) that has been a nightmare for at least 4 years now.
A section of Tennessee between 18th and 19th was resurfaced about a year ago (in part because there was building construction along the road that did heavy damage), but just this past week they were digging up a large section in the center of the road to do some work underneath, and when they patched it up, they as usual did a crap job, so the road sucks again.
I grew up in New Jersey (80s) and Maryland (90s), and the roads were much better maintained in both of those places, Maryland especially.
I agree SF has shit roads. I do not find that to be the case almost anywhere else in CA.
I’ll put it this way too: while I’m mindful of potholes, generally, I have yet to have a single issue popping any of my 21” thin sidewall summer tires on my >5500lb EV.
My counterparts in the South have popped between 2 and 10 depending on who you ask. The answer each time is: hit a pothole.
Some of that’s driving. Some of it is also just the roads. They’re far from perfect. But they’re better than most other states.
> The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes
I live in San Francisco and absolutely disagree with this. The roads are garbage. And lest we think that's just a city thing, whenever I leave the city and drive out on local and state roads they range from garbage to ok-ish.
My family moved to Maryland when I was a teenager, and the roads there were pristine (90s, not sure about nowadays). It felt like some section of some road or highway near me was always being resurfaced.
> Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California's 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.
Obviously there are more than two states, but it’s not so simple.
Plus, someone’s got to pay for everything:
> [California] receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid, according to its review of a 2015 New York Comptroller study.
Bizarrely, even experts miss this obvious fact. If not income taxes, then how does government pay the bills? Income taxes are usually the most progressive tax, so no income tax usually means less wealthy people pay more. If government spends less, what services are cut?
Yeah it's very funny hearing my dad talk about how nice it is to have no income tax in Washington (he's a dentist). But when you tell him that the relatively higher income tax is worse for poor people he doesn't seem to agree. Washington is certainly a progressive state on the whole, but the taxation is horrible.
Poor people spend more of their income on things that have sales tax. In other words, someone who is worried about their 401k is probably spending less of their income each month by percentage compared to someone living paycheck to paycheck.
What solution does that offer? People have been debating what to keep and cut for generations, as well as ways to improve spending; I don't see any low-hanging fruit or big improvements there.
Really? If people weren't forced to pay as much taxes as they have today they would have more resources to invest in what really matters to them instead of having a bunch of bureacrauts wasting it.
> I don't see any low-hanging fruit or big improvements there.
There are tons of low-hanging fruits, at least in South America, the issue is that government doesn't exist to provide services and seek the interests of the population. Government is just a big mafia and things are corrupt and inneficient by design because their true goal is to fill their pockets.
You see libraries and schools barely having enough funding to function while consumers spend thousands on entertainment. I don't really trust the average Joe to know "what really matters". Or at least not realize it matters until it's too late.
Not to say government spending doesn't have its share of inefficiencies and outright corruption. But they at least have some checks to keep it from going off thr deep end (both literally and socially via elections).
My point exactly. They barely get funding by people whose job is to allocate and get people to fund them. How many will actively think to fund these institutions if optional? And how much would they fund? And to which schools? Can't you see all the emergent issues?
>Average Joe live paycheck to paycheck. It doesn't have disposable income.
Average Joe makes 70k and pays 1300 in rent. Average Joe is fine, problem is half the people by definition aren't average and average is only a decent living with no kids and two incomes.
The truly poor Joe isn't taxed much or at all. This would affect them the least.
Are you surprised I'm just not accepting the trope as God-given truth? Get used to it. :)
> If people weren't forced to pay as much taxes as they have today they would have more resources to invest in what really matters to them instead of having a bunch of bureacrauts wasting it.
And they'd have less services provided by government.
Anyway, your claim is a trope, but let's actually examine it:
People want government to do certain things; government does things that "really matter". Nobody gets exactly what they want from anything - the restaurant, their family members, employers, etc., or from government.
I know the word 'bureaucrat' has been demonized, but that's not evidence (in fact, it's evidence IME of right-wing propaganda). I personally know some government bureaucrats well, and they are serious professionals, completely committed to their job and to public service.
Government waste is long been a trope of the right-wing propaganda, as a way to persuade people to cut taxes (for the wealthy) and reduce government's influence (which democratically counters that of powerful people), but I've never seen evidence that government is more wasteful than other sizeable institutions - if you've seen the inside of a mid-sized corporation, you would recognize it. Same with churches, non-profits etc etc.
If you have evidence, that's one thing. Just repeating these claims doesn't make them true. It makes them ripe to be challenged.
> There are tons of low-hanging fruits, at least in South America, the issue is that government doesn't exist to provide services and seek the interests of the population. Government is just a big mafia and things are corrupt and inneficient by design because their true goal is to fill their pockets.
Who is there only to provide services? Don't businesses also want to fill their pockets? Also, we are grouping all of South America, from Columbia to Argentina, into one broad generalization?
> Who is there only to provide services? Don't businesses also want to fill their pockets?
Business don't put me in jail if I don't buy their services. Choice, freedom is an important distinction. Also this is nonsense because taxes are a one-way obligation, government has no obligation to provide services just because you paid taxes. There's a distinction between taxes and fees.
> Government waste is long been a trope of the right-wing propaganda, as a way to persuade people to cut taxes (for the wealthy) and reduce government's influence (which democratically counters that of powerful people), but I've never seen evidence that government is more wasteful than other sizable institutions - if you've seen the inside of a mid-sized corporation, you would recognize it. Same with churches, non-profits etc etc.
I have experience working for big-sized organizations including NGOs. The bigger the more inefficient. And you know what are the biggest organizations in the world? Government. e.g. California budget for 24-25 is $291.5 billion.
The truly wealthy are able to circumvent high taxes. They can have fiscal residencies in tax heavens along dozens of other loopholes to avoid taxes.
> If you have evidence, that's one thing. Just repeating these claims doesn't make them true. It makes them ripe to be challenged.
Honestly I think your worldview is limited to "Democratic" vs "Republican" parties. There's ample evidence. Historically socialism and big government lead to poverty. This is explained both by economical and political theory.
I lived in Texas making six figures as a SWE. Texas was not far better tax wise. Texas does a lot to ding you in ways that aren't taxes, and buying a home that doesn't involve an hour and a half commute one way is unrealistic.
Yeah. I totally get why people conceptually hate the idea of paying taxes, even if my values lead me to a very different conclusion. That said, most of the arguments I've encountered about places with higher taxes being worse places to live strike me as either glib and uninformed, or in bad faith. That's not a partisan-specific folly by any measure, but it's a folly nonetheless.
It is an honest argument. No point in a secure job that can't even pay rent. But people with families can't exactly engage in multi job hustles and expect to remain a healthy unit.
It depends on how high the taxes are and what protection is offered exactly. The extra protections I would get in California are not worth nearly enough for it to be worth for me.
Totally agree. When taxes are the highest in the country and take almost 40% of your income and the only people who own houses are the ones that bought them 20-50 years ago that is very employee unfriendly.
Now, the housing market is not great but again, greatly overstating your case is not an effective strategy, and it isn’t a uniquely California problem even though prop 13 makes it worse there than many other places.
Show me a married couple both working in tech in California which is what this website is for and show me their average tax rate. It will be almost 40% at the lower end of this income range. This stuff is not rocket science.
Then do the sales tax as well. I’m not exaggerating anything. This is why my family and so many others moved from the state during COVID.
Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
>Show me a married couple both working in tech in California
I didn't know everyone on this site met their spouses at work. Statistics say that's been dwindling for 15 years or so. Then you account for the 20-30% of women in tech (and the fact that not every woman wants to marry a techie)...
Still, congrats on your situation.
>Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
Well, I'm single (with worse rates) and CA is 9.3% for my bracket + 24% federal. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. Sounds more like a housing issue than a tax issue.
It's also why I live out in a suburb. I know people online these days glamorize walkable cities, but California right now isn't very "walkable", even if we could redesign everything tomorrow. Lot of other deep seeded issues to solve first.
You’re the one making the claim, why can’t you show us your calculations? I can’t reproduce your numbers unless you’re assuming a truly massive real-estate assessment.
These are the rates and includes a over million 1% tax for mental support.
California 13.3%
Hawaii 11%
New York 10.9%
New Jersey 10.75%
District of Columbia 10.75%
Oregon 9.9%
Minnesota 9.85%
Massachusetts 9%
Vermont 8.75%
Wisconsin 7.65%
Tax burden is a different measurement including property. Parent poster has no property.
So, yes, if you’re making millions per year in taxable income, California’s top rate is higher. That is not a concern for anyone outside of the 99.5th percentile, which is uncommon even in FAANG circles.
Tax burden is also the best metric to use because the money has to come from somewhere. If you’re trying to decide where to live, looking at state income tax only is as foolish as only looking at housing purchase prices without also considering your commute, utility, and maintenance expenses.
> So, yes, if you’re making millions per year in taxable income, California’s top rate is higher.
But isn't that what "top rate" meant in the first place? It doesn't mean "median".
Seems like you're moving the goal posts over a few percentage points. Whether it's 12% or 14.4%[0], it's very high.
And at some point those very wealthy and highly mobile people start thinking, "maybe we should crunch the data and do what other wealthy people are doing: find a state with a more reasonable tax bite."
Remember that I was correcting someone who hyperbolically claimed California “taxes are the highest in the country and take almost 40% of your income” in a thread claiming that taxes were high enough to make California employee-unfriendly. Whether it’s the 2023 or 2024 rate, they were arguing triple the actual rate and very, very, very few employees in the state are paying even that top rate. Even the WSJ editorial board–hardly neutral–clearly state that this only applies to people making over $1M a year (the top 1% starts around $550k, so that’s pretty elite!).
If you want to accuse anyone of shifting goalposts, start with the people trying to portray the concerns of the top .1% as employee issues.
I find it weird that people quote top-tax-bracket rates and try to use tha tto directly compare state taxes.
That's nonsensical. You need to compare the effective tax rate that people pay.
When I was making bank at tech, sure, I was in CA's top tax bracket. But I never paid that rate across all my income. My effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.
> But I never paid that rate across all my income. My effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.
This seems to be a strangely common cognitive pitfall - I’ve seen so many people talk about progressive tax rates that way, even claiming that a raise would cost them money, and it’s not like this is a secret or requires advanced math skills.
But it does require thinking about more than just the headline. A lot of people are lazy (I don’t mean that as a moral issue, just literally) and don’t want to think for themselves, so often they simply parrot.
We bought a home 11 miles from the Googleplex in 2009 and paid it off in 15 years and did it on a single salary working in non-profit tech. Your assumptions here are deeply flawed or your reasoning is broken.
So, two years after the nearly existential crash of 2007 and only one year after Sequoia's famous "RIP Good Times" memo, when housing prices were at their absolute lowest and investment in the Bay Area was at its lowest ebb since at least the dot-com crash.
He was responding to the absurd assertion that nobody has bought a house in California in two decades. It’s not cheap but that’s pure hyperbole, and Asa was reminding him of that.
Yes this is one of the risks of working for a very small employer. A lot of the normal rules don't apply. But if a company is big enough to have "HR" I'm guessing they likely are bigger than 50 employees.
> I don't know how hard this sort of thing is to litigate, "at will" employment covers a lot of abuses, and honestly why would you want to stay at an employer who treats you like this? Probably best to spend your energy finding a new job.
It's not very hard to imagine why someone who is expecting a new child would want to continue to receive a paycheck and health insurance.
At least it has gone to court, and she has won at this point. It's not clear to me whether Magda gets paid for the time between her dismissal and her job being reinstated.
I'll continue to boycott Amazon. Earlier in the week I spent about an hour sleuthing the web to find an obscure item that wasn't from Amazon or China, finally found it at a local supplier.
> I announced to HR that my wife is expecting (Tue) and was fired on Friday.
Did you expect this might happen, maybe the baby is due very soon?
I discovered recently that some ebay sellers dropship via amazon. Unfortunately I don't think you can tell until you get tracking info, when it's too late to cancel - they are tracked via 'aquiline' which just seem to operate some server api that wraps amazon tracking numbers into ebay tracking numbers, and the delivery is from Amazon. But the actual product page just says 'other 24-hour courier'
I can’t speak to this case, but generally low wage workers are paycheck to paycheck and so get jobs while they wait for the system to do their thing. They only get paid for loss of income, so it actually subtracts what they earned in that time and so by working in the meantime the damages paid are much smaller. There are no punitive damages or anything.
Just to clarify: was "fired without cause" (worked "at will" which most of full-time employments are in the US). By asking why they were getting rid of me I heard the pharse "for no good reason, really" like a broken record. This was enough indication that it was clearly in regards to my talk with HR a few days prior.
Also, during my announcement to HR about my wife's circumstances, I remarked I wanted to take some time off to be there for wifey & baby.
The company was 90% lawyers so just in case I wanted to proceed legal action against them, their Armada of lawyers made a possible follow-up rather unsavory.
> their Armada of lawyers made a possible follow-up rather unsavory
Understood, but you should also know that EPLI deductibles are often in the mid-to-high five figures usually, which is an incentive for the employer to settle for anything less than that deductible.
Point being, if you get a lawyer, threaten to make a stink etc and are generally showing you're serious about fighting this abuse, settlement to the tune of 20-70k is a reasonable expectation. IANAL etc
Sadly, and I say this with all the love for my Polish brethren and sisters, Poland and many Eastern European countries still have some catching up to do.
The silver lining, however, is that these countries make significant headway at a steady pace.
Especially the countries that are part of the EU are constantly improving, partly because they have to adhere to the EU-wide minimum baseline.
So I've got faith they'll get there.
But this lagging behind, for lack of a better world, is also, in part, why many US companies that want to expand into the EU set up bases in countries like Poland.
It's generally cheaper and is the “least bad” from the corporations’ perspective regarding labor rights.
Do you have a source describing how common retaliation is in the US? I always thought it was actually pretty rare.
Sorry you lost your job, but I find it difficult to believe that it is solely due to you announcing the arrival of your child. Paternity leave is rarely more than 2 weeks in the US, I can't imagine a company preferring to deal with potential law suit instead of just living 2 weeks without an employee.
I expect most retaliation goes unreported, so going to be difficult to get any numbers that are not full of assumptions. Even if you know someone fired you for X, going to be hard to prove it: time, money, conflicting accounts, potential reputational damage for suing employer.
In the US too you get paternity leave, it's very fishy to see someone claim they got fired for announcing that their partner is expecting. This is a massive liability.
What parallel universe are you in? There is no guaranteed paternity leave in the US. Some states may have it, and a few employers offer it, but it’s in no way a right.
In general, it is better for US employees to plan as though they had no rights (especially if they can't afford a good lawyer or wait months/years for the NLRB to process a claim, and even then only during a Democratic administration). Of course they actually have a few rights, but much fewer than in European and many Asian countries, and the enforcement/protection is pretty minimal and delayed. Most employees will just get trampled on with no real avenue for recourse, especially if they have bills due in a week or two.
Presumably because he wanted to take paternaty leave after his child was born. Also why wouldn’t you tell coworkers you’re having a baby? It’d be really weird to keep that a secret.
So back when my team was smaller, we used to do birthdays. Lure the coworker into a conference room on some pretense or another, then bring out a cake.
Of course, once it became routine, it's rather hard to surprise someone -- any irregular meetings on your birthday are extremely suspect.
So for one coworker's birthday, a week after we'd just done another's, I scheduled JACK'S BIG ANNOUNCEMENT on his birthday. He, of course, was extremely suspicious, and assumed it was a front for his birthday.
I made my announcement, brought out the champagne (well, sparkling Catawba), went out into the hallway to get a corkscrew, and came back in with the birthday cake.
So he had the whiplash of, wait, is this not for my birthday after all, wait, if it is, then are you not having a baby? And I declined to clarify until after I started my paternity leave, and half my coworkers didn't believe it until after I brought the kiddo in to show off.
I can't parse what you wrote to figure out what you were celebrating, but whatever it is, this is my idea of a workplace nightmare. It's bad enough being forced to celebrate someone else's birthday, but it sounds like you're also forcing people to celebrate their own birthdays without their permission, and possibly forcing people to celebrate pregnancies and other personal events without their permission?
> but it sounds like you're also forcing people to celebrate their own birthdays without their permission
I've taken to telling people I don't have a birthday when asked, unless it's clearly for necessary record keeping; especially in a work context. I get a funny look, but whatever.
If I learn someone else has appropriated my birthday, I do let them know, and we can share private birthday greetings.
That is a lot of emotion and politics. How is it important to you? Is it really about birthdays? Relative to most things, IMHO they are pretty innocuous; YMMV of course.
Kind of harsh without context? I worked for a team that did this - putting your birthday on the spreadsheet was entirely optional, as well as attending any celebratory hallway things. Nobody was forcing anybody to do anything. If you had a conflict or was busy working, or just plain didn't want to participate, everybody understood and wouldn't mind.
FWIW I usually didn't participate nor did I let anybody know my birthday and I never felt excluded.
It's one thing to say "we're celebrating Bob's birthday so there's cake in the kitchen", or "we're going out to lunch for Jill's birthday". You should get Bob and Jill's permission before you do that, but if they're cool with it, then by all means. I can decide for myself if I want to participate, or make a polite excuse not to.
Throwing me a surprise birthday? I hate you. Inviting me to a meeting that I feel obligated to attend, only for it to be a surprise birthday? If it's for someone else, I'll just smile and pretend to enjoy it for the minimum socially-acceptable time and then bow out. If you did that for my birthday I would be pissed off. I'd still smile and pretend to enjoy it, but it would be excruciating torture for me.
And if you ever threw a party for me for anything more personal I wouldn't even smile and pretend, I'd make it publicly known how inappropriate it was.
It's cake and a break from work. Even if you hate every single person you work with with a burning passion, it's still cake and a break from work.
I can only understand this opinion if its some kind of forced event after or before work, or worse you're the employer and just want people making you money only. But getting paid to take an extra break and then scolding your coworkers seems a step too far
Since it's happening during work and between coworkers it's work.
I'd rather do actual work instead of pretending to be glad that coworkers are celebrating my birthday. Actually they aren't. For them "it's cake and a break from work".
So they basically have fun at my expense.
That's exactly why I always take a day off on my birthday. To do what *I* want to do on *MY* birthday.
And the cake part : sure, if you like bad food, don't care about your health and don't have allergies, that's perfect. But that's not everybody's case.
Having gone through a weight loss journey during my twenties, work was the only place where I felt pressure from other people to stop my efforts and join them in their trash food orgies.
So I completely understand where @caymanjim's comment is coming from.
I'm probably a miserable person, if you say so.
As a coworker, I'll go out of my way if you ask for help around work or personal issues.
But I will never impose on yourself something that is not directly related to our jobs.
You like having a party for your birthday at work? Awesome! If bosses are okay with that, have fun with all the other coworkers that share this same feeling!
But don't throw a party for anyone else without asking them their opinion about it first.
If you can't understand that different people have different expectations about basically everything, I can see why you are quick to qualify strangers as miserable.
>But I will never impose on yourself something that is not directly related to our jobs.
I see sentiments like this and understand why we lost the workplace as "the second place" in modern times. Part of it is corporate exhaustion, but others just walk into the ironwall by themselves.
It's half your waking life during biological peak of life. And very few people are working their dream jobs. People can help mitigate the lack of passion in the workplace. It's not my job to maximize the company productivity. I'm not getting any extra pay for working harder.
>If you can't understand that different people have different expectations about basically everything, I can see why you are quick to qualify strangers as miserable.
To be fair, this chain started with an experience and then a dismissive response about a different expectation and experience. It takes two...
I'm an IC, so no. I'm given a task or a module of tasks to investigate and solve them based on budget. I may give input, but rarely are the approaches I'm told to take after giving options nor approaches the most optimal nor quality route. Nowhere in the contract does it mention "maximize productivity", nor does it happen in practice.
Even if I was a manager, politics in the office would keep me from hiring the most optimal employee if I can't convince HR or whoever to cough up a bit more money to hire them. Nor would it let the manager relax the load on the most productive workers stuck in meetings so they can work. There's a lot more Theatre among the c class to make things look shiny to investors than there ever is among the workers.
So it's not literally nor figuratively my job. nor even my job de facto. It's not even the C class's job: the most productive is not necessarily the most profitable to begin with.
I understand where you're coming from, but please consider that not everyone is enjoying social situations the same way and to the same extent. For some people, being thrown into a surprise party as its main attraction is quite uncomfortable and outweighs the benefits of "cake and a break from work". It's more like "cake and a very exhausting kind of emotional work" for them.
They might not be much fun at such parties, yes; but telling them that they should enjoy them instead or that they are miserable people seems like a very unkind and unhelpful response to me.
This is outrageously inappropriate. Coworkers who are so willing to be cruel are exactly what makes me uncomfortable in social situations at work. Bullying is always inappropriate. Social interaction at work should be optional and consent should be obtained before revealing personal information. People have different preferences and those preferences should be respected. I can’t believe I even have to say that.
> It's cake and a break from work. Even if you hate every single person you work with with a burning passion, it's still cake and a break from work.
It’s not about hating your coworkers. It’s about social anxiety, professional conduct, and personal liberty. Don’t lie to me about the purpose of a meeting and don’t use my professional time for your personal entertainment. I have a life outside of work. I don’t appreciate wasting working time because I still have to do the work. Don’t interpret my discomfort in forced social situations as a personal insult.
> I can only understand this opinion if its some kind of forced event after or before work, or worse you're the employer and just want people making you money only.
It doesn’t matter what you understand. Your behavior is inappropriate. I doubt it was your intention to hurt anyone so take the feedback, adjust your behavior, and move on.
> But getting paid to take an extra break and then scolding your coworkers seems a step too far
I am paid a salary. The work has to get done. Social interaction isn’t free. I still have to find time to do the work.
This is the stuff of nightmares. I would take whatever amount of PTO necessary to avoid this abuse around my birthday. Did you at least ask before advertising personal information to coworkers? Surprise party suggests no consent was obtained.
Your gratitude is someone else’s abuse. I doubt you meant to cause harm but unsolicited celebrations hurt people. Please stop acting without consent. It’s never ok. You’re hurting people. Stop.
> I doubt you meant to cause harm but unsolicited celebrations hurt people.
I've never thrown a work party. But if my thanking or praising you is abuse then I feel this is a personal issue than a character flaw. Learn to take a compliment and learn to bow out gracefully. There's way too many impromptu abuses of your time and energy by corporate leeches for a random celebration of life to be considered torture.
You have completely misunderstood the meaning of the golden rule. “Treat others the way you wish to be treated” does not mean “subject others to your personal desires”. It means “respect the wishes of others as you would want them to respect yours.” You have no right to compel the behavior of anyone else.
> But if my thanking or praising you is abuse then I feel this is a personal issue than a character flaw. Learn to take a compliment and learn to bow out gracefully.
Please stop being a bully. You are hurting people with your behavior. Please stop hurting people.
HR are employer's cops and every cop-related advice applies, starting with "don't volunteer information". At least with managers in a big tech corp you have the same goal to pursue and failures to share. With HR it's either a script or a cop.
And with HR it can be the same. If the HR have the guidelines of making the employes happy - then you absolutely can share information with them, making planning easier - with the result of a better outcome for everyone. Like when the wife will give birth. "So hey, concratulations, good to know, so we can plan around it" - if it is a good company. If it is a company who don't give a damn and see every person as replacable in an instant, then this is a different scenario and the rule of not giving them anything does apply.
>And with HR it can be the same. If the HR have the guidelines of making the employes happy - then you absolutely can share information with them
It can be, but it requires a skill of reading the room and knowing nuances in a situation of information asymmetry. The combination of information asymmetry and hr people, being agents of the big corp and not caring about the outcome for you is what makes it problematic.
> you absolutely can share information with them, making planning easier
if they company has a clear policy and is known for following it -- sure. otherwise it's "x days off for personal reasons".
Yes it depends.
But the thing with a birth is, that the day is not clearly defined. Which is common knowledge and works in the companies I know(in germany though). With - when it is time, he needs to leaves that moment.
But when you say "x days off for personal reasons" - they would like a date.
Cynically speaking, HR is an abstraction layer between management and employees, sorry, 'resources'.
When I worked for a huge engineering multinational years ago, it showed time and time again that people went into HR with the best of intentions, but most were as time ground on disillusioned upon finding they were not, after all, employed to help other employees.
The good ones mostly left, the poor ones thrived. Sigh.
(That being said, I do believe HR has a purpose, ensuring (at least in theory) professional, correct and consistent treatment of employees.
Just don't make the mistake of believing they are on your side; they are not.
Well, HR staff are people like any other department, so as with all people there's always potential for asshole behaviour even in a company that generally encourages HR to be employee-friendly, and potential for someone to do a nice thing that's technically against HR policy in a shitty company. Not to mention that the abstracted layer above - whether the company has employee-friendly or employee-hostile policies when it comes to HR team - is also ultimately down to people with the same potential for good and bad.
"HR work for the company not for you, don't trust them" is a reasonable general rule considering the average HR department especially in large companies, but it's not a guarantee that all HR people, or even all HR teams' policies will be evil.
Agreed; I believe the tipping point is where the company becomes so large that you no longer know, or at least are familiar with the people you're working with.
I expect you are much more inclined to try to find a workable solution if the case at hand is Dave in accounting whose kid attends the same soccer practice your kid does than if he's just employee #628481.
The company gets the best bang for their buck if employees are reasonably happy, healthy and productive. So most of the time your interests and the company's should be aligned.
Why wouldn't you communicate ahead of time that you're going to be taking a chunk of time off in the near future, specifically for something so important?
I'm not clear on when exactly he let HR know, but the original post makes it seem like he let them know a week before. I think at least a couple months notice makes more sense depending on the duration of leave.
I read that as he told HR on Tuesday, and then was fired three days later, on Friday. Not that the wife was due the following Tuesday. We don't know how far out the due date was based on what OP said.
I agree that employees should give sufficient notice for something like that. But even if they don't, that's not grounds for firing. It might be grounds for disallowing the leave until the required notice period has passed, assuming that's documented and legally allowed.
To earthwalker99: You got downvoted to death because you called out downvotes against you, but to explain more issues with your argument: Capitalism is a system of organizing society based on private ownership of the means of economic production. You're saying capitalism is about prioritizing the rights to capital accumulation by the current holders of capital, which is one specific form of capitalism, often called crony capitalism.
Private ownership of the means of production is more orthogonal to workers rights. There are capitalist economics in countries with very strong workers rights and unions, but where the means of production are still privately owned. Capitalism is fully compatible with strong family and medical leave protections, even though those who own the means of production are disincentived in the short term from giving workers rights. The fact that the US is worse on workers rights isn't a problem unique to capitalism.
So called "right to work" laws that actually give employers the right to fire for no cause. As long as an employer doesn't say what the cause was, employers in those states can fire you for "no cause" even if the hidden reason would be an illegal cause if they stated it. It's only illegal if someone gets caught specifically saying the firing was because the employee is having a kid. Coincidences are not considered admissable evidence in those courts.
I think you’re conflating “at will employment” with “right to work”.
The first allows no-reason, no-notice termination of employment by both parties (which doesn’t really work - the employee usually needs income more than the employer needs a single employer).
> Those downvoting me for sharing the literal definition of capitalism should at least have the self-respect to defend themselves.
I downvoted because it is off-topic and very obvious flamebait, as simple as that.
No one downvoted you just for sharing the dictionary definition of capitalism, you woulda gotten plenty of upvotes for that exact same comment in a thread where it was actually relevant.
If "capitalism" is the reason that it's ok to fire someone because they're about to have a child, then capitalism is garbage and should be discarded.
Systems that prioritize money over humans are disgusting, and, sadly, we have far too many of them in modern society.
Note that we implicitly recognize this through law: there is no such thing as a "free market". Markets are regulated, and we have things like FMLA because we understand that capitalism is heartless, and if we allowed it free rein, we'd live in a dystopian society that no one except the wealthy elite would actually want.
Unfortunately, even with all that, we still don't control enough of capitalism's negative effects on people.
That's why I downvoted you. Also, don't complain about downvotes. That's against the HN guidelines, and will usually get you downvoted further; complaining about downvotes rarely leads to interesting discussion. If you're unsure why you're being downvoted, maybe that's your problem, not ours. No one lacks self-respect because they see an obviously-crappy comment, downvotes it, and moves on without "defending" their vote. The entire concept you are trying to push with that is nonsensical.
Retaliation is abundant in the US. What are you smoking?
If a company thinks it can get away with it, it will. Saving money is more important than a hypothetical, minuscule and temporary hit to their reputation. There will always be consumers looking for a bargain at any real cost, workers desperate for a pay check, and shareholders worshipping the bottom line.
Evidence for what, though? An absence of evidence is perhaps evidence that someone who is asserting something is happening didn't do their homework. But an absence of evidence is certainly not evidence that something is not happening. It might be persuasive enough to allow people to reasonably believe that something is not happening. But it's not evidence of such.
This is the tech bubble talking. Most big tech companies do treat their tech workers well...warehouse workers, not so much.
But for every big tech company there are thousands of smaller non-tech companies, where they do not treat employees well. Also common != majority.
Just read up on how Walmart treats their employees, for example. I just read an article earlier this week about Walmart systematically under-reporting OHSA violations, and retaliating against employees reporting workplace accidents to OHSA.
IDK if it's very common but it happens, especially at smaller companies who either don't know the rules or those who have gotten away with it in the past and think they are too small to get noticed.
Just recently here a restaurant was fined for not paying overtime by employing dishwashers and kitchen staff as "salaried" exempt employees.
At large companies with in-house legal and HR teams? It probably doesn't happen much, but even there they will know what they can get away with.
Its not "retaliation" as such, just that for many unskilled jobs having someone show up everyday is the main part of the job. If you want time off they can swap you for someone who'll be there.
I feel somewhat safe in believing that retaliation isn't common in tech companies (though it does happen sometimes). But I don't think I would feel safe assuming that generalizes to all jobs in the US.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was quite a lot of exploitation and retaliation at lower-skilled, lower-income jobs in the US.
Corporation don't and can't act. They are pieces of paper. It's people who do things, often evil things. Corporations are shields against accountability of these people. This protection for liability is the entire raison d'etre of corporations.
Any discussion about making things better has to focus on returning accountability to the people that do bad things. Without that, nothing will change.
They’re treated as persons because they’re owned by persons, and it’s a lot easier to refer to the legal fiction than it is to invoke the legal rights of all the owners (whoever they may be). A programmer should recognize a useful form of encapsulation.
The abstraction breaks under some circumstances. For instance, they get no voting rights (as voting can’t be done collectively by a group).
The problem is that they're afforded some important "person" rights, without many of the restrictions or responsibilities.
Corporate malfeasance is punished much more leniently than personal malfeasance. Fines are usually wrist-slaps (and treated as a cost of doing business), and it's very difficult to hold executives and board members personally accountable for what are ultimately their actions. And yes, corporations don't get votes, but they do get to have an outsized influence on the votes of others through campaign donations.
That's why it's reported, followed up and punished. And not in the cracks of history. Also let's note that he company doing this is a US company which doesn't really consider itself as subject to EU law.
misleading headline. "They fired me for allegedly taking pictures or videos — but they didn’t know, because no one saw it — when the body of Dariusz, a colleague of mine who had died during his shift, was moved to the hearse, which they considered inconsistent with their values and social standards."
The English is a little confusing - "they fired me for allegedly taking pictures or videos — but they didn’t know, because no one saw it" implies she admits she did take pictures/videos of the dead colleague but Amazon couldn't have known.
If she had had taken photos and shared them with police to prove an accident or bad working practices fair enough, but otherwise I think I would have sacked her too if there was even anecdotal evidence that she had taken photos.
I don't think it's intended to imply she did it; there's a language barrier that is probably confusing things. But "I allegedly did it but they don't know because they didn't see me do it" absolutely implies she did.
e: (because she is only denying the existence of evidence and could just as easily deny the claim itself)
Taking photos at work is almost always a bad idea. I do it for stuff like recording how a bunch of cables are connected to a server so I can put them back, but anything that includes identifiable locations, brand names, and employees is potential trouble.
“Finally, the judge stated that my dismissal could have been caused by my activity. What I was accused of in terminating the contract was not proven during the case. Amazon didn’t manage to provide any evidence to support their position.”
“That is actually what the judge said: that there is a conflict between labor and employer, but the conflict cannot be an argument to dismiss union members.”
It's unclear (probably some language barrier issues) if she was essentially saying "I did take pictures and videos, but there's no way Amazon could have known I did that", or if she was saying "I didn't take pictures and videos, but Amazon is using that as an excuse to fire me".
But even if it's the former, so what? Assuming she was taking those pictures and videos with the intent to document what was going on in case there was something improper, Amazon absolutely should not be permitted to fire her because of it.
Even if she was taking pictures because she's a gossip and wanted to share them with people because it's just generally shocking to see someone die like that... well, I'm still sympathetic to the idea that she was actually fired because she was complaining about the working conditions, and the pictures she took were just a convenient excuse.
I hope courts worldwide continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things. They need to change the calculus — to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots.
" to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots."
He was not crushed by machinery or anything:
"Dariusz worked so hard. His job used to be done by a few people during a shift, but then they made him do all that work alone, pushing around trolleys with heavy boxes."
He was simply pushed working too hard. So a robot doing the job would have been one solution - the other simply an extra human helping, or switching tasks, to something less physically demanding.
True! There might be other solutions, like having management treat people as they themselves would want to be treated. That kind of thing just sounds fairly unrealistic.
Well, robots _will_ put people out of work; I am wholeheartedly for this.
However the difference, is that in the utopia inside my head, we start taxing the rich/corporations and provide UBI to people, our goal should be to mechanise/automate everyone out of jobs where possible and allow them to do whatever they want to with their lives.
The sad truth of the world is smart people invented a machine that can make 10,000 widgets per hour instead of 1 per hour by hand, but did that mean the price of widgets went down? No, and all of the benefits of this machine were reaped solely by a bunch of parasites in suits and ties, who contribute nothing to the world.
> continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things.
Amazon is not punished. That woman was only reinstated in her rock-bottom-wage, back-breaking/RSI-inducing Amazon job.
If she'd have gotten some large sum of money as compensation, or if the court had ordered Amazon to enter good-faith negotiations with the union, or accept some of its demands, or to cease warehouse operations temporary etc. - that would have been punishment.
Overall it seems that American corporate has become embedded in overseas environments and has been fighting other cultures. Tesla in Scandinavia has a more public appearing problem.
Did you stop using AWS? Amazon's retail costs them money, AWS nets them profit. If you think about it, buying from Amazon is kinda like stealing from them.
Ha! I'm sure they wouldn't operate at a loss. They might be investing or having a bad year, but if they were losing money they would shut down the operations.
>Amazon’s online store revenues have been decreasing and its results for the first quarter — $106 billion in revenue worldwide — were “roughly flat” as its U.S. market share growth in e-commerce and Prime “stalled after years of high growth,” according to the Journal. Its global e-commerce business reported a $300 million operating loss.
Once a year around black Friday I start a new prime trial, order a bunch of heavily discounted stuff and cancel the membership. I'm pretty sure there aren't sufficient margins and they are losing money on my order (with the hope most people will keep buying/keep the prime membership).
I predict that Amazon's war chest is such that this kind of abuse with impunity will continue indefinitely unless some powerful countries start seriously acting to break them up. Abuse of labor, distortion of markets, distortion of law and even basic governance are all symptoms of letting companies with both more power than most countries and explicit limitation of liability baked in exist. I'd like to see limited liability killed altogether, but the bare minimum to solve problems like this is very aggressive trust-busting
it is sad (and appalling) that so many people around the world are so addicted to "convenience" and material possessions that Amazon flourishes financially despite the huge number of reasons to avoid using that godforsaken abomination of a company.
I realize AMZN employs a huge number of people around the world and that is "good" for the world economy and I am extremely cynical about both unions and gov intervention in business, so idk what the ideal solution is aside from somehow magically convincing people to not use it and choose options that are less easy/convenient.
"Q: Do you think this ruling will change anything in the immediate future?
A: ... I’m afraid they will not change their policy. ... They’re just smashing everything on their way to making more and more profit."
2. Main takeaway II:
"... Amazon has used Poland as a base from which to attack German unions right next door, either by importing Polish workers as strikebreakers when German warehouses were being picketed or then by simply building warehouses along the German-Polish border to serve the German market and get around German labor laws and unions."
3. Personal suggestion to fellow readers:
Please don't use Amazon, and ask your friends to avoid it as well. Yes, a grass-roots consumer boycott is not the most efficient of measures, but we should at least do _something_ other than just shrug and accept it.
Also, if there is an Amazon facility near where you live - try to figure out if they're trying to unionize. And if they are, try and help them out, or at least donate.
You often can’t stop acquaintances from doing things you don’t condone, but you can stop associating with them and being privy or party to their nonsense.
I can’t stop Amazon from being assholes, but it says something about me if I still participate, let others participate on my behalf.
Amazon warehouses have cameras. Lots of them. Do they not in Poland? The man didn't seem to want to quit, from the context, it's possible the person did not tell the truth. He may have worked himself too hard, I've known many people that just didn't quit.
For some people, quitting their job is a financial death sentence.
It should be unsurprising that people continue to work at a job where they think it may negatively impact their health, rather than quitting, which they know will have serious consequences for them.
For a lot of people quitting (or losing their job) is not an option. I'm sure if they had a choice they wouldn't work in such a place as Amazon warehouse. Let's not blame the victim, we should punish Amazon (and similar corporations) instead.
It makes me sad and angry that such things can happen - unfortunately I can't boycot them more than I do already. I'll stop boycotting them when they start treating their employees right... Not holding my breath though.
My read of the article was that the victim was stuck in the job, and desperately trying to get it made tolerable by petitioning the company, and the company was instead making it worse.
I read your message to suggest something very different: that the victim did it to themself, and would work themself to death some other way, if not at this company, and the company is really blameless.
I think the person writing this is biased and using this person's unfortunate death for political gain.
Dariusz is a victim of circumstance, a mental unwillingness to stop working for any period of time, a situation I have also tried to stop friends who were exploited from workplaces in the restaurant industry again and again.
Only mental health would have saved him from throwing himself off the metaphorical cliff; if not Amazon, another place. You read it correctly but I feel sympathy for the victim.
Maybe there is this related-sounding issue that has been close to you from friends, and you are sensitized to try to spot it elsewhere (like we learn from trauma)?
Is it possible that the person in the article didn't fully fit the pattern to which you've been sensitized, and that the biggest cause in that case is actually different?
Also, in case of your friends, maybe there are two problems to address: (1) any weakness of self or situation that makes them vulnerable to being exploited; and (2) any party that consciously or negligently exploits that.
Maybe the reason I'm pushing back on this: I've known people who soldier through tough situations they shouldn't have to, including someone who died from it. In all cases, they tried hard to get out of the situation, but people who were the cause of the bad, or whose job was to be a check on the bad, either refused to help, or made it worse by trying to cover it up rather than fix it. I think that to blame the victims in those situations would be incorrect.
The end result was that in all these cases, they worked themselves to death and they had a poor sense of self preservation. This is the pattern I see.
If I was to be positive on Amazon I'd suggest that they may have paid bonuses or some incentives to keep him there. I believe that Dariusz may have been paid bonuses but I ignored that as it wasn't important for self preservation, I'm taking the negative stance that they fostered this environment, but the writer did not die or want to leave the job, and many others quit due to their own sense of self preservation.
Self preservation isn't an innate trait and I feel sympathy for Dariusz that he did not have that trait.
You didn't know this person at all, and I suspect you aren't a licensed psychiatrist, so you have no place diagnosing him with some sort of work-himself-to-death mental illness.
The most likely and simplest explanation is that he believed he needed this job in order to survive, and as the staff around his job function was reduced and he was given more to do, he felt he had no choice but to do the extra work that was assigned to him, or else lose his job and suffer financial ruin.
He diagnosed himself when he worked himself to death after years of neglecting his health. You may believe he had a strong sense of self preservation or mentally healthy if you wish to.
> The man didn't seem to want to quit, from the context, it's possible the person did not tell the truth. He may have worked himself too hard, I've known many people that just didn't quit.
Did you read the whole article carefully? There's a detailed description of the events that led to his death, and how the company's treatment of him and of his requests and complaints directly contributed to his death.
Yes I did, and he continued to work, the writer alleged many things, and he continued to work to his death.
I've known people that just didn't quit, even when it was better for them to. The context was he continued to work, again and again with claims from someone who wrote for a very biased publication.
> On the Sunday before Dariusz died, he asked the supervisor to transfer him to another department because he was fed up with working too hard. Despite the requests, he continued to work alone at his post for about five hours.
What "isn't adding up" in that paragraph is possibly a problem with the reading comprehension. Dariusz requested a change, but it wasn't granted and he had to work alone for another five hours.
Granted, the sentence could have been phrased in a way that didn't leave things open to your interpretation, but then we come to the second thing that "doesn't add up": your own bias, evident in your insistence on victim-blaming.
People like Dariusz continue working in adverse, unhealthy conditions because they don't have the luxury of just quitting.
You don't know his story or anything about him, you are making up a narrative and insulting me. Find his backstory of him not being able to quit before you make up another fantasy.
What? If anyone is making up a narrative, it's you. The rest of us are just reading the article and going by what it says: he was overworked, he complained about it, his requests for help were denied, so he kept working.
Is it so completely unfathomable that someone would stay in a job that is deleterious to their health because they need the job, and the money, and fear that they won't be able to find something else, and end up hungry or homeless? Because that's the norm. Not this weird mental illness you've somehow decided he had, without any evidence to support your theory.
I am not making up a narrative, I am presenting alternatives to the narrative you made up from the start. You're the one who said that Magda might not have been truthful and you offered arguments based on your own narrative about Dariusz being able to choose to quit freely, without consequences, and choosing to work himself to death. I provided counterarguments by showing how there are other alternatives you didn't think of.
As for insults, it was not my intention to insult you and I'm not sure which part of my reply you found insulting. If it was the reading comprehension, then I apologize for the way it sounded: I merely meant to say you might not have understood the sentence properly, which is something that happens to everyone.
If it was the part where I pointed out your bias, that's on you. When I point out that the person you're trying to blame for their own death might not conform to your own expectations -- the expectation that they are free to choose to quit without any consequences -- you're perfectly happy to call that a "fantasy", but you don't apply the same label to your own ideas about people who "want to work themselves to death". If you find the description of your biases insulting, maybe you should re-evaluate them.
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.
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.
The reason for the poor view of the NH community (outside NH) is clear from the opinions expressed here. From defending Amazon's right to pay low wages to “it's easy, just quit” demonstrates the disconnection of NH people with reality to the point of full psychopathy. And everyone knows that you never go a full psychopath.
The technical part of HN is a delight. But the non-technical part, when something is said about humanities, it's sad. It's as if most of the people at HN were no longer people, they were robot CEOs who defend money above all else. I would love a tag system so I can't view these discussions (I already do this, but sometimes it escapes me)
It's a population of mostly tech workers, a population of which a large segment has mostly never experienced the labor market as others do, and of which an at least significant segment has been inundated with messaging that implies that they have more in common with the people who own tech companies than other workers. The massive layoffs that occasionally happen show some of them that this is a fiction, but survivorship bias is strong in the presence of so many smart-sounding people saying people who are harmed by a system simply failed in some personal sense (or, often, as seen in this thread, chose their outcome intentionally).
It seems deeply out of touch and unempathetic because it is, and that's the point of it
> The reason for the poor view of the NH community (outside NH) is clear from the opinions expressed here.
Where does HN have a poor reputation? Whenever I've seen it mentioned, its either been by other users of the site or people who generally view it favorably (largely due to the post quality).
The only place I've come across that has a particular disdain for it is /g/, but they hate everyone so thats to be expected.
Basically outside this mosh pit, there are many smaller communities scattered about the internet and social circles. They all refer to HN as "the orange site" to avoid naming it, and it's usually always about something in disdain.
So small echo chambers whose opinions don't matter and whose relevance is unnameable don't like this site? I'm so depressed. I hope their 3 friends on Mastodon don't get upset.
What do I need to do for you today? Cover up your mistakes? Deal with the admin you are slacking on? Pull you into the conference room and reteach you electricity and magnetism? Give you a pat on the back? Throw you softball projects that will make you look like a superstar? Climb into the tight places you cant fit? Send you the job application to fill out? Fill it out for you?
There is little doubt who the nicest person is at work, and I feel terrible about the trajectories of everyone elses lives. Though, I am at a loss, what more do I need to do? Would the true kindness be in having these people fired, because otherwise they will die on the job?
You say this, and yet there are plenty of people in the comments here defending the worker who died on the job, and the woman interviewed for the story.
Yes, there are a lot of heartless people here who seem to think that capitalism trumps all. And there are some who are so insulated by their privileged bubble that they can't understand the idea that quitting a job can mean financial ruin for a huge number of people.
But I don't see the overwhelming level of awfulness that you see.
> From defending Amazon's right to pay low wages to “it's easy, just quit” demonstrates the disconnection of NH people with reality to the point of full psychopathy.
You seem to be under impression that people who express this view do not have sympathy for the workers. That's not true. We just refuse to accept that an employer becomes responsible for a person's condition just because he chooses to purchase the person's labour.
When you hire a plumber to fix your pipes, or buy tomatoes from a farmer, you don't become responsible for their condition. You don't have an obligation to pay higher than a market rate, or to continue paying them when you no longer want to. Why would you expect a full-time employer to have these obligations?
This doesn't have anything to do with sympathy. My sympathy for the poor people drives to me donate a significant proportion of my income. But I don't have any right to force my notion on charity on other people or organisations.
> When you hire a plumber to fix your pipes, or buy tomatoes from a farmer, you don't become responsible for their condition. You don't have an obligation to pay higher than a market rate, or to continue paying them when you no longer want to. Why would you expect a full-time employer to have these obligations?
You know very well these are non sequitur, absurd arguments.
If the plumber dies fixing your pipes in your home, you bet your civil liability will be scrutinized. As for the rest of your arguments, the agreement is usually only about the plumber "fixing the pipe", not forcing the plumber to work 10 hours a day, or prevent them from taking more than a 15 minutes lunch break or something,
You see the absurdity of your examples? You're acting like there are no differences between an individual contracting a plumber and the relationship between a megacorporation, the employees, and the obvious power imbalance between them.
It's usually because you deem your interlocutor an idiot whom you can just patronize with absurd arguments.
> just because he chooses to purchase the person's labour
This sounds like the corporation’s point of view. Most people view employment as a relationship between employer and employee which extends beyond the salary and includes a proper work environment, etc.
Libertarians believe that it’s OK to treat people as badly as they allow themselves to be treated.
The reason for the negative view of HN is because the community skews way farther left than the general public.
Case in point: this story comes from a website dedicated to promoting socialism and not one single person here is even questioning the credibility of the source.
My teammate's friend died when my teammate was oncall. The skip was super irritated that dude was attending the ceremony instead of "oncall handover". Mind you, that guy still solved Sev-3 issues till the handover.
How much longer will we keep letting our Congress allow corporations to get away with murder and harm? Laws and enforcement are disincentives. They work. We can make things fair for people if we try.
Whistleblower reporting systems work for the GDP [not you].
----
I was a union electrician for a great apprenticeship; as the article's author admits CONSTRUCTION IS DANGEROUS in different ways. Yet I resonate greatly with the "repetitious motions" lament on account of having literally turned so many screwpost connections [many goobers use basic electric drills to "torque;" not sure how/if this works well].
This is precisely the reason I have strictly ZERO respect for HR department. They are the most hypocrite department in a company. They call it human resources, but all they do is make everyone's jobs difficult. They are the worst of all. Simply the worst. Not to mention, the most arrogant and lazy.
But as frequently stated, Human Resources is not for the employees. It's even in the name. Humans are just a Resource. The whole point of HR is to ensure the company is legally safe from their employees and legislation.
If you own a company, you'll love HR. If you work for a company, hate them.
Amazon are absolutely scumsters, and this is why I would never work for them. I had their recruiters trying to headhunt me for engineering roles in AWS, but they can go and sling one. This is also why I will never buy any goods from them. support local business instead.
Amazon should be held accountable for running a safe workplace. Even if she is not there, Amazon should not be allowed to operate an unsafe workhouse that puts its employees in danger. If Amazon has a culture of firing anyone who dares to speak up about unsafe working conditions, it will be allowed to abuse and endanger its employees for profit since no one would be willing to speak up for fear of losing the paycheck that puts a roof over their head and food on their plate.
For one, there’s, of course, the simple matter that these kinds of things shouldn’t happen and that cases like hers bring it to light.
The implied alternative by you would mean companies can keep being poor employers because people would walk away, and nothing would change for the ones that stay behind and are affected by it.
And then there’s, of course, your implication that everyone is in the fortunate position of being able to walk away from a job or let go from a job without the slightest inconvenience.
In reality, a lot of people work because they have to survive. Losing a job can be an earth-shattering experience for many because of the implications it has on their ability to survive.
The solution to employers creating poor or dangerous work conditions isn’t to say, “Let the market sort it out,” and then blame the victims. The solution is to regulate employers and to punish them hard and often when they create those work conditions.
The main reason for this is because of the highly skewed power balance. One side has a fundamental need for survival, the need for money to pay for shelter and food, while the other side mainly has to worry about shareholder value and profits.
This power imbalance always ensures there will be people desperate enough to take on any job, no matter how shitty or dangerous, to the point that they’ll even rationalize it and delude themselves.
One way to balance out the powers a bit more is regulation on working conditions, and another is creating social safety nets and improving standards of living that guarantee a level of survival regardless of whether you hold a job or not, which allows people to walk away from poor working conditions.
It is in countries where these measures are lacking or non/existent, where you see many people taking up jobs that have questionable or outright poor working conditions.
This is why you see a proliferation of gig workers, MLMs, and people willing to take on jobs with poor pay and poor working conditions in those countries. You’ll also see the exploitation of people with lesser legal protections in those countries, such as children or undocumented immigrants.
Ironically, in countries with better regulations and where they facilitate programs that ensure everyone can survive regardless of employment status, you’ll see more of the classical “free market” effects you allude to.
People who walk away from a job that has poor working conditions or people who won’t even take up a job with such conditions, which in turn motivates employers to improve the working conditions beyond the minimum conditions as prescribed in regulation.
It turns out that when people don’t have to worry about being homeless and hungry, people can negotiate better working conditions, even if the negotiations are done with their feet.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. [...] If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
While I disagree with the GP's sentiment, a court ruling in her favor just means that the court agrees that she was unreasonably terminated, not that the things she said happened (please correct me if I'm wrong).
It's pretty consistent with other reports out of Amazon. Apparently the variance between different fulfillment centers is quite large - but that also tracks with Amazon's engineering divisions.
That poster wasn't responding to you, but I'll take this on.
The court case changes things.
You accuse the interviewer of being biased, not understanding that you yourself are so biased you've ignored a crucial piece of evidence, that an independent court agreed that it was wrongful termination.
You started a flamewar in this thread and perpetuated it quite nastily. We have to ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
My other comments were a bit hotheaded, but where is there something in my original comment that would be grounds for me starting a flamewar? I simply stated a fact: far left magazine interviewing a union head and getting an opinion from a non-expert of warehouse deaths as cause to read with caution.
This is a completely valid opinion and I am trying to make it clear that there is an agenda here beyond defending the death of a poor guy just trying to earn a buck.
People like you? Like the original post, you aren't dealing with the substance, you're just slinging insults.
You are violating the first guideline. Which I reproduce here and offer you an opportunity to apologize to me: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
What does it mean to be an expert on deaths in Amazon Warehouses?
She was a Union Organizer. Presumably, unions are most interested in working conditions and pay. She spoke out about the working conditions that she feels caused the death.
This seems inline with what a union organizer would do, but more importantly, who the hell do you think is going to be more authoritative on this than a union organizer?
What credentials do you feel she is lacking and who has the credentials such that you would be willing to defer to them as an expert?
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how provocative someone is being or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I didn't think about that but now that you say that, I'm not finding any other sources reporting on it. Again, when I read a heavily biased source, I'm always suspicious of the findings. When the author asks a virtual nobody at the company (and to be clear I am a virtual nobody at mine as are 98% of HN'ers) if there are deaths happening all the time at Amazon warehouses, this is a huge red flag. Why not check into this yourself? If she had said "yes all the time" he would have ran with that as if fact. I wish she had explicitly said it so Amazon could have sued the magazine out of existence.
Speculating on the journalistic quality of a far-left magazine on HN: Taboo
Speculating on the journalistic quality of a far-right magazine on HN: "due diligence".
It's important to understand the standpoint of the magazine. If they're far-anything chances are most of the reporting is garbage. So what they ruled in their favor? It doesn't mean the journalistic integrity is worth actually wasting clock cycles heating your CPU.
Why should we distrust the source of the claims when the opposing entity, amazon, already has a well documented and long history of pulling shit exactly like this and who’s been caught lying about it multiple times?
I’m not even saying the worker/organizer is completely beyond reproach, but the only other entity with anything to offer is amazon themselves whom have already obliterated anything resembling credibility on this topic. Amazon corporate could tell me the sky is blue above a union organizers head and I would want it verified.
well because big corporations are our best friends, can do no wrong, and anything that criticises them is "biased" or has an agenda, of course. why be a reasonable human being when you can instead irrationally defend Amazon Inc doing the indefensible for absolutely no reason, repeatedly backstabbing your fellow worker in the process to "own the libs" in the process?
Without reading the article, I agree with you regarding journalists doing some research and adding facts to their articles, like number of warwhouse death at Amazon and elsewhere or the fact that a court already ruled in favor of the fired employee.
That being said, the union organizer bit and "far left" magazine bit were uncalled for. If anything, being a union organozer would be further reason for Amazon firing them, and doesn't mean at all thwir accoubts are less believable.
Do not use amazon, do not buy books from amazon, do not use AWS, do not get their certs, do not work in places that use AWS, do not watch prime, do not use their opensource tech.
I'm old enough to remember when Amazon was a welcome change from the local B&N/Walmart/Target/CVS/BestBuy landscape. Amazon was amazing to have the choice and much lower prices. Sure its maybe too big now but we're all much better for it.
They’re only Amazon employees temporarily. Give equivalent money for other services by different businesses and these different businesses can hire them.
I think the point you make could be repeated for every boycott and sanction ever but most people don’t think these methods are inherently unethical.
I must have been unclear because that’s not what I intended for people to understand. I was saying, if you want something from Amazon, don’t buy it there but from somewhere else instead (like Barnes & Nobles for ebooks, Azure/GCP for web services, whatever). If people do this on a large enough scale, those businesses will grow and start hiring people. Then the employees may have better places to work.
That’s the point of boycotting Amazon, or Amazon might change its ways if the sting hurts too much.
Money? We can only vote with our wallets and that's what we should do. Should we support all shitty companies and, dare I say, regimes employing people just because of "but think of the salaried employees" line? You know history is full of examples where a mass of people worked for some evil entity willingly because the system is structured around short term rewards and not looking at the big picture.
edit: I didn't downvote you either, I don't use downvote as "I do not agree" button
I don't find Amazon to be a shitty company though. I get a lot of value from their services. When I was living in Vietnam, I greatly missed the convenience of ordering something and having it appear in a day or two.
Given their size, it seems I'm not the only one. I'd say that one person getting fired also falls into the anecdotal realm that primarily serves to give loud voices a forum.
Amazon is super evil, I appreciate you find value in their services, this can be true and the company can still be evil though. It leeches off opensource, it actively fights against employee rights, it copies most successful products in their marketplace and competes against them. Do you care enough so I should search sources to back these claims?
I've been doing open source for 30 years now, I co-founded Java @ Apache. My code or something I touched, is probably in almost every server they operate.
If I cared that Amazon might "leech" off my open source, I wouldn't have open sourced it.
As for the rest, I don't believe that a boycott will have any effect on their practices. I believe that change is better effected from within.
Nah, unionize and report to regulators as much as possible. Can't succeed in the worker version of the Kobayashi Maru by "starting your own Amazon." Seek leverage and engage it to maximum force.
Companies will never give a shit about you, put them in a box like you would a shark. Don't play by existing broken rules, you will just suffer.
Why don’t we fix the union we already have - our government?
My biggest gripe with unions is they’re the political version of “let’s make a new standard”. Yeah it works - for a time - but ultimately just adds complexity to temporarily address a symptom of the problem.
Representatives are a function of the electorate. If you want better representation, not only must people run, but the electorate must turn over (old ideas and their voters dying out, new voters and their ideas aging in). 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4 million voters turn 18. Worker rights support increases as cohort age declines (and skews progressive, naturally).
Certainly, a long term fix that will take decades. Near term, gotta organize, which can be done today. And workers need help today.
>> Representatives are a function of the electorate.
Not in America. The essentials of our representative republic make it not especially representative. It's badly in need of reform to make the legislature actually representative: much larger house of representatives, 3-5 member districts, ranked choice voting, 18 year terms for supreme court justices, etc. etc.
None of what you listed will ever happen, so why bother thinking about it? Just accept that the U.S. is not democratic and never will be. That’s not even really pessimistic; plenty of people live happy, fulfilling lives under undemocratic regimes
Because it's not your government. Between media message management, corporate lobbying, and outright gerrymandering, the US is an oligarchy, not a democracy.
Unions, imperfect as they are, can be far more directly representative.
I have a total of 3000€ available to me in cash and some possessions like my pc (no house no car). Do you realistically think it is possible for me to start up a business?
Yes...depending on the business. My friend and I started an online retail store with $500 each during the early e-commerce days.
As the saying goes, why spend your money when you can spend an investor's money? The trick isn't starting a business, but starting a business with a viable business model.
Jobs in the EU have notice periods for both the employer and the employee. Typically the employer's notice period is longer.
[1] shows it is 3 months (for either side) after working for three years, but this can be reduced by mutual agreement. We'll need someone from Poland to say how likely that would be agreed for a warehouse worker.
Maybe mediocre for tech workers making 6-7 figure. For someone toiling away in Amazon's warehouse it can only get better. If that wasn't true Amazon wouldn't be offering raises and firing people whenever they heard faint whispers of a union.
That and you’ll just be replaced by more amenable immigrant labor. People that are willing to travel around the world potentially risking their lives are going to take that $15 an hour warehouse job in a heartbeat. And it will be a considerably better deal than they’d get back home.
That sounds like an issue with immigration policy, you could stop this at amazon but it will do nothing for everyone else. Ill also point out that amazon only hires legal labor.
Persons who claim asylum can file for a legal work permit 150 days after filing for asylum until their case is adjudicated. Given the backlogs that currently means for years. And of course any children they have in that time are citizens. There are NGOs that help immigrants learn of these rights and exercise them. Amazon themselves even have a program to do so[1].
You are right, immigration policy has no bearing in the dramatic rise in asylum requests and how they are honored. If someone from mexico comes to the american border and requests political asylum that makes sense, why are people crossing several countries to come here? Thats not asylum, asylum is escaping a hostile regime.
Because doing something that involves other people requires consent. That's what people 'organising better working conditions' forget. It's not actually within their power, and the conditions they want might not match what the employer wants. Whereas acting for yourself (quiting) requires only your action.
I'm so happy that those people that forgot all this at the turn of the previous century did what they did. Without that you'd have 80 hour workweeks for peanuts.
That seems like an incomplete comparison. We could also look at the inverse, where industry shut down as it couldn't operate and thus those people have zero hour workweeks.
Your argument deviates from one around consent back to the worker seeking the upper hand, which isn't that different (just the other way around) to what you counter with - where workers refuted being overworked (the employer having control).
Control over the other party - in any direction isn't good. Only consent, that was my original point.
Unions have their own problems that aren't often spoken about. Just recently, in fact, several hospital unions made concessions on employee safety due to COVID crises.
As for me, personally, I don't plan on working for a company my entire life and see a union as a roadblock to my selfish goal to financial freedom. Nothing would drive me off a job faster than getting my CoL raise after the union rep "fought so hard" for the pay. The reality is in most cases they're in bed with the C-levels and the "fight" was the three martini lunch at the country club. If you actually understand the balance sheet allowing a union almost never makes sense. In some cases it's cheaper to just fire everyone and outsource. In the case of Amazon they are large enough doing this in total is a little hard... but they're still working on it I'm sure.
The proper answer, I think, is if working conditions suck start your own thing and make the working conditions better. If you really do have a solution you will have an eternal wellspring of employees willing to do nearly anything for you. This, of course, would require the person to not go home and play video games or binge netflix. A path that isn't for everyone. Alternatively you could start a union and clear high 7 figures a year as the rep fighting for those "hard-earned" raises. A perfect example of this is the teachers and trade unions. Most of the time - a union is just an inversion of control that's designed to enrich the people running it. The socialist idea of a true trade union can't, and never will, manifest in a reality where humans are selfishly driven to improve their own conditions while sacrificing the comfort of others.
>Just recently, in fact, several hospital unions made concessions on employee safety due to COVID crises.
I don’t think anyone’s going around insisting that unions are always perfect or always produce the most employee-favorable outcome conceivable. Unless they were actively campaigning to have the hospitals worsen working conditions more than they wanted to, making some concessions still gives a better outcome than in the absence of a union.
The word "just" here implies quitting is a simple solution. For most people quitting is anything but simple. Leaving a job can be costly and risky, if not outright dangerous. Rather than suggesting people quit their jobs if their jobs are awful, we can attempt to build a society where providing awful jobs is not permissible, specially when the cost of being less awful is not a huge for the employer.
Sounds like modern day slavery. I assume they must just pay pretty well for completely unskilled labour compared to the competition, otherwise why would people put up with those conditions?
They don't have to pay well, people working that kind of job don't have a whole lot of options. One leaves 10 more want to take their place. Employers are having a very easy time of it.
A return to the gold standard would solve quite a bit. The ability to manipulate the money supply is too much power for any person or organization or government for that matter. This is the lifeblood of the economy, it is 50% of every transaction, of course when that gets corrupted everything goes with it.
I don't see how the Euro is ever going to go back to being backed by gold, that makes no sense at all. It never was backed by gold since the day it was created.
I am well aware, the united states was issuing credit for gold they didnt have. Other countries got upset and wanted their share of the gold back. Rather than trading under a fair economic system, we abandoned the gold standard. Nixon blamed "speculators", but it was and is plainly evident that we didn't have the gold we claimed we did.
I hate this line with a burning passion. We can and should do better, but comparisons to slavery just show how completely ignorant many people are of the horrors of slavery at every stage of history.
There's no comparison between the plight of an Amazon worker who loses a job unjustly and the millions of people who were (and still are!) treated as literal chattel to be bought, sold, separated from family, mutilated, raped and killed at a whim.
Being worked to the bone while getting paid barely enough to survive affords only a very theoretical freedom and capacity for personal development.
We know this from every UBI pilot ever ran: People do start businesses and better their own situation if you remove them from the threat of poverty and homelessness.
What you describe is accurate and terrible, but it isn't slavery. There are actual people in the world today who are treated as literal property. That is modern-day slavery, we need a different word to describe the plight of a free person who is unable to get out of a cycle of poverty.
In absolute terms are more “modern day” slaves than at any point in time. Actual slaves, treated as property, raped, beaten, worked to death. They don’t work in Amazon.
> millions of people who were (and still are!) treated as literal chattel to be bought, sold, separated from family, mutilated, raped and killed at a whim.
If you're comparing the plight of Amazon workers to actual slaves, you're playing down the plight of actual slaves.
I know many old people at amazon who apparently decided they never needed to try in life. They found a role they were comfortable enough in, their joints creak going up stairs, they cant fit into tight spaces, and they refuse to take on any level of responsibility or ownership of anything. If you dont like the work, quit, but ill tell you right now that these people only pretend to care about themselves.
As the youngest person on my team, I work every day to give my people every kind of assistance, resources, and encouragment that they could need to succeed past the more physical role they work now. I can only spoonfeed them though, I cant make them swallow a promotion. Some people dont want to live into old age, thats all I can call it.
As to the interviewee, did you take pictures? Because you dont deny it, and you know that you are jepordizing the livelihoods of over a million of my coworkers in doing so.
Getting old sucks. Your mind is fine but your body lags behind. I’ve noticed it a lot more after turning 40. My issue, as I’m sure everyone’s issue, is that in my mind I clearly remember being able to do things physically with excellence that today would send me to the hospital. Skateboarding (I can still kickflip), snowboarding, fighting (for sport, like mma), volunteering for habitat for humanity building homes (can’t do that no more). The best thing is that I work with computers so my job job isn’t physically demanding but boy does it suck bending over to drop trash in the waste bin only to have your back slip out.
Maybe they ARE trying. Perhaps you don’t know what they are struggling with. Maybe their bodies ache all day long every day, but what keeps them going is providing for their loved ones.
Perhaps you dont know how easily they could step into a position that isnt physically demanding, several of them would be a shoe in for chief given their experience. They wont fill out an application if I put it infront of them, they would rather fix air conditioning units than have responsibility, and they will tell you as much directly.
I read it as: commenter works in a physical job with older colleagues who, despite getting older and struggling more, are not attempting to get promoted or moved into a role they can continue to do as they age.
What about the third paragraph? I can see how taking photos of a corpse might save lives, since it implies the death was suspicious, and might be part of whistleblowing about some sort of violation of regulations, or negligence. But how can it jeopardize the livelihood of millions?
Is the idea that their jobs might all have to vanish if a whistleblower reveals them to be fundamentally dangerous?
No, we have a strict policy of not taking pictures or video at work unless it has gone through a rigerous process and is explicitly approved. This protects company IP in the only way that should matter, but it also literally saves lives. Someone tried to bomb the building I used to work in. I do not need the layout of my site on public display, the security measures, the blast proof structures, the safe places to hide.
Sorry, whatever pictures the interviewee took takes a backseat to personnel safety. It is the paramount value at amazon, existing above any and all leadership principles.
* They aren't photos of the building. Perhaps a hundred frivolous public photos could present a risk in this way. A few secret ones taken for a good reason do not.
* They were taken to protect safety, just not in alignment with the employer's particular idiosyncratic perspective on safety (which seems muddled up with concerns about IP and PR).
So this has no relation to the risk of bombings or shootings, and I still don't see the connection to risk to other workers' livelihoods (AKA jobs). Maybe Amazon are monitoring what you write here, so you're obliged to say this weird stuff?
You know whats better than trying to strategize and hypothesize around a million employees taking pictures with no approval or accountability? An iron rule that everyone is subject to. You might be right in the particular scenario, that is completely irrelevant.
Everyone gets alerts regarding every incident at amazon regardless of whether anyone was hurt. We have a very robust infastructure for identifying issues and correcting them globally. The best the interviewee could have accomplished is adding political complications that produce inferior results.
There are institutions for public safety outside of Amazon, such as regulatory bodies and laws, to which it is subject. Amazon is not yet a sovereign country, so the alleged robustness of its suspiciously self-serving internal safety procedures is not relevant here, since there can and should be such a thing as whistleblowing, in the civil society within which Amazon awkwardly sits prior to its secession.
Right, the epa did a great job with east Palestine and flint. Not having accidents is something amazon has an economic incentive for, what incentives do these other institutions have?
> As to the interviewee, did you take pictures? Because you dont deny it, and you know that you are jepordizing the livelihoods of over a million of my coworkers in doing so.
I don’t understand the jeopardy from taking pictures. I understand it’s probably against the rules at Amazon.
If people can take pictures willy nilly then there will be entire layouts of sites on public display. Someone tried to bomb my site, and we have had rioters try to breach the perimeter. Further, if amazon IP were to leak you put our jobs at stake, which is how we put food on the table.
I also noticed that some people just don't care about themselves much. I know a person who opens beers with their front teeth. Many people seek abusive relationships. They don't have self preservation or their own well being as a core concept and it is sad. You're the only other person who seems to have seen this kind of character.
Unions won't save them, his mental health is being weaponized into politics.
Retaliation is pretty common in the US - I announced to HR that my wife is expecting (Tue) and was fired on Friday.