IMO, it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.
If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.
When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.
>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.
I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.
Your point is valid, but other than the acronym used to get people talking about the bill, Amazon is not targeted directly.
Wal-mart would actually be impacted much more than Amazon as they employ 5x the workforce, and has arguably been the larger target of such legislation considering the majority of their workforce relies on government subsides to make ends meet.
>it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company.
In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is unconstitutional.
Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn’t exactly sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon there is a problem, but that isn’t likely.
Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem. Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.
Shouldn’t lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen loopholes? I don’t think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re-evaluated.
In Wisconsin, when the legislature wanted to target Milwaukee for things, without actually naming them, they would say things like "This law applies to metro areas/counties with > xxx,000 people". Things like "the state takes over some of the mental health operations because they bungled it so bad", etc.
In the next Census, Madison, WI (and/or Dane County) is expected to hit some of those same limits. All sorts of things that were never intended will start applying.
As others have pointed out, the text of the bill does not target Amazon and will likely affect others more. You're complaining about a name.
On the broader point, I think it's highly debatable whether bills should target individual companies. Certainly the arguments against bills of attainder do not apply, because corporations are not people and any doctrine to the contrary is loathsome. They are already given every right that people have, in addition to being immortal and shielded from full liability. The bargain under which they are even allowed to exist has become very one-sided since the abandonment of specific time-limited charters, so allowing them to be regulated individually seems like the least we could do to even the scales.
> If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.
Sorry, but what you're advocating for a is a barrier towards fixing these problems.
If the legislature only talks in terms of abstract situations, all of it will feel theoretical and will be far less likely to spur real action. On the other hand, if you have concrete examples of problems, that makes the problems feel real. Real problems motivate real action.
Rest assured, whatever bill Sanders writes will target the broad problem at all companies, because he's forbidden from writing a law that would only target Amazon explicitly.
A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at least treated like humans. The atmosphere at some of these Amazon warehouses serves to dehumanize the workers. You are not a person, you are an object that is expected to obey very strict rules like a dog. The management at these warehouses is even worse, because it's often very abusive people who wind up in those positions.
So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this treatment is legal?
Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.
I live a few miles from a Walmart distribution warehouse, and had a good friend who worked there. It really started to affect his health. The working conditions are horrible, and the culture promoted is toxic and demeaning. The money was a little above average for the area, but that's about the only thing positive he could say about it. When he left, his migraines went away.
I have an online friend who used to work for an Amazon fulfillment center. I say "used to", because she got fired. For being sick. She got food poisoning one day and had to take a week off. When she got sick, she put in a request via MyLeave. Two or three months later, Amazon retroactively denied her request and fired her because she went negative on UPT. That's right, months. As far as she knew, everything was going well, and all of a sudden she was called into HR and unceremoniously dumped because Amazon decided months after the fact to deny her sick leave.
That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.
"Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages."
Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here.
If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.
The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think.
This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.
The federal government and these huge corps REALLY do not want unions to form, and they will do anything in their power to prevent it from happening.
It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.
There are many problems with unions. But, every time there is no union, the company screws workers. Screws them to within an inch of common decency. This just seems to be a basic law of human interaction - those that can be exploited will be exploited. With the right legislative environment, unions can be very effective, especially for logistics industries where down time is very costly for the company.
Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.
After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly.
I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.
Apparently Walmart forces workers to watch anti-union videos and will entirely shut down a store at the first hint of union activity (and then later re-open it few months later with new staff). Amazon likely does the same with the anti-union propaganda and can also afford to shut down factories or fire the entire staff.
But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.
Yes, it's definitely ripe for some old-fashioned unionizing. As for automation, though... large parts are already automated, and they're constantly automating anything that can be automated. Humans are really the "last mile" here.
There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target.
One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.
The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.
Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.
Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.
> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.
You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.
I always feel like a stick in the mud with these convos but you are hitting on exactly the points that I first think of.
1 - Let's target warehouses across the country for this, and raise the average cost of American production. You're right, Bernie. When we take down Amazon warehouses, as the big bogeyman, a litany of other businesses will also get dinged for this. Walmart, Target, FedEx, UPS, so-on. Shitty warehouse conditions and employee abuse is only a shock to you, and you only see Amazon as a big target for this, if you have never worked at or known someone who has worked at any low-wage factory work.
2 - Your point about food stamps is dead on. I have asked everyone I know how they feel about Amazon paying someone more just because they have 5 kids. Regardless of what work they perform or, their experience, usefulness, or quality that they do their job with. Accepting food stamps has very little do with your employer, and more to do with your job and financial obligations.
I can't see Bernie's perspective any more. The pie in the sky legislation that he proposes make me believe that he actually doesn't intend to win the presidency. He's just here to make loud noises.
One thing to consider - it could mean Amazon uses more part-time/seasonal workers than those other companies, since I believe SNAP benefits are based on annual income, rather than hourly pay.
If you have a business in a country and cannot afford to pay your workers high enough wages that they can afford to live without society subsidizing them. Then you cannot afford to run your business and are stealing money from the society you are in.
This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums.
If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.
The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.
If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).
Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?
No. While I'm completely in favor of UBI and stuff like that (although entirely against your call for deciding who can have children), shifting blame to society completely ignores that Amazon is the one who bears all the responsibility for what they pay workers, and how they treat them. This problem is entirely Amazon's to own.
Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.
The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc."
Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."
So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.
The issue is not that the employee is being underpaid (although that is a problem), it's that the underpayment is only possible because the government (i.e. taxpayers) is also giving money to that employee. If that safety net weren't in place then Amazon wouldn't be able to employee these people at these rates since it wouldn't be enough for people to survive on. Essentially, the government is subsidizing Amazon.
Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise.
And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.
"Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary?"
Because it absolutely does not matter.
"then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain."
This makes a whole lot of assumptions about things, namely that the employee has the ability to go somewhere else, and that Amazon is entitled to treat their workers like shit.
"So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps."
And for a company of their size, with their resources, this is entirely unacceptable and pure evil.
If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.
It's as if you've willingly chosen to ignore over 100 years of collective bargaining, and the reasons for it, just to poorly make a point. If it were as facile as you make it out to be, we would have never had unions.
You get the society that your systems incentivize. There may very well be a perfect version of capitalism and a free market that allows for free movement of employees between firms and a virtuous circle. Instead, we see a vicious spiral of incentivizing externalities (including treating workers like a never-ending powerless resource you can run into the ground and break and then find new ones) and a person with more money than most of his laborers put together.
Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this.
(Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)
Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took
a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite
notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift
that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the
doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how
they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished
people for being ill. “It’s what Amazon have always done,” he
replied blandly.
1. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book.
2. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc.
3. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay.
4. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me.
5. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things.
Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.)
$1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.
FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top down opression.
From all the stories I've heard, it seems to be a combination of the two: most of the really inhumane stuff comes from local managers rather than global policy. However, those managers are just acting to meet unrealistic targets of their own, and when they're reported, nobody above them in the hierarchy seems to care.
I guess people just realized that blue collar jobs were horrible?
Guess what it is same for many other of those jobs , construction, healthcare, army,...
TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn’t it? Why is minimum wage still so low and why are all political parties not coming together to raise it?
[+] [-] sokoloff|7 years ago|reply
If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.
When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.
[+] [-] ameister14|7 years ago|reply
I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.
[+] [-] rando444|7 years ago|reply
Wal-mart would actually be impacted much more than Amazon as they employ 5x the workforce, and has arguably been the larger target of such legislation considering the majority of their workforce relies on government subsides to make ends meet.
[+] [-] will_brown|7 years ago|reply
In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is unconstitutional.
Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn’t exactly sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon there is a problem, but that isn’t likely.
Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem. Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.
Shouldn’t lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen loopholes? I don’t think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re-evaluated.
[+] [-] briffle|7 years ago|reply
In the next Census, Madison, WI (and/or Dane County) is expected to hit some of those same limits. All sorts of things that were never intended will start applying.
[+] [-] notacoward|7 years ago|reply
On the broader point, I think it's highly debatable whether bills should target individual companies. Certainly the arguments against bills of attainder do not apply, because corporations are not people and any doctrine to the contrary is loathsome. They are already given every right that people have, in addition to being immortal and shielded from full liability. The bargain under which they are even allowed to exist has become very one-sided since the abandonment of specific time-limited charters, so allowing them to be regulated individually seems like the least we could do to even the scales.
[+] [-] 394549|7 years ago|reply
Sorry, but what you're advocating for a is a barrier towards fixing these problems.
If the legislature only talks in terms of abstract situations, all of it will feel theoretical and will be far less likely to spur real action. On the other hand, if you have concrete examples of problems, that makes the problems feel real. Real problems motivate real action.
Rest assured, whatever bill Sanders writes will target the broad problem at all companies, because he's forbidden from writing a law that would only target Amazon explicitly.
[+] [-] downrightmike|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rotdhizon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|7 years ago|reply
Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.
[+] [-] Ricardus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|7 years ago|reply
I have an online friend who used to work for an Amazon fulfillment center. I say "used to", because she got fired. For being sick. She got food poisoning one day and had to take a week off. When she got sick, she put in a request via MyLeave. Two or three months later, Amazon retroactively denied her request and fired her because she went negative on UPT. That's right, months. As far as she knew, everything was going well, and all of a sudden she was called into HR and unceremoniously dumped because Amazon decided months after the fact to deny her sick leave.
[+] [-] archi42|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElBarto|7 years ago|reply
Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here.
If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.
[+] [-] nemo44x|7 years ago|reply
This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.
[+] [-] free652|7 years ago|reply
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...
[+] [-] honkycat|7 years ago|reply
It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.
[+] [-] Gatsky|7 years ago|reply
Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.
[+] [-] 2-m3m3n70|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
Between that and the use of contractors, unionization is very difficult to achieve.
[+] [-] camtarn|7 years ago|reply
But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.
[+] [-] beat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to see a comparison of working conditions between the different countries.
[+] [-] andrewla|7 years ago|reply
One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.
The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.
Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.
Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.
[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states...
[2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.
[+] [-] jklinger410|7 years ago|reply
1 - Let's target warehouses across the country for this, and raise the average cost of American production. You're right, Bernie. When we take down Amazon warehouses, as the big bogeyman, a litany of other businesses will also get dinged for this. Walmart, Target, FedEx, UPS, so-on. Shitty warehouse conditions and employee abuse is only a shock to you, and you only see Amazon as a big target for this, if you have never worked at or known someone who has worked at any low-wage factory work.
2 - Your point about food stamps is dead on. I have asked everyone I know how they feel about Amazon paying someone more just because they have 5 kids. Regardless of what work they perform or, their experience, usefulness, or quality that they do their job with. Accepting food stamps has very little do with your employer, and more to do with your job and financial obligations.
I can't see Bernie's perspective any more. The pie in the sky legislation that he proposes make me believe that he actually doesn't intend to win the presidency. He's just here to make loud noises.
[+] [-] dlgeek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geggam|7 years ago|reply
This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums.
If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.
[+] [-] devit|7 years ago|reply
If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).
Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?
[+] [-] EpicEng|7 years ago|reply
Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.
[+] [-] s73v3r_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamache|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstatusthequo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gagege|7 years ago|reply
The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc."
Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."
So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.
[+] [-] zippzom|7 years ago|reply
Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise.
And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.
[+] [-] archagon|7 years ago|reply
Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they are "fair".
[+] [-] s73v3r_|7 years ago|reply
Because it absolutely does not matter.
"then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain."
This makes a whole lot of assumptions about things, namely that the employee has the ability to go somewhere else, and that Amazon is entitled to treat their workers like shit.
"So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps."
And for a company of their size, with their resources, this is entirely unacceptable and pure evil.
[+] [-] mikestew|7 years ago|reply
It's as if you've willingly chosen to ignore over 100 years of collective bargaining, and the reasons for it, just to poorly make a point. If it were as facile as you make it out to be, we would have never had unions.
[+] [-] jnordwick|7 years ago|reply
The article is a massive non-sequitor.
[+] [-] llamataboot|7 years ago|reply
Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this.
(Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)
[+] [-] 0xmohit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bensonn|7 years ago|reply
1. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book.
2. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc.
3. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay.
4. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me.
5. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things.
Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.)
$1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.
[+] [-] paulus_magnus2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camtarn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ousta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hulton|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] la6470|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamache|7 years ago|reply