We tend to hate on big companies, right up until they close up shop and move elsewhere. Then we decry the loss of relatively good paying unskilled jobs.
There's a very big difference between a "factory town" and a "company town".
While there are a million reasons to be skeptical of Amazon, most especially vertical integration between AWS and Amazon, "blue-collar labor market monopolies" are not one of them, at all.
The work is demanding. So was most every job that put food on American tables from 1770 until 1955.
If the wages justify it against the backdrop of a labor-hungry economy, then there's not a ton to worry about.
Not everywhere in the country. It’s broadly competitive with similarly intense work in second-tier metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Columbus, or Denver, and not even that in NYC, the Bay Area, or LA. I’m sure they pay higher starting wages in those markets.
I meant that if that is Amazon's starting wage nationwide, it's extremely generous. That's a fantastic starting wage for unskilled labor in Flyover, which is most of the country. I moved my business to Flyover from SoCal five years ago, and that certainly would have been a great starting wage for warehouse work even in SoCal five years ago.
https://1ac50a88-25ab-4011-94bc-c9af1856189b.filesusr.com/ugd/27755d_4e9c9f125e9446a9a5ce2327793c77ba.pdf A very interesting paper related to this. Basically, a local monopsony, but with a mobile labor force, is actually better in terms of overall compensation than regular compensation (because the local monopsony, having control of an entire area, can pay more efficiently through infrastructure and perks, but at the same time, because people can easily move to different jobs, you don’t have the underemployment and underpaying of an actual monopsony)
I've seen very similar papers with regards to workers at foreign enterprises in China in the 1990's; compensation packages and job satisfaction were consistently higher, simply because the firms were more productive than their local or state-owned counterparts.
Obviously, without an overwhelming regional footprint/concession, they were not investing in local infrastructure and worker amenities, just paying better. But the Chinese government, with much stronger state capacity than early 20th century Central American ones, was able to leverage foreign investment and the increased tax base first into local public investment and ultimately into national public investment that improved amenities for great numbers of citizens.
While the concession model seems to have yielded a small benefit to infrastructure and amenities in Costa Rica, I'm hesitant to generalize to say that it has any real bearing on many other cases in which stronger governments are more able to provision public goods and services.
So its relevance in the United States is, to my mind, very limited.
This is why the unionization effort in Alabama failed so miserably: Amazon actually pays better than local employers, the "mom-and-pop" shops everyone idolizes. National Democrats like Bernie and AOC, who know very little of econ conditions in rural, working class America, are completely oblivious to this fact. It's the power of local/regional econ elites and workers fear. Amazon can actually break up that power a little and offer better jobs. Nat'l Dems need to end their Amazon/Bezos obsession
Working conditions at Amazon must seem hideously awful to bicoastal media elites (and union officials who spend all their time in offices and conference rooms), but they are not so different from other factories and logistics centers, through which pass all the tangible manufactured products those bicoastal media elites use every day. Agricultural work is even nastier, and yet these bicoastal media elites still eat every day.
And based on the results of the Alabama union vote, Amazon's conditions are probably slightly better than the average.
I mean, there will be investigations and that’s fine. The NLRB should probe any serious allegations. But what i’ve read of allegations from union seems pretty small ball. Besides the union effort got creamed, like 70-30 i believe. No way investigations reverse outcome i think
I suspect it's also the case the union would have demanded an investigation in any case if they lost, regardless of the facts, because why not? Plus the NLRB has historically leaned pro-labor anyway, so again why not?
I am reminded of big government contract awards: almost every time, no matter the circumstances, one or more losers will challenge the result, because why not? They have Congressional representation too.
Not really, there's some conspiracy theory about a mailbox but the vote was not even close. Frankly, it all feels like a Trumpian face-saving denialism in the face of an embarrassing loss.
My attitude toward Amazon is pretty much identical to Matt Y's. That said, the "playing off cities against one another" and the accompanying largess offered by local and state officials is off-putting.
My problem is that they were going to give tax credits *just to Amazon*. I think municipalities competing on tax rates and services is a very good thing, but we cannot give out tax credits just to one company or the other.
It might be a good thing if municipalities competed on complete packages of tax rates and services. But at least sometimes they don't. Emeryville in the Bay Area, and weird little gerrymandered cities like Industry and Commerce in Southern California, have relatively few residents, and compete to be a location for commercial or industrial spaces. Thus, they offer low tax rates, and no services, and expect companies to rely on being immediately next door to other municipalities that do offer services. They're just free-riding.
My working theory is that the MSA should be the fundamental unit of American local governance.
None of this border arbitrage bullshit, no more school districts, and no more wrangling about who pays for what bit of intra-regional services and public goods.
I'm 100% in agreement: It's these *bespoke* deals that are the problem.
I don't begrudge any polity's efforts to foster a general, pro-business environment. Economic development is good. Jobs are needed! But it seems to me a barrier of unseemliness is pierced when we see large jurisdictions prostituting themselves (and their taxpayers) in order to shovel cash into the bank accounts of the shareholders of *individual* firms.
If they actually lived up to their commitments, the incentives probably would have been worth it, really.
The issue is that they're heavily front-loaded relative to the steady trickle of tax revenues produced, which is problematic when you don't realize a return for 50 years.
If we look back historically... had cities competed for business like this in 1968 instead of 2018, they'd have been falling all over themselves for names like Eastman Kodak, RCA, or Chrysler Corporation... oops.
The problem with privileged people writing about blue collar work is we would find almost any blue collar job hideous. I have no idea how I would hold my life together on $18/hr, and enduring 40 plus hours a week of drudgery to live an austere, paycheck to paycheck life would make me miserable. If I fell into the working class after spending two decades as a professional, I would probably wind up dying a “death if despair” I don’t know if I would kill myself slowly or quickly, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
Yet no country of any size has figured out how to get by without a big working class. I would be interested how the lives of Amazon workers differ from those of unskilled blue collar workers in France or Sweden. It’s pretty clear that Amazon isn’t that much worse than other American warehouses, if it were, they wouldn’t have a work force.
I'm definitely an upper-middle-class privileged white dude professional, but I feel like I can't be the only one who held down a blue-collar job over the summer or two. And yeah, they all featured everything I hate - getting up early, working outside when its hot, packing a lunch. Being told what to do by somebody who doesn't give a shit about you. Yeah, I started a white collar career to not have to do that stuff!
But the work's so mind-numbing it goes by fast. Some of it you can do sitting down; the rest you do in more comfortable shoes than I've ever worn in an office. You clock out and you're done; there's no taking your work home with you. When you're sick you call out; somebody covers your shift and you never feel like you're letting the team down because "only you" can do something. (I'm aware that calling out when I was sick is a privilege a lot of the working class can't afford.)
Plus, what's the most interesting machine they let you play with in an office? At my summer job we had jackhammers, cartridge-powered nail guns, skip loaders, all kinds of shit. One job I was the only kid who knew how to drive stick so they let be drive the combine. (It was like a little four-row nursery combine, but still.) For whatever reason its easier to grab beers after work with people like that than people in offices with their kids and their totally encapsulated lives out in the burbs. There's stuff to recommend it, in other words, at least in your 20's and 30's. Maybe I just think that because I don't do it anymore, though.
So, as someone who worked in a factory out of high school for three years before the older guys basically bullied me into going to college, and then worked in restaurants for the next 14, only to end up back in the same manufacturing industry I started out in but in a supervisory role, I agree with you...mostly.
My brothers and I are all pretty nerdy, book-reading, liberal kinds of guys who, for various reasons, worked in jobs that would be described as blue-collar for periods of time before ending up in more white-collar-ey. Factory work, overnight line cooking, pressure washing old factory equipment for re-sale, the Navy, yada, yada. Our sister, on the other hand, went the more lefty route of college, then grad school, then social work, and it's kind of a running joke with my brothers and I that her worldview would have greatly benefitted from a stint in a good old-fashioned soul-grinding job for at least a year or so.
I'm of the opinion that those sorts of jobs can be really good for you, I think, in terms of perspective and whatnot, but you gotta have a long-term exit strategy. That work is fine for guys that are in their mid-twenties with no kids, but it's very easy to get stuck on that treadmill, and you don't want to look up when you're 50 and your body is breaking down and the only other job you are qualified for is a literal move into the same kind of work at a different place.
Permit me to testify. Coming out of high school I took just such a job. I spent two years working in the packaging and warehouse of a rubber manufacturing plant in order to save money for school. I spent every working day packing 75 lb bales of hot rubber into crates that weighed a ton and then strapping and stenciling them for shipment. It was hard and demanding work. But my goal was to get to engineering school which I did.
Engineering schools are interesting. You don't get in unless you are demonstrably good at science and math. Nevertheless they always flunk out more students then the graduate. My class year was no different, started with a little less than 400 first year students and graduated 135. I do not for a second imagine that I was brighter than all those students who flunked out or left for whatever reason. But I got up every morning, attended all the classes and did all the often mundane work because I knew from experience what the alternative was. That early work was my inspiration.
Amen. So true. My pre-college jobs included landscaping, bagel baking (3:30am start), house painting, and restaurant work. I was not going back to any of that.
To add somewhat to what you said "blue collar" and "white collar" (or "working class" verse "professional" jobs) are just enormous categories, and the jobs within them are vastly different from each other. There are piece of cake blue collar jobs and hellish white collar jobs, even if the trend may be the opposite. The pay trend also goes in favor of white collar work, but again, enormous exceptions exist.
By the way I think you make a good point about age and physical work. A lot of difficult, somewhat low-pay physical jobs appealed to me when I was in my 20s, but in my 40s with a family and the realization that my body isn't what it once was they sound much worse. But at age 25 working in a logging camp sounds way more fun than working in an office.
That’s Wigan. I just made the point. My blue collar job is awesome. I make enough of a salary that I pay more in taxes than the median income.
They are equating blue collar with low skill. Blue collar means simply that your job involves some sort of physical actions and doesn’t require a 4-year degree.
I work with Union Millwright Supervisors who pull 250K a year, and still have months off work.
Being a blue collar worker in one’s 20s is a lot different from going back to it in ones 40s. The biggest difference is expectations and commitments. $18/hr is okay until you get a girl pregnant. Then you have to chose between being overworked, being a deadbeat and being poor.
Even most 22 year olds would rather work construction or drive a truck (which seem a lot more satisfying/interesting) than be a warehouse drone. I’ve done carpentry as a hobby. I find it satisfying, it isn’t too physically demanding for a fit middle aged person, and I might become a carpenter if I got disbarred and couldn’t find work as a paralegal.
Maybe I was a weirdo, but I liked being a warehouse drone in my late-teens/early twenties, and I would've let you take a hand as sacrifice before I ever worked construction.
Yeah definetly agree with you. Sure blue collar work isn't ideal but I am currently a student who works like 55 hour weeks at a restaurant over the summer. Sure it is pretty tiring and probably not quite as demanding as warehouse work but idk you get to have some fun "shared suffering" with coworkers, days go by fast as you said, and frankly the months I am there fly by. Makes enough money for me to pay for school, though I have to be quite frugal. Sure my feet hurt like hell and If I wasn't on my parents healthcare it would be much tighter, but I am happy and isn't that what we care about?
At the student life-stage a 55 hr/wk busy restaurant life is awesome. Often free food and booze, tons of friends at your place and in the industry, always a party, always tax-free cash in your pocket. However, with some time (not much, in my case) this gets old real quick. Your age, energy, fitness, entertainment preferences change, your concerns for savings, retirement, insurance, career interests and advancement change, intellectual stimulation, your family changes, and your housing and transportation needs change as well. I'm not saying that there isn't a restaurant career track for you and many others, but there were whole ton of us who do wanted to do something else, and did.
I don’t know. My Blue Collar job is pretty awesome. I make six figures and travel the world.
I have plenty of friends who are blue-collar, mechanics and welders who love their job. Come out on a jeep run with me. 99% blue collar guys who have more fun than you can imagine.
Blue-collar is very broad. It includes skilled and unskilled labor.
Personally I’d go crazy going to an office and working with the same people over and over.
I suspect you mean service jobs (is that the best phrase?) which are a subset of blue collar.
I worked in construction as a kid and liked it, went into engineering and discovered that office work sucks, then went into software/process consulting and discovered that it checks the same boxes as construction. Lots of problem-solving, tons of human interaction, regular site visits and travel, wide-ranging view of the industry.
And I can get my construction on fine-tuning my house, lol, where I can *stop* when I'm *sick of it*. As I mentioned the other day, for some stupid reason I've gone and gutted the master bath after having just finished the kitchen and ground floor powder room.
Universal service would toss all the 18-21 year old kids in the country into a blender, forcing them to interact with folks from all walks of life, commiserate over shared hatred of their sergeants, provide valuable technical skills and self-discipline, and provide a unifying experience for all Americans.
At the same time, the sure and certain knowledge that *everyone's kids* will be getting shot at would force politicians to be a bit more circumspect in making foreign policy that flirts with war.
I don't expect it to provide significant advantage in times of war, I expect it to help head off the increasingly worrisome internal threats to our democracy and prosperity, namely division and polarization.
Perhaps it's not necessary, but I can't conceive of a situation in which it's a bad thing.
You'll be dead and gone before the crippling atomization that your definition of "freedom" has caused in American society really comes to a head. I'll be here to live through that climax and pick up the pieces when it's over.
As I note above, I think this misunderstanding of "freedom" and ignorance of "responsibility" has the potential to end up killing millions of my fellow Americans, so I don't care at all about your opinion. Your attitude is precisely the *problem* that broadly inculcating a healthy patriotism and solidarity is intended to *fix*.
It's not like anyone is going to implement my little pipedream here, so you can rest assured you'll get your way. God help us all.
Is this about covid vaccines? If so, hundreds of thousands have died because the FDA refused to allow human challenge trials, and refused to allow vaccines to be released unless they met their excessive safety standard.
Yep. Hard to be much younger and think about these things.
I know what you're pointing to and don't care. I also don't make over a million dollars a year but I have a say in how those folks are taxed. I don't make less than $20,000, but I have a say in how the EITC is implemented.
Though... I'm young enough that it would be reasonably straightforward to make it "retroactive," in the sense that all folks under 35 must also report for their stretch before eventually settling into "everyone gets called up for 18 months between the ages of 18 and 21".
The military is not your therapist. It’s an organization that has a very specific mission. Besides, 75% of kids these days are too fat to be in the military. Fortune stupid. Or do too many drugs.
Let’s just make all the kids go work at wherever you work at. Chances are the standards are lower.
Switzerland has compulsory military service, and a small volunteer standing military. Not a bad model for the United States, if paired with major reduction in the standing army - most of the able-bodied population goes through training and serves a short stint then becomes part of the national guard or reserve. We need cybersecurity defenses more than a large army.
It never does turn out to be everyone, and wouldn’t be that way unless we were under such a threat as Israel is. Conscription did make our military far worse during the Vietnam war, and we must be able to defeat China in a war over Taiwan. Also, they would be pulled out of productive activities at a time when they are at their best.
The point would be to structure any future universal service requirement specifically as a society-building exercise that encompasses everyone, with no exceptions and no discretion over assignments.
There is no chance that the any foreign opponent can forcibly invade the US and topple our government or society. There's very little chance that once can pose *any* physical threat beyond hacking the shit out of various pieces of infrastructure during wartime.
But there is a very real, if still small, chance that we destroy our democracy and prosperity because of polarization and the increasing acceptance of violence as a political means.
Call such a program an insurance policy, if you will. Chances are that we'd be ok without it, but it is nonetheless a good idea.
And I have no idea why we should believe it would detract from our Navy's ability to face off against the PLAN in the Western Pacific.
I’ve deleted like five comments because I’ve called these guys idiots or worse. These guys have no concept of what the military is like. It’s condescending and pisses me off. I think it’s Boy Scout camp or some bullshit. They obviously never served.
Look, you can disagree with me, and get pissed as hell. I don't care, you're entitled to whatever language you like, and all the vitriol in the world isn't going to phase me much.
And yes, you're correct that I haven't served.
But that doesn't detract from my right to say this: the *only* reason we have a military is to protect the security of the country and its people.
Our security isn't under severe threat from foreign enemies, and not from domestic ones. It's under threat from our fragmentation and atomization, our own inability to view our fellow countrymen and women as fellow citizens with all the rights and responsibilities that entails. Civil conflict poses a far greater threat to the prosperity and safety of today's America than any other.
If the best way to protect the country is to use the military as a tool to stitch together our social fabric once again, then I'm not going to pretend I have qualms about turning it into a tool to do just that, your objections be damned.
If Congress and the President, by some miracle, came to agree with me and told you that you're now the national therapist, then you're the damned therapist. That'd be the mission.
If the right tool to fix the problem were the Department of Peace, Ponies, LSD, and Glitter, then great, you're off the fucking hook.
You disagree with me; I understand that.
But are you really telling me that if you felt as I do, that universal service was the best or only means to head off a civil war and restore some semblance of unity, you'd still say it shouldn't become the mission?
Look. I agree with you about your goal. I hate polarization and the military is excellent at bringing people together. But so is a football team. Only because people choose to put something above themselves.
You look at the success of military and confuse correlation with causation.
Additionally, you are under the condescending impression that the military is a participation sport.
It’s not. The average IQ of the military is significantly higher than the average IQ of the general population because it requires a lot skill and knowledge to do just about anything in the military. Only to do these jobs, but to do them in stressful conditions.
I don’t know what you do for a living but I would never say… hey everyone can do your job… even if they didn’t want to, you would Probably have issues.
If you want to have some sort of service commitment, people get to choose between the Peace Corps, or road work projects or community service and the military was one of many options, I would Support that.
I can not stand by and let some degrade our Military with the insinuation that anybody could do it. That’s just fucked up.
if the pay and opportunities for future growth were comparable, I would much rather work in an Amazon warehouse than sitting in front of my screen for 12 hours a day working for clients.
Definitely. Also I just thinking working service gives you a greater appreciation for the amount to which small gestures of kindness can influence other people's days. Not to say there aren't plenty of people who've worked in service, but in general I think it makes people better.
Wage differential. Words for a concept that I’m always trying to explain. My job has a lot of these non-ideal work conditions. It’s physical, exposed to the elements, and involves being away from home for long periods. Hello from 5-weeks in Argentina. The job also requires several specialized skills and judgement.
Anyway, one thing that Matt left out about Amazon are a they actually promote fairly well. We have a friend who lasted through the six months of box moving and was recognized qnd moved up. She now maintains the robots and is a supervisor.
I’m curious as to what will happen when an Amazon fulfillment center finally unionizes.
Wage differential also is a big part of why most people can't make any money in jobs like sports writer, actor, musician or any other kind of job that people will often do just as a hobby.
The combination of which explains why a lot of middle/upper class millennials (like me) who grew up hearing “find a job where you love it so much, you wonder why they pay you!” are so frustrated by their shitty pay.
I completely agree that that is the worst advice going around. It left me pretty confused as a kid - I liked playing video games, hiking, trying new things / going to new places and reading - what job is that?
I had a huge epiphany in my 20s at some point when I read better advice that flipped "do what you love" around. It was more along the lines of "become very good at something. If you're an expert at (almost) anything you'll probably start to like and appreciate that thing. At the very least you'll like the feeling of being in demand and respected for your expertise"
I know that won't work for everyone or for every type of expertise, but if feels like better one-size-fits-all advice than "do what you love"
Our parents were idiots, and everything is their fault.
Everything they did was wrong, and every adverse effect was completely predictable when they set out, so it's completely their fault that they chose to do those things anyway, and they deserve our vilification.
/s
(Said literally every child about every parent since the concept of "society" arose)
Nope. Boomer and Gen X parents really were idiots. Im a Gen Xer. We really did fuck up millennials and Gen Z by telling them that they could do anything, blah, blah, blah.
It was probably inevitable because of the technology advanced made us naive. But it ain't sarcasm.
Every generation before us, told their kids to suck it up and work hard at something. Support your family first... everything else comes after.
My parents are an end-Boomer and an elder-Xer respectively.
Most of the mistakes were made by their parents, and most of the problems they were sowing were not obvious at the time.
The real issue I have with your generation is that many of the challenges were apparent 20 years ago and y'all decided to double-down on all of the policies that led us to them because it was harder to reflect and change course than to ignore the problems that were cropping up.
My hope is that, when my kids are my age and telling me about all the mistakes my generation made, I will have the fundamental *grace* to admit that, yes, not everything went perfectly. We had our reasons for implementing these policies, many of which helped solve problems you don't face any longer, but they've had unforeseen effects, and it's now time to consider those new problems in their own light.
My parents and the vast majority of their generation with whom I interact do NOT have that grace or rigorous self-honesty. Most of them prefer to whine about what's wrong with my peers, and I'm here in the corner thinking "Who raised us, again?"
I think we'll be more than happy to blame people in our generation, just not ourselves. If only those Republican's/Democrat, YIMBY/NIMBY, etc. hadn't stopped us, we could have made solved that problem.
21 years ago we had just finished the longest sustained period of peacetime growth in American history, the cold war was over, unemployment was at historic lows, interest rates too, the budget was balanced and the internet was just getting going. Doubling down was the logical thing to do.
In that context, even the Iraq War seemed like a good idea given how successful the Persian Gulf War of the early nineties was.
I'm not sure about sports writer. But actor and musician are an example of the tournament model where you have a large number of people pursuing very few fabulously lucrative jobs.
My pet theory about why Hollywood actors tend to be liberal is they've seen firsthand how much luck is involved in success. For every successful movie actor there are hundreds of extremely talented actors just scraping by. Rita Rudner switched from dance to comedy because female comedians were relatively rare in the eighties.
Is it really? Wage differential is about people choosing to do or not do work. I don’t think there’s a Reserve of people capable of being NBA stars, who just didn’t put in the effort or who though the schedule was as to long. Wouldn’t that more be supply and demand or something else.
The way he described it, I thought wage differential was more like truck driver pay. There’s a huge population is capable of doing it, chooses not to do it the hours away from home, or the monotony.
I think his point wasn't about NBA stars or their pay. It was about the bottom of the rung where the vast majority of people are. Basketball is probably a bad example because low-wage basketball work is sort of rare with the possible exception of the NCAA if you consider that as a job.
Being a musician is a better example - a tiny number of acts sell out stadiums but the vast majority of people who consider musician their job title actually have 2nd jobs as waiters or whatever. Relative to the time, energy and talent required to be a musician, you generally make almost nothing.
If I described the career of "being a musician" to you on paper, but left out the parts about having fun playing music it would sound dreadful.
i.e. you travel around in a shitty van, lugging around heavy equipment for very low and uncertain pay with absolutely zero benefits with a tiny tiny chance of ever rising through the ranks and then dealing with shark managers who will probably screw you over. You'll have to sell your own merchandise and Tee-shirts and constantly promote yourself on facebook just to have gas money, etc...
So I think that's what he means. Likewise, playing in the NFL or MLB is great if they'll hire you, but minor league baseball and pop-up stadium leagues are terrible jobs on paper when it comes to hours and $s. But people do enjoy playing sports.
Yes, because there's an over supply of people willing to do it. It's the opposite of an arduous or boring job. Negatives of a job are disamenities and perks are amenities
Even basketball player is a decent example. It's true that there are much clearer objective measurements than most jobs as to who is good. But 500th best basketball player in the country has to leave the country to make a living. There are other weird things with basketball in that the NBA is a monopoly and unionized (which is why they have a minimum salary, otherwise the teams would be able to fill the end of the bench with much smaller salaries).
I think it can’t be overemphasized the extent to which Amazon — and also Uber, Lyft, and the entire “gig economy” sector — was an artifact of the terrible employment numbers of the last 20 years. As Matt correctly notes, Amazon manages to be a notoriously unpleasant place to work even for their 6-figure engineers, and was _remarkably_ unpleasant to their manual laborers. The instant workers could vote with their feet and go elsewhere they did, and I suspect we’re just seeing the start of that phenomenon.
First of all, there have not been terrible employment numbers for the last 20 years. Fifteen years ago, the employment numbers were about the strongest they have ever been since economic statistics were recorded. They obviously cratered during the financial crisis and COVID, but as recently as 2019, the unemployment rate was the lowest since 1969, and the employment-population ratio was again about the highest it had ever been, only slightly lower than in 2007, with fairly strong real income growth
In other words, Amazon has operated and grown in a variety of employment situations - both very bad, and among the best ever.
I love Amazon. What with my increasingly bad mobility issues they are a godsend. Cheaper and more convenient is hard to beat. I have read about a lot of issues with Amazon but being quite familiar with very hard work in very dangerous jobs I would say that most of the critiques regarding labor conditions are bullshit. Amazon does not have a get out of jail free card when it comes to working conditions. Those are set by OSHA. Been in a lot of warehouses too and never saw one that wasn't used for storing perishable goods that was air conditioned.
When it comes to the physical difficulty of this labor I will direct your attention to the first picture accompanying this piece. Look at who is in it. There are women, a couple of older guys and some younger workers. If this were the dystopian hell hole of back breaking labor activists describe then most of these people simply would not be there. On the other hand I would be the first to admit the work is certainly mind numbingly boring. But that would describe a lot of work from assembly lines to meat packing and everything in between. And those businesses also have high turnover. If you think the people stocking supermarket shelves every time you go to a store aren't bending and lifting you would be mistaken. Think the work pace displayed above is unusually onerous? Try fast food.
My assessment of the people who write about the horrid job conditions in Amazon and believe those are actually unusual for this sort of work is fairly blunt. They have obviously never done any sort of hard job in their life.
Anecdotally, two of the last three places I've worked in the past 5 years have suddenly found themselves in wage/labor competition with Amazon...one was a restaurant and the other was a factory. Both had starting wages that they were fine with offering until Amazon opened up nearby, offering a higher wage. A lot of the restaurant workers would leave for Amazon and come running back, because, IMO, the culture change and longer shifts were too difficult of an adjustment for them to make. In lots of restaurants, if you are a dependable employee who does a decent job, you can have job security for as long as you want it, for the most part. But the rate of employee return for the factory was much, much lower, and I think it just might be because there are a lot of factory jobs that, frankly, kind of suck, and lots of temp agencies to place you in a new one if you feel like spinning the roulette wheel on a new place that might have better wages or better amenities.
This is happening in the knowledge worker class as well. I work for a large, historic industrial company as an engineer, and we are bleeding technical talent to Amazon, doing anything from robot design and programming to logistics and operations (or Blue Origin, another Bezos operation). Usually for a 50-100% pay jump. They have an incredible bonus program too. But I hear a lot of folks burn out quickly.
Amazon is really rough on white collar workers. Their legal team pays well and allows permanent remote but is supposed to be pretty brutal even for lawyers used to biglaw firms, which are themselves examples of paying junior associates tons of money to get people to work miserable jobs.
Frankly, as someone who spent 2 years working for amazon, most of the negative things people say straight up baffle me. Like its nothing like my experience, its weird.
I have been bemused by that sort of online discussion where the most vehement anti-Amazon opinions came from people who very clearly had never set foot inside an Amazon fulfillment center or sort facility. In particular it was pretty common a few years ago to see news accounts or opinion pieces alleging that Amazon had a terrible safety record and culture. I found that impossible to square with my direct knowledge, limited though it was.
An example: just outside each exit Amazon installs a short sign pole with a round, reflective indicator mounted on top. The indicator can be twisted one way to display green and the other to display red. A sign cautions those exiting the facility that a red indicator means possible icy conditions on the walkway and/or parking lots. What I found interesting was that the icing indicator I saw was at a facility in south Florida - a place that never, ever gets icy conditions. I asked the facility manager about it: He chuckled a bit and agreed with me that it was somewhat incongruous given the local climate, but said that when a safety edict was put out the expectation was the it was to be obeyed by everyone, at every facility, without question. When it comes to safety simple rules (no exceptions!) are often best because they are easy to explain, implement, and enforce. I took the icing indicator to be evidence of a strong safety culture, and I saw nothing elsewhere to dissuade me from that conclusion.
". . . lots of bending, lifting, and moving . . ."
This might come as a shock to a few Slow Boring readers, but this is a characteristic of almost all blue collar work. I wonder how these liberal arts grads think the stuff they buy is manufactured, packaged, shipped and retailed? Robots?
The biggest missing piece I see to all of this is how to get labor from being unskilled to skilled. Whether that is through college, trade school, apprenticeships, self study, etc. it seems like that is the most important piece. $18 for unskilled labor is great, but at a standard 40 hour work week, is still under 40k. If your single and age 16-20 making that, you're doing great. If you have a family of four at 40, that's mediocre at best.
Contrast that to a skill trade where you can go from apprentice to master (plumber, electrician, mechanic, etc.) and have your pay grow pretty dramatically as you gain skill and experience.
I don't think this is any more fundamentally correct than "send everyone to college".
At the end of the day, a huge chunk of the workforce is not ever going to become skilled labor of any sort.
Allowances must be made for those folks to have a chance at a decent quality of life based merely on a willingness to work hard for a lifetime. Whether that's minimum wages, income transfers, strongly progressive taxation, public works projects, or whatever, I don't care.
"At the end of the day, a huge chunk of the workforce is not ever going to become skilled labor of any sort."
Why does it need to be huge? I can see if being 10%, but does it need to be 30%?
The difference between those is immense for our economy and the amount of resources needing to be spent by the government in transfers, subsidies, etc.
The portion of the population engaged in unskilled labor has been huge at all times, in all places, in every sort of society. It is huge today in developed European and East Asian nations with universal public tertiary education that encompasses both academic and vocational options.
Perhaps saying this reveals me for the prejudiced asshole I am, but I genuinely don't think it possible, no matter how many opportunities are given, for a very large number of people to grasp them, whether that's due to intelligence, self-discipline, or work ethic.
I don't know how large that number is; hopefully you're correct and it's really only 10%. But I wouldn't bet on making good education and vocational opportunities available panning out how you expect.
Do it anyway, because I'm sure the number of folks who have the potential to do something more is still more than enough to justify it.
But the folks who only want to, or are only able to, go to do a day of low-skilled work still deserve to go home to enjoy a decent life at the end of the day, to have the dignity that they enjoy in places like Japan or Finland, to earn a living wage, access public goods, and share in the basic comforts.
If the "market value" of their labor doesn't give it to them, step in and do it anyway.
That number has changed over time. For the last couple of thousand years, the vast, vast majority of labor was (relatively) unskilled farm labor. That has been changing since the industrial revolution and over the last century, the amount of skilled labor has increased dramatically. We've been trying to continue this by driving more people into higher education, but I think that is a mistake where we we have substituted educational attainment for skills. How do we help people gain skills outside of a university environment?
I work in logistics. One of the top criteria for siting a new warehouse is the availability of labor. And its cost. Labor costs a lot more than the buildings (rent) for instance. Anecdotally, I've never heard a warehouse operator say, "Yay, Amazon is coming here soon, so now wages will fall". In fact, they correctly say the opposite.
People hate excessive hours and weird schedules. Why doesn't Amazon offer more humane hours and shifts? Can there really be that much economic advantage in working a small group of people into misery with 60 hours a week, instead of hiring twice as many people for 30 hours a week?
And this crazy stuff with their working you so hard that you don't have time to pee (yeah, Amazon tried to lie about this, and got busted). Once again: would Bezos really lose that much money if he allowed the managers to relent a little on the slave-driving? Like, so what if people packed only 80% of the orders in a day? If the job were less grinding, you would not have to offer the same wage. And if they had less turn-over as a result, some of that would be recouped in HR costs.
This attitude that we must drive our workers into an early grave seems weirdly short-sighted, like not even economically rational.
But they don't work 60 hours a week. And if they payed their workers 80% as much just to let them go a little slower they would be taking much more shit from all these commentators. If you don't like this deal there are absolutely other jobs that you just have to show up on time but you don't have to work very hard to make close to minimum wage.
You absolutely cannot forget that Amazon operates on extremely low margins. At any given margin of higher pay or a less productive work force, Amazon would be losing money. So this idea that Bezos could go a little easier on people and it would be fine for his business is simply false.
I believe the crux of the issue is Amazon Prime. When you guaranty two day shipping you need to make sure the stuff gets out right on time, so if they work 80% instead of 100% then 20% of their customers don't get their stuff for three days, which would be bad.
I would also hazard a guess that hiring fewer people and working them more hours, even with overtime pay, means they have to pay for fewer healthcare packages... though I'm not sure how many benefits they offer in the first place.
I'm gonna add something I haven't seen here, which is that for many employees I've had as a supervisor, they *want* to work 60 hours a week, and the reasons are often all over the map for that. I've had employees tell me they just want the extra money, or working more keeps them out of trouble, or they'd rather work 60 hours at one job than 40 at a full-time and another 20 at a part-time, or even (and I think this comes as a surprise to many white collar workers) it's just a competition thing. Some employees are perfectly fine not working OT, unless a few other people are gonna work it, and then they want to because they feel like they're being cheated out of money. I've had employees rip me a new one and be offended because I gave them a Saturday off and asked someone else to work. I thought I was helping them out, they thought I was screwing them.
One of the articles MY linked to in the post said that Amazon actually likes high turnover. Not as in, tolerates it as a cost of otherwise economising on working conditions, but thinks that high turnover is better than low turnover all else being equal.
This is a classic paradox about Taylorism and other numbers based systems for organizing work.
I think the problem can best be explained by a look at personal factors. This is the way Bezos and people like him approach the world. They can’t imagine other ways of life.
Matt seems to allude to this but I'm going to say it outright. Amazon's fulfillment warehouse have a 150% annual employee turnover - that's so high. Best I can tell Walmart is operating at ~ 50% (NOTE: bit harder to benchmark here with their use of a part time workforce). I suspect Amazon is purposefully running high to minimize unionization efforts. If your employee base is in constant churn - very hard to organize.
I have to imagine at some point they'll churn through the ~ entire potential employee base and hiring will slow and they'll need to change. And this might already be happening. They just bumped starting pay again to $18 / hour. Their new ad campaign is highlighting education reimbursement. We'll see.
We'll see how quickly automation saves their ass, I think.
Like Uber, their model for fulfillment seems contingent on doing away with a great number of the people involved sooner rather than later. Unlike Uber, that might be an achievable goal.
Uber will burn investor money for another 2 decades, if it makes it that long, before AVs are really usable in their major markets.
IDK. Amazon's margins seem healthy and scalable. Back in 2019 their own robotics lead said a fully automated end-to-end solution is "at least 10 years away". I don't think they're dependent on fulfillment automation for continued growth.
If they burn through the labor pool, how long is that true?
I guess a big part of the difference is that Amazon doesn't face an "all or nothing" proposition for automation; every incremental difference is a few less people and higher potential wages for the remainder.
This reminded me I have a package coming tonight with seven different products in it, that would've taken trips to multiple different stores, all delivered at no extra cost of a high quality streaming service.
I enjoyed this piece as Matt earnestly engages with this important topic, but he's ultimately beating up on a strawman. The sharp folks in the "Amazon bad" crowd don't think the company is literally driving down wages. Why not engage with the more substantive objections to Amazon labor and warehouse practices? Some of the biggest being:
(1) the fact Amazon's minimum wage of $18/hr is still nowhere near the marginal product of a warehouse worker, given how efficient the warehouses run thanks to the robots and logistics software
(2) the company's model of hitting high turnover goals to burn through tired-out workers
(3) union-busting practices.
Matt even references (2) but doesn't seem to find much wrong with it.
We tend to hate on big companies, right up until they close up shop and move elsewhere. Then we decry the loss of relatively good paying unskilled jobs.
There's a very big difference between a "factory town" and a "company town".
While there are a million reasons to be skeptical of Amazon, most especially vertical integration between AWS and Amazon, "blue-collar labor market monopolies" are not one of them, at all.
The work is demanding. So was most every job that put food on American tables from 1770 until 1955.
If the wages justify it against the backdrop of a labor-hungry economy, then there's not a ton to worry about.
$18 per hour starting wage for unskilled labor, everywhere in the country, is outstanding pay.
Not everywhere in the country. It’s broadly competitive with similarly intense work in second-tier metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Columbus, or Denver, and not even that in NYC, the Bay Area, or LA. I’m sure they pay higher starting wages in those markets.
I meant that if that is Amazon's starting wage nationwide, it's extremely generous. That's a fantastic starting wage for unskilled labor in Flyover, which is most of the country. I moved my business to Flyover from SoCal five years ago, and that certainly would have been a great starting wage for warehouse work even in SoCal five years ago.
I understand, and I think we can all agree that it is a good thing that it is no longer a market-beating starting wage in many places!
https://1ac50a88-25ab-4011-94bc-c9af1856189b.filesusr.com/ugd/27755d_4e9c9f125e9446a9a5ce2327793c77ba.pdf A very interesting paper related to this. Basically, a local monopsony, but with a mobile labor force, is actually better in terms of overall compensation than regular compensation (because the local monopsony, having control of an entire area, can pay more efficiently through infrastructure and perks, but at the same time, because people can easily move to different jobs, you don’t have the underemployment and underpaying of an actual monopsony)
Interesting.
I've seen very similar papers with regards to workers at foreign enterprises in China in the 1990's; compensation packages and job satisfaction were consistently higher, simply because the firms were more productive than their local or state-owned counterparts.
Obviously, without an overwhelming regional footprint/concession, they were not investing in local infrastructure and worker amenities, just paying better. But the Chinese government, with much stronger state capacity than early 20th century Central American ones, was able to leverage foreign investment and the increased tax base first into local public investment and ultimately into national public investment that improved amenities for great numbers of citizens.
While the concession model seems to have yielded a small benefit to infrastructure and amenities in Costa Rica, I'm hesitant to generalize to say that it has any real bearing on many other cases in which stronger governments are more able to provision public goods and services.
So its relevance in the United States is, to my mind, very limited.
This is why the unionization effort in Alabama failed so miserably: Amazon actually pays better than local employers, the "mom-and-pop" shops everyone idolizes. National Democrats like Bernie and AOC, who know very little of econ conditions in rural, working class America, are completely oblivious to this fact. It's the power of local/regional econ elites and workers fear. Amazon can actually break up that power a little and offer better jobs. Nat'l Dems need to end their Amazon/Bezos obsession
Working conditions at Amazon must seem hideously awful to bicoastal media elites (and union officials who spend all their time in offices and conference rooms), but they are not so different from other factories and logistics centers, through which pass all the tangible manufactured products those bicoastal media elites use every day. Agricultural work is even nastier, and yet these bicoastal media elites still eat every day.
And based on the results of the Alabama union vote, Amazon's conditions are probably slightly better than the average.
You are in the right substack then - Matt is definitely no cheerleader for mom and pops!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/small-business-is-not-the-answer
Isn't the jury still out on why unionization failed? I thought Amazon was being investigated for anti union tactics tainting the vote.
But yea, I do also agree with Matt's thesis that the Amazon jobs, while grueling, are almost certainly the best paying options in that town.
I mean, there will be investigations and that’s fine. The NLRB should probe any serious allegations. But what i’ve read of allegations from union seems pretty small ball. Besides the union effort got creamed, like 70-30 i believe. No way investigations reverse outcome i think
I suspect it's also the case the union would have demanded an investigation in any case if they lost, regardless of the facts, because why not? Plus the NLRB has historically leaned pro-labor anyway, so again why not?
I am reminded of big government contract awards: almost every time, no matter the circumstances, one or more losers will challenge the result, because why not? They have Congressional representation too.
Unless they used them Dominion machines. I read those things are sketchy. ( \s for liability)
Not really, there's some conspiracy theory about a mailbox but the vote was not even close. Frankly, it all feels like a Trumpian face-saving denialism in the face of an embarrassing loss.
I haven't noticed many Democratic politicians railing against amazon. I'm not sure that Bernie and AOC are representative of them.
The new Amazon office in NY actually polled well. Being anti-Amazon is definitely not a mainstream Dem position the way that criticizing Facebook is.
My attitude toward Amazon is pretty much identical to Matt Y's. That said, the "playing off cities against one another" and the accompanying largess offered by local and state officials is off-putting.
They probably learned it from sports teams.
Yep. Very similar phenomenon.
My problem is that they were going to give tax credits *just to Amazon*. I think municipalities competing on tax rates and services is a very good thing, but we cannot give out tax credits just to one company or the other.
It might be a good thing if municipalities competed on complete packages of tax rates and services. But at least sometimes they don't. Emeryville in the Bay Area, and weird little gerrymandered cities like Industry and Commerce in Southern California, have relatively few residents, and compete to be a location for commercial or industrial spaces. Thus, they offer low tax rates, and no services, and expect companies to rely on being immediately next door to other municipalities that do offer services. They're just free-riding.
My working theory is that the MSA should be the fundamental unit of American local governance.
None of this border arbitrage bullshit, no more school districts, and no more wrangling about who pays for what bit of intra-regional services and public goods.
Can you elaborate on what services they are free-riding on?
I'm 100% in agreement: It's these *bespoke* deals that are the problem.
I don't begrudge any polity's efforts to foster a general, pro-business environment. Economic development is good. Jobs are needed! But it seems to me a barrier of unseemliness is pierced when we see large jurisdictions prostituting themselves (and their taxpayers) in order to shovel cash into the bank accounts of the shareholders of *individual* firms.
If they actually lived up to their commitments, the incentives probably would have been worth it, really.
The issue is that they're heavily front-loaded relative to the steady trickle of tax revenues produced, which is problematic when you don't realize a return for 50 years.
If we look back historically... had cities competed for business like this in 1968 instead of 2018, they'd have been falling all over themselves for names like Eastman Kodak, RCA, or Chrysler Corporation... oops.
The problem with privileged people writing about blue collar work is we would find almost any blue collar job hideous. I have no idea how I would hold my life together on $18/hr, and enduring 40 plus hours a week of drudgery to live an austere, paycheck to paycheck life would make me miserable. If I fell into the working class after spending two decades as a professional, I would probably wind up dying a “death if despair” I don’t know if I would kill myself slowly or quickly, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
Yet no country of any size has figured out how to get by without a big working class. I would be interested how the lives of Amazon workers differ from those of unskilled blue collar workers in France or Sweden. It’s pretty clear that Amazon isn’t that much worse than other American warehouses, if it were, they wouldn’t have a work force.
I'm definitely an upper-middle-class privileged white dude professional, but I feel like I can't be the only one who held down a blue-collar job over the summer or two. And yeah, they all featured everything I hate - getting up early, working outside when its hot, packing a lunch. Being told what to do by somebody who doesn't give a shit about you. Yeah, I started a white collar career to not have to do that stuff!
But the work's so mind-numbing it goes by fast. Some of it you can do sitting down; the rest you do in more comfortable shoes than I've ever worn in an office. You clock out and you're done; there's no taking your work home with you. When you're sick you call out; somebody covers your shift and you never feel like you're letting the team down because "only you" can do something. (I'm aware that calling out when I was sick is a privilege a lot of the working class can't afford.)
Plus, what's the most interesting machine they let you play with in an office? At my summer job we had jackhammers, cartridge-powered nail guns, skip loaders, all kinds of shit. One job I was the only kid who knew how to drive stick so they let be drive the combine. (It was like a little four-row nursery combine, but still.) For whatever reason its easier to grab beers after work with people like that than people in offices with their kids and their totally encapsulated lives out in the burbs. There's stuff to recommend it, in other words, at least in your 20's and 30's. Maybe I just think that because I don't do it anymore, though.
So, as someone who worked in a factory out of high school for three years before the older guys basically bullied me into going to college, and then worked in restaurants for the next 14, only to end up back in the same manufacturing industry I started out in but in a supervisory role, I agree with you...mostly.
My brothers and I are all pretty nerdy, book-reading, liberal kinds of guys who, for various reasons, worked in jobs that would be described as blue-collar for periods of time before ending up in more white-collar-ey. Factory work, overnight line cooking, pressure washing old factory equipment for re-sale, the Navy, yada, yada. Our sister, on the other hand, went the more lefty route of college, then grad school, then social work, and it's kind of a running joke with my brothers and I that her worldview would have greatly benefitted from a stint in a good old-fashioned soul-grinding job for at least a year or so.
I'm of the opinion that those sorts of jobs can be really good for you, I think, in terms of perspective and whatnot, but you gotta have a long-term exit strategy. That work is fine for guys that are in their mid-twenties with no kids, but it's very easy to get stuck on that treadmill, and you don't want to look up when you're 50 and your body is breaking down and the only other job you are qualified for is a literal move into the same kind of work at a different place.
Permit me to testify. Coming out of high school I took just such a job. I spent two years working in the packaging and warehouse of a rubber manufacturing plant in order to save money for school. I spent every working day packing 75 lb bales of hot rubber into crates that weighed a ton and then strapping and stenciling them for shipment. It was hard and demanding work. But my goal was to get to engineering school which I did.
Engineering schools are interesting. You don't get in unless you are demonstrably good at science and math. Nevertheless they always flunk out more students then the graduate. My class year was no different, started with a little less than 400 first year students and graduated 135. I do not for a second imagine that I was brighter than all those students who flunked out or left for whatever reason. But I got up every morning, attended all the classes and did all the often mundane work because I knew from experience what the alternative was. That early work was my inspiration.
Yep. That's why I was so ready for school after being in the army.
Amen. So true. My pre-college jobs included landscaping, bagel baking (3:30am start), house painting, and restaurant work. I was not going back to any of that.
To add somewhat to what you said "blue collar" and "white collar" (or "working class" verse "professional" jobs) are just enormous categories, and the jobs within them are vastly different from each other. There are piece of cake blue collar jobs and hellish white collar jobs, even if the trend may be the opposite. The pay trend also goes in favor of white collar work, but again, enormous exceptions exist.
By the way I think you make a good point about age and physical work. A lot of difficult, somewhat low-pay physical jobs appealed to me when I was in my 20s, but in my 40s with a family and the realization that my body isn't what it once was they sound much worse. But at age 25 working in a logging camp sounds way more fun than working in an office.
That’s Wigan. I just made the point. My blue collar job is awesome. I make enough of a salary that I pay more in taxes than the median income.
They are equating blue collar with low skill. Blue collar means simply that your job involves some sort of physical actions and doesn’t require a 4-year degree.
I work with Union Millwright Supervisors who pull 250K a year, and still have months off work.
Being a blue collar worker in one’s 20s is a lot different from going back to it in ones 40s. The biggest difference is expectations and commitments. $18/hr is okay until you get a girl pregnant. Then you have to chose between being overworked, being a deadbeat and being poor.
Even most 22 year olds would rather work construction or drive a truck (which seem a lot more satisfying/interesting) than be a warehouse drone. I’ve done carpentry as a hobby. I find it satisfying, it isn’t too physically demanding for a fit middle aged person, and I might become a carpenter if I got disbarred and couldn’t find work as a paralegal.
Maybe I was a weirdo, but I liked being a warehouse drone in my late-teens/early twenties, and I would've let you take a hand as sacrifice before I ever worked construction.
Yeah definetly agree with you. Sure blue collar work isn't ideal but I am currently a student who works like 55 hour weeks at a restaurant over the summer. Sure it is pretty tiring and probably not quite as demanding as warehouse work but idk you get to have some fun "shared suffering" with coworkers, days go by fast as you said, and frankly the months I am there fly by. Makes enough money for me to pay for school, though I have to be quite frugal. Sure my feet hurt like hell and If I wasn't on my parents healthcare it would be much tighter, but I am happy and isn't that what we care about?
At the student life-stage a 55 hr/wk busy restaurant life is awesome. Often free food and booze, tons of friends at your place and in the industry, always a party, always tax-free cash in your pocket. However, with some time (not much, in my case) this gets old real quick. Your age, energy, fitness, entertainment preferences change, your concerns for savings, retirement, insurance, career interests and advancement change, intellectual stimulation, your family changes, and your housing and transportation needs change as well. I'm not saying that there isn't a restaurant career track for you and many others, but there were whole ton of us who do wanted to do something else, and did.
I don’t know. My Blue Collar job is pretty awesome. I make six figures and travel the world.
I have plenty of friends who are blue-collar, mechanics and welders who love their job. Come out on a jeep run with me. 99% blue collar guys who have more fun than you can imagine.
Blue-collar is very broad. It includes skilled and unskilled labor.
Personally I’d go crazy going to an office and working with the same people over and over.
I suspect you mean service jobs (is that the best phrase?) which are a subset of blue collar.
I worked in construction as a kid and liked it, went into engineering and discovered that office work sucks, then went into software/process consulting and discovered that it checks the same boxes as construction. Lots of problem-solving, tons of human interaction, regular site visits and travel, wide-ranging view of the industry.
And I can get my construction on fine-tuning my house, lol, where I can *stop* when I'm *sick of it*. As I mentioned the other day, for some stupid reason I've gone and gutted the master bath after having just finished the kitchen and ground floor powder room.
yeah, that does sound interesting. Sometimes people get lucky. Find the right path.
“The problem with privileged people writing about blue collar work is we would find almost any blue collar job hideous.”
You make a good case for universal military conscription.
Nooooooo. Military conscription is a bad idea. Our military rocks only because its professional and people choose it.
Our biggest threats are not external right now.
Universal service would toss all the 18-21 year old kids in the country into a blender, forcing them to interact with folks from all walks of life, commiserate over shared hatred of their sergeants, provide valuable technical skills and self-discipline, and provide a unifying experience for all Americans.
At the same time, the sure and certain knowledge that *everyone's kids* will be getting shot at would force politicians to be a bit more circumspect in making foreign policy that flirts with war.
I don't expect it to provide significant advantage in times of war, I expect it to help head off the increasingly worrisome internal threats to our democracy and prosperity, namely division and polarization.
Perhaps it's not necessary, but I can't conceive of a situation in which it's a bad thing.
I prefer freedom and autonomy to tossing 18 year olds in a statist blender in hopes of increasing solidarity
You'll be dead and gone before the crippling atomization that your definition of "freedom" has caused in American society really comes to a head. I'll be here to live through that climax and pick up the pieces when it's over.
As I note above, I think this misunderstanding of "freedom" and ignorance of "responsibility" has the potential to end up killing millions of my fellow Americans, so I don't care at all about your opinion. Your attitude is precisely the *problem* that broadly inculcating a healthy patriotism and solidarity is intended to *fix*.
It's not like anyone is going to implement my little pipedream here, so you can rest assured you'll get your way. God help us all.
Is this about covid vaccines? If so, hundreds of thousands have died because the FDA refused to allow human challenge trials, and refused to allow vaccines to be released unless they met their excessive safety standard.
I'm willing to bet you happen to be older than 18-21 years old.
It’s a safer bet to say that he’s never been in the fucking military.
Yep. Hard to be much younger and think about these things.
I know what you're pointing to and don't care. I also don't make over a million dollars a year but I have a say in how those folks are taxed. I don't make less than $20,000, but I have a say in how the EITC is implemented.
Though... I'm young enough that it would be reasonably straightforward to make it "retroactive," in the sense that all folks under 35 must also report for their stretch before eventually settling into "everyone gets called up for 18 months between the ages of 18 and 21".
The military is not your therapist. It’s an organization that has a very specific mission. Besides, 75% of kids these days are too fat to be in the military. Fortune stupid. Or do too many drugs.
Let’s just make all the kids go work at wherever you work at. Chances are the standards are lower.
The mission is to ensure the security of the United States.
What if that requires a role other than warfighting, and no other institution can fill it?
Then you create a new institution. Duh.
Switzerland has compulsory military service, and a small volunteer standing military. Not a bad model for the United States, if paired with major reduction in the standing army - most of the able-bodied population goes through training and serves a short stint then becomes part of the national guard or reserve. We need cybersecurity defenses more than a large army.
It never does turn out to be everyone, and wouldn’t be that way unless we were under such a threat as Israel is. Conscription did make our military far worse during the Vietnam war, and we must be able to defeat China in a war over Taiwan. Also, they would be pulled out of productive activities at a time when they are at their best.
The point would be to structure any future universal service requirement specifically as a society-building exercise that encompasses everyone, with no exceptions and no discretion over assignments.
There is no chance that the any foreign opponent can forcibly invade the US and topple our government or society. There's very little chance that once can pose *any* physical threat beyond hacking the shit out of various pieces of infrastructure during wartime.
But there is a very real, if still small, chance that we destroy our democracy and prosperity because of polarization and the increasing acceptance of violence as a political means.
Call such a program an insurance policy, if you will. Chances are that we'd be ok without it, but it is nonetheless a good idea.
And I have no idea why we should believe it would detract from our Navy's ability to face off against the PLAN in the Western Pacific.
Unfortunately it seems pretty hard to imagine any such conscription given that polarization... otherwise I'm with you lol
“Military conscription is a bad idea.”
No kidding.
I’ve deleted like five comments because I’ve called these guys idiots or worse. These guys have no concept of what the military is like. It’s condescending and pisses me off. I think it’s Boy Scout camp or some bullshit. They obviously never served.
All of which I can still see, Rory.
Look, you can disagree with me, and get pissed as hell. I don't care, you're entitled to whatever language you like, and all the vitriol in the world isn't going to phase me much.
And yes, you're correct that I haven't served.
But that doesn't detract from my right to say this: the *only* reason we have a military is to protect the security of the country and its people.
Our security isn't under severe threat from foreign enemies, and not from domestic ones. It's under threat from our fragmentation and atomization, our own inability to view our fellow countrymen and women as fellow citizens with all the rights and responsibilities that entails. Civil conflict poses a far greater threat to the prosperity and safety of today's America than any other.
If the best way to protect the country is to use the military as a tool to stitch together our social fabric once again, then I'm not going to pretend I have qualms about turning it into a tool to do just that, your objections be damned.
If Congress and the President, by some miracle, came to agree with me and told you that you're now the national therapist, then you're the damned therapist. That'd be the mission.
If the right tool to fix the problem were the Department of Peace, Ponies, LSD, and Glitter, then great, you're off the fucking hook.
You disagree with me; I understand that.
But are you really telling me that if you felt as I do, that universal service was the best or only means to head off a civil war and restore some semblance of unity, you'd still say it shouldn't become the mission?
Look. I agree with you about your goal. I hate polarization and the military is excellent at bringing people together. But so is a football team. Only because people choose to put something above themselves.
You look at the success of military and confuse correlation with causation.
Additionally, you are under the condescending impression that the military is a participation sport.
It’s not. The average IQ of the military is significantly higher than the average IQ of the general population because it requires a lot skill and knowledge to do just about anything in the military. Only to do these jobs, but to do them in stressful conditions.
I don’t know what you do for a living but I would never say… hey everyone can do your job… even if they didn’t want to, you would Probably have issues.
If you want to have some sort of service commitment, people get to choose between the Peace Corps, or road work projects or community service and the military was one of many options, I would Support that.
I can not stand by and let some degrade our Military with the insinuation that anybody could do it. That’s just fucked up.
Blue collar like an auto mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc? Or do you mean unskilled labor?
if the pay and opportunities for future growth were comparable, I would much rather work in an Amazon warehouse than sitting in front of my screen for 12 hours a day working for clients.
I very much enjoyed my time waiting tables. Good people, and good wages for no degree
Definitely. Also I just thinking working service gives you a greater appreciation for the amount to which small gestures of kindness can influence other people's days. Not to say there aren't plenty of people who've worked in service, but in general I think it makes people better.
Wage differential. Words for a concept that I’m always trying to explain. My job has a lot of these non-ideal work conditions. It’s physical, exposed to the elements, and involves being away from home for long periods. Hello from 5-weeks in Argentina. The job also requires several specialized skills and judgement.
Anyway, one thing that Matt left out about Amazon are a they actually promote fairly well. We have a friend who lasted through the six months of box moving and was recognized qnd moved up. She now maintains the robots and is a supervisor.
I’m curious as to what will happen when an Amazon fulfillment center finally unionizes.
Wage differential also is a big part of why most people can't make any money in jobs like sports writer, actor, musician or any other kind of job that people will often do just as a hobby.
The combination of which explains why a lot of middle/upper class millennials (like me) who grew up hearing “find a job where you love it so much, you wonder why they pay you!” are so frustrated by their shitty pay.
I completely agree that that is the worst advice going around. It left me pretty confused as a kid - I liked playing video games, hiking, trying new things / going to new places and reading - what job is that?
I had a huge epiphany in my 20s at some point when I read better advice that flipped "do what you love" around. It was more along the lines of "become very good at something. If you're an expert at (almost) anything you'll probably start to like and appreciate that thing. At the very least you'll like the feeling of being in demand and respected for your expertise"
I know that won't work for everyone or for every type of expertise, but if feels like better one-size-fits-all advice than "do what you love"
I also like “find the overlap of what you’re good at (or can become good at) and what the world needs.”
Our parents were idiots, and everything is their fault.
Everything they did was wrong, and every adverse effect was completely predictable when they set out, so it's completely their fault that they chose to do those things anyway, and they deserve our vilification.
/s
(Said literally every child about every parent since the concept of "society" arose)
Nope. Boomer and Gen X parents really were idiots. Im a Gen Xer. We really did fuck up millennials and Gen Z by telling them that they could do anything, blah, blah, blah.
It was probably inevitable because of the technology advanced made us naive. But it ain't sarcasm.
Every generation before us, told their kids to suck it up and work hard at something. Support your family first... everything else comes after.
My parents are an end-Boomer and an elder-Xer respectively.
Most of the mistakes were made by their parents, and most of the problems they were sowing were not obvious at the time.
The real issue I have with your generation is that many of the challenges were apparent 20 years ago and y'all decided to double-down on all of the policies that led us to them because it was harder to reflect and change course than to ignore the problems that were cropping up.
My hope is that, when my kids are my age and telling me about all the mistakes my generation made, I will have the fundamental *grace* to admit that, yes, not everything went perfectly. We had our reasons for implementing these policies, many of which helped solve problems you don't face any longer, but they've had unforeseen effects, and it's now time to consider those new problems in their own light.
My parents and the vast majority of their generation with whom I interact do NOT have that grace or rigorous self-honesty. Most of them prefer to whine about what's wrong with my peers, and I'm here in the corner thinking "Who raised us, again?"
I think we'll be more than happy to blame people in our generation, just not ourselves. If only those Republican's/Democrat, YIMBY/NIMBY, etc. hadn't stopped us, we could have made solved that problem.
21 years ago we had just finished the longest sustained period of peacetime growth in American history, the cold war was over, unemployment was at historic lows, interest rates too, the budget was balanced and the internet was just getting going. Doubling down was the logical thing to do.
In that context, even the Iraq War seemed like a good idea given how successful the Persian Gulf War of the early nineties was.
I can just hear little Ugnuk and Splork saying this around the cave’s campfire
And we’ll do much better for our kids and their lives will be perfect.
Of course.
"find a job where you love it so much, you wonder why they pay you!"
That works if you love writing code or ruthlessly vanquishing your corporate enemies. Otherwise, not so much.
Why wouldn't it work for someone who loves operating a lathe?
'Cause we white collar folk need our 6-figure (or 7-figure, lol) salaries and can't conceive of those who don't being in earnest.
I'm not sure about sports writer. But actor and musician are an example of the tournament model where you have a large number of people pursuing very few fabulously lucrative jobs.
My pet theory about why Hollywood actors tend to be liberal is they've seen firsthand how much luck is involved in success. For every successful movie actor there are hundreds of extremely talented actors just scraping by. Rita Rudner switched from dance to comedy because female comedians were relatively rare in the eighties.
Is it really? Wage differential is about people choosing to do or not do work. I don’t think there’s a Reserve of people capable of being NBA stars, who just didn’t put in the effort or who though the schedule was as to long. Wouldn’t that more be supply and demand or something else.
The way he described it, I thought wage differential was more like truck driver pay. There’s a huge population is capable of doing it, chooses not to do it the hours away from home, or the monotony.
I think his point wasn't about NBA stars or their pay. It was about the bottom of the rung where the vast majority of people are. Basketball is probably a bad example because low-wage basketball work is sort of rare with the possible exception of the NCAA if you consider that as a job.
Being a musician is a better example - a tiny number of acts sell out stadiums but the vast majority of people who consider musician their job title actually have 2nd jobs as waiters or whatever. Relative to the time, energy and talent required to be a musician, you generally make almost nothing.
If I described the career of "being a musician" to you on paper, but left out the parts about having fun playing music it would sound dreadful.
i.e. you travel around in a shitty van, lugging around heavy equipment for very low and uncertain pay with absolutely zero benefits with a tiny tiny chance of ever rising through the ranks and then dealing with shark managers who will probably screw you over. You'll have to sell your own merchandise and Tee-shirts and constantly promote yourself on facebook just to have gas money, etc...
So I think that's what he means. Likewise, playing in the NFL or MLB is great if they'll hire you, but minor league baseball and pop-up stadium leagues are terrible jobs on paper when it comes to hours and $s. But people do enjoy playing sports.
Yes, because there's an over supply of people willing to do it. It's the opposite of an arduous or boring job. Negatives of a job are disamenities and perks are amenities
Even basketball player is a decent example. It's true that there are much clearer objective measurements than most jobs as to who is good. But 500th best basketball player in the country has to leave the country to make a living. There are other weird things with basketball in that the NBA is a monopoly and unionized (which is why they have a minimum salary, otherwise the teams would be able to fill the end of the bench with much smaller salaries).
I think it can’t be overemphasized the extent to which Amazon — and also Uber, Lyft, and the entire “gig economy” sector — was an artifact of the terrible employment numbers of the last 20 years. As Matt correctly notes, Amazon manages to be a notoriously unpleasant place to work even for their 6-figure engineers, and was _remarkably_ unpleasant to their manual laborers. The instant workers could vote with their feet and go elsewhere they did, and I suspect we’re just seeing the start of that phenomenon.
I think you've managed to overemphasize it.
First of all, there have not been terrible employment numbers for the last 20 years. Fifteen years ago, the employment numbers were about the strongest they have ever been since economic statistics were recorded. They obviously cratered during the financial crisis and COVID, but as recently as 2019, the unemployment rate was the lowest since 1969, and the employment-population ratio was again about the highest it had ever been, only slightly lower than in 2007, with fairly strong real income growth
In other words, Amazon has operated and grown in a variety of employment situations - both very bad, and among the best ever.
Amazon got its start during the hot labour market of the 1990s
I doubt Amazon will be severely effected by worker shortages. They can most afford to increase pay; a worker shortage will hit everyone else harder.
I love Amazon. What with my increasingly bad mobility issues they are a godsend. Cheaper and more convenient is hard to beat. I have read about a lot of issues with Amazon but being quite familiar with very hard work in very dangerous jobs I would say that most of the critiques regarding labor conditions are bullshit. Amazon does not have a get out of jail free card when it comes to working conditions. Those are set by OSHA. Been in a lot of warehouses too and never saw one that wasn't used for storing perishable goods that was air conditioned.
When it comes to the physical difficulty of this labor I will direct your attention to the first picture accompanying this piece. Look at who is in it. There are women, a couple of older guys and some younger workers. If this were the dystopian hell hole of back breaking labor activists describe then most of these people simply would not be there. On the other hand I would be the first to admit the work is certainly mind numbingly boring. But that would describe a lot of work from assembly lines to meat packing and everything in between. And those businesses also have high turnover. If you think the people stocking supermarket shelves every time you go to a store aren't bending and lifting you would be mistaken. Think the work pace displayed above is unusually onerous? Try fast food.
My assessment of the people who write about the horrid job conditions in Amazon and believe those are actually unusual for this sort of work is fairly blunt. They have obviously never done any sort of hard job in their life.
Anecdotally, two of the last three places I've worked in the past 5 years have suddenly found themselves in wage/labor competition with Amazon...one was a restaurant and the other was a factory. Both had starting wages that they were fine with offering until Amazon opened up nearby, offering a higher wage. A lot of the restaurant workers would leave for Amazon and come running back, because, IMO, the culture change and longer shifts were too difficult of an adjustment for them to make. In lots of restaurants, if you are a dependable employee who does a decent job, you can have job security for as long as you want it, for the most part. But the rate of employee return for the factory was much, much lower, and I think it just might be because there are a lot of factory jobs that, frankly, kind of suck, and lots of temp agencies to place you in a new one if you feel like spinning the roulette wheel on a new place that might have better wages or better amenities.
This is happening in the knowledge worker class as well. I work for a large, historic industrial company as an engineer, and we are bleeding technical talent to Amazon, doing anything from robot design and programming to logistics and operations (or Blue Origin, another Bezos operation). Usually for a 50-100% pay jump. They have an incredible bonus program too. But I hear a lot of folks burn out quickly.
Amazon is really rough on white collar workers. Their legal team pays well and allows permanent remote but is supposed to be pretty brutal even for lawyers used to biglaw firms, which are themselves examples of paying junior associates tons of money to get people to work miserable jobs.
Frankly, as someone who spent 2 years working for amazon, most of the negative things people say straight up baffle me. Like its nothing like my experience, its weird.
I have been bemused by that sort of online discussion where the most vehement anti-Amazon opinions came from people who very clearly had never set foot inside an Amazon fulfillment center or sort facility. In particular it was pretty common a few years ago to see news accounts or opinion pieces alleging that Amazon had a terrible safety record and culture. I found that impossible to square with my direct knowledge, limited though it was.
An example: just outside each exit Amazon installs a short sign pole with a round, reflective indicator mounted on top. The indicator can be twisted one way to display green and the other to display red. A sign cautions those exiting the facility that a red indicator means possible icy conditions on the walkway and/or parking lots. What I found interesting was that the icing indicator I saw was at a facility in south Florida - a place that never, ever gets icy conditions. I asked the facility manager about it: He chuckled a bit and agreed with me that it was somewhat incongruous given the local climate, but said that when a safety edict was put out the expectation was the it was to be obeyed by everyone, at every facility, without question. When it comes to safety simple rules (no exceptions!) are often best because they are easy to explain, implement, and enforce. I took the icing indicator to be evidence of a strong safety culture, and I saw nothing elsewhere to dissuade me from that conclusion.
". . . lots of bending, lifting, and moving . . ."
This might come as a shock to a few Slow Boring readers, but this is a characteristic of almost all blue collar work. I wonder how these liberal arts grads think the stuff they buy is manufactured, packaged, shipped and retailed? Robots?
The biggest missing piece I see to all of this is how to get labor from being unskilled to skilled. Whether that is through college, trade school, apprenticeships, self study, etc. it seems like that is the most important piece. $18 for unskilled labor is great, but at a standard 40 hour work week, is still under 40k. If your single and age 16-20 making that, you're doing great. If you have a family of four at 40, that's mediocre at best.
Contrast that to a skill trade where you can go from apprentice to master (plumber, electrician, mechanic, etc.) and have your pay grow pretty dramatically as you gain skill and experience.
I don't think this is any more fundamentally correct than "send everyone to college".
At the end of the day, a huge chunk of the workforce is not ever going to become skilled labor of any sort.
Allowances must be made for those folks to have a chance at a decent quality of life based merely on a willingness to work hard for a lifetime. Whether that's minimum wages, income transfers, strongly progressive taxation, public works projects, or whatever, I don't care.
"At the end of the day, a huge chunk of the workforce is not ever going to become skilled labor of any sort."
Why does it need to be huge? I can see if being 10%, but does it need to be 30%?
The difference between those is immense for our economy and the amount of resources needing to be spent by the government in transfers, subsidies, etc.
"Why does it need to be huge?"
The portion of the population engaged in unskilled labor has been huge at all times, in all places, in every sort of society. It is huge today in developed European and East Asian nations with universal public tertiary education that encompasses both academic and vocational options.
Perhaps saying this reveals me for the prejudiced asshole I am, but I genuinely don't think it possible, no matter how many opportunities are given, for a very large number of people to grasp them, whether that's due to intelligence, self-discipline, or work ethic.
I don't know how large that number is; hopefully you're correct and it's really only 10%. But I wouldn't bet on making good education and vocational opportunities available panning out how you expect.
Do it anyway, because I'm sure the number of folks who have the potential to do something more is still more than enough to justify it.
But the folks who only want to, or are only able to, go to do a day of low-skilled work still deserve to go home to enjoy a decent life at the end of the day, to have the dignity that they enjoy in places like Japan or Finland, to earn a living wage, access public goods, and share in the basic comforts.
If the "market value" of their labor doesn't give it to them, step in and do it anyway.
That number has changed over time. For the last couple of thousand years, the vast, vast majority of labor was (relatively) unskilled farm labor. That has been changing since the industrial revolution and over the last century, the amount of skilled labor has increased dramatically. We've been trying to continue this by driving more people into higher education, but I think that is a mistake where we we have substituted educational attainment for skills. How do we help people gain skills outside of a university environment?
I work in logistics. One of the top criteria for siting a new warehouse is the availability of labor. And its cost. Labor costs a lot more than the buildings (rent) for instance. Anecdotally, I've never heard a warehouse operator say, "Yay, Amazon is coming here soon, so now wages will fall". In fact, they correctly say the opposite.
A puzzle:
People hate excessive hours and weird schedules. Why doesn't Amazon offer more humane hours and shifts? Can there really be that much economic advantage in working a small group of people into misery with 60 hours a week, instead of hiring twice as many people for 30 hours a week?
And this crazy stuff with their working you so hard that you don't have time to pee (yeah, Amazon tried to lie about this, and got busted). Once again: would Bezos really lose that much money if he allowed the managers to relent a little on the slave-driving? Like, so what if people packed only 80% of the orders in a day? If the job were less grinding, you would not have to offer the same wage. And if they had less turn-over as a result, some of that would be recouped in HR costs.
This attitude that we must drive our workers into an early grave seems weirdly short-sighted, like not even economically rational.
But they don't work 60 hours a week. And if they payed their workers 80% as much just to let them go a little slower they would be taking much more shit from all these commentators. If you don't like this deal there are absolutely other jobs that you just have to show up on time but you don't have to work very hard to make close to minimum wage.
You absolutely cannot forget that Amazon operates on extremely low margins. At any given margin of higher pay or a less productive work force, Amazon would be losing money. So this idea that Bezos could go a little easier on people and it would be fine for his business is simply false.
I believe the crux of the issue is Amazon Prime. When you guaranty two day shipping you need to make sure the stuff gets out right on time, so if they work 80% instead of 100% then 20% of their customers don't get their stuff for three days, which would be bad.
I would also hazard a guess that hiring fewer people and working them more hours, even with overtime pay, means they have to pay for fewer healthcare packages... though I'm not sure how many benefits they offer in the first place.
I'm gonna add something I haven't seen here, which is that for many employees I've had as a supervisor, they *want* to work 60 hours a week, and the reasons are often all over the map for that. I've had employees tell me they just want the extra money, or working more keeps them out of trouble, or they'd rather work 60 hours at one job than 40 at a full-time and another 20 at a part-time, or even (and I think this comes as a surprise to many white collar workers) it's just a competition thing. Some employees are perfectly fine not working OT, unless a few other people are gonna work it, and then they want to because they feel like they're being cheated out of money. I've had employees rip me a new one and be offended because I gave them a Saturday off and asked someone else to work. I thought I was helping them out, they thought I was screwing them.
One of the articles MY linked to in the post said that Amazon actually likes high turnover. Not as in, tolerates it as a cost of otherwise economising on working conditions, but thinks that high turnover is better than low turnover all else being equal.
This is a classic paradox about Taylorism and other numbers based systems for organizing work.
I think the problem can best be explained by a look at personal factors. This is the way Bezos and people like him approach the world. They can’t imagine other ways of life.
This was an especially enjoyable and informative comment thread today. Kudos to everyone involved.
Matt seems to allude to this but I'm going to say it outright. Amazon's fulfillment warehouse have a 150% annual employee turnover - that's so high. Best I can tell Walmart is operating at ~ 50% (NOTE: bit harder to benchmark here with their use of a part time workforce). I suspect Amazon is purposefully running high to minimize unionization efforts. If your employee base is in constant churn - very hard to organize.
I have to imagine at some point they'll churn through the ~ entire potential employee base and hiring will slow and they'll need to change. And this might already be happening. They just bumped starting pay again to $18 / hour. Their new ad campaign is highlighting education reimbursement. We'll see.
https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-starting-pay-18-an-hour-it-hires-125000-more-logistics-2021-09-14/
We'll see how quickly automation saves their ass, I think.
Like Uber, their model for fulfillment seems contingent on doing away with a great number of the people involved sooner rather than later. Unlike Uber, that might be an achievable goal.
Uber will burn investor money for another 2 decades, if it makes it that long, before AVs are really usable in their major markets.
IDK. Amazon's margins seem healthy and scalable. Back in 2019 their own robotics lead said a fully automated end-to-end solution is "at least 10 years away". I don't think they're dependent on fulfillment automation for continued growth.
"Amazon's margins seem healthy and scalable"
If they burn through the labor pool, how long is that true?
I guess a big part of the difference is that Amazon doesn't face an "all or nothing" proposition for automation; every incremental difference is a few less people and higher potential wages for the remainder.
For Uber... either driving is automated, or not.
The other big advantage for Amazon is that their cloud computing margins are so big, which gives them more flexibility on the retail end.
This reminded me I have a package coming tonight with seven different products in it, that would've taken trips to multiple different stores, all delivered at no extra cost of a high quality streaming service.
I enjoyed this piece as Matt earnestly engages with this important topic, but he's ultimately beating up on a strawman. The sharp folks in the "Amazon bad" crowd don't think the company is literally driving down wages. Why not engage with the more substantive objections to Amazon labor and warehouse practices? Some of the biggest being:
(1) the fact Amazon's minimum wage of $18/hr is still nowhere near the marginal product of a warehouse worker, given how efficient the warehouses run thanks to the robots and logistics software
(2) the company's model of hitting high turnover goals to burn through tired-out workers
(3) union-busting practices.
Matt even references (2) but doesn't seem to find much wrong with it.