The world famous Ford plant in Dearborn (River Rouge, Dearborn Truck) doesn't have air conditioning on the factory floor. Entry level pay in the notoriously well compensated UAW is only slightly higher than $15/hr despite this fact. The jobs in that plant are also not what one would call comfortable -- I would even argue overall worse for employees than the more varied Amazon work, since you install the same two or three parts every 53 seconds for a 10 hour shift, meaning that you are at a much higher risk for repetitive strain injuries, even with mitigations in place.
Worse than that, the Big Three are some of the best paid entry level jobs in the area, meaning that the far more numerous supplier jobs making things like, for example, seats are worse paying and worse working conditions. The people I've talked to that worked in seat manufacturing on the assembly line said that turnover was insanely high because so much of the work was inherently unergonomic -- you have to be bent over then follow that around until you're almost upside down to get some of the stitching on the seats, again with very unpleasantly short times to finish a single piece and no air conditioning in those factories either. Honestly, as far as I can tell from the stories I've read (many of what Matt linked to) Amazon is no worse than other blue collar jobs, up to and including the screaming and down right illegal working conditions imposed by line supervisors.
People are nostalgic for union jobs that people didn’t leave at high rates. It was hard to get those jobs. That’s how we know they were more desirable than what Amazon is offering.
Matt too commonly reverts to presuming that the national headline unemployment at a given moment is the all-driving force undergirding every single economic phenomenon observed at all places in that moment...
"Sure Amazon had ambulances at the warehouses for their workers suffering of heat-stroke in 2010 but the unemployment rate was high, so what can you do?" is not as convincing as he thinks it sounds. OSHA was around a decade ago. Amazon warehouses in 2010 are not Harlan County coal mines in 1937.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Another take on the faIled unionization drive at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama:
Even if it had succeeded (at great cost per worker for the unions involved), its effects on the company would have been minimal. One site-based bargaining unit would have had minimal direct effects on a company with thousands of warehouses and the ability to move those warehouses all over the map. The effects of unionization one site at a time are, at best indirect -- the same kind of effects that Matt points our come from negative media coverage. Any cost-benefit analyses would show that media coverage and public campaigns, e.g. the Fight for Fifteen, are the best way to influence the behavior of these companies, not site by site organizing and bargaining, which is a remnant of the 1930s. It seems to me that unions gain more from running these campaigns, even when losing, by the publicity they generate, rather than the real gains they achieve at a particular site.
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.
". . . 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?
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.
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.
Are Amazon warehouse jobs worse than ordinary warehouse jobs? I would think so just because there are more organized and smaller packages that aren't forklift type stuff. But worse than working in a distribution center of the postal service? Probably not.
Not at all. Walmart distribution centers (DCs) use pack pick for store replenishment vs. piece piece at Amazon. Totally different systems. Same reason Walmart struggled with online early and had to build separate dedicated piece pick DCs.
Maybe. Pack pick store replenishment uses way more skids and fork lifts. But more just pointing out the two systems are radically different. What Amazon has built is unique (e.g., low shelving, mixed product storage bays, automated pick routing, full site conveyors).
BTW - for the same reason most early online omni-channel fulfillment systems pushed pick and ship out to the retail stores. The DCs couldn't operate with a dual pack and piece storage system. The stores were super inefficient because they were picking from the store shelves.
Seems clear Amazon is more demanding. I think the 150% annual employee turnover rate supports that too. They have (or had) an 1800 picks / hour target - which is really high. I doubt other warehouse jobs have the digital sophistication to track employee productivity to their degree - this is where scale really helps.
My take is that this is one of the reasons we have a labor shortage. Amazon warehouses, and at home delivery in genera (Eg Instacart) are a net drag on the economy.
Here’s why — in a situation with labor abundance, this is all fine. But in a situation where the population is stable, and a slightly higher percentage of the population doesn’t want to work because of COVID, there are fewer workers. Then you have several million of them work in these jobs that are low productivity but high paying, and you end up with labor shortages, but the labor being redirected to activities (like delivering groceries or restaurant food) that generate little economic value. Yes, I could go to the grocery store and buy my own groceries, but instead I sit and watch Netflix on my couch. This generates 0 additional economic value, but uses up a scarce resource — labor.
How is it possible to have a low productivity but high paying job? I guess the idea is that you perform some service that is of very little value, but its small amount of value is for a rich person, so they are willing to pay a lot even though it's objectively not very valuable?
i don't see why sitting on the couch watching Netflix is the only substitute. Perhaps it is a frequent one, i don't know...but I'm a little skeptical.
When we get busy with work that's when we tend to use delivery services. When we're not busy that's when it's more fun and cost effective to go to the grocery store or the Target or wherever. At least for me and my wife, shaving off an hour of grocery shopping usually allows an hour of our work to happen. I'm much less likely to replace that time with screw around stuff
You are failing to account for the fact that you going to the store and whatnot is a cost. What these services do is allow you transform a time cost into monetary cost. If you value your time at more than the monetary cost, this is a net improvement in your well being (and of course, not just of you, but of basically every person making at least middle income).
It is not in any way a retraction. There is no fundamental difference between paying someone to shop for you and, say, paying someone to clean your house. Both have economic value.
Ken, you said, "Clearly you are incorrect: You pay for the service[Netflix]." You are now saying, "He is choosing leisure over remunerative work" and defining leisure as having economic value. If you can't back up your assertion and instead jump to an entirely new assertion you are effectively retracting your original statement.
I think Matt's point is that labor shortages in this case are good, because they lead to wage growth in response. Also, Amazon warehouse workers are extremely productive, as are delivery workers. They save people a lot of time.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The world famous Ford plant in Dearborn (River Rouge, Dearborn Truck) doesn't have air conditioning on the factory floor. Entry level pay in the notoriously well compensated UAW is only slightly higher than $15/hr despite this fact. The jobs in that plant are also not what one would call comfortable -- I would even argue overall worse for employees than the more varied Amazon work, since you install the same two or three parts every 53 seconds for a 10 hour shift, meaning that you are at a much higher risk for repetitive strain injuries, even with mitigations in place.
Worse than that, the Big Three are some of the best paid entry level jobs in the area, meaning that the far more numerous supplier jobs making things like, for example, seats are worse paying and worse working conditions. The people I've talked to that worked in seat manufacturing on the assembly line said that turnover was insanely high because so much of the work was inherently unergonomic -- you have to be bent over then follow that around until you're almost upside down to get some of the stitching on the seats, again with very unpleasantly short times to finish a single piece and no air conditioning in those factories either. Honestly, as far as I can tell from the stories I've read (many of what Matt linked to) Amazon is no worse than other blue collar jobs, up to and including the screaming and down right illegal working conditions imposed by line supervisors.
People are nostalgic for union jobs that people didn’t leave at high rates. It was hard to get those jobs. That’s how we know they were more desirable than what Amazon is offering.
Matt too commonly reverts to presuming that the national headline unemployment at a given moment is the all-driving force undergirding every single economic phenomenon observed at all places in that moment...
"Sure Amazon had ambulances at the warehouses for their workers suffering of heat-stroke in 2010 but the unemployment rate was high, so what can you do?" is not as convincing as he thinks it sounds. OSHA was around a decade ago. Amazon warehouses in 2010 are not Harlan County coal mines in 1937.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Another take on the faIled unionization drive at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama:
Even if it had succeeded (at great cost per worker for the unions involved), its effects on the company would have been minimal. One site-based bargaining unit would have had minimal direct effects on a company with thousands of warehouses and the ability to move those warehouses all over the map. The effects of unionization one site at a time are, at best indirect -- the same kind of effects that Matt points our come from negative media coverage. Any cost-benefit analyses would show that media coverage and public campaigns, e.g. the Fight for Fifteen, are the best way to influence the behavior of these companies, not site by site organizing and bargaining, which is a remnant of the 1930s. It seems to me that unions gain more from running these campaigns, even when losing, by the publicity they generate, rather than the real gains they achieve at a particular site.
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.
This was an especially enjoyable and informative comment thread today. Kudos to everyone involved.
". . . 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?
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/
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.
The other big advantage for Amazon is that their cloud computing margins are so big, which gives them more flexibility on the retail end.
Are Amazon warehouse jobs worse than ordinary warehouse jobs? I would think so just because there are more organized and smaller packages that aren't forklift type stuff. But worse than working in a distribution center of the postal service? Probably not.
Walmart or any other large scale retailer would use exactly the same system for picking and dispatching replacement stock to their retail locations.
Not at all. Walmart distribution centers (DCs) use pack pick for store replenishment vs. piece piece at Amazon. Totally different systems. Same reason Walmart struggled with online early and had to build separate dedicated piece pick DCs.
Yes. Walmart ships carton quantity stock for most items. Which means their warehouse workers are moving heavier quantities.
Maybe. Pack pick store replenishment uses way more skids and fork lifts. But more just pointing out the two systems are radically different. What Amazon has built is unique (e.g., low shelving, mixed product storage bays, automated pick routing, full site conveyors).
I love when commenters know what they are talking about.
BTW - for the same reason most early online omni-channel fulfillment systems pushed pick and ship out to the retail stores. The DCs couldn't operate with a dual pack and piece storage system. The stores were super inefficient because they were picking from the store shelves.
Seems clear Amazon is more demanding. I think the 150% annual employee turnover rate supports that too. They have (or had) an 1800 picks / hour target - which is really high. I doubt other warehouse jobs have the digital sophistication to track employee productivity to their degree - this is where scale really helps.
My take is that this is one of the reasons we have a labor shortage. Amazon warehouses, and at home delivery in genera (Eg Instacart) are a net drag on the economy.
Here’s why — in a situation with labor abundance, this is all fine. But in a situation where the population is stable, and a slightly higher percentage of the population doesn’t want to work because of COVID, there are fewer workers. Then you have several million of them work in these jobs that are low productivity but high paying, and you end up with labor shortages, but the labor being redirected to activities (like delivering groceries or restaurant food) that generate little economic value. Yes, I could go to the grocery store and buy my own groceries, but instead I sit and watch Netflix on my couch. This generates 0 additional economic value, but uses up a scarce resource — labor.
How is it possible to have a low productivity but high paying job? I guess the idea is that you perform some service that is of very little value, but its small amount of value is for a rich person, so they are willing to pay a lot even though it's objectively not very valuable?
There is no such thing as “objectively not valuable.”
i don't see why sitting on the couch watching Netflix is the only substitute. Perhaps it is a frequent one, i don't know...but I'm a little skeptical.
When we get busy with work that's when we tend to use delivery services. When we're not busy that's when it's more fun and cost effective to go to the grocery store or the Target or wherever. At least for me and my wife, shaving off an hour of grocery shopping usually allows an hour of our work to happen. I'm much less likely to replace that time with screw around stuff
You are failing to account for the fact that you going to the store and whatnot is a cost. What these services do is allow you transform a time cost into monetary cost. If you value your time at more than the monetary cost, this is a net improvement in your well being (and of course, not just of you, but of basically every person making at least middle income).
“This generates 0 additional economic value…”
Clearly you are incorrect: You pay for the service.
He paid for Netflix service. There is no (additional marginal) value to his siting on the couch and watching a movie (which is what he said).
Of course there is: He is choosing leisure over remunerative work. Or at least that’s the greatly simplified economics view.
That is a pretty roundabout retraction of your original statement, but sure..
It is not in any way a retraction. There is no fundamental difference between paying someone to shop for you and, say, paying someone to clean your house. Both have economic value.
Ken, you said, "Clearly you are incorrect: You pay for the service[Netflix]." You are now saying, "He is choosing leisure over remunerative work" and defining leisure as having economic value. If you can't back up your assertion and instead jump to an entirely new assertion you are effectively retracting your original statement.
ZachAJ's comment seems absurd to me but this particular critique seems unreasonable.
I think Matt's point is that labor shortages in this case are good, because they lead to wage growth in response. Also, Amazon warehouse workers are extremely productive, as are delivery workers. They save people a lot of time.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
Unless they used them Dominion machines. I read those things are sketchy. ( \s for liability)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you elaborate on what services they are free-riding on?
They probably learned it from sports teams.
Yep. Very similar phenomenon.
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
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.