> You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
Meanwhile, The Intercept has mountains of evidence that Amazon itself knows that its workers pee in bottles[2].
It's so blatant that I thought the account was a parody, but it's real.
100% sure that wouldn't have happened if that tweet from @amazonnews didn't piss off some Amazon employee. They're really not doing themselves any favours by letting whoever posted those tweets to tweet from their official account.
This is the first time I hear about Amazon News account, but from a factual perspective, they are right, despite one like it or not. Sanders is indeed a powerful politician, which is what they said in the tweet. $11.75 vs. $15 is a 20% gap, which is quite a lot and is also a fact. Again, I'm looking at it purely from a factual perspective. It seems to me that the criticism mainly comes from people not liking AmazonNews being blatantly honest in their tweets and not giving a shit about political correctness. My impression is based on quickly glancing at the most recent tweets, so I could be wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Well they support a national $15/hr minimum wage, for one thing, though the cynical side of me thinks this is more to close the door behind them on competition and will result in further closures of small local alternatives.
Vermont has a tiny population, Sanders has massive influence. If he wanted to work on mobilizing change in his state he could. Now a better counter argument is he is elected to work in the federal government, so his constituents don’t expect him to effect change in their state law.
The one denying claims of pee bottles is factually wrong & is actually evident from the operations staff guidelines, which probably the one tweeting doesn't know about.
They pretty beautifully baited Sen. Elizabeth Warren into running her mouth today. She wrote -
"I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
If she brings an anti-trust suit against them, it will be so easy for Amazon's lawyers to argue that she is only doing so to violate their first amendment rights, which she full out admitted to today.
> the fact that Amazon warehouse / delivery employees have to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines?
Amazon does not want its employees to piss into bottles. But sometimes employees (predominantly male I hope) do piss into bottles, because they did not plan correctly, or just had to go while on the road. If caught, these employees (and their managers) are then reprimanded. If they get a chance to defend themselves, of course they claim it was due to the deadline, not poor planning or bladder control or uncommon hygiene ethics.
Amazon factually states: Hey, if we required our employees to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, do you seriously think people would work for us, and not 100s of other low-paid jobs which don't have that medieval requirement?
Politicians: Hey, this you?! I have lots of pictures of bottles with piss! Where is your snotty reply now? You say that your employees do not have to piss into bottles, so how come I have those pictures?! Huh?!
It is embarrassing to both sides. Especially for official government employees (who also don't have to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, but I am sure you can turn up at least some pictures: if not, find any traces of cocaine use in the Capitol, then posit that the US congress have their senators use cocaine in the toilet to meet deadlines. Or, you know, bi-partisan plan to have low-skilled employees share in the American dream made possible by Amazon, but I guess that does not fit inside a tweet).
The warehouse/delivery worker abuse at amazon runs deep, and it goes far beyond employees peeing in bottles. Checkout the Frontline documentary, Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos [1]
No, but solid rhetorics. This is the part you give proof of the fact that Amazon have their workers pee in bottles to meet deadlines. Not point to something else entirely that goes far beyond the things you pose as facts, which are not. Don't look at that! Look at this documentary that goes far far beyond it. Well played! And solid one for PBS for exposing the worker abuse that Amazon is now in court for! We need the free press to save worker laws.
Deadlines are calculated from the average worker speeds. Perhaps some Amazon employees really are below average, or do not give it their best at all, so they are forced to piss in bottles and poop into the delivery car before returning it to station to meet these devilish average-worker deadlines.
I would agree that is a terrible problem. Perhaps Amazon should focus more attention on catching such employees early and letting them go (or offering them potty training with quarterly evaluations)? But then where does the average go? Deadlines get even tighter! Or you could make your wage relative to your worker speed: the fastest people earn the most. Only if you think you still earn enough for shitty work will you then be forced to keep doing that job. Or should Amazon be more kind to these employees who can't seem to manage their personal hygiene or fall way below average worker speeds? Treat and pay them the same as the 99% employees who don't shit and deliver? That would lead to an equal outcome for sure.
Amazon doesn’t come out of this looking good either, but it’s pretty bad for a Senator to go around telling people that she’ll break up your company if you “heckle” her with “snotty tweets”.
Warren has been campaigning to break up large tech companies.
What is so unprofessional about that?
Clearly if she was to try and get them fined or broken up it would be through these laws.
She isn't silencing them. She's saying that there'll be consequences.
And Amazon's PR isn't a small company. They can take the heat.
I don't agree with you. A company that forces employees to piss in bottles and lies about it should have their lies face consequences.
Warren isn't removing their tweets. How are they being silenced?
Here is the quotes:
```
After she posted the video on Twitter, saying that companies like Amazon "pay close to nothing in taxes," the tech giant quickly fired back.
"You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them," it tweeted from its official news account.
"If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," it added.
Amazon said that it had paid "billions of dollars" in corporate taxes over the past few years alone.
Warren hit back, saying: "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon – your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did.
"But you bet I'll fight to make you pay your fair share," she added. "And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
```
You're being obtuse. You know as well as anyone that it doesn't matter if the homeless man in the park heckles Senators. That's the difference; Amazon has real power behind their words.
The problem is not that Amazon is criticising politicians. The problem is that Amazon doesn't need to care; it'll get loads of money anyway. I need to care about what I say, because if I upset people, they'll stop interacting with me.
If Amazon started running adverts about a giant space monkey that wanted to eat the moon, what would happen?
If Warren tweeted that she was going to break up amazon because they were harming consumers and mistreating workers, etc, that would be one thing.
Instead, she is going after amazon as a personal vendetta because she feels 'heckled'. She is explicitly attacking first amendment rights. It's a textbook case of corruption / abuse of power.
Instead of “Politicans should not express views I don't like on social media” how about “Politicans should not express the view that ‘people shouldn’t be powerful enough to be snotty to/heckle me’ on any platform.”
It’s the “so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” part that’s bad. Regardless of how you feel about her campaign to break up big tech, this is an appalling thing for a government official to say. I hate Twitter and Twitter culture as much as anyone, but “you shouldn’t be powerful enough to be snotty to a senator” is dystopian in my book.
But in this case the Amazon Twitter account is in the wrong while Warren is in the right. Amazon Twitter straight up lied. Warren is actively doing the job she was elected to do of motivating change to make laws and rules that will change the underlying foundation of the business landscape in ways that she and those who voted for her perceive as positive.
I presume the people that voted for Warren are on her side in this argument so she's being an advocate for their views.
Just because you think Amazon's employees being forced to piss in bottles isn't bad to you doesn't mean that others sees it as an injustice that makes people angry.
>Why is this only bad when Trump or a Republican does it?
Maybe treat each event on a case by case basis rather than a blanket rule?
Breaking up Big Tech isn’t an idle threat from Warren. It was an explicit part of her platform when running for president. She has always believed that some companies run afoul of anti-trust laws.
This far predates a spat with an Amazon twitter handle
But they can engage in virtue signaling like the rest of us.
But in all seriousness, it would be optimal for a society that values liberty and freedom to move away from platforms to standards. No need to breakup FANGS if NIST or something similar defines qualitative API standards for social networks, or more broadly societal network services. And this will also be a huge boon for the startup space and true non-predatory innovation in the virtual services space.
But the things they say about the laws aren’t very useful if you’re suing to get the law overturned. (Related, you can’t use defenses like attorney-client privilege if Congress asks you to submit documents, you just do it.)
> "I'll fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
I thought I liked her policies but this sounds authoritarian. I'd prefer politicians stay tf off twotter unless they got the stomach for it. They're speaking about "authenticity" and the problem of people hiding behind handles whenever given the chance. But they are themselves only interested in "engineering consent" for those who bankrolled their move into office. The consensus should be that they have to be able to put up with a very wide variety of opinions (and most certainly the "snooty" kind).
>it's like amazon entire business model is based on exploitation of labor
Wait till you find out how the electronics and clothes in your house are made and how the materials they're made from are sourced or what the workforce that picks the fruit and vegetables you see in the supermarket, endures.
It is rarely (never?) discussed in the west how all the consumer goods are cheap simply because the supply chain relies on poor exploitable people and exploiting the environment.
All we hear about is the positive spin, how capitalism and globalization have blessed us with cheap goods and how those poor farmers halfway around the world now have paying jobs, woo-hoo!
> nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.
Nobody seems to want to do something about it. It's easy, vote with your wallet. But since the choice is either A) help humanity by stop buying cheap consumer electronics or B) don't get any cheap consumer electronics to make your day 0.5% better, it seems we're stuck in exploiting humanity.
Not sure how buying expensive consumer electronics helps either, given how the excess profits continue to be captured rather than fairly distributed. There's even case studies celebrating these COOs turned CEOs for how well they've "optimised" their supply chains.
Well, my point was more to stop buying consumer electronics we don't really need, that just marginally increase our quality of life. Not that we should buy expensive electronics instead.
Another option legally would be to disincentive the purchase of materials manufactured in those overseas areas to which you refer, or tax the bejesus out of companies using them as labor sources. I think there’s room for talk of tariffs and tax penalties for offshoring labor/manufacturing, and I’m not really familiar with other levers to turn that would fix this. Efforts to enforce better working conditions in other countries come and go, are easy to game and are quickly forgotten.
The parts of our society that profit off cheap offshore labor are quick to spin stories accusing people of being nationalist/protectionist/racist, but their profit margin is being defended in the process and the issues distracted from.
At the same time, if I lived in a largely agrarian society and factory work offered me the choice to get out of poor farm labor work, I’d jump at it the same way my ancestors did. I feel most of us can appreciate the value and prosperity that the global supply chain has brought, while simultaneously lamenting the destruction of domestic industry and the exploitation that has accompanied it.
We don’t have to be all-for or all-against, though I think when “free trade” agreements come up, they should be regarded very suspiciously, and when accusations fly about nationalism and protectionism, those should be seen as the cheap and distracting rhetorical devices they are.
I tried that for a while. Some time later I found out that they source their products from the same factories and the only thing I've done is prove that marketing works if you wanna convince people to pay premiums for imaginary differences.
The percentage of humans living in poverty around the world has never been lower [0]. How is that just spin?
I also can’t relate to your “all we hear about” point at all. I feel like I really have to go out of my way to find any discussion about anything good in the world, the vast majority of what I hear is negative takes like yours about how everything is horrible and everyone is oppressed.
It really depends on the definition of poverty. I pretty much took the argument you are making for granted until recently. I mean, how can we argue against raising people out of poverty, right? But recently I watched this interview with Paul Kingsnorth and he makes a compelling case for why these numbers don't tell the whole story. I am linking to the middle of the interview more or less this is mentioned but the whole interview is quite interesting:
Inflation in different countries goes at different rates. You can't use dollar inflation for these conditions, as prices rise much faster in those countries.
As for Chinese people, it is amazing that they came out of poverty. But clearly it's not thanks to free market capitalism.
Those numbers mean nothing. First of all, anything before maybe 1900—1950 is meaningless, as no one was collecting data about how people actually lived. They are only estimates based on national fortunes, for periods of time when many people mostly lived off the land.
The poverty line is also arbitrarily low, with many countless people over the poverty line who are dying of hunger. A more realistic poverty line would probably be several times bigger than the current value, which would fuether skew the numbers.
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, the vast majority of people taken out of poverty were taken out by dictatorial China's social programs, not capitalism.
Wait till you find out that they have a twitter handle & department for Public Policy as well. Why does a global e-commerce giant even need one unless they want to lobby/pressurise politicians & govt's altogether
