The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"
I could be wrong but... I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space. Relatively demanding, sure. I get it. We've all seen the article where some Amazon worker urinated in a bottle because "the job is just so ruthless!". They employ hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide. If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.
I could have sworn I read that if you are a hardworking Amazon warehouse worker, they'll train you for a more technical job. That seems like a pretty good benefit. I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box? Maybe drive a forklift/unload a truck with a pallet jack.
I feel like the same people who want Amazon to unionize so workers can get better wages + healthcare, also don't want Amazon to kill mom + pop shops. Ok... How is a mom and pop shop supposed to pay $20/hr with healthcare for a warehouse worker when they don't have AWS money falling from the sky?
"Relatively demanding" is an understatement. It seems as though you're really downplaying how much this job sucks. The awful nature of the conditions are well known:
As for people hired, try upwards of 600,000 in front line roles, with high turnover. They keep hiring because many don't last over a year in the warehouses. People need cash, and the hiring process is incredibly frictionless.
> I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space.
> I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box?
Amazon is also one of the richest companies in the world, largely dependant on the work of each and every one of those warehouse workers. Why is it ok for the company to try to squeeze every penny of profit, but not for employees to try to squeeze every possible penny of wage out of the company?
Amazon could probably make a great profit even if it paid its warehouse workers 30 or even 100 USD per hour. Why is it a priori wrong for employees to try to move the needle in that direction?
If that's unrealistic, still: Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
Not saying that they should, but there is a strange double standard in these sorts of discussions, where it is taken for granted that the company should seek to extract the maximum amount of profit from its workers, but the other way around is seen as abnormal.
> Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
Amazon’s moneymaker is AWS, not the warehouse. At least in my city, AWS salaries have went up a fair amount in the last year or two, which makes sense given that AWS generates lots of profit.
The warehouse on the other hand has much thinner margins and if they largely increased warehouse worker salaries they might not be profitable.
Amazon is made into separate business units, so increasing salaries in one business unit which isn’t very profitable because the other business unit is profitable is just bad business.
I doubt warehouse salaries are a significant percentage of costs for Amazon outside AWS. And the non-AWS part of Amazon is still significantly larger than AWS (revenue ~346 billion dollars vs ~40 billion for AWS) even if it is indeed less profitable. Warehousing is of course not that profitable, but it is a significant enabler for the sales of the rest of the business (perhaps even for AWS infrastructure).
> If that's unrealistic, still: Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
So, say Amazon's net income in 2019 was $11.5B, and that they paid employees about $25B. Even if Amazon's scale in 2020 required no additional workers, increasing wages for those existing workers by 84% would have wiped out Amazon's entire profit and more despite a banner year.
"How much better" would be things like AC when the weather is too hot (which it seems has improved after all the negative press), and other safety considerations as mentioned in all the articles.
I'm not for or against unions here, but I'm certain Amazon could do better.
> The biggest confusion I have is everybody seems to approach Amazon and Tesla unionization as "hopefully it happens so workers will get better wages!"
That might be the thing you're wrong about. It sounds like most of the Amazon unionization efforts _aren't_ necessarily about better pay. It seems like more of the focus is about better, more humane working conditions.
If Amazon pays its workers slightly above average that's great, but if they treat those same workers like absolute shit with inhumane working conditions, then that's a problem that a union can help resolve.
>> they treat those same workers like absolute shit with inhumane working conditions
I think this debate is going to be like all the others on the topic, if you have never done manual labor, warehouse work, or factory work you are going to talk about the "inhumane working conditions", and if you have done that type of work you consider an Amazon warehouse job to be a great job for an unskilled laborer.
I did 10 years in that world, the factory workers I worked with would have considered an Amazon warehouse job to be a dream job.
I feel dirty now for having defended Amazon, but the truth is the truth.
Any job that doesn't give workers time to use the bathroom when they need to is inhumane.
Any job that is too warm, and doesn't provide workers adequate water, breaks, or AC such that workers are feinting or suffer health consequences is inhumane.
If the working conditions elsewhere are worse than that, then it's not a positive mark for Amazon. It's a black mark for those workplaces.
> I feel dirty now for having defended Amazon, but the truth is the truth.
I don't know if you have condemned Amazon, so much as tarred other workplaces if they also fail to meet these standards.
I listened to a podcast recently about Amazon union drives and apparently the big gripe isn't wages but working conditions. The almost universal sentiment is that people are treated like robots. Breaks are so rare and short that pissing in bottles or defecating in bags is common. Sometimes people have to choose between relieving themselves and eating since the break is too short for both. Most of the people interviewed wanted more humane working conditions.
There are many worse places to work, but that's whataboutism and using that argument leads to a race to the bottom.
> pissing in bottles or defecating in bags is common
I'd be willing to wager this "fact" has been brought up more in this thread alone than has actually happened on the job. Makes for great sensationalism, though. The union cause would be much better served without this silly BS being shared like it's the actual cause of woos.
> The email [May 2020] went on to say: “We’ve noticed an uptick recently of all kinds of unsanitary garbage being left inside bags: used masks, gloves, bottles of urine.”
> Workers have previously told the Guardian they needed to urinate inside water bottles on a daily basis for fear of missing delivery rates. A forum on Reddit dedicated to Amazon drivers, which, while impossible to vet completely for authenticity, nonetheless shows hundreds of comments from drivers claiming they frequently have to urinate in water bottles for lack of bathroom breaks while on the job
It’s so common that within 16 hours of soliciting anonymous tips about the prevalence of it within Amazon, the intercept was able to fill an entire article with evidence of how common it is
Warehouse work used to pay more than $15/hr, and if you look at the stats workers in counties without Amazon warehouses get paid more[1]. Pay is closer to 20 an hour.
Unions can (and do!) negotiate working conditions.
Dunno about Tesla but based on everything I've read, Amazon's "blue collar" workforce appears to have productivity requirements that are mostly unobtainable without taking shortcuts (like skipping lunch and bathroom breaks) and these jobs appear to have an extremely high turnover rate, which speaks to the crap nature of the job.
A lot of people would not mind taking a small cut in pay for more humanitarian working conditions. People, generally, like being treated like people and not machines. But I don't actually think this is needed, I think Amazon can both improve working conditions and make a strong profit.
For a quick example, my cousin has a union job where a paid lunch break (half hour) was negotiated every day. Union leaders routinely make their rounds around the office to make sure everyone is actually taking their lunch break and not feeling forced to work through lunch.
Amazon is the company that knows its drivers are peeing in bottles to meet their quotas[1], but then tweets things like this in response[2]:
> 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.
> If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.
You're severely underestimating the punishing conditions of an Amazon warehouse job.
A picker has a tablet that alerts them of an item to get. A clock starts counting down on the time you have to get to the right bin, find the item, and scan it. The warehouse sorting algorithms created by Amazon engineers optimize for retrieval time - but the warehouses are so huge, this means in practice that you have exactly as much time as you need assuming you never stop moving. For your entire 8-9 hour shift.
A typical amazon warehouse worker is essentially powerwalking non-stop for 8 hours straight on hard concrete floors. Breaks begin at a scheduled time, but your break begins when you sign out of your device, then you walk some distance to the break room (typically a 3-5 minute walk), AND you have to be signing back in to your device at the end of your break time. In practice this means your actual resting time on break is typically 5 minutes or less for 15's, 15-20 minutes for lunch. You are not allowed to sit or rest anywhere other than the break room.
If you sign back in only a few seconds late from your break, a manager will speak with you about it. If you sign back in 30 seconds late a few times in a row, you can be fired.
It's true that Amazon pays well in the warehouse space and is constantly hiring people with no experience. However, this isn't because Amazon is a great place to work - it's because there is an incredible amount of churn. People burn out of Amazon warehouse work constantly.
If you search on google for Amazon warehouse stories, you'll find a lot of people talking about how physically punishing the job is, about the constant stress from 22-year-old "managers" doing their rotation through a warehouse and enforcing Amazon's draconian rulebook without a thought in their head about the people they're taking to task for coming back from lunch 30 seconds late.
There's a blog out there from a guy who worked in Amazon warehouses in the Midwest, who documented everything while looking into trying to organize. The stories he tells about the work environment are hair-raising.
Amazon has figured out how to optimize the physical output of a human being, squeezing every last ounce of productivity from them every second of a shift until they either quit from burnout or get fired for not "making rate" (total % of lateness picking or packing assigned items). The fact that Amazon has an endless supply of people signing up to work in this environment says less about Amazon and more about the state of the American economy and how many desperate people are out there who need to sell their physical and mental health to Bezos pay their bills.
I feel like I'm going to be remembering this post every time I click the "Buy Now" button from now on. I wonder if this means it's more humane to buy from third party sellers rather than Prime?
I don’t see why people expect existing US unions to improve the situation. They have entrenched political interests and represent many different industries. Once they’ve managed to get into an company, they’re repeatedly demonstrated they have no interest in listening to or advocating for the workers they represent.
I’m actually for having unions, but they should be limited in size, and it should be easy for workers at a given site, or with a particular job role to quit the union and form their own.
As it is, with an Amazon union, employees will have two abusive monopolies to fight instead of just one.
That's a nice local statistic but it's probable at this point amazon is depressing warehouse work wages that used to be quite a bit above minimum wage.
I could be wrong but... I'm pretty sure Amazon and Tesla pay great relative to their space. Relatively demanding, sure. I get it. We've all seen the article where some Amazon worker urinated in a bottle because "the job is just so ruthless!". They employ hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide. If it was that bad, I think they'd have a harder time hiring.
I could have sworn I read that if you are a hardworking Amazon warehouse worker, they'll train you for a more technical job. That seems like a pretty good benefit. I'm sure most Amazon warehouse jobs start in the $15-20/hr range. How much better can you really get for what is essentially reading a screen, grabbing something off of a shelf, and putting it in a box? Maybe drive a forklift/unload a truck with a pallet jack.
I feel like the same people who want Amazon to unionize so workers can get better wages + healthcare, also don't want Amazon to kill mom + pop shops. Ok... How is a mom and pop shop supposed to pay $20/hr with healthcare for a warehouse worker when they don't have AWS money falling from the sky?