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The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves
theodp writes "If Amazon is Santa, says Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in 'workcampers' from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. 'Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,' explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. 'There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious.' Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. 'They'd get there exhausted.' The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned."
They accepted terms of employment. A willing employer got a willing employee. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, if the employees are unhappy they can always get another job, no shortages of those!
Local hippie couple heads to the heartland and learns about hard work.
Seriously, wtf is the point of this article?
While your point is well taken, holding a graduate level degree isn't any guarantor of a higher salary. I know several people who finished grad school and never broke $50K a year (they're in their 40s and 50s now). There are also jobs that pay six figures but don't require anything more than a high school diploma or equivalent.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Not everybody wants the same things out of life, and I've never thought it in good taste to explicitly or implicitly insult anybody's honest work, regardless of what it is or who they are.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Robots might make sense to handle their routine volume, but the holiday rush is probably cheaper to handle with humans which don't require the large capital expense.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're 43 and your highest paying job ever is stuffing boxes for Amazon? Have you ever considered furthering your education?
That way he can be the best educated box stuffer at amazon. Those who believe the high paying jobs are coming back in any quantity have another thing coming... The truth is that the median income in the US is actually much lower than people seem to realize. $13.50/Hour is the median income. There are whole swaths of the United States where $11 / hours is actually a "desirable" job as opposed to the minimum wage jobs that are otherwise available. We have become a service industry country, and have given all of the "high paying" jobs to foreign nationals because otherwise our corporate masters would have to pay for real benefits and a meaningful pension plan. Corporations have abdicated their moral responsibilities for their employees. As long as our justification is the almighty dollar, this situation is only getting worse. I am not one to advocate socialism in any form, but capitalism only works when those who benefit from the system perform their social responsibility towards their employees and treat them right. The people who reap the profits have to take a backseat to the common good of all, otherwise the system collapses and no-one gets any profit. The only viable way to ensure that every employee exercises their responsibility is through regulation. We have already seen what happens when they are allowed to operate on their own recognizance. Every industry that has been allowed to function without regulatory oversight has found a way to bubble. This situation can logically only result in an ultimate burst which threatens the stability of our entire economy. It is a publicly sanctioned pyramid scheme, where a select few early adopters make money and everyone else gets screwed. When are we going to collectively put a stop to it. Do we have to see 90% of the population below the poverty line before we will wake up and see it for what it is?
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
In the middle of an argument criticizing capitalism you say:
I am not one to advocate socialism in any form
This illogical undercurrent of anti-socialism is a big reason why America is where it is.
And the argumenets against socialsm aren't about not sharing, they are about others not pulling thier own weight in society. after all why should i work hard only to have the benefits of that hardwork given to someone who works less?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
At the end of a conveyor belt, a worker took castings, turned, and removed the sprue with a punch press.
A salesman came in and said that there were neat advantages with a robot : It would never come in late, organize the shop, chase your wife, or sue. They bought one.
What was not mentioned was that the robot was perfectly willing to have its hand in the way of the press.
Now the worker takes castings and walks around the robot.
Enslaving your fellow man is not the point of capitalism. The point of capitalism is merely to reward people investing in capital (like factories, or post-secondary education, or server farms, or hog farms, or orchards, or houses, or wheelbarrows, or telecommunications networks) by allowing them to profit from the use of that capital. When you allow this, then people invest in that capital, and you get a lot of stuff done - more so than you would from mere labor, the other component of getting things done. But anything else in excess of this isn't really about capitalism anymore: it's just selfish materialism taken to extremes. That is destructive, and abusive, and wrong.
And anyone who says that "greed is good" needs to be bonked upside the head. No, greed is not good. Greed is useful. That's different. It's useful for this: it drives people to go out and make worthwhile things happen, so that they can make money satisfy their greedy impulses. It drives people to invest in capital, in loans and and bonds and equities in companies which will ultimately pay them back and make their investment as worthwhile as possible. These companies bring new things to people, or bring old things to people better, and everybody wins. (Except when they don't, because the market is imperfect, and some people definitely win more than others, like our favorite people in the world: CEOs.... and they get away with it because of market inefficiencies, and we should probably consider how to actually effectively deal with the situation rather than just assert partisan rhetoric about the matter one way or another).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Socialised capitalism (Various European nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc) has had far more positive benefit to the standard of living than the raw, unfettered capitalism of the USA, which has been stagnating for the last 50 years or more (unless you happen to be in the top 1% economically, then you're laughing). Sure, a lot of these nations don't have their middle class all living in McMansions mortgaged up until their eyeballs bleed, but the overall standard of living accross all levels of society is higher.
Each side of this debate (socialism vs. capitalism) really only gets half of the picture.
Higher living standards are achieved by only two methods: resource conservation and technological progress.
The way capitalism encourages higher living standards is via hoarding. Hoarding is not necessarily beneficial. Resource conservation and technological progress are beneficial. But hoarding is the means to the end. Allowing capitalists to hoard tends to encourage conservation and, in theory, technological progress. This raises the baseline living standards of the society, over time, in exchange for a large gap in living standards between the hoarders and the resourceless classes.
Socialism, on the other hand, can also result in higher living standards but via the opposite means. Instead of hoarding, socialism encourages redistribution. Besides the immediate direct raising of living standards of all citizens, by redistributing raw materials, human input (both labor and intellectual) is maximized. This encourages technological progress, at the cost of quicker resource depletion. Done correctly, redistribution can even encourage conservation.
What we have in America is called a mixed-economy. Not quite free-market capitalist, not quite commie-socialist. Capitalists are allowed to hoard, to an extent. Socialists are allowed to redistribute, to an extent. The entire thing is, of course, a complete clusterfuck. Instead of redistributing renewable raw materials, mixed-economy "socialists" redistribute finished goods and labor. Instead of hoarding limited raw materials, mixed-economy "capitalists" hoard worthless paper money. We end up with the worst of both worlds, resource depletion, forced labor, impoverished underclasses dependent upon the state, technological progress that can barely keep up with population growth, and stagnation in living standards.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"