Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Workers Strike In Germany As Christmas Orders Peak
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Washington Post reports that in Germany, Amazon's second-biggest market behind the United States, hundreds of Amazon.com workers went on strike just as pre-Christmas sales were set to peak, in a dispute over pay and conditions that has raged for months. Amazon, which employs 9,000 warehouse staff members in Germany plus 14,000 seasonal workers at nine distribution centers, says that 1,115 employees joined the strike at three sites. 'Amazon must realize it cannot export its anti-union labor model to European shores. We call on the company to come to the table and sign a global agreement that guarantees the rights of workers,' says Philip Jennings of the global trade union UNI. Verdi organized several short stoppages this year to try to force Amazon to accept collective-bargaining agreements ... The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs and that other retailers pay overtime, but Amazon does not. 'What Amazon is doing is taking this American race-to-the-bottom roadshow to Germany and trying it out on our German brothers and sisters,' says David Freiboth. Amazon has defended its wage policies, saying that employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany. Amazon also says it prefers to address employment issues with worker councils at individual sites rather than through negotiations with the union. Amazon says that there have been no delays to deliveries ... adding that Amazon uses its whole European logistics network during the Christmas period to ensure delivery times. A delegation of German workers was set to rally at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle along with U.S. unions. 'We're standing in solidarity with them. We are asking that Amazon respect the union there in Germany and negotiate in a way that is acceptable to Verdi,' says Kathy Cummings of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, which was also attending the protest in Seattle."
FUCK YOU Amazon.com!
Seriously, if you don't want the work don't take it. Nobody forces you to work at Amazon
I sense a whole lot more of them in Amazon's (near) future...
coding is life
they're already doing it pretty heavily... this sort of thing... striking in the middle of a christmas season... it inspires drastic steps.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Unten Gleben Glauben Globen
translation: what goes around comes around
How apt. It's too bad Americans can't see this but Germans can.
Does AWS also employ slave labor?
Amazon must realize it cannot export its anti-union labor model to European shores. ... ... powered by lobbying machine KPMG Consulting, their shill Gerhard 'Let's wrap him in barbed wire and shoot him into the sun' Schröder, Hartz 4 cheap-flexible-workforce-supply powered by German taxpayer and so forth. ... There, fixed that for you.
As much as I love shopping for stuff at amazon, I'm totally with these strikers. Kick them where it hurts is my vote on this! Go, workers rights, go! Voll in die Eier! ... I hope this spills over into the US, a notable signal no-holds barred neo-con corporate-socialism disguised as free market capitalism desperately needs. Here and across the pond.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In one corner you've got an organisational of thousands with huge financial resources and political clout using its sheer size to say how and when people should be employed, and in the other corner you've got a union.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I dunno. Seems to be doing pretty good to squeeze out opportunities for the unskilled. Why hire 3 unskilled people when I can only afford 1 because of government mandate?
Sorry folks... there are only so many rungs that the government will allow us to put out there. The rest of you can FOAD.
What do we reckon is the probability of the Washington Post starting an investigative report on a story like this?
Misread the title as "Amazon Women Strike Germany as Christmas Orders Peak" - for a short while the world was a much more interesting place to live...
The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs and that other retailers pay overtime, but Amazon does not. Amazon has defended its wage policies, saying that employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany.
Please note that the union sees the work as a mail-order job, where wages are higher.
Amazon thinks of it as a logistics job.
The union demands that Amazon recognize that the workers are in the mail-order business and pay accordingly.
What power has law where only money rules.
FTA....
1. Amazon says that it's pay is already near the top of the scale for logistic centers.
2. German Union Organizers have a problem with Amazon defining their distribution warehouses as "logistic centers" because it allows them to pay less than they would otherwise be required to.
Germany's strike is really a strike against Amazon fulfillment centers being allowed to classify themselves as "Logistics" centers. I'm curious what a better definition would be.
"Amazon also says it prefers to address employment issues with worker councils at individual sites rather than through negotiations with the union."
Yeah, I bet they do.
That's actually the reason we have unions in the first place, you know...
You would like them to, but they dont FOAD.
They get welfare and food stamps and employment assistance, and guess where all the money for that comes from.....Your taxes.
Your paying them to live anyway, you may as well get some work out of them.
It's sad that Amazon and other organizations in the US have succeeded so much in suppressing Unions.
I guess I'll do a little whistleblowing on a job I had with Joann Fabrics here in the US in one of their warehouses. It was during the Christmas season and they hired many temp employees from temp agencies to fill out their staff to meet orders. I was one of many "pickers", someone who hauls heavy stuff all day (20+ pounds, all day for 8 hours) in a very dusty, dirty warehouse. The air was thick with the dust, so much so that if I didn't wear a mask, I'd be hacking up phlegm within an hour. Most people working there didn't wear masks. One guy said that, because many of the boxes come from overseas, he gets a rash every fall that "is red and itches like crazy". It happens around the same time shipments come in.
They treated us pretty badly, running us hard, as hard as the people who were there for 20 years, and expecting us to perform at their pace or get canned. You had your stats told to you every day. When I started at a whopping $8.00/hr, I was told I'd get a $.25 raise after working for 600 hours. I wanted to laugh in the supervisor's face.
This is the way these warehouses are, generally. As a worker you are paid crap, treated like crap, expected to work insanely hard, and if your health suffers, oh well.
I'm not sure why Amazon is being singled out here, except perhaps that it's a great example. The root problem is the greed of American-based companies and their total disregard or apathy towards their employees. The only people working for these parasitic companies that make money are the directors and C*s; their inflated value of what the "top people" do and the remuneration they award these so-called "top people" is outrageous. There really does need to a proper evaluation of how wages within a US-based company are distributed amongst the employees. Is a CEO really worth the same as 10000 (or more) "workers"? No, of course not. For a start, without workers there is no company and there is no profit because without workers the damn company can't even make a cent. And don't get me started about boards having to look out for their shareholders; if that was truly the case then proper and fair distribution of remuneration throughout the workers would be exactly the same (it's just the the C*s wouldn't earn 10 (or more) figure salaries whilst the minions earn 5 figure salaries, or maybe 6 if they're lucky.) The greed is sickening. The US culture is sickening. More and more countries are realising this. I fully support the workers; if they don't stand up, who will? It does seem that US workers seem to just accept this shit, but fortunately the rest of the world does seem to have more of a clue.
Voll in die Eier
Full in the eggs?
As much as I love shopping for stuff at amazon
Me too. I live in the UK. I browse for stuff on Amazon. Frequently, the cheapest option is a third-party vendor. So I go to the vendor's website where the product is frequently cheaper still. I order it. Amazon makes nothing. And my money stays in the UK.
I save money. I help the economy. I don't help Amazon. What's not to like?
A friend of mine down on his luck and desperate for money worked last year for a few weeks at one of Amazon's fulfillment centers during their holiday hiring surge. Told me some stories that were Orwellian in the degree that people were "managed", with a ruthless efficiency that rivaled the mechanical processing of the products themselves. From the moment the trucks rolled in with the goods to the second they rolled out again, every moment of every item including the employees were tracked, itemized, stamped.... It was pretty unbelievable the conditions people were working in a Modern Times-like cog-in-a-machine way.
The pay was shit, the turnover ridiculous, and my friend like most people there didn't last very long. David Sederis or someone would have a field day with this.
I am not labelling the majority of individual US citizens as sadistic, egotistical, greedy, sociopathic, controlling, corrupt, stupid and dishonest. Just the US nation as a whole (i.e. your government, your spies and the business and banking leaders and their "top people".) The rest of the world is waking up to the disease that's called the US, the internal stability of the US is eroding rapidly, and we're quite possibly witnessing the spiralling downfall of a once great nation. I empathise with those in the US who have or will be caught up in this downfall, but your own government will probably just call it collateral damage.
Well, I bet your 2 cents aren't worth as much as you paid Amazon, you stinking hypocrite.
Once again, a Slashtard talks up a good idealistic game but fails to deliver in action. Who woulda thunk it?
Housewives making extra money for the Holiday, poor folks using Christmas' commercialization as an opportunity to get hired on full time, and possibly even some Department Store Santas who cannot hold a regular job year round.... I don't think we're talking historical on the order of Lech Walesa here.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
No delays to deliveries? Less than 5% of the current workforce participating in the strike? What a waste of time.
So what you are saying is that the minimum wage jobs are working out quite well for them?
I agree that welfare in the US allows companies to not pay a living wage to employees and it effectivly subsidizes those companies. But that is the result of half assed socialism not the companies taking advantage of it. Without those social services making up the differences, those jobs would either be relegated to extra money jobs, jobs for kids looking for experience, or gone altogether. It only becomes a problem when it distorts the job markets to the point that minimum wage jobs become career opertunities. This is compounded by the increasing concept of single person/parent households and the ever increasing expectations of them.
Square in the nuts.
What's it going to be? It's a global economy, there are people in other countries willing to do the job you won't. Sad to say but unions are effectively dead until third world countries stop working for pennies on the dollar.
~ "Right in the balls"
Amazon fulfillment centers in america routinely make workers stand in unpaid lines for security checks as they exit. Wages in the states would never appropach our own livable $15 thanks to a patchwork system of labor laws and tax incentives pushed through by gerrymandered republican political districts under the guise of job creation.
if you mandate health insurance for full time employees, all the employees will be made part time.
if you mandate OSHA regulations and safe work environments, employers will just pay their political lackey to chisel the agency down to nothing at the state level.
if you complain about the workplace, the squeekiest wheel will be terminated without cause.
if you finally get tired of your employers jackboot, they'll complain about how rudely you brought their insolence to the public limelight, instead of burying your remorse and misery in their complaint department rubbish bin.
state-by-state corporate legislation works about as well as state-by-state marriage legislation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs"
"Amazon has defended its wage policies, saying that employees earn toward the upper end of the pay scale of logistics companies in Germany."
So who is right? Is Amazon avoiding paying overtime because they schedule worker shifts in an intelligent manner that does not require overtime (resulting in lower earnings per employee), or because they dont pay overtime even if people work overtime?
"The union says that by classifying its centers as "logistics" centers, Amazon can pay lower wages" - so what is the right definition - Can they be called "retail", or as "mail-order" jobs... can someone enlighten... based on facts...
There are so many nuances that just cannot be understood from a simple media article... Oh well... this is slashdot....
But what I'd rather have is that Amazon, and its workers and its worker councils and its unions sort the matter out in an amicable manner, than to inconvenience their paying customers, which can only result in something negative for all the parties involved.
Apparently, Czech wage slaves would be more manageable, or so they say. But the locals blocked it in a plebiscite.
http://www.praguepost.com/business/23186-amazon-sets-eyes-on-czech-republic
I didn't like my old job because the pay and benefits were unfair. Now I got a new job and the pay and benefits are good. That's what I think of unions. Oh and here's the kicker: the former company was doing terrible financially. A union would have made them go bankrupt.
"The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs"
So go work for them. Amazon isn't the only place to work in Germany.
I want to hear this one. I love foreign idioms and their literal translations (presumably English idioms are also funny in their literal translations). German seems particularly colorful. I like "I have seen the horse vomit."
The minimum wage is/was *supposed* to be for kids in or just out of high school, college students, etc.
The real cause of this, the point at which we jumped into the race to the bottom was in the 80's, when two things happend:
Union busting actually became popular. Reagan busting the air traffic controllers, and the unexpected level of approval from Americans, was a tipping point. Upward pressure on wages fell away across the economy.
Supply side economic policy has been the norm since (under Reagan) taxes on the super rich was basically cut in half.
Income inequality is the real devil here. The flatter the line is the better off everyone is, even the super rich. To fix it we need two things, upward pressure on labor wages, and an artificial friction to acquiring wealth. By that I mean the more wealthy you are the harder it is to get more wealthy. A progressive tax system does this, but maybe there are other methods.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
A friend of mine down on his luck and desperate for money worked last year for a few weeks at one of Amazon's fulfillment centers during their holiday hiring surge. The pay was shit, the turnover ridiculous, and my friend like most people there didn't last very long.
I had horrible low paying jobs at times. If there are less horrible or better paying jobs available you can move to them. If not, well, it's nice to have a job when you need one. I would guess that the majority of people don't think their jobs are fun, and would like to get paid more. I doubt most coding slaves are happy.
A quote from the movie Gladiator:
Cicero: Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.
I would fire all their assess.
Unions arguably served a point back in the days of slave labour rates in dangerous factories.
But Europe is well past those days. If people aren't happy with Amazon they can talk with their feet and quit. There are plenty of options around and if they feel they can get a better deal elsewhere, they can quit and move to greener pastures.
Ganging up and threatening to ruin their company shows a serious lack of respect and attitude of selfishness.
I'm sure some people would be happy to take their jobs, and if Amazon has a though time retaining employees, then that's a sign that there's room for improvement.
Half the time modern unions are effectively blackmail machines rub by people who don't care about the company or the employees.
An interesting article by David Simon on a similar theme.
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jnr.
... I've got to say: the American posters on here that are largely big-company bootlickers are really pathetic. I think that Free Market Capitalists are almost as bad a Religionists in that you both believe in fairy tales and you want to be on your knees "worshipping" said fairy tale.
I don't respond to AC's.
As much as I love shopping for stuff at amazon
Me too. I live in the UK. I browse for stuff on Amazon. Frequently, the cheapest option is a third-party vendor. So I go to the vendor's website where the product is frequently cheaper still. I order it. Amazon makes nothing. And my money stays in the UK.
I save money. I help the economy. I don't help Amazon. What's not to like?
Your purchasing model treats the services of searching and aggregating product listings as an externality that you expect society as a whole to bare while you enjoy a free rider effect.
If your system were used by the majority of people Amazon would go out of business and you'd loose the key point in your system.
No shit, Sherlock. And then I would go back to using Google.
The minimum wage is/was *supposed* to be for kids in or just out of high school, college students, etc.
Citation? Because I was always told it was considered the lowest wage a single person living alone could survive on.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So when those jobs are gone all together, where will the people work?
And do you expect the companies to suddenly pay a decent wage from the goodness of their heart for all the jobs that do remain?
The next lowest paid will just be forced into the situation of the lowest paid now. I's all downward pressure on wages from bigger and bigger companies fighting against more and more desperate workers. Who do you expect will win?
Lol.. you have so many misconceptions it isn't funny. The minimum wage was created to curb minority companies under bidding bloated established white companies. It created a base level that barred those willing to work for less from taking well paying jobs. Mandating a prevailing wage in government contracts was much the same. In more modern times, the minimum had been used to stealth tax increases as both the employee and the employer has taxes associated with pay that does not get refunded.
Second, union busting has never been popular in recent times. People started seeing unions in a negetive light when Reagan busted the air traffic controllers specifically because they walked off the job and left people in danger in planes in the air with no one directing their movements in a reletively tight airspace. That is when people started seeing that 90% of what unions were needed for was already encoded into law and their remaining usefulness was mostly about greed of income. But what really killed the unions was downsizing in the 80s where the bloat was consolidated and made efficient. This lead to companies poping up that could compete far better than most established union shops and they took an even deeper hit with the offshoring craze that pitted union wages against third world wages. Outside of the traffic controllers showing how wreckless the pursuit of greed can be, it had little to do with the fall of the unions.
As for income inequality, the majority of the income being considered too large is performance based. It is stock options, bonuses and so one attached to a base pay. It was originally done this way in order to shirk pay obligations if the executive failed to properly run the company (with some tax strategy). The problem is it an incentive to keep wages low and stagnant. It isn't so much the inequal amounts that is the effective problem but what makes those amounts so inequal. Now i know you are looking at fixing it meaning increasing worker pay but the realities will likely be decreasing exec pay and simply giving them prefered stock where they get the same but it is counted as dividends separate from their pay.
The only way to fix this is to tie employee wages to the same or similar bonus structures. This way, even if the ceo makes 20,000 times more than the base hourly pay for workers, those workers get rewarded the same. I have seen people who actually do get profit sharing earn as much as 2 times thier anual salary fron the profit. Mostly it seems to be one third to two thirds more.
I had horrible low paying jobs at times. If there are less horrible or better paying jobs available you can move to them. If not, well, it's nice to have a job when you need one.
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
I did that for a while when I was at school, and would have switched to Amazon without a second thought if they'd been around at the time.
After winning the historical 1936 election by a landslide, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) into law in early 1938. The FLSA introduced sweeping regulations to protect American workers from being exploited, and created a mandatory federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour in order to maintain a "minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being, without substantially curtailing employment". This new law was welcomed as a godsend by the thousands of workers who were previously forced to work for a fraction of that amount, but was violently opposed by many employers and fiscal conservatives who argued that a minimum wage could hurt employers. In addition to establishing a mandatory nation-wide minimum wage the Fair Labor Standards Act introduced many other worker's protection laws still in effect today, including banning child labor and establishing workplace safety statutes.
http://www.minimum-wage.org/history.asp
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't confuse unions with onions. Onions are the round things that make you cry. Unions are actually good - because of them, people no longer work 16 hours a day, and there is no child labor.
I want to hear this one. I love foreign idioms and their literal translations (presumably English idioms are also funny in their literal translations). German seems particularly colorful. I like "I have seen the horse vomit."
Mensch, du hast einen Vogel!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Put your money where you mouth is. Start sending the employees +15-20% of every purchase you make to substitute their wages. Amazon isn't dealing with high margins here and is known for not making a profit. I could understand if they were over charging for goods and underpaying their staff that you could be upset the C-- level was reaping the benefits but that just isn't the case here.
If Amazon had two check out options, one for current wages and a second for proposed wages, and let people choose which option to use you would find most people don't want to pay employees more but they want to pay less on goods.
Why exactly? What is the benefit to society in having poorly-paid "menial" jobs?
That sounds decidedly Marxist
Hi Amazon,
I'm not saying you ought to do business around here.
But if you do, please do it in a decent way.
Pay you workers a decent wage and and pay your taxes where you turn a massive profit.
Amazon got 7,1 Mio â directly off of the german state and pays *nill, nada, nothing* here. Their german profits (some 8,7 billion (!) bucks) are sucked up by a Amazon EU S.a r.l. (Luxemburg, tax haven) ;)
Any thoughts? :)
Your purchasing model treats the services of searching and aggregating product listings as an externality that you expect society as a whole to bare while you enjoy a free rider effect.
Society has to get naked? The Bill of Rights guarantees the right to wear sleeveless shirts?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The minimum wage is/was *supposed* to be for kids in or just out of high school, college students, etc.
.85 MW .70 MW
If this is the case, then why was the law not written to reflect this?
Minimum Wage = MW
Under 22 Wage =
Under 18 Wage =
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Yeah, you are one of those. There are no 'worker rights', there are no 'women rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'racial minority rights', there are only group privileges, which impose obligations upon somebody else to provide those privileges and that means that some groups of people exert legislative and thus lethal (as in bullets) power over other groups of people.
Unions are not interested in YOUR rights, they are interested in THEIR privileges, they want special status, special treatment, MONOPOLY on the supply of labour so they can extract undue profits from the economy, where the economy would rather see much more efficiency.
You can't handle the truth.
I have no idea what a union would have been like, but I have worked in a factory. It wasn't in the same line of business, but I do recognize the notion of being worked to death and cared about very little. You're lucky it was only 8 hours, my factory had no qualms about working you for 12, then idling you for part of the next day so you got no overtime.
As you say, paid like crap, treated like crap, disposable. $0.25 is a good raise, kinda. At least when you compare it to the $0.05, $0.10 and $0.15 raises I remember. I especially remember that nickel raise. It was supposed to be $0.25, but they found some reason to cut everyone's pay by the same. They said that they didn't feel right about cutting the *entire* raise, though, so they let us keep a nickel.
Yay.
If it breaks, the company pays a local repair guy to come to my shop to fix it.
If I know exactly what I want, what's the point in paying more at a local store? If I need some assistance though, then buying local makes sense.
That's not right. Our expression is "(Aber) Man hat schon Pferde vor der Apotheke kotzen gesehen." A translation might be "(But) Horses have been seen vomitting in front of a pharmacy". It's a phrase that's added after describing a very unlikely situation, which may nonetheless happen, e.g. "Given X and Y, I doubt that Z will happen ... but horses have been seen ..."
Actually, here it's "I've seen a horse vomit in front of a pharmacy", meaning everything is possible...
Yes, that was the good intention which together with other good intentions paved the road to the continued Depression which in turn was only "cured" by the World War and destruction or re-purposing of the industrial capacity of most of the rest of civilized world.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
My German uncle can cuss for a hour without repeating himself.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Income inequality is the real devil here. The flatter the line is the better off everyone is, even the super rich.
Why? Most people who talk about this seem more interested in beating down the rich than in helping the poor get richer. You are no exception. Why the jealousy of the rich? Who cares what other people have?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
Tell me about it. I worked a summer before college in a recycling plant. Awful, dirty, and hazardous place. Some of the people there were doing it full time for a living. It impressed on me why I was going to college.
Mod parent up. Let's see the if the Invisible Hand will save the workers.
And that's why I think some form of socialism is the way to go. Too few people want to pay for other people. And especially not if they are not sure most of the money will go to the needy (e.g. it goes to making some rich person even richer).
But in the end they may end up paying anyway - as victims of crime, or in increased costs (prevention of crime or handling, prosecution and incarceration of criminals). Not everyone will choose to die quietly when they have no job, no money and no food.
So the question is how little can you pay, and which of the options would be least evil. You could of course live in an isolated environment and thus pay a lot less to everyone else, but most people are social animals.
That said we can't afford to pay for people to raise many children who we also have to pay for and so forth (exponential problem). So if you are living off welfare you shouldn't be allowed to produce more children unless you can find willing and able sponsors for them.
I get that seeing horses vomit is seeing the impossible because horses can't vomit, but where does the pharmacy come in?
Minimum wage is not enough for a single person to live alone. They would have to choose between food or a roof over their head.
Seriously, if you don't want the work don't take it. Nobody forces you to work at Amazon
And, what the hell do you think a strike is, anyway?
You can argue that strikes are good, but that argument didn't cut it.
The grand-parent was arguing that if you don't like the work, you should find another one.
You argue that this is what a strike is; wrong. The company is prohibited by law from firing strikers. So striking is "having the cake and eating it too".
(also, I modded you "flamebait" by accident, and I am undoing it now)
You assume that value is 100% objective, the same for everyone. That is of course wrong. If I buy soft drink for a dollar, I do it because I value soft drink more than a dollar; the soft drink company does it because it values a dollar more than the soft drink.
Voluntary transactions are not a zero-sum game. Suppose I have two hammers and no nails; you have 100 nails and no hammer. Both of us need to hammer 50 nails. If you give me 50 nails and I give you one hammer, both sides profit.
Minimum wage is not enough for a single person to live alone. They would have to choose between food or a roof over their head.
I won't disagree with that, because it's true, but my point is that's what the minimum wage is supposed to provide: the minimum amount of fiscal security necessary for a single person living alone to survive on. Age nor education status have anything to do with it, as OP contended.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's nice to see capitalism at work. Companies who squeezed workers, are now enjoying pushback from workers.
We can discuss outsourcing, robots, & economic trends forever, but the bottom line at Amazon is holiday shipments, and their leadership appears to have failed to keep worker moral high enough to deliver. The same statement applies to some fast food companies in the US and factories in China.
Job demand outweighed supply during the recession. Now that economies are picking up this imbalance is correcting. Those companies not smart enough to adapt will die. Unless US socialists again protect their friends companies who are "to big to have to compete".
Unless Amazon has injected their workers against their will, no one is forcing these people to work there. They knew what they were signing up for, agreed to the contract and now begin to complain that "its just not fair, we want more money."
Tough noogies. You signed a contract, you accepted the wage. Quit and work somewhere else if you are so ungrateful to have a paying job.
Bearded Dragon
And shut the whole freak show down.
This comment is sausage to me.
Nope, it just seems that way because all German words sound a bit evil/angry/cursing. My favorite is "Ich liebe katzen!' which most people in the US hear and look horrified.
Hopefully you'll be replaced by a robot soon. And likely will. Enjoy that.
Couldn't we say the same about you, o Anonymous asshole? In fact how would we even determine that you are not in fact a robot?
My German uncle can cuss for a hour without repeating himself.
Big deal. A typical New Yorker can curse for an entire day without repeating himself, though it would be much shorter if he only used English.
Business is war, not a matter of "gratitude" because employment isn't a "gift". Collective bargaining is the only way otherwise valueless workers have leverage. One ant is nothing, but an army of ants is very different.
Very true. But I have a problem when the Army of Ants start feeling that they have a right to always win because "They are real people." The world does not have an obligation to take the unions side. I as a rational outside observer I should be able to take the corporations side without the guilt.
My biggest problem is that people have the right to work. If a person does not want to join a union they should not have to. This includes strike-breakers. If it weakens the army to bad.
This is all disregarded in cases of public safety where the only rational choice is to have government intervention.
The union says Amazon workers receive lower wages than others in retail and mail-order jobs
So go work in retail and mail-order. What am I missing here? If all of these Amazon workers could go get these other jobs that supposedly pay more, why are they still working for Amazon? A company can only get away with what people are willing to work for. If nobody was willing to work for what they're paying then nobody would. The whole point of unions is to try and artificially force companies to pay more than what the market dictates.
Sure. But just because there are shittier workplaces than Amazon doesn't mean that Amazon should represent the gold standard. (And granted, you never said that it should.)
As some other countries demonstrate, the average worker (citizen / voter) CAN have a higher income and better social services (health, education).
Successive US governments will claim they have no money to provide such services, then turn around and waste trillions in useless endeavors.
Or they won't raise the minimum wage while passing tax-cuts for the wealthy.
It's not the Glorious Market making these decisions. It's politicians; bought and paid for by the business lobby.
Where the hell are my mod points? Oh right, since I saved up a bunch and didn't use them, they got redistributed to those who blew all of theirs. Maybe one of them can mod you up.
In a sane world a strike at the busiest time of year would be seen as a clear case of extortion and would not be legal. Such nuttiness will add incentive to greater replacement of human workers by automation.
Bit company bootlicker? No, simply no fan of extortion and someone sensible enough to know that no one owes me a job just by virtue of my existing. I am a huge fan of actual freedom of people and groups to voluntarily interact with each other to mutual benefit. But I don't consider breaking a contract and demanding another under an extortion situation to be voluntary interaction so much or reasonable behavior. At the very least in a sane world I would expect the company to be able to fire all people doing this at its first convenience.
BOOM! HEADSHOT! You won't get a response from that guy. You pwned him. Too bad you had to AC that one. The karma is well deserved.
Who cares what other people DON'T have? Oh yeah, the rich.
wth? Where did you get that from?
*No one* who talks about this is interested in beating down the rich, and I am no exception.
Supply side economics: If the wealthy have more money someone is more likely to build a factory.
Traditional economics: If most people have more money more factories will likely be built to satisfy demand.
Supply side economics (voodoo economics if you remember) is a LIE that only continues because a handful of people at the top benefit a lot *right now*. But even they realize that it's a long term loser for the whole economy.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I've always assumed that only students, entry level young people, etc. should be expected to live at that level. I don't actually think we're in complete disagreement.
It's too bad that my minor point caught so much attention, probably at the expense of my main point.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
No, no misconceptions. You didn't argue against a single point I made, go read again. lol indeed.
You are talking about the mechanics of how people get paid which is complete unrelated to the point(s) I made -save labor unions, and your post backs up mine. "That is when people started seeing that 90% of what unions were needed for was already encoded into law and their remaining usefulness was mostly about greed of income". Ahem, unions were harder to break before, and easier to break after.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
The only people I've heard mention supply side economics in a long time was from people mocking it. Even Bush tried to follow your idea of giving people more money to create demand, and later Obama tried the same thing.
In any case, you didn't answer the question of why income inequality is such a bad thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's a lot, but here's something
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/03/income-and-happ.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics#Criticisms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#Effects
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
The minimum wage helps people the same way a minimum height would help short-asses.
Yeah, working for Amaz is just great. Easy to bump your pay though. Break stuff accidentally on porpoise, retrieve it, buff it, flog it on ebay. Takes 3 people to pull off. Gives a beautiful bump to your pay.
Which is a shame.
In your beloved country, anyone who is employed in a miserable way thinks:
That not so good, but one fine day I'll make it otta here and the I'll be the one who pays a shit.
So I keep on and keep reelecting the same people on and on and on and on.
That's not the case here in good old Europe. Except may be for the UK and parts of the southern or eastern ridges. ;)))
So standard of living here is pretty leveled out. Alt least for comparison.
No, it's not Marxism, btw.
Just quality of living and society.
The stuff we save on "intelligence" makes us live better.
Just my 2cents.
The minimum wage helps people the same way a minimum height would help short-asses.
Care to expound on that?
Also, what would you suggest as an alternative?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Heh.....replace supply side with demand side, everything will be great this time, right?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I would rather not, but yet I am forced to do so.
>> And then there's loading the randomly-sized packages onto the truck - as full as possible.
Many years ago, I did this basic problem for a mail order BBQ that needed to get the smallest box for each order. It was one SQL query on a PC. It is not that hard if you have a large sample of prior shipping data.
The unions are much the same as everywhere else in the world. They represent all the workers of a certain trade.
They claim to represent all the workers of a certain trade. They only actually represent their members.
That depends on the the trade. Labor agreements can be declared generally binding in Germany, in which case they cover everyone in a certain trade, whether or not the employee is a union member and whether or not the employer is in the industrial association.
But in general, yes, you are right.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I read on the BBC News site a story of stress related illness manifesting in Amazon inventory picker position workers, I believe this was in the UK, due to a beeping countdown device that measured the duration of the pick effort. Truly Orwellian with a little 'mobile' minder. ... aw shit, I'm addicted.
I have curbed my purchases, and will continue to monitor, sites that use Amazon for physical fulfillment. There is plenty of margin available to pay the worker and/or adjust the working conditions. Uh, Kindle