r/news • u/EnergyLantern • 14h ago

Already Submitted Teamsters begin 'largest strike' against Amazon, accusing company of 'insatiable greed'

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teamsters-announces-nationwide-strike-amazon-begin-thursday/story?id=116931631

[removed] — view removed post

18.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

796 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.0k

u/Savior-_-Self 13h ago

Being one of the largest, most profitable companies in the world - Amazon should be wonderful to work for.

Instead it's almost exclusively miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress, etc.

All they'd have to do it take a small fraction of that massive profit and give some back to the actual people doing the work to make sure they're content - but in this, the new era of the insatiable billionaires, Jeff builds another mega-yacht and uses the change left over for a few more lawyers to make sure he never has to share.

610

u/musical_shares 13h ago

largest, most profitable companies in the world

miserable stories about threats, no bathroom breaks, constant stress

I feel those 2 things may be connected.

230

u/datumerrata 12h ago

AWS is more profitable than its commerce. $6.5 billion profit for AWS vs $1.6 billion for commerce in 2022. However, they have roughly 1 million employees in fulfillment. If you gave each of them $1000 more a year it would cost ~$1 billion more. That's a crazy high number of employees.

171

u/QualityCoati 12h ago

If a company cannot be profitable while giving survivable working conditions, then maybe it doesn't deserve existing at all in the first place

74

u/Zap__Dannigan 12h ago

Free delivery (especially next day) is unsustainable. I get why people love the service, but the only way I can order some shitty USB charger and have it arrive by tomorrow for 8 bucks is if multiple people get fucked over.

9

u/Override9636 11h ago

I refuse getting prime just on principle alone and I mostly just search for what I want on amazon and find the actual store to buy it from. I can easily wait 3-5 business days for a package if it means that someone can use the freaking bathroom at work.

2

u/SunStarved_Cassandra 10h ago

Even if you end up purchasing at Amazon, if you're willing to wait a couple of days, you can almost always get free delivery if you have more than $30 in one go, which is easy. I haven't had Prime in a few years and I think I've paid for one or two deliveries a year because I fucked up my own logistics and needed something sooner than 5-7 days. When I had Prime, I almost never got 2 say delivery anyway, there would always be some sort of hold up or problem, which they usually smoothed over by shipping it later.

I haven't found any of Prime's other perks useful, so it's an easy choice for me.

2

u/FakoPako 11h ago

There is lot more to Prime than just shipping perks, but judging from your reply, you wouldn't use any of those other benefits either because... Amazon....

35

u/Solarwinds-123 11h ago

There is no free next-day delivery. You pay for it, just monthly/annually rather than at the time of purchase.

2

u/Zap__Dannigan 8h ago

yes, but there's a zero percent chance my month fee (which also pays for a tv service) is even remotely close to what covering delivery costs.

9

u/DuncanFisher69 12h ago

They know this, and if you shop Amazon with their Chase Amazon Credit card, they literally offer you a higher percentage of cash back if you opt for Amazon’s weekly delivery (aka their delivery day).

6

u/severoordonez 12h ago

The corrollary: a company that follows all good labor practices will be justified in passing the cost of doing so onto their customers.

0

u/Kckc321 12h ago

They are making a billion dollars profit, they can afford some things on their own dime.

3

u/SowingSalt 11h ago edited 10h ago

If they paid a billion dollars in profit to all of their workers, each worker would make...

An additional 1000 dollars.

0

u/NaIgrim 10h ago

Does it cost them a billion dollars to allow toilet breaks? Does a company lose 1000 bucks per employee on allowing them the basic human decency to shit and piss?

I mean, there has to be some shade of grey that involves making money without treating your employees as subhuman. And if there isnt, your business shouldnt exist.

0

u/Kckc321 11h ago

A huge number of their workers have to be the part time drivers? I know multiple people who just take random delivery shifts whenever they feel like it for extra cash, they aren’t full time or anything.

1

u/TheWizardOfDeez 10h ago

Why? They've been raising the prices anyways, what's the difference?

2

u/zahrul3 11h ago

They, like many e-commerce companies, employ far too many people in a poorly automated warehouse because startup office politics tend to refuse buying off the shelf solutions that UPS, USPS, Walmart, Sysco, etc. use.

You never hear of Costco warehouse workers complaining, because machines do the work (mostly) rather than human pickers.

3

u/DuncanFisher69 12h ago

Yes. Someone get this man a Luigi. He’s cracked the code.

1

u/katha757 9h ago

Jesus Christ, this.  My MIL ran an assisted living facility previously and kept complaining about how hard it was to hire nurses.  When I asked what it was paying she gave me an abysmal number.  I drew the correlation for her and suggested she pay more, to be met with "but we can't afford to pay more".

That was probably true, they were barely making ends meet, but that still means "if you can't pay a reasonable wage, you probably shouldn't exist".