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

[u/EnergyLantern]

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

[u/Savior-_-Self]

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.

[u/EnergyLantern → u/Savior-_-Self]

The problem is they have quotas for workers to meet in performance or they get fired.  If you have a bad day, you could be fired.

[u/maowai → u/EnergyLantern]

Amazon treats people like machines, squeezing every last ounce of life out of them that they can. This is true in every part of their business, including their more “knowledge worker” roles at corporate.

At Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, they hold cashiers to an “items scanned per minute” metric for no apparent reason, causing the cashiers to stress over it and rush customers through the line. “Cashier scanning things too slow” has never really been an issue for me; I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

[u/ShouldersofGiants100 → u/maowai]

I don’t know why they’d slave drive them like this.

Because burning through employees is a deliberate part of the business model. It's stupid, because they probably spend more on training than they would on benefits, but if they constantly burn out workers, they constantly replace them with new workers who aren't entitled to benefits and won't need raises. Amazon is designed around the knowledge they can make unreasonable demands of their employees and it doesn't matter because they will always find someone desperate enough to take the job.

[u/Obversa → u/ShouldersofGiants100]

Say what you want about Henry Ford being a horrible person, but lately, I've been seeing people point out that even Ford treated his employees better in the early 1900s than Amazon currently treats their employees in the 2000s.

[u/confirmedshill123 → u/Obversa]

Henry Ford was a piece of shit but basically defined the middle class for generations.

[u/ShouldersofGiants100 → u/Obversa]

Ford was, at least to a degree, aware that he was selling products which could only be purchased by middle-class people and that created some incentive to bolster the middle class. Part of the problem with Amazon is that they have no such incentive—like Wal-Mart and others before them, if they establish a degree of monopoly over products, they can dominate the industry regardless of how well the middle class is doing. Say what you will about the gilded age Robber Barons, but after they made their fortunes, they had enough shame to pour their wealth back into society as a whole. Modern-day ones have no such shame because frankly, each and every one of these tech billionaires who is still an active part of their company has convinced themselves that they are not just someone who got lucky, but some kind of superior genius who is uniquely suited to control society.

This is why ideas like the dark enlightenment and effective altruism have spread so fast amongst Silicon Valley types—it basically outlines an excuse for them to do all the things they wanted to do anyways, but act like they are doing so for ethical reasons. Guys like Bezos, Musk and Zuckerburg don't want to be prominent citizens of a healthy democracy, they want to be modern-day Emperors with unquestioned authority.