[andrestan]

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

[techsupporter]

In every thread like this, there's an argument like yours, taking the absolutist view that individual workers should have unlimited freedom ("completely and totally incapable," as you wrote) to sacrifice themselves for money. In the micro sense, you are possibly correct. However, as a society, we have decided at the macro level that no, workers are not free to make that decision because to do so would inherently drive the collective working environment to the bottom.

We make rules about a lot of things to protect the collective good at the sacrifice of the individual. Workers are not free to decide that climbing a tall tower without a safety harness so as to go faster and complete more jobs for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to put their unprotected hands into fast-moving machinery so as to be more efficient and complete more piecework for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to inhale toxic gases, labor in buildings without sanitary facilities, or be worked non-stop until the worker passes out from exhaustion. (These are, of course, generalities but, again, we as a society have also decided that carve-outs can exist where required but these are the exceptions to the wide rule.)

I would also note that the person to whom you replied expressed a favorable opinion of the trade-off for health against money not being made. No rule or law was proposed. That, too, is part of what society does: we debate things in good faith, not with the assumption that an opinion is a dictate by fiat. These rules are generally considered acceptable and good. It is up to you, the person with the view opposed to the current situation, to express why you disagree instead of simply turning the question back on the person commenting.

[andrestan]

I'm not taking an absolutist view at all. I was asking questions challenging a blanket statement without any supporting evidence that the workers or society or some very broad concept's welfare was improved by removing performance based incentives. I don't even make a positive statement at all.

These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?

I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.

[ip26]

because to do so would inherently drive the collective working environment to the bottom

Also the part where the cost burdens of bad health outcomes are generally socialized.

[Trill-I-Am]

Many people who object to unions would also object to that, thought

[seventhtiger]

You make a great point. We have to be careful when we design a race to the bottom. We don't let companies do it to themselves, so we shouldn't let them do it to their employees.

There's also the fact that if you are free to choose it, you could also be pressured to choose it. Like companies that give you the freedom to cash out your vacation instead of taking it. It'd be great because not all of us want to go on vacation every year.

But unless there's a mandatory minimum vacation, some employees will be pressured into literally never taking a vacation. Think of Japanese work culture. Top down work-life balance measures are completely ignored because they're not mandatory.

[cortesoft]

I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide.

We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think this wouldn't happen to modern workers, go look at what goes on in Dubai and the UAE.

[barry-cotter]

If you look at a graph of historical workplace deaths you can’t tell where OSHA was enacted. There’s no change in the rate of decrease of workplace deaths. As far as minimum wage laws go less than 5% of the US workforce gets paid minimum wage, and unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit. Minimum wage laws are a great way to reduce workforce participation, just look at France. Does the US even have overtime laws as such?

Dubai is part of the UAE for what it’s worth but it would be impossible to treat workers like that in the US because (a) the US does not do slavery, or indentured servitude outside prisons (b) you can sue people in the US because you have the rule of law and a functioning legal system where everyone has equal rights. Before OSHA if a worker got injured at your place they they could sue you, so most places had insurance, which got more expensive if injuries happened. People also notice if a workplace is more dangerous. They demand higher pay to work there.

[AlexandrB]

> unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit.

Unpaid internships are a great way to gate off poor people from high-paying jobs. No matter how beneficial they are to the intern, if said intern can't afford rent and food while on your internship it's simply not an option for them. Unpaid internships have no place in a society that wants to consider itself a meritocracy because the primary qualification for an unpaid internship is not merit but a well-off family.

[barry-cotter]

If you can afford to not work for three or four years while getting a Bachelor’s and the tens of thousands of dollars you pay in tuition you can afford to do a six month unpaid internship.

What you say is absolutely true but if unpaid internships are a problems journalism schools and other forms of credentialist gatekeeping are much worse.

If the choice existed would you rather go to Columbia Journalism School it spend two years working for the New York Post unpaid? Wouldn’t you get more and more valuable experience as a dogsbody for a fashion photographer than doing a degree in photography?

Credentialism is bad for the sane reason unpaid internships are bad but does vastly more damage to oppprtunity.

[tropo]

OSHA is why I can't have a perfectly normal UL-listed power strip at work, but somehow a UPS (with a battery full of lead and sulfuric acid) is perfectly fine. Every place where I'd want a power strip, I have to use a UPS.

Given the evidence, OSHA looks dumb and useless.

[ntsplnkv2]

Perhaps it would be helpful to share said graph?

[barry-cotter]

It’ll show up if you do an image search for OSHA historical workplace deaths. Also in the below document http://freedomandprosperity.org/2012/blog/big-government/ass...

If you look at this economic history link you’ll see a reasonably consistent trend, not universal, of decreasing workplace deaths.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-workplace-safety-in-th...

[ntsplnkv2]

Thank you

[andrestan]

Possibly, but generally the difference is one of power structure. With OSHA, workplace safety laws are put in place to protect workers from the tyranny of their need for wages. People need to work and therefore their workplaces should pose a maximum amount of risk that society defines as reasonable. What's at stake here is not the general safety environment of the employee but rather the amount of effort the employee VOLUNTARILY chooses to exert. Who are we to define how much effort an employee chooses to exert? Who are we to define incentives that encourage a worker to exert more effort? None of this seems reasonable to me.

[okr]

It would be nice to hear opinions from the workers at amazon.

I find it very compelling to agree with you. But i also like to make my own decision, to negotiate. My ideal, at least. And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world. And I also think, its a two way street. I will not risk my life, and Amazon does not want dead people.

And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?

Many confusing signals i receive.

[krapp]

I can only speak for myself as an Amazon fulfillment center employee... I haven't directly witnessed any of the horror stories people tell about working there, but knowing the culture as I do, I would not be surprised at all that such things happen. Someone complained on the VOA board where I work about having been docked for time off task when they had to clean up after their own nosebleed, but that's anecdotal. You read about people having to pee in bottles to make quota, people passing out from heat exhaustion, people being forced to stand on injured feet because Amazon has a policy against employees sitting for any reason. Enough anecdotes pile up, though, and it smells like data.

The thing is, not everyone working at Amazon is a young, single person without any ties, who can afford to simply quit at a moment's notice and not worry about the risk of unemployment, or losing healthcare. So it's not a binary situation where if Amazon's employees are willing to work there, then clearly they must be willing to accept anything the company does because otherwise they would quit. For low income people, the cost of quitting can be significant, much more so if they have families to support.

Which is why regulations are necessary - because the relationship between employer and employee is not equal, as is often assumed in a perfectly ideal free market model. The ability of a company to coerce their employee due to holding arbitrary power over that employee's livelihood must be limited somehow, and there must be some means by which consequences can result for bad actors.

In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones. That's not a game most people can win alone against a billion dollar corporation.

[i_made_a_booboo]

>In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones.

The history of planet earth is full of bad actors in all kinds of markets, regulated or not. The animal kingdom is full of examples of deception. Seeking personal gain at the expense of others is a very deep feature of life.

[br3n7]

Capitalism is "[s]eeking personal gain at the expense of others(...)"

[crazygringo]

> And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world.

My personal elders and seniors don't know the first thing about how to judge whether workplace chemicals would be harmful to me or not.

They're just other human beings, very fallible like myself.

As long at it seems decently run, I trust a government agency full of experts and reams of research over the elders and seniors I happen to know personally, who are generally totally lacking in both expertise and knowledge in most areas, any day.

[okr]

I do not mean my personal elders, or, if you will, my parents or friends.

What i mean is, in whatever workplace i worked so far, there were people telling me, what not to do. Surely playing around with me at first, but always keeping me away from dangers.

In the long run, well, i agree, that there are many things, that are not very obvious to me. Like office work, sitting in the chair all day, not moving, looking at screens all the time. But iam sure my boss does not mean no harm. He surely looks more at his phone than me on a screen. We get smarter over time, i hope.

[Daishiman]

> And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?

Because people taking this up live in even worse conditions in some of the most abject poverty there is and they have no way to climb up the social ladder that doesn't involve saving some money with this kind of work even at the expense of their physical safety.

[okr]

And here i am confused. So from their perspective, they can achieve something better for themselves, with that risk. And from my perspective, i see it as abuse of their situation, because iam on a different cushion level, where i dont have to risk my life for my job.

Good luck to them!

[crooked-v]

Something can be both opportunity and abuse. The whole point of health and safety legislation is to remove the "abuse" part.

[Daishiman]

The abuse component is completely unnecessary.

It's not about the type of labor or physical effort but the completely inhuman conditions. How the heck is that a contradiction?

[NeoBasilisk]

You have no power to "negotiate" as an Amazon warehouse worker.

[br3n7]

Because they are desperate. That's it. they are trying to survive.

[Spooky23]

Because Taylorism is a blunt instrument that is marginally effective.

If you’ve ever worked in an environment with those sorts of incentives, it’s immediately obvious that they are loosely related to productivity and turn into tools of favoritism and control.

Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They no doubt concluded that just focusing on objective, easily controlled measurements like hours ultimately made more sense. The workers themselves are disposable anyway.

Besides, the workers now have more guaranteed income that can be invested in Amazon stock! They gain the freedom of dollar cost averaging.

[notfromhere]

Because people have a long-established inability to fully realize the long-term impacts of things when compared to short-term benefit?

[Spooky23]

Wait, you mean that drinking cases of Diet Coke and beer all day and working 18 hours a day for your 20s May have long term health impacts?

[com2kid]

People who worked as teenagers working at ice cream parlors report life long pain in their dominant wrist.

Is that something you expect a 16 year old to know is going to happen?

Biomechanics is a complicated subject.

[Spooky23]

Totally agree — my sarcasm may not have been clear.

I worked on a farm throwing hay from 12-17. I ended up needing back surgery at 25.

[com2kid]

Sorry, I read it as another one of those "dumb entitled kids get what they deserve!" posts.

It is hard to tell nowadays, with multiple people coming out and saying things like "millennials could afford houses if they didn't buy iPhones!"

[andrestan]

"people" aren't but you are able to for them? What makes you so much better than the workers at Amazon?

[notfromhere]

Employers creative incentive structures that screw over employees in the long-term is objectively bad.

[mikestew]

Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder??

Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.

[andrestan]

Citation needed. This makes no sense. There's always going to be heterogeneity in output per worker in every role. Amazon pays for a baseline of expected output and wants to ensure that within a role they can manage to capture those workers whose productivity will exceed that. To do so, they provide performance bonuses. Not everyone will get the performance bonuses. Amazon is willing to pay the bonuses because the increased output is worth the increased cost. This race to the bottom isn't at all aligned with reasoning and could only happen in a monopsony which Amazon is obviously not.

For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?

[lozenge]

How do you think people gain this mystical knowledge of how targeting that extra level of throughput will affect their health?

[oh-kumudo]

I mean you can't have both.

[br3n7]

Yes

[robryan]

They will be making more now than what the bonus would have made them previously though.