[BurningFrog]

Ali Baba is the Amazon of China. It is enormously profitable. I assume that in return for working so hard, the employees are paid quite well, or else they would find better jobs.

I guess the unsupported claim that they're "ill-compensated" out of the blue was what annoyed me.

[learc83]

It looks like the average senior software engineer salary at Alibaba is around $30k.

That's well above the average annual salary in China, but it's about average for a software developer, and no one is going going to become a millionaire working for those wages.

Also long hours are normal in China. If your choice is to work for one of 50 companies that all have insane schedules, it's hardly informed consent.

[BurningFrog]

This Fortune article speculates in much higher numbers for their stock compensation: http://fortune.com/2016/02/05/alibaba-stock-pay-disturbing/

If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.

[learc83]

There's no way Alibaba is giving away 15% of their revenue in stock grants, so I'd take that with a huge grain of salt. Regardless the vast majority of their employees aren't going to become millionaires working there.

>If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.

That's not what informed consent means--informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent. If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent.

The logical conclusion to this argument is that there is literally no limit on how bad you make your working conditions so long as everyone else is doing it. A century ago it was common to pay employees in company scrip and to not pay them enough to live so that they ended up permanently indebted to the company. It was the standard work environment in many places so by your argument all the employees freely consented to it.

[BurningFrog]

Your consent argument makes no sense to me. We're probably too far apart to communicate, but I'll make an attempt:

I agree that "informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent".

But this is absurd: "If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent."

Note that you can replace "72 hour weeks" with "40 hour weeks" or "10 hour work weeks" without changing the argument. I'm guessing your silent assumption is that anything worse than your current middle class American expectations are by definition inhumane. This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.

To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.

[learc83]

There is obviously a large gray area between coercive and completely consensual when it comes to employment. Even 40 hour a week employment in the western world isn't completely without coercion in every case--only if the person has other alternatives.

>This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.

In many situations they can't. When the power differential between 2 people is too great, there can be no consent. If the president asks an intern to sleep with him and he tells her she is free to walk away with no repercussion, there's still an element of coercion to the proposal.

>To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.

How far does this belief go? If you come across a dying man in the desert and offer to sell him water in exchange for everything he owns, I'd say that's obviously not a consensual agreement. Despite the fact that he can freely walk away from it.