[mercury_craze]

Amazon is a great evil.

It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world but as a company that has treated its employees (both hourly and salaried) with contempt, driven independent stores out of business and refused to play on a level playing field both through its shady business practices or its refusal to pay tax.

Well done to Tim Bray for acting according to his conscience. Hopefully this sets an example to other Amazon employees and other tech workers working in similarly morally compromised organisations.

[enitihas]

Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon? Does the rest of big tech even employ their non professionals directly? Which of big tech directly employ their janitors and treat them much better than Amazon warehouse workers? Which of big non tech company does this?

>its refusal to pay tax.

What do you even mean by this? Companies can't refuse to pay tax. They have to pay tax as per law. If you mean they are using legal mechanisms to not pay their maximum possible tax, how is that different from Apple or other big tech keeping money in tax heavens.

> driven independent stores out of business

And which big/successful comapny doesn't drive out competitors out of business? Google/FB have driven local newspapers out of business by sucking away all the ad money. MSFT squashed all the competition by extremely evil business practices.

> It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world

Again, which is the mythical company you are using as a benchmark here?

[AlexandrB]

> Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon?

That's an easy one: Costco. Do a cursory Google search and you'll generally find positive stories going back years. There's nothing "mythical" here, it's a matter of explicit policy difference between the two retailers.

[sadturnip]

Costco is an okay place to work however, As someone who worked for Costco in the past, i think i was getting barely $1.50 more than minimum wage (this was 2015).

Furthermore you have a ton of full time employees who will sing praises about the company. However part timers get shafted hard. Oh you can't work 3 days a week due to school, okay enjoy barely 8 hours a week. There were a lot of people there who had to work multiple jobs simply because they could not get enough hours.

Unless you are fully willing to commit to them it isn't a great place to work.

[ngngngng]

Where was this? Sounds like the kind of things that are extremely variable depending on where you live. When I was working near minimum wage in California, companies would screw me like this. But when I moved to Utah, companies would give me nearly any hours I asked for since they really needed the work done.

[ashtonkem]

I knew a few people who worked at Whole Foods before they got bought; they seemed relatively happy with how they were treated.

[notatoad]

>before they got bought

this is the key - the bigger the organization, the further removed the workers are from the leadership. Consolidation and expansion removes a company's humanity. There's tons of examples of smaller companies that treat all their staff well. There's no examples of huge conglomerates who do.

[ashtonkem]

I mean, Whole Foods wasn’t small before Amazon bought them. They’ve gotten bigger, no doubt, but they weren’t exactly a neighborhood coop either.

[pgrote]

They have a good track record. The covid19 outbreak seems to have caused some bumps.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-thr...

https://www.kuow.org/stories/costco-tells-office-workers

https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-workers-stressed-coro...

[mercury_craze]

Ignoring the bad faith questioning, I dont have to provide a gold standard in order to criticise Amazon. Everything I've said is extremely well documented.

[scarface74]

The only reason that the other big tech companies don’t get criticized for the way that their low wage “employees” are treated, is because they are subcontracted/outsourced either locally or in manufacturing plants in China.

[enitihas]

Off course, you don't have to provide any standard to criticize whatever you deem fit. The point of my comment is not to ask you to provide a benchmark, but more to point out the flaw in your arguments to future readers. I admit I could have done this in a better way. But my point is without a relative benchmark, one can criticize anything and everything, even though the criticism encodes very less information. To brand something evil, it has to be compared to it's peers in it's time frame. Or else I can brand every single company and human being on the planet evil for n number of reasons, e.g, for not paying their lowest paid workers enough, or for not doing enough to combat climate change. These will apply to every single company for some definition of "enough", and if I don't have to provide a benchmark, I can set enough at any point.

[lidHanteyk]

You may be interested in the Repugnant Conclusion [0]: At large-enough scale, every tiny movement of massive actors is consequential to those around them. This is not merely a utilitarian curiosity, but highly relevant to how states treat their subjects and how corporations treat their employees.

I will set a basic standard: Our employers ought not to knowingly violate human rights. Here's a list of some of Amazon's more notorious violations [1]; among the ones that concern us in today's thread are labor rights like the rights to organize, take breaks, be well- and fairly-paid, and work in safe environments.

The point of my comment is not to ask you to defend Amazon, but more to point out the flaw in your worldview to future readers. I admit that I could have dropped many more citations explaining Amazon's poor behavior, but again, that's not the point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

[1] https://www.greenamerica.org/blog/10-ways-amazon-violates-hu...

[jeromegv]

This is one of the largest company in the world, it is normal that they get criticized more than smaller companies. They have more resources and abilities to make changes than most companies. And I disagree, we can criticize a company regardless if we provide the example of a better company or not. When it comes to workers abuse in the middle of a pandemic, "everyone else is bad" is not a good answer, i'm sorry. That's just a recipe for never changing anything. One can hope for better worker treatment regardless, this is how progress is made.

[fastball]

Does AMZN in fact have more resources to make changes?

I would generally argue that your ability to change your org is somewhat limited by your profit margins. It is hard to pay warehouse workers more, for instance, if your margins are razor thin. While AMZN's profit margin is not quite the 0 it used to be, it is certainly not stellar by any means. And it is certainly not as good as many, many other companies.

[fastball]

How are these questions in bad faith?

[jshevek]

Internally accusing people of bad faith can be a mechanism for dealing with cognitive dissonance. Publicly accusing people of bad faith, with no evidence or justification, can be a rhetorical tactic.

[rjkennedy98]

That was not bad faith questioning at all. He was making excellent points that you refused to answer.

Companies exist to make money period. Look at the most powerful companies throughout history (British East India Company, Standard Oil, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, IBM, Facebook, Google, Apple ect). Do any of these have as good of a record as Amazon? IBM for instance played a major part in the Holocaust. Goldman Sachs was involved in the scams crashing the world's economy. Facebook and Google prey upon people's addictive behavior and use it to sell adds. Apple simply has all their employees run out of sweatshops in China, and has all their tax havens in Ireland.

I'm for workers rights and for people getting more pay, but let's be honest, expecting Amazon to fix our inequality problems is astonishingly naive. If Tim Bray wants to leave to have a good conscious about it - that's fine. I myself would never work for Facebook or Google because of how they addict people to their phones. We all have our own standards, but not our own facts.

[iandanforth]

Wegmans is another good example. Decent company, happy workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegmans

[_ea1k]

> Again, which is the mythical company you are using as a benchmark here?

Exactly. These kinds of criticisms are useless without a benchmark. Is Wal-Mart better, for example?

[yalogin]

It's amazing that this is where it arrived. In its early days, the exact opposite was true. People loved Amazon because its going against the "big box stores". Movies were made romanticizing the downfall of the big box stores. Now Amazon became the villain. Similar thing is of course happening with Google.

[pm90]

Same with Google. Oh... remember Apple-David v/s MS-Goliath? or Apple-David v/s IBM-Goliath?

Corporations change, just like people. I'm not sure if thats something that can be avoided. Maybe Valve is an outlier, perhaps. Size seems to be the factor here...

[twomoretime]

I think that's the nature of public corporations. Once the board starts to gain influence, the company is gradually steered by people who are not interested in image or philanthropy any further than necessary for growth.