[blagie]

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries:

1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?

2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.

This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).

[bsedlm]

It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side.

Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...

[abakker]

Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?

look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions.

All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.

[cupofpython]

If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem.

People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.

[Beldin]

> "if you do X like me,

Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).

[mbesto]

> the market will solve this.

I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is true, then the market is basically solving this now.

In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs 250k of them to operate their biz and the average retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left previously are now looking for jobs and the only option is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor, then they will collectively argue for higher pay.

Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work conditions eventually catches up with them and the market will respond.

If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be repossessed.

[ruined]

i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material.

how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it.

it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation.

maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.

[SR2Z]

It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before.

It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.

"Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.

[ruined]

sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice.

but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.

>It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.

these are both literally happening.

if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.

as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.

[SR2Z]

> but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.

A shockingly large chunk of people making six figures live paycheck-to-paycheck. The perceived threat of homelessness is useless compared to actual homelessness statistics, which tell a different story.

> if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.

It's not exploitation, and it's not OK to call it exploitation. All trades must create value for both parties, or else they wouldn't happen. It's the reason why civilization is able to exist at all.

Yes, Amazon gets more out of their workers than they pay them. Workers get paid more for their labor than they would get out of it themselves.

[prewett]

> if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around

That's a pretty simplistic argument. For one thing, it assumes a zero-sum game. But in economic theory both sides need to gain something in order for a transaction to occur. Walmart is not exploiting its customers just because it gets more from the customer than it cost (i.e. profit). Both sides are benefiting: the customer gets thousands of products in one location at pretty much the lowest possible price. Likewise, Target is not exploiting its customers just because it has higher prices than Walmart; customers get thousands of products in one location with somewhat higher quality than Walmart and a good deal better style. Target has a fairly loyal following, in fact, indicating that customers derive value from Target, even though Target is turning a profit; they could always go to Walmart if they were unhappy.

My employer is (hopefully) getting more value from me than they are paying for. I do not see it as exploitative at all: I could be in business for myself, but I already tried it and I discovered I did not want to bother with a lot of the business stuff, and people were not interested in paying for my product. So I switched the (internally perceived) product I am selling: now I am selling my software engineering services. In return I get some money. I'm a lot happier now than when I felt like I was an employee.

The problem is not that Amazon is getting more perceived value from the worker than the perceived value that they are paying the worker. The problem is that Amazon is abusive; people work for them either because they pay enough to make up for the abuse (at least the initial perception), or the worker does not feel like they have other options. The latter is not a problem of companies making a "profit" on workers, though; that is required for any employment to take place. It is a problem, but it is a different problem.

[jholman]

> that's by definition exploitation

I think you're just factually wrong about this particular part. If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that the definition of "exploit" is "derive net profit from", but I've never seen any definition like that. Generally, I think there are two definitions:

1) use / utilize

2) use unfairly

The first is typical when describing resource exploitation. The second is typical when describing relationships between humans. In neither case does net profit come into it.

That's both my personal understanding of the word (but who cares what I think), and also what I see in three different online dictionaries that I just checked. So I ask you: where are you getting your definition from?

[andi999]

Then every non bancrupt company would be exploiting the staff. The definition is no good.

[ruined]

true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.

[adrianN]

I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.

[anotheracctfo]

Or you could band together and collectively withhold your labour. These are solved problems, its how the impoverished and exploited ended the gilded age.

Individualization is heavily pushed because capitalism requires fungible labour. But if you band together then capitalism breaks down, because pure ideology runs into the brick wall of reality.

[politician]

The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their compensation at the outset of the engagement.

This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.

[int_19h]

> Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?

No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do.

Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?

[blagie]

I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for people who have worked there, and therefore have better-informed opinions.

I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market.

I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether:

- Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or

- Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor

depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.

[jppittma]

Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe."

1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided.

2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop.

3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors.

4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.

[ComputerGuru]

> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?

You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had.

Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible.

The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.

[blagie]

I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and professional when a customer would draft in, but for the most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like that much above minimum wage, or anywhere close to Amazon's wage.

If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's nightmarish warehouses.

That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country, which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent / mortgage needs a bit more.

[stevenwoo]

Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment?

30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year.

Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than 15/hour as well.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4...

[blagie]

> Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment?

In most cases, the scenario described involves families who have been in the US for several generations, who are poorly-educated, but own homes and land. One parent takes care of kids. One works.

It's not uncommon.

Wealth and income aren't as strongly correlated as people assume. A lot of immigrants are low-wealth, high-income, while a lot of American families have generational wealth, but little income. There are plenty of families with >$1M homes with $30k incomes where I live. And there are plenty of families with >$100k incomes, who can't afford to buy homes here too.

[president]

Solution to #1 is bringing in workers that care more about $ than lifestyle. Same situation in the tech industry.