- Maybe they just added it, but there's also a "Prefer entering email instead?" link below, which I appreciated
- A britishism I've never come across—does anybody know what "sandwiches with paste" are?
- Not a lawyer but I think this would be constitutional in the same way that international sanctions are constitutional. The regulation of interstate and foreign commerce is an enumerated power given to congress and usually interpreted pretty broadly.
- Yeah I 100% buy this. Just commenting on the fact that this tends to get conflated as a regular experience in warehouses, which ime it isn't.
- I can comment on this as a current Amazon worker!
I think people pissing in bottles probably does happen in Amazon's vast network, but as a very, very rare exception. It makes for good public propaganda, but it's not the issue most salient to warehouse workers.
There's a constant grind that Amazon puts on your body and brain. The work is monotonous. Your joints slowly break down from RSI. You get aches that you learn to compensate for or ignore. You learn to manage the pressure of the little screen at your work station that shows you the rate you've been packing at over the past ten minutes. You learn to manage the pressure of your co-workers at the next step in the process, who have their own little screens, and need you to work faster so they can work faster.
The pay is better than most shit jobs, the benefits are good, the work rules are clear and the managers largely aren't abusive. The trade-off you make is that the physical and psychological demand is intense. There's a reason that the average Amazon FC worker lasts six months—I reckon Amazon's done the math and decided that high turnover is worth the extra productivity they can squeeze out of workers while they're there.
In that sense, it's a bit of a shame that reporters and politicians focus so much on pee in bottles, because working at Amazon is still pretty ghoulish without it. I'm rooting for the workers at Bessemer. It will be very hard to build up the union density needed to really have negotiating leverage over Amazon, but you have to start somewhere!
- Yeah--compare an alternate phrasing here, like "I watch and give a lot of presentations at work."
- > Warehouse workers are going to have to form a union and threaten to really shut down amazon's profits, in order to defeat these profit-motivated outrages. It's always been like this. People have to self-emancipate.
I agree with this! However, it would be very nice if Amazon engineers were organized as well. I know CWA has an ongoing effort to organize tech workers. They're a pretty good union--still what I'd call a "business union," but one of the better ones that understands their power comes from being organized enough to shove the boss around a little.
- Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
- Iirc only people who would be eligible for the presidency can be elected as VP, which would disqualify Obama. This is the same reason Bernie couldn't have chosen AOC as his running mate
- Another thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that bosses will often try to slow down, stymie, or break up organizing drives by dragging out legal arguments at the labor board. This means arguing that the bargaining unit should be broken up, that certain employees are actually supervisors and shouldn't be included, that certain supervisors actually aren't and therefore _should_ be included in the vote, that the proposed bargaining unit is too small and should include more employees, etc. Typically you'll need a lawyer to navigate this process, lawyers are very expensive, and national/international unions have money.
Organizing a union is also fairly hard, and staff of established unions are more likely to have the skill set to teach you how to have convincing conversations with your co-workers, make sure they stick together, keep everybody from freaking out when the boss starts threatening to fire people, etc. It's also good to have them around to provide financial/legal support if the boss follows through on those threats.
- There _is_ a slightly looser coupling than an HR department, but the judges are still appointed and confirmed by politicians with pretty clear material interests. It's not so much a case of being "paid to rule the right way" as being chosen _because_ of an inclination to rule the right way
- I think it actually is nurses physically moving the device around the room—the photo looks like it's just on casters, not motorized wheels.
- The state de-funding of the university is great for corporations in a lot of ways. First, as you note, it's a way of getting you to pay for your own job training.
It's also a clever way for tech companies to externalize a lot of their R&D costs—because academic labs often rely on private grant funding more than the state, corporations can determine research priorities by extending grants, and then have the costs of that research partially subsidized by tuition-paying students!
This is an interesting talk on the subject. Haven't listened to it in a while but it really shaped my thinking about the university while I was a student: https://wearemany.org/a/2014/06/fall-of-faculty
- The article mentions that Uber hope to replace public transit miles, and recognize it as profitable to do so. There's a link to a Times article that elaborates on this claim. It is true that Uber on occasion enter into sort of last-mile "partnerships" with transit agencies, but we should all recognize how such a strategy can be a wedge for privatization-a sort of public service embrace-extend-extinguish.
There is no conspiracy or collusion with the Kochs alleged in this article. One tidy aspect of Marxist politics (Jacobin is a socialist magazine) is that it recognizes that wealthy people's actions aren't arranged through some grand and unlikely conspiracy, but rather by a shared material interest that causes them to tend to desire and work toward similar things. Thus the note that, though Uber and the Kochs have many superficial aesthetic differences, including preference of political party, they appear to often work toward the same political ends anyway.
- And in the sense that Amazon generates tremendous profit for its owners, which has to come from somebody's labor!
- I have to agree. The premise in the headline is so obviously agreeable, but the application described sounds like it would make for a terrible place to work. This isn't an article about building a supportive work environment that sets realistic expectations and fosters a mutually-supportive team environment. It's about the one-on-one meeting as the most effective tool to extract as much work as possible out of each individual worker—which obviously is quite hard in a group meeting.
Of course, a manager who does that effectively is also doing their job as a manager well. One reason I will always refuse to become a supervisor is that being a good manager (i.e. nice and reasonable to work for) and being a good manager (i.e. extracting the maximum surplus value out of each worker) are often directly in conflict, as this article shows.
ETA: In fact, I can think of a manager just like this at an employer I recently left. Individual meetings were a tool to push each of us to the limit, try to pit us against each other, &c. Employees hate this boss, but management loves them!
- Why?
- I suppose it could end up as only a slight loss for Musk if the diver can't demonstrate damages? E.g. if Musk's claim was so absurd and non-credible that nobody took it seriously?
https://gothamist.com/news/bh-photo-workers-strike-on-may-da...