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Orange Devil posted:I work in warehousing, in a country where Amazon's bullshit doesn't fly. Yet here also "Order today have it delivered tomorow" creates so many lovely loving jobs for no measurable societal gain it's infuriating. Just making that one thing illegal would already fix so much. Don't worry, robots are being refined that will get rid of those lovely jobs
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Jul 2, 2019 22:50
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Orange Devil posted:I work in warehousing, in a country where Amazon's bullshit doesn't fly. Yet here also "Order today have it delivered tomorow" creates so many lovely loving jobs for no measurable societal gain it's infuriating. Just making that one thing illegal would already fix so much.
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Jul 3, 2019 03:56
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Think of the shareholders
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Jul 3, 2019 09:15
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Azhais posted:Don't worry, robots are being refined that will get rid of those lovely jobs The shittiest jobs are the ones robots will have the most difficulty taking over, because they are highly variable. Pretty sure a lot of the office is going to get automated away first. LividLiquid posted:Or we could just make the companies pay more employees a living wage to work fewer hours to provide this service, which they are completely capable of doing. You could do that, but you'd still have a highly variable and unpredictable workload that needs doing immediately meaning you'd still end up sending people home after only 2 hours or misguesstimate the other way and have days where only a few people need to bust rear end to get everything done. A lot of these jobs would still be nightshifts and involve people being on call all day not knowing if they'll be working that evening/night until the last moment or not. Like yeah, you can come down hard on temp work bullshit (absolutely a thing governments should do) and make sure minimum pay per shift (regardless of hours worked) is a living wage, but what that would also do is increase the pressure on the warehouse to favour underestimateing their labour requirement rather than overestimating, leading to more chance of too few people having to deliver on an unreasonable workload. And these jobs would still be in the middle of the drat night for no reason other than people getting their e-commerce orders a day earlier. Next day delivery is the root of a lot of the shittiness in these jobs. If you don't abolish capitalism these are never going to be great jobs, but they can be a whole lot less soul-crushing with just 1 (imo small) government measure. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Jul 3, 2019 |
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Jul 3, 2019 13:47
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Just to be perfectly clear: Amazon could pay a minimum wage of $135/hour for every employee and contractor in their warehouses and corporate chain and still turn massive profits.
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Jul 3, 2019 13:52
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Out of interest, what's that number based on?
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Jul 3, 2019 14:54
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Orange Devil posted:The shittiest jobs are the ones robots will have the most difficulty taking over, because they are highly variable.
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Jul 3, 2019 15:44
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Kyte posted:They don't need to automate everything, they just need to provide for the most common cases. That alone would massively reduce the pressure on workers. loving lol no it won't. It'd just lead to a reduced workforce and a larger number of now-unemployed people willing to step in to take their job, loving up their labour market position even further. AKA downward wage pressure. And the third party logistics companies would see increased pressure on their profit margins at the same time, further motivating them to take full advantage of this downward wage pressure. This is because in all the 3PL contracts I'm familiar with, the contracting company is the one paying for all the machinery and if there even are any margins on that they are razor thin. And that's if automation is even worth it. Contract durations of 3 years are not unusual for 3PL contracts. That means you don't have time to write off your big automation investments, making them not worth doing in the first place. So you end up having people do jobs that machines have been invented to do years ago, because it's cheaper/much less risky. Not that the 3PL provider minds, because the only real source of margin for a 3PL provider is in labour. Either you have some form of cost-plus, meaning the more labour you can convince your customer you need to run the operation the more money you make, or you have some mix of transactional or fixed rates, meaning the fewer people you can get the job done with the more money you make. But if you use automation to do the job with less people, the customer will demand lower rates because they're already paying for the machine. Also even if you don't automate anything, the customer will demand lower rates whenever the contract is up for renewal, hence why they go in for the short durations in the first place. And so the temp workers slowly get squeezed more and more. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jul 3, 2019 |
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Jul 3, 2019 17:53
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Duzzy Funlop posted:Out of interest, what's that number based on? I don’t know about that number but here’s an article breaking down how much Bezos made last year https://www.businessinsider.com/what-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-makes-every-day-hour-minute-2018-10 He was effectively making 8.9M an hour.
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Jul 3, 2019 18:08
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Orange Devil posted:The shittiest jobs are the ones robots will have the most difficulty taking over, because they are highly variable. There is enough money and there are enough people who'd do it. The abuses stem from greed, and only greed.
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Jul 3, 2019 23:16
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Orange Devil posted:You could do that, but you'd still have a highly variable and unpredictable workload that needs doing immediately meaning you'd still end up sending people home after only 2 hours or misguesstimate the other way and have days where only a few people need to bust rear end to get everything done. A lot of these jobs would still be nightshifts and involve people being on call all day not knowing if they'll be working that evening/night until the last moment or not. Surely if every Amazon employee can be paid six figures a year and the company still turns a profit, they could pay people to come in and sit around on their phones when there isn't work to be done
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Jul 4, 2019 01:07
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ninjewtsu posted:Surely if every Amazon employee can be paid six figures a year and the company still turns a profit, they could pay people to come in and sit around on their phones when there isn't work to be done I think I established in my very first post on this topic that I wasn’t talking about Amazon. And besides what you are talking about here is abolishing capitalism, which I’m all for, but until we do that a very easy and virtually costless measure we can take to improve thousands of jobs is making next day delivery illegal.
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Jul 4, 2019 19:05
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LividLiquid posted:Pay people to be there to do the job. If there isn't much of a job to do, they stand around or clean and reorganize. You're thinking like a middle manager trying to make his bonus. Even if that would work, which in many cases it wouldn’t as I’ve already explained, they’d still be working night shifts for no good goddamn reason.
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Jul 4, 2019 19:08
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Orange Devil posted:Even if that would work, which in many cases it wouldn’t as I’ve already explained, they’d still be working night shifts for no good goddamn reason. And you'd pay them all a living wage, pay the night shift people more because they don't get to live normal hours, and you'd still have more money than god. You're telling on yourself here. The richest company on earth can afford to pay a living wage, and any argument against that is an appeal to authority. And if it's not Amazon? Well, if you need to pay poo poo wages to stay in business, you're poo poo at business.
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Jul 4, 2019 20:37
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Orange Devil posted:I think I established in my very first post on this topic that I wasn’t talking about Amazon. And besides what you are talking about here is abolishing capitalism, which I’m all for, but until we do that a very easy and virtually costless measure we can take to improve thousands of jobs is making next day delivery illegal. I think even the abused workers would vote any politician that suggested this out of office. Next day delivery exists because people want it.
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Jul 4, 2019 20:44
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I noticed that you can now choose an "Amazon Day" where they'll deliver all the stuff you order through the course of a week on like a Tuesday or whatever. I wonder if that could have any meaningful impact on how hard the warehouse workers are pushed if enough people use it and they have a better idea of how much stock is going to be pulled in advance. Or maybe it just makes everything worse because they hold out on picking everything until the day before so you have all that stuff on top of the need-it-next-day Oreos people are ordering. E: ^ Oh yeah this is assuming enough people are able to resist that instant gratification we've gotten so accustomed to with next-day delivery.
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Jul 4, 2019 20:47
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Or you hire more people and pay them well. Why is this so hard to understand?
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Jul 4, 2019 21:02
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Saucy_Rodent posted:I think even the abused workers would vote any politician that suggested this out of office. Next day delivery exists because people want it. "Next-day" shipping has existed because there is a need for it in some circumstances, e.g. legal documents or perishable items (like meds.) It's now a thing on Amazon because it was the logical next step from free 2-day shipping and a thing Bezos could [temporarily] hold as an advantage over competitors, not because people need their Oreos tomorrow. Freaquency posted:I noticed that you can now choose an "Amazon Day" where they'll deliver all the stuff you order through the course of a week on like a Tuesday or whatever. I wonder if that could have any meaningful impact on how hard the warehouse workers are pushed if enough people use it and they have a better idea of how much stock is going to be pulled in advance. Or maybe it just makes everything worse because they hold out on picking everything until the day before so you have all that stuff on top of the need-it-next-day Oreos people are ordering. I think it's in part a way to do what you said, to alleviate stress on the supply chain, but it also allows people to receive their shipments all at once on a day they know they'll be home, as opposed to stuff showing up at any time and sitting around for someone to steal it. The latter isn't a problem in my neighborhood but I know it exists in plenty of other places, so a constant delivery day of the week is certainly useful to some people. Even though I have Prime I've been intentionally choosing the "no-rush" option and receiving the media credit (towards books.)
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Jul 4, 2019 21:08
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Check this one out: Hiring more people and paying them better will mean less people stealing poo poo because they aren’t hopelessly desperate.
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Jul 4, 2019 22:38
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pwn posted:Check this one out: Hiring more people and paying them better will mean less people stealing poo poo because they aren’t hopelessly desperate. That's not really a feasible solution to people stealing deliveries from outside your front door, though. I mean, it'd be nice to work toward, but it's hardly within Amazon's power to fix global society to the point unattended package theft is no longer a thing.
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Jul 4, 2019 23:51
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Atomizer posted:"Next-day" shipping has existed because there is a need for it in some circumstances, e.g. legal documents or perishable items (like meds.) It's now a thing on Amazon because it was the logical next step from free 2-day shipping and a thing Bezos could [temporarily] hold as an advantage over competitors, not because people need their Oreos tomorrow. It’s not about need, it’s about want. People would rather have their Oreos tomorrow than later, or their new shirt, or their retro gaming system or whatever. It’s probably a good policy, but it’s a policy that will be unpopular with the vast majority of people who aren’t warehouse staff. No politician is going to run on taking away your nice things. You’re going to see the exact same thing with climate regulations, even those that only regulate corporate activity. People aren’t going to support laws that make things slightly less convenient.
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Jul 5, 2019 00:06
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Orange Devil posted:And besides what you are talking about here is abolishing capitalism What the hell are you talking about? Hours and hours of the time of white collar workers is spent waiting to be useful. This isn't uncharted territory.
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Jul 5, 2019 00:48
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Amazon started offering single day delivery on everything because they worked out the numbers and they could do it, and they're doing everything they can to push up sales just a little bit more, not particularly because they want your money from whatever the gently caress you're buying at the moment, but because they want to put the squeeze on the competition to break them and force them out of business. That's how they got big, they've been running their company to make whatever industry they're in a zero-sum game. You can't deal with that any other way than direct legislation. They're not going to stop unless you force them. And what else is really annoying is that if the government manages to win a long, dragged out battle with Amazon to force them to give workers fair working conditions, they'll turn right around and try using their now-humane conditions to show off how generous and good they are as a company, just like what they do with that $15 wage that they only instituted after congress started introducing bills targeted at companies that pay their employees a non-living wage that forces them to live on government aid programs.
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Jul 5, 2019 01:21
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SlothfulCobra posted:Amazon started offering single day delivery on everything because they worked out the numbers and they could do it, and they're doing everything they can to push up sales just a little bit more, not particularly because they want your money from whatever the gently caress you're buying at the moment, but because they want to put the squeeze on the competition to break them and force them out of business. That's how they got big, they've been running their company to make whatever industry they're in a zero-sum game. You can't deal with that any other way than direct legislation. They're not going to stop unless you force them. Yep! You don’t have to run your business at a profit if you have enough investors to keep you running forever. Youtube’s a black hole financially, but where else are you going to upload a video and expect anyone to actually watch it? This form of capitalism isn’t free market. Businesses with theoretically sustainable business models are being crushed by companies that never intended to make a profit, Amazon included.
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Jul 5, 2019 01:40
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I think another problem is that people don't know where to buy poo poo any more. For example: I lost my umbrella the other day, and I needed to get a new one. Where does one go to buy an umbrella? There's no such thing as an umbrella store. I think I've seen them in souvenir shops before, maybe. A department store, perhaps? gently caress it, I guess I'll just order one off Amazon, because I type "umbrella" in the search box and all of a sudden I have a range of different sizes, constructions, colours, etc. and I can stop thinking about my need to purchase a new umbrella. The only other place I can think of that works similarly is WalMart and you'll excuse me if I don't consider supporting WalMart over Amazon a win for the proletariat. The only retail stores I actually like are those that have an incredibly narrow focus with a huge selection of products. The nature of brick and mortar means you can't have a broad focus and a large inventory, so you're stuck with either focusing on being just adequate in a number of departments (which is pretty poo poo) or being an absolute king of one small niche, which I actually like quite a bit but it only works in a select few cases.
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Jul 5, 2019 02:12
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Saucy_Rodent posted:Yep! You don’t have to run your business at a profit if you have enough investors to keep you running forever. Youtube’s a black hole financially, but where else are you going to upload a video and expect anyone to actually watch it? It's the Venture Capitalist model and Silicon Valley is loaded with it. Basically the whole SV ecosystem is one giant ponzi scheme.
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Jul 5, 2019 03:40
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LividLiquid posted:The richest company on earth can afford to pay a living wage, and any argument against that is an appeal to authority. I can't actually tell what you mean by the term "appeal to authority" here but I think you're using it wrong?
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Jul 5, 2019 04:24
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LividLiquid posted:It would work, and yes, you'd have a crew working at night. The "night shift," if you will, though who knows if that terminology would catch on. So 3 things, all of which I've already stated before: 1. I'm not talking about Amazon. I don't work for Amazon. Amazon is a massive outlier in the warehousing business, in large part because of their stupendous profitability. Amazon does not operate warehouses in the country I work in because our laws about worker protection and minimum wages make it more attractive for them to operate their warehouse in a neighbouring country instead. Which is what they do. And the stories coming out of those distribution centers are pretty horrendous. 2. The entire sector pays pretty lovely wages to the low-skilled operators. That said, in my country, those are still living wages. Wages which are attractive enough to cause tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans to leave their countries and come here to work those jobs. Unsurprisingly this puts a big downward pressure on those wages, because it is a job market after all and the neoliberal institutions of the EU exist to ensure that things work out in exactly this way. 3. The wages in a vacuum aren't even what makes the job lovely, though you won't hear me saying the wages are good either. The jobs are lovely because of precarity first and foremost, where you don't know how many hours you'll be working next week, or even tonight. They're lovely because the workload can spike suddenly, putting a lot of pressure on everyone to get done more than planned for because welp I guess a lot of people decided to all use the webshop this evening. And they're lovely because if you can order in a webshop until 23:30, or 23:59, and still have guaranteed next day delivery, the only way that actually happens is by a lot of people working their entire jobs at night every night. Saucy_Rodent posted:I think even the abused workers would vote any politician that suggested this out of office. Next day delivery exists because people want it. No it doesn't, it's an artificial demand created by competitive pressure and marketing, something which happens in capitalism all the time. If you're distributing medicine or similar then you've got a genuine possible next day or even same day demand. That's fine. if you're distributing consumer goods the only reason there's a next day demand is because if you as a consumer have the choice between 2 webshops who are functionally identical but one offers next day delivery and the other doesn't, you pick the one that does because why not? But your life is not measurably improved by this, while the jobs of literally tens of thousands of people is measurably worsened. And because of this competition the companies cannot unilaterally decide not to offer the service. Government legislation however, absolutely could kill this stone dead and improve jobs at virtually no cost. And if the immeasurably small benefit to consumers outweighs the interests of the workers here, well, that's a political choice we're all making. Freaquency posted:I noticed that you can now choose an "Amazon Day" where they'll deliver all the stuff you order through the course of a week on like a Tuesday or whatever. I wonder if that could have any meaningful impact on how hard the warehouse workers are pushed if enough people use it and they have a better idea of how much stock is going to be pulled in advance. Or maybe it just makes everything worse because they hold out on picking everything until the day before so you have all that stuff on top of the need-it-next-day Oreos people are ordering. Even if they'd save up the orders to pick the day before (something actually likely because then you can pick into the trucks rather than having a bunch of picked pallets standing around taking up space all week) you could still have a lot less pressure on the warehouse workers because you could properly plan for these picks. That means efficient pickruns (not going from 1 side of the Whs to the other and all the way back again) and a proper workload planning meaning you can get the right amount of workers in to do the job. Ofcourse, Amazon would still get to decide what they think a reasonable target number of picks per hour is (so they could still squeeze hard) plus you'd now have a much higher demand for workers on 1 day of the week, meaning you'd basically have jobs that are part time for 1 day only. In conclusion: What I'm saying is, if you want to really fix things permanently, you've got to abolish capitalism. I'm all in for this. But unless you have a brilliant plan to get that done, it's not happening any time soon. In the meanwhile, I'm presenting a concrete action government can take (and thus, we can demand from our representatives) which will have a real positive impact on tens of thousands of workers and which can be implemented today. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 07:38
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I'm not sure why you're so fixated on next-day delivery as the root of this problem. Amazon and other warehousing jobs sucked way before next-day delivery was commonplace. People would still be working third shift to get your packages to your door in two/three/four days, there just will be fewer of them getting squeezed just as much. The reason your solution blows is that you think the invisible hand of the free market will fix the plight of the warehouse worker if only the state could save the midnight Oreo buyers from themselves. How about instead empowering your regulatory agencies to set meaningful work limitations so that the picker grabbing your Oreos gets to wait until another order pops up in her zone rather than walking clear across the warehouse to save their boss half a penny.
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Jul 5, 2019 15:26
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Baronash posted:The reason your solution blows is that you think the invisible hand of the free market will fix the plight of the warehouse worker if only the state could save the midnight Oreo buyers from themselves. Is that really an accurate representation of what I've said?
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Jul 5, 2019 18:16
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Next-day delivery is an unnecessary convenience we’ve all gotten used to and wouldn’t want taken away, and the idea that outlawing it would get any public support at all is laughably naive.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:32
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Orange Devil posted:Is that really an accurate representation of what I've said? Yes, because for whatever reason you think that a ban on next day shipping (the enforcement of which is laughable even to think about) would suddenly lead to these retailers deciding that they really ought to care about their workers a bit more. It's not going to happen. They'll get rid of some of their workforce and squeeze the remaining employees just as hard because there is a profit motive to do so. What would actually change that is legislation to limit the ability of companies to treat their employees like highly dexterous and easily replaceable robots.
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Jul 5, 2019 19:46
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Baronash posted:Yes, because for whatever reason you think that a ban on next day shipping (the enforcement of which is laughable even to think about) would suddenly lead to these retailers deciding that they really ought to care about their workers a bit more. Please quote where I've made this argument. quote:They'll get rid of some of their workforce and squeeze the remaining employees just as hard because there is a profit motive to do so. Are you just going to keep ignoring my point that a real contributor to the shittiness of these jobs is next day delivery, regardless of how squeezed employees are getting? Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 20:45
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Orange Devil posted:Are you just going to keep ignoring my point that a real contributor to the shittiness of these jobs is next day delivery, regardless of how squeezed employees are getting? Sky-high pick counts, long walks between items, poor ergonomics, and unforgiving metric-based termination were all a part of the Amazon experience long before they were touting free next-day delivery for Prime members. If you want to say more people experience it now because next-day delivery requires more employees than two-day delivery, then we agree, but the underlying experience of each one of those employees is likely as lovely as it was before. So, for the third time, the solution is not some dumb, arbitrary limitation on shipping speed that could never be enforced. It's to set limits on what you can ask a human being to do in a warehouse context.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:30
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I mean it's the employees being squeezed that's the problem. If you enforce proper labor standards, who the gently caress cares how quickly consumers get their poo poo? It's not a new thing for logistics companies to have to deal with randomly spiking demand, just worker's rights have been drastically scaled back in recent years.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:51
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Baronash posted:Sky-high pick counts, long walks between items, poor ergonomics, and unforgiving metric-based termination were all a part of the Amazon experience long before they were touting free next-day delivery for Prime members. If you want to say more people experience it now because next-day delivery requires more employees than two-day delivery, then we agree, but the underlying experience of each one of those employees is likely as lovely as it was before. Less lead time leads to less optimized pick routes as pickwaves are released more frequently and contain fewer SKUs, leading to more walking. Other than that, we agree that Amazon can squeeze their employees regardless of next day delivery. However you're still ignoring that: 1. I've explicitly stated multiple times that I'm not talking about Amazon. 2. Less walking and dayshifts rather than nightshifts means the underlying experience is likely less lovely than before. Even if still lovely. 3. I've never claimed eliminating next day shipping would make these jobs good. In fact I've explicitly stated it wouldn't. What I've argued this entire time is that it would make these jobs measurably less lovely and it would do so at a loss of minimal societal benefit. 4. Forbidding next day shipping for consumer goods is literally setting limits on what you can ask a human being to do in a warehouse context. And it's a hell of a lot more enforcable than even existing limitations, such as labour time laws and max lifting weights.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:52
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Tiggum posted:I can't actually tell what you mean by the term "appeal to authority" here but I think you're using it wrong? SlothfulCobra posted:I mean it's the employees being squeezed that's the problem. If you enforce proper labor standards, who the gently caress cares how quickly consumers get their poo poo? It's not a new thing for logistics companies to have to deal with randomly spiking demand, just worker's rights have been drastically scaled back in recent years. We've so bought in to the bosses' side of things for so long that we think it's impossible to provide services people want but don't need without completely dicking over workers in the process. There is a way of doing next and same-day delivery of stuff all over the country in a profitable way that doesn't gently caress over the workers, but for some reason if you say that, people show up to bootlick for billionaires.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:57
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LividLiquid posted:There is a way of doing next and same-day delivery of stuff all over the country in a profitable way that doesn't gently caress over the workers, but for some reason if you say that, people show up to bootlick for billionaires. And this way is?
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Jul 5, 2019 21:58
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Like somebody posted before, if you want to be able to meet randomly spiking demand, have on hand enough employees to handle full capacity the whole time. They can reduce the distance that employees have to walk and they can allow employees sick days and whatnot without randomly firing them. It's a little dubious how "profitable" it would be, but like I said before, profitability doesn't technically matter to companies that are just trying to destroy competition. Maybe the cost it would take to keep single day delivery working would be more than the company feels like it can reasonably sustain, but then they can just shut down their program themselves. It's only getting sidetracked to worry more about a company's dumb marketing strategy than the people they're willing to hurt to do it.
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Jul 5, 2019 22:25
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Orange Devil posted:2. Less walking and dayshifts rather than nightshifts means the underlying experience is likely less lovely than before. Even if still lovely. Are you under the impression that second and third shift didn't exist in warehouses until Amazon popularized next-day shipping? Orange Devil posted:And this way is? By setting limitations and empowering regulatory agencies to enforce them with fines, warehouse shutdowns, and prison time in extreme cases. Then you let them figure out if they can still make it work. Baronash fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 22:26
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