pretty much like you've described. When you're making up the valuation and spending your own currency there's no problem; you control both sides of the balance sheet
This is what I don't get. As soon as I started reading about all the unfair business practices by delivery companies, I just started picking up my food. Gets me out of the house, removes the middle man, supports local business while cutting out the larger business that funnels wealth to the top echelons. What's not to love?
If it's hot outside or whatever, it's still a small price to pay for doing the right thing.
Pretty much. Though one factor is in the US there's really dumb zoning concepts that basically led to longer drives to get to business areas. This is why bicycles never really caught on as a major mode of transport in the US, a 5 minute bike ride is one thing to get lunch, a 20 minute ride without any dedicated paths and often restaurants being placed in a shopping hub like area designed around highway access is a different story. It's all a sort of hassle so many people may prefer just ordering in, but yeah otherwise we are pretty lazy lol. Also, on 'doing the right thing'.
wait... this comment is confusing. how is he not contributing towards "keeping the restaurant in business" by ordering delivery vs picking it up in person?
When you order through a delivery service, the restaurant is generally paid less than their normal menu price, and none of the tips go to the kitchen staff.
In addition to charging the restaurant, the delivery service charges the customer a higher price than the restaurant would. They add delivery fees and service fees. On top of that, the online menus in the delivery service apps often have higher prices than the restaurant’s “real” menu.
Restaurants often negotiate special deals with the delivery services, so all these details can vary. However, delivery app margins are much lower than carry out or dine in margins.
Yes, but a restaurant wouldn't be entering into these special deals if it wasn't beneficial to them as well. Even if the margins are much lower, it could be offset by the increase in number of customers/orders.
I've talked to people who run restaurants and in their words uber eats is not worth it economically. They just do it, barely breaking even, as a marketing thing, hoping people will like the food and go to the real place.
Restaurants handle this issue in many different ways. I have been to several who explicitly state that all tips are divided & shared among all employees, and I think this is a good model. I've also seen one with a separate tip jar for kitchen staff, which may be a better option in some places. Really, why should the server make more than the cook or the dishwasher? Are they actually working harder? [I know, their wages are often structured differently, but I question whether they should be.]
At least it still avoids all the other problems, not to mention the domain squatting, misrepresentation of search results, and of course the upcharge on your end and the downcharge on the restaurant's end.
Often these delivery services take around 20% off the top of the restaurant's pay in addition to the 'fees and taxes' they take out and 'delivery fee' and 'driver tip', plus specials and discounts generally come out of the restaurant's cut too, plus door-dash and the like also take out cuts on advertising.
But let me take this a step further because you're not just screwing the restaurant...
The delivery driver is ALSO being screwed by the nature of all of this!
You see, on average the pay and tip of a delivery actually is less than the cost of car wear and tear + minimum wage + gas! People take this job to have cash now but will often end up stuck with the bill in the end. By supporting these delivery companies you are actually supporting companies that are taking aggressive advantage of people to drive engagement numbers and eventually...
^ $7.3 Billion in investor payoffs for a company that has effectively only built an app and menu directory and did basically none of the work. They classify drivers as 1099s to avoid having to adhere to minimum wage laws, they dodge laws where they can and take zero responsibility when people screw up. All of them are exploiting poor people and while one can argue that that's the driver's fault.. as long as you pay the Doordash or GrubHub's of the world their fees and as long as they take 20% off the restaurant's cut, the restaurant wont be able to afford to pay to hire more employees which helps these delivery app companies get drivers due to unemployment. Should I also note that this same company used to pocket the driver tip?
This is an all stock deal, so valuations are about as realistic as a televised poker tournament. No one is paying a 27% premium in cash; they're spending their own ridiculously valued stock.
There is no business model in the world that makes grubhub a 7B company. If proven wrong I will gladly eat a hat delivered by them.
Just Eat had a very nice profit of 101m GBP, so the business model works. However Grubhub is not that impressive, with a 12% YoY Growth, Compared to Just-Eats 43%.
From Grubhub "Revenues: $363.0 million, a 12% year-over-year increase from $323.8 million in the first quarter of 2019."
I disliked JIRA and we switched to Microsoft DevOps about a year ago. Now I really miss JIRA. DevOps is so painful in comparison, especially doing really specialized things like, you know, tracking work items and answering questions like "what's done; what's outstanding". sigh.
I'm a big believer and user of 1:1s and don't think they're a waste of time, because if there are no problems it gives me a chance to get a coffee, go for a walk, get to know my direct reports - how is that a waste?
The challenge with natural check-ins is everything else in our world is scheduled and it will eat all time not allocated. I block off the time and the schedule tells my team mate "This time is for you".
I trust my teamm members too, but it's not their job to proactively bring up every problem in a timely manner:
Some people/cultures will not do this but they will respond to empathetic, well thought out lines of questioning.
some problems are very sensitive and scary and don't need the added burden of "going to the boss to ask for some time to talk"
Some problems are not apparent and the 1-1 gives you a forum to discover them
Some very serious problems are not viewed as problems by your team members. A huge part of a manager's job is to identify them early.
I do a lot of the casual and emerging management stuff as well; 1-1s are not mutually exclusive. There are bad 1-1s too: right now with everyone remote I think the quality has gone down because we can't capitalize on the personal aspects. You learn that the 1-1 process is the easy part; actually giving a shit and working at building relationships is the hard part.
having sat on both sides of the table, this is a weak rationalization for wasting a lot of people's time. You're making candidates do so much work in terms of applications, preparation and interviews and you don't even know what the market looks like? Are the positions you're staffing so unique that you can't get comparable data from anywhere, or are you really just fishing for someone you can low-ball?
Why do you consider their application process a waste of time? After we get the taste of the market, I don't see any reason not to hire one of those early applicants if they're the best candidate for the position.
I hear this all the time and it's overly simplistic. Maybe if I give you a single number that is my true desired value, yes. If I give you a range where the low-end is 25% higher than that true value, I've now anchored discussion at a much higher value and it will be hard for you to reset the anchor.
But you've now increased the probability of them stopping the conversation right-away. The higher anchor came at a cost. That's what loss of leverage is.
You want to know as much as you can about the other party, while revealing as little as possible about yourself.
That's good though, if an employer is unwilling to meet your anchor then you don't want to work there anyway so they save you time by pulling out early.
This seems reasonable and beyond what other major employers are offering, but as is the fashion I'm sure Amazon will be convicted in the court of public interwebs shortly...
Amazon is doing pretty well due to the quarantine (as they deserve to given the services they provide). Them having to reduce their share of the profits from these extraordinary times is not particularly noble, but rather just average.
The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs.
Here in SF, multiple employees at 3 Whole Foods locations have already contracted Covid. Amazon has not done nearly enough thus far. The fact that they are now providing masks and cleaning up door handles is again, a bare minimum.
They should let exigent time off policies rein for at least 2 more months, before going back to business as normal policies.
Please realize, that even despite all of the above, their profits will keep rising through this period; there is no reason to think of them as victims, when they very much so are winners in this situation. Foregoing just a little bit of your extra profits to ensure your workers stay healthy in unprecedented times of a pandemic is not asking for too much.
>The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs.
Considering multiple states are larger than many European countries, I don't think it's appropriate to treat the US as a monolithic entity with respect to virus containment. Even if all of the states reacted identically, time and space dictate that different regions will be in different stages at any given time.
> Total death counts in the US are still going up.
It depends on the state, though. New deaths are decreasing in many States, including Washington, Texas, and California [1]. Looking at the US, as a whole, isn't really useful here.
This is ridiculous. I don't understand the defensiveness.
The United States is a nation. It has a federal government and federal bodies which are responsible for preventing spread of disease.
People can travel freely within these bounds without passports or visas or checkpoints.
Of course states have their own rules, and this is good, and yes, some states are doing better than others, but why the fear of revealing the incompetence of one nation?
This is how nation-states work in 2020 on planet Earth.
The European Union also has a federal government and federal bodies which pass policies. It has a directly elected lower house that represents the People with proportional representation[1], and an upper house that represents the Member States with equal representation[2], and an executive branch with a Chief Executive that signs bills into law[3].
People can travel freely within Member States without passports, visas, or checkpoints.
Of course, Member States have their own rules, and this is good, and yes, some Member States are doing better than others, but why the fear of revealing the incompetence of one Union?
This is how Unions work in 2020 on planet Earth.
I think we both agree that looking at the EU as a whole is totally meaningless in the context of the current discussion about Amazon workers. We are simply arguing the same about the United States. This isn’t some pro-US propaganda, the only agenda here is an insistence on ensuring that we are comparing apples to apples.
P.S. Speaking of "Nation-States", hilariously enough, Gavin Newsom recently referred to California as a "Nation State"[4].
I'm still flabbergasted at the need to compare to the EU or European states.
No where in my original comments did I bring them up, or was thinking of them. Your snide metaphor also doesn't work since the EU does not override the nation-state model. The EU parliament only exerts some powers over EU nations. The Health department of Germany cannot made decisions on behalf of the health department of France. I understand you're going to compare this to two American states, but honestly, it doesn't work.
> This isn’t some pro-US propaganda, the only agenda here is an insistence on ensuring that we are comparing apples to apples.
Again, when did I compare anything to Europe? You brought up the comparison for no reason I can comprehend. Hence my questions about the defensiveness.
I don't think we're going to agree, so happy to leave this here.
I'm the one who brought up the EU. The purpose was as a size comparison. Look at the differences
in covid "stage" between different EU states - that difference is primarily a function of geography - the time it takes for the virus to spread is about the same as the time it takes to isolate and suppress it.
Now consider that the US is substantially larger and more sparsely populated. That alone ensures that it doesn't make any more sense to say "US is at stage 1" than it does to say "EU is at stage one", because that fails to capture the range of different stages in different geographic regions (countries/states). That doesn't even begin to capture policy differences.
That was the sole reason I brought it up. Nothing defensive anywhere.
Just like it makes no sense to say the UK is at stage one because London is ahead. You need to stop being so pedantic. I get you guys want to compare but you're beating a dead horse.
The difference is that the UK is a unitary State[1], and as such its COVID strategy is dictated at the UK-level. The sub-national units are not sovereign.
The US and the EU are federations[2][3], and their sub-national units are sovereign. Like the EU, the US’s COVID strategy has been left to the States[4].
The post I was replying to clearly said that the issue was size not governance. But even with regards to that point I really don't understand how it affects what I said.
My point was that you can't say even a country is in a certain stage because the outbreaks are much more local than that. London is a month ahead of some parts of the country. So its just as incorrect to say the UK is at a certain stage as it is to say it about the EU and USA.
> The EU Parliament only exerts some powers over EU nations
The same holds true for the Federal government of the US. The 10th Amendment ensures this. Similar to the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, EU law overrides Member State law (E.g. GDPR).
> The Health Department of Germany cannot made decisions on behalf of the health department of France
Yes, the same way the Minnesota Department of Health cannot make decisions on behalf of the New York State Department of Health.
> I understand you’re going to compare this to two American states, but honestly, it doesn’t work
Saying “it doesn’t work” again and again doesn’t magically make it true, you need to provide actual concrete counterpoints.
The US is a Union of States. The Federal government does not have the authority to issue lockdowns or stay-at-home orders. The vast majority of US testing is being funded and administered by States, not the Federal government. In practice, this is indistinguishable from the EU.
The US contains 330 million people, and consists of 50 different states, each with their own Constitutions, legislatures, and their own responses to COVID.
The EU contains 500 million people, and consists of 27 different states, each with their own Constitutions and legislatures.
We can do this all day, but it’s pretty clear that your argument doesn’t have any legs.
> We can do this all day, but it’s pretty clear that your argument doesn’t have any legs.
It certainly doesn't once you begin to ignore facts. Coming up with literal parallels is not a good argument. No wonder you can keep it going all day.
In either case, I'm going to stop because I still don't know why we're comparing the US and the EU. I didn't start the comparison, and it has no bearing on the subject.
> It has a federal government and federal bodies which are responsible for preventing spread of disease.
The response is handled at the state level, not the federal level. The federal level can provide advice and help coordinate actions between states / provide backup resources, but isn't meant to take direct action.
This isn't about defensiveness. You state that, collectively, the US is still in stage one, and then go on to say that this is evidence for a poor response and that it's early to recommend returns to work.
This is invalid, because for example a couple of states could be bring the total number up. Further, again because of the scale of the US, policy appropriate for one state may not be appropriate for others.
Again, the issue here is treating the gigantic US, a mishmash of cultures in 50 states with semiautonomous governments, as a monolithic entity. If you evaluate response policy in this way you're not going to get a good signal.
What do you expect one state is supposed to do if another is bringing the numbers up due to their autonomous choices? It's just not useful to consider the US as a single entity in matters where states maintain control over most relevant measures. No one is denying the numbers, but it seems rather strange to lump (with respect to the matter) largely independent entities together. If you're trying to make a point, then make that point directly where it applies.
> The United States hasn't even passed the first stage of Corona yet (in SF, daily number of deaths is still rising). It is too early to mandate come backs.
That isn't true according to the numbers from https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en. Do you have a citation for that? Numbers for new deaths have been hovering between 0 and 5 for the last month in SF, SF has had a total of 22 people dead, due to successful lockdown measures it basically never hit SF.
Deaths is not a metric that can determine which stage of this pandemic we are in. Immunity is the figure you're looking for, which will not increase under a shelter-in-place order. Deaths are down, but will immediately shoot back up if the shelter-in-place is lifted.
The only goal posts you should care about are herd immunity or vaccination. Nothing else matters when discussing how much longer this pandemic will last.
edit: Wow you guys are really mad at me judging by all these downvotes. You're right, the pandemic is over, lift the stay-at-home orders!
For a long time I thought HN had higher quality discussion than Reddit, but in reality it's just the same BS with slightly larger words.
I think people are hoping for a third option: driving the infection rate low enough that it can be contained going forward with testing and contact tracing. Whether it’s realistic to think that can be achieved in an acceptable timeframe, I don’t know.
My understanding is the end game for that is still a vaccine or herd immunity. It just slows the process down enough that you don’t have more people dying because of a lack of equipment.
So then trying to drive the infection rate too low before reopening could actually be counterproductive because it also slows down the building of herd immunity?
> Deaths is not a metric that can determine which stage of this pandemic we are in. Immunity is the figure you're looking for, which will not increase under a shelter-in-place order. Deaths are down, but will immediately shoot back up if the shelter-in-place is lifted.
Absolutely not. If you believe enough information is known about herd-immunity in relation to Corona, you are dangerously misinformed.
Please don't play the "I thought you people were smarter" card if you're being downvoted for spreading misinformation.
Number of deaths DO matter in relation to:
1. Human suffering (perhaps the most important metric)
2. Learning how we prevent further deaths (calculating hospital and materials dissemination needs)
I'm spreading misinformation by saying deaths per week won't tell us what stage of the pandemic we're in?
> Number of deaths DO matter in relation to: 1. Human suffering (perhaps the most important metric) 2. Learning how we prevent further deaths (calculating hospital and materials dissemination needs)
Did I ever suggest otherwise? Literally all I said about "number of deaths" was that it does not tell us how close we are to the pandemic being over. You just brought up a bunch of other stuff to feel good about yourself.
I really did think you people were smarter though. Apparently you haven't even learned how to read something before you reply to it.
> If you believe enough information is known about herd-immunity in relation to Corona, you are dangerously misinformed.
Again, I never said anything about this. Please learn how to read. I'm not claiming to know how we reach the level of "herd immunity" we need to get out of this. I just said "herd immunity" or a vaccine would be the solution here. Am I wrong about that? Jesus fucking christ, the only thing HN does better than Reddit is self-righteousness and smug asshats.
People not getting COVID-19 immunity after recovery seems an extraordinary claim that would require very strong evidence for me to take seriously.
How do you believe people recover from COVID-19?
The fact that you recover from it at all, and generate measurable antibodies in the process, and that humans generally gain some level of immunity to all the other coronaviruses we're plagued by weights my belief strongly towards at least short term immunity being very likely.
I downvoted because I'm not currently aware of a current usable metric for immunity and because you didn't link to one. It's obvious to me too that the pandemic isn't over but deaths is (to my knowledge) the best proxy for all the other metrics that we currently have, due to lack of consistent testing.
I tend to agree.. It's not on employers to support their employees - it's on governments to support their citizens.
Amazon will get lambasted in the press, but this isn't an issue to be fixed employer by employer but rather by the government, which needs to provide safety nets like universal healthcare or living wage
In other countries employers have a duty of care towards their employees, they just can't use them up until they aren't good any longer. I note there are continuous reports about dozens of people falling sick with coronavirus at Amazon warehouses, and in the past there reports of were ambulances parked outside Amazon facilities because it's cheaper to cart someone off to the hospital with heatstroke than to provide proper air conditioning.
What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all?
There are multiple active outbreaks in crowded factories and other facilities, just like an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. They do not have necessary safety equipment and procedures in place yet. Forcing people to show up to work under these conditions is murder. They could fix it, though.
A starting point would be Amazon providing tests and ensuring that everyone has been tested before returning to work, along with ensuring everyone has masks and gloves and enough time to thoroughly wash their hands throughout their shift. Press reports up until this point and complaints from employees suggest none of that is consistently the case.
> Millions of masks have been distributed across our network. They are available to all Amazon associates, delivery service partners, Amazon Flex participants, seasonal employees, and Whole Foods Market stores employees. We are encouraging everyone to take and use them.
As for testing, they have been unable to do it through regular channels so they are building a lab to do it themselves:
> An important safety step might be regular testing of all employees for COVID-19, including those without symptoms. We have begun assembling equipment we need to build our first lab to process tests and hope to start testing small numbers of our frontline employees soon.
As for cleanliness:
> We have increased the frequency and intensity of cleaning at all sites, including regular sanitization of door handles, handrails, touch screens, scanners, and other frequently touched areas.
> Our enhanced cleaning has added almost 200 additional points of contact per site across our janitorial teams, and we’ve increased the size of our cleaning teams threefold to support our buildings.
> We require everyone to wash their hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using the bathroom and before eating, as well as after blowing their nose, coughing, or sneezing. If soap and water are not readily available, alcohol-based hand sanitizer stations are easily accessible throughout our buildings.
> In addition to break times, employees can log out of their system to wash their hands whenever they choose, without worrying about impact on their performance goals.
Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable.
Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a global logistics company should have done the same. I would be very surprised if they hadn't, frankly, and my view of Bezos would be lower than it already is if they hadn't because this is really something that should have mattered to him before it was a real situation.
Frankly, I'm quite surprised Amazon, FedEx, UPS and USPS have done as well as they have under these conditions.
Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.
Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.
Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.
I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this!
Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".
Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...
I've had some opportunity to have insight into corporate pandemic planning over the years.
It's important to understand that U.S. corporate planning for a pandemic has assumed a certain level of urgency and competency from the federal response.
This has been reasonable, as the federal government has for the last 20 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, taken potential pandemics very seriously, and responded aggressively to them.
The federal response to the 2019 novel coronavirus has completely failed to live up to these expectations and the result is that everyone is scrambling to catch up. Corporations and states are following their playbooks... but those playbooks were not written in terms of "let's be ready to fill in for the federal government when they fall on their faces." The whole point of the federal government is to be a backstop for everyone else in the face of huge national threats.
This is one reason you're seeing Republican lawmakers be so willing to pump money out of the government: they know the government screwed up the early response, and so it is fair that the government should pay to help mitigate that.
Most major Governments have an ability to print money on will, and yet they were caught red handed in handling covid19. Not to mention that the entire mandate of government is to keep their country safe as first thing, and yet their incompetence was on fully display. I for one, am glad that private companies didn't copy the government.
As someone reading through this thread, I have some feedback for you. This is partly to test the commonly held view that feedback is desired instead of blindly voting and partly to help you. I piped it through `base64` so that you can ignore it if you don't feel like it:
Thanks. I read it. I'm curious where is the mental block that prevents people from seeing the point I'm trying to make. Am I brow-beating around the bush too much, neither clearly nor concisely?
I'm not convinced, as it creates the possibility of egregious violations of community standards being difficult for moderators to detect.
Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).
That's a fair point. Acting in good faith I had not considered abuse of the technique.
I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
Perhaps a good example is StackOverflow's Q&A format w/ comments and chats. You can comment and move to chats but the emphasis is on the important part: the question and the answers.
Allowing voting on these "asides" in StackOverflow permits all of the usual stuff while relegating them to the asides they are.
Of course, in the case of what I used it for, it is generally impolite to offer advice unasked but the nature of slow feedback loops means it's better for me to offer an ignorable piece of thing. i.e. if you think I'm an idiot, I want you to have the power to ignore me. That is only polite to compensate for the brain-hacking strength of having text describe you. You can't ignore it afterwards.
>I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
That would either be PMs, or the forum equivalent of posting "sage" on an imageboard (which prevents the post from bumping,) neither of which HN supports.
Although given the forum's focus on quality over quantity, I think some kind of "whisper" mode might be worth looking at, to opt out of having such comments from appear on the new comments page.
Yeah, I considered PMs but they're really not the same because the point is that everyone benefits with low attention contribution. The whisper mode is totally what I was thinking of.
They could be comments that are automatically marked dead for everyone but the intended recipient. People with showdead on already self-select for higher noise content anyway.
Those aren't facts, those are PR slogans from a blog post on Amazon's web site. I am not holding my breath to see whether these policies are enacted in good faith, given Amazon's business practices and labor relations of late.
I'm being specific about the framing and the narrative that is constructed when well-meaning users parrot corporate talking points in an organic setting like a public Internet forum.
This article mentions 300 people, which isn't a very big fraction of Amazon employees. I'm sure some employees who aren't participating sympathize, but what number would convince you that the "vast majority" think it's fine?
>Not having enough money to survive isn't a made up thing.
No one has suggested that anything here is a 'made up thing', are you creating strawmen?
>However you want to define it, people need to make ends meet including right now.
I'm interested in understanding what the GP's point was. I don't get to definitely choose arbitrary definitions and interpretations for them. The dictionary and accepted usage offers a range of interpretations.
Apologies.. your comment sure read a lot like 'if starve really means eat less, maybe they should just suck it up and eat less.' I though it was obvious that GP's usage of the word 'starve' wasn't to be taken literally.
In what way am I in the wrong? I did not claim and do not believe that there is only one level of 'forced'. No one here is making it out to be that way.
Edit: Just because there is a range of accepted meanings for the word 'forced' doesn't mean that all uses of the word 'forced' are correct. Even with the most low key interpretations of the word 'forced', I don't think that this is in any way the correct word for this situation.
> What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all?
Amazon is about as close to the ideal of an "essential employer" as anyone is, though. They're shipping a huge amount of food and other essentials. Objectively, a package delivered through a managed professional environment is less risky and involves fewer potential transmission events than one purchased at retail.
Online sellers, where they have product to deliver, are the ones we want to prioritize keeping open.
Now... there's lots to complain about with Amazon's response in other ways. It's very reasonable to argue that their workers need more PPE, employer-provided testing and notification, hazard pay, better safety practices, etc...
But if you want to argue that Amazon should shut down... who do you want to be open instead?
I'm glad I waited an extra minute to comment b/c you did all the work. Amazon has allowed me to limit my local travels to two physical environments for essentially the past six weeks. There's a value to that in reducing transmission.
> By requiring others to do that for you and paying them pennies for what value they're providing.
The median wage of an Amazon Warehouse worker is about $60,000 / year, which is above the median wage in the US[1]. The 25th-percentile wage for the same worker is $53,000 — still higher than the median wage, and this is an entry level position that requires no college eduction.
Amazon also provides 401(k) matching for their warehouse workers and provides them the same group health insurance as their software engineers and executives[2][3]. It is quite possibly the most generous set of benefits currently available to an entry-level low-skill worker with no college education.
> I'd agree with you if the company decided to not take profit during this time and paid the employees the same amount of value they produce.
Couple things: 1) I think you're overestimating how much profit Amazon makes on its retail business; the margins are razor thin. 2) profit is just the cost of labor for the managers, I.e. the people that are coordinating the labor and calling the high-level shots. This includes coming up with the policies and systems to ensure the company can continue to operate in the midst of a global pandemic.
Finally, Amazon employed 798,000 people as of 2019, and added 100,000 new jobs in the last month alone, with 50,000 current openings outstanding. A lot of the margin goes into literally providing all of these wages and benefits for nearly 1 million people. This is more than many industrialized nations.
The first number is so laughably far away from reality. Do you have any idea how many hours a week you would have to work to make $60k at $15/hr? Does the average warehouse worker make double the starting rate or work 70 hour weeks?
As someone who works in the industry I do agree however that they do an okay job taking care of their people compared to others. But nobody is going to write an article about how shit it is to work at a warehouse owned by a company no one has ever heard of. Amazon has actually done a lot for people at those places too though, if there is an amazon warehouse nearby starting at $15 an hour nobody is going to come work for you for barely above minimum wage anymore, it has definitely put some out competitive wage pressure.
The Paysa number is probably correct... For the tiny minority of workers in Amazon Warehouses who are salaried. If we look at actual wages (not just salaried employees) it would be far lower.
Terribly naive to include that point in the argument.
Like I said, they can fix the problem. It sounds like they're trying, but it's not proven that they've gotten all the way. In the past they were clearly inadequate and it's why employees went on strike and publicly protested.
"Essential employees" shouldn't be put at risk just because people need them to ship stuff out. We shouldn't put "essential employees"' immune-compromised relatives at risk either.
> "Essential employees" shouldn't be put at risk just because people need them to ship stuff out.
But... isn't that what "essential" means? No one claims this is fair. It's not fair that as software developers we get an automatic pass to continue our careers working from home while our bartender friends have to file for unemployment either.
But at the end of the day we need stuff to live. Someone needs to run the power and intenet and water infrastructure. And someone needs to deliver goods to people who need them.
I mean: I agree we need to make this better for those folks. I just don't see how Amazon demanding essential workers come to work is the wrong thing here.
I don't know about that, but there'd definitely be newspaper headlines about the number of workers testing positive implying that it's somehow Amazon's fault. We've already seen this with one of Amazon's NYC warehouses (over numbers that seem very much in line with NYC in general), various food manufacturers, etc. Apparently some meat-packing companies are now reluctant to test any of their workers because of the bad publicity and the damage it does - they'd rather just close down the entire site.
COVID tests aren't DNA tests. It's a swab of the back of your throat (through the nose, oof) to test for a specific virus. It's not hard to find the specific stuff used to perform the tests, it's out there on the internet, the CDC published it. Are we really descending into paranoia about Amazon trying to genetically profile employees?
There's a big population of people who just start from the premise that Amazon must be doing something wrong and search for facts to justify it. I lost my ability to assume good faith when people complained they should pay $15 an hour, they started paying $15 an hour, and then the controversy immediately restarted about how greedy they are to not pay more.
I'm pretty sure they could start paying a minimum wage of $30 an hour and people would be irate that they're making it impossible to hire anyone because Amazon is overpaying. When you're the biggest player there is nowhere to hide.
This probably won't be too far off, if the current level of unemployment benefits holds. Just the $600 a week on top of state benefits comes out to $15/hr.
Never mind the fact that Amazon does 401(k) matching and provides its warehouse workers the same group health insurance plan as their software engineers, which might possibly be the most generous health insurance plan for an entry-level position that requires no college degree.
I'm right there with you... I don't like Trump, even if I agree on a lot of policy actions/choices, but the guy can't have a good day with a lot of people. So many are outright lying to push an agenda over truth, and you can't really rely on anyone to be informed anymore.
Right now, I'm much more concerned that we're on the brink of war with China and Iran... partly because China sees us as weakened over COVID, I'm not sure on Iran's motivations right now either... With how much of our tech comes from taiwan, it's really concerning... this could literally set the world back a decade for a decade.
Correct, because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and contains no DNA. But the test does work by detecting the viral RNA and it is hard to find the specific stuff (reagents) to perform the test and that's a big reason why we're all sheltering in place without a proper nationwide testing regime.
They are not forcing them since they are allowed to take time off. You can't self quarantine forever anyways, standard procedure is 14 days of quarantine if you think you may have been exposed to the virus or if you have any symptoms.
Unpaid time off. How are people supposed to eat and pay rent if their only available leave is unpaid? How will they afford their hospital bills after being exposed?
I'm not sure why that makes it okay to add to that population? Amazon has the resources to temporarily cover paid leave until they can guarantee safe conditions in their warehouses for employees. Regions that have prematurely relaxed their virus controls have seen new outbreaks, the same could happen in warehouses. It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven to be safe, which is going to take a bit even after all the appropriate measures are in place.
The safety net is by far the better way to address this, it's a drop in the bucket relative to the total cost of the safety net.
> It's in everyone's best interest for Amazon to offer paid leave until their workplaces have been proven to be safe, which is going to take a bit even after all the appropriate measures are in place.
Amazon appears to think that your "until" condition is here now, per the safety measures they purport to be taking.
Yeah, I don’t see how few extra bucks is worth literally risking life. Total numbers look big but really it’s $120 more per each shift where you can be exposed or expose others to a deadly virus.
>What's a few avoidable deaths between friends, after all?
There is no vaccine coming for a year, maybe two, maybe never. "Flattening the curve" is ONLY a delaying strategy to not swamp the health-care system and hope that some treatments are developed (no guarantees there either). COVID is going to be part of our lives.
Are you saying we should shelter in place forever?
>A starting point would be Amazon providing tests
What tests? Are you expecting every employer to test their workers every day?
>along with ensuring everyone has masks and gloves and enough time to thoroughly wash their hands throughout their shift.
That's reasonable. Masks + social distancing + gloves, and policies for hand washing and disinfecting of commonly used surfaces. I suspect Amazon isn't too far from that, and if they are it's only because of the global PPE shortage.
IMO a starting point is: Single test for all employees before return to work, 100% guarantee that everyone has a mask for their shifts, the facility has ventilation, and they have gloves. 100% guarantee that facilities have soap and running water.
In the past all of what I mention has been a problem in warehouses, and it's why employees are protesting. Amazon can fix this, but it's been a problem very recently.
It's super reasonable if they can't gather up a bunch of N95s and medical grade gloves, but paper surgical masks or cloth masks should be feasible by now. It sounds like they're working on their own testing infrastructure, which is great.
Except they were there for 14 years. Unless it became instantly diametrically opposed to their belief system in the past couple of months, the author has put up with the changing environment for a long time. They're not some skill-less laborer; after all, they worked at google! they could get another job pretty easily, no, one with a company that shared their personal values?
The company has pivoted significantly in the past approximately three to five years (first with the founding of Alphabet, which resulted in Larry and Sergey stepping back from the helm, then with the appointment of Sundar as CEO). Some extremely unsavory things about the way the company operated at the top-tier management level during Larry and Sergey's years also came to light in that time period.
My wild guess is the author stuck around long enough to see if things would turn around and has become convinced they will not, and this is Alphabet's new trajectory as a compnay.
