Amazon’s attrition costs $8B annually according to leaked documents
engadget.com> The same Times investigation reported the company “intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers,” according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President.
It’s not just for hourly workers. I was actively coached on holding promotions as a carrot. My leadership team would commit to unrealistic dates, taking input and estimates from dev teams but hand wave it.
Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams.
We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other.
I can’t tell you how many SDEs were promised that getting some project delivered is key to their promotion. These people would kill themselves working every night, every weekend, coding, writing documents, and so on. They’d get very little in return if anything.
I saw several successful launches, where specific promotions were held back because of nit picks on some engineering decision, which the whole group agreed on, including Principals and Sr. Principal engineers.
It’s just a sweat shop. And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.
> And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.
This matches what I saw at Nike. Though it was a bit less extreme, it was the same dynamic. Indian-born workers got paid half what the American-born workers did for the same SWE jobs. And Indian workers couldn’t complain or push back against unrealistic expectations because getting fired meant getting deported. It’s a captive, exploitable labor force. It’s really messed up.
Same for us Europoors.
Joining meetings at Seattle time (like 7-8pm CET), meanwhile you're being paid less than half of what the American engineers earn at the same level.
But they know there's so few options in Europe so they set the salaries according to "local market conditions".
> Same for us Europoors.
Mate, it isn't quite nearly the same for Europeans.
It is. We're getting paid peanuts compared to our American counterparts and we do the same work. What's worse is we pay higher taxes. The only way this changes is by European tech workers standing together and demanding matched salaries.
The point is that Indian workers are held hostage due to threat of deportation / returning home. European remote workers still live at home and have much more job mobility.
European workers face the same threat in the USA...
When we're in the US, sure; but the implication of your previous comment was that this was remote work.
But the flip side is you don't have to save $,000s for your kids college tuition, generally much lower property tax and cheaper healthcare.
> But the flip side is you don't have to save $,000s for your kids college tuition, generally much lower property tax and cheaper healthcare.
Irrelevant. Just because you work for a US company that does not mean your kids should go to US colleges.
Yes but you do not face deportation right? Infact if you were to move to the us on a H1B yould get your gc in a couple of years. GCs (for Indian born) are like a 25 year wait! Doesn't matter your citizenship. Govt perpetuated racism my friend!
It's really fascinating how it is so much easier to understand the problems we face but so much harder to wrap our minds around the problems that other people face.
Well it's fair that your payment is adapted to the cost of living in your country/area.
No it isn't. You're doing the same work. It is fair to get paid the same for the same work.
I live in Silicon Valley and had to pay a plumber 150USD just to visit and fix a small problem. Do you pay a plumber in your area 150USD (in local currency) for 30min of work? If not, why not?
Yes in Denmark it can be even higher than this. So Danes are being compensated (it's actually much less than SV programmers: I'm getting a take home of 81k a year for senior) but are paying more for plumbers.
This is one hundred percent a problem of exploitation and cultural expectations and needs to change.
Do people pay plumbers the same in SF as they do in Charlotte?
As an employee I want to be paid the highest that anyone else is paid for the same work. More so if the value generated is the same regardless of location. Yet I can understand employers wanting to help maintain sustainable communities, even where cost of living is high.
Governments too want some control over their currencies and its value.
I don't desperately need to have understanding for governments or corporations. They can all take care of themselves without my help.
My point is it's a collective concern too. Because without coordinating all prices globally there will be variance in costs of living. Which could price out lower valued jobs from certain areas entirely.
In terms of compensation maybe (I'd say Indians in USA generally make more than EU devs), but you don't fear being fired and deported.
That said, Russian and Chinese developers had the same happening in companies in the UK.
... Am I the only one looking at American companies offering me 3-digits salaries and going "holy shit, that's a really good deal"?
In my case, the company is extremely accommodating and doesn't schedule reunions at hours that are inconvenient for me, but even if they did, I'd still consider it worth it for the compensation they give out.
I dunno. Maybe I could get an even better deal if I pushed hard or if I unionized or whatever, but right now I just look at the fact that I'm getting 5x what a middle-school teacher gets while doing way less work, and I just... don't feel the anger?
(maybe other american companies pay a lot less, though)
3 digits? So up to $999/year? That sounds extremely low. In the US salaries are done per year, so a 6-figure salary is >=$100,000/year.
Do you mean as an hourly wage? That would be $200,000+/year and a 6-figure salary.
I imagine they mean three digits above the first set of zeroes.
Right, I meant 6 digits.
I think I meant "3 digits before the K".
Hourly would be $2,000,000+/year at that rate
Well, I guess I'd be fired quickly because between 7 and 8 PM CET I put my kids to bed, usually fall asleep too.
> Joining meetings at Seattle time (like 7-8pm CET), meanwhile you're being paid less than half of what the American engineers earn at the same level.
Joining late meetings and being paid typical local rates is hardly the same as being paid half the local rates and facing deportation.
The former sucks, but the latter is unconscionable.
That's ridiculous - that's 11am for them, well within their work day, but well outside yours.
I'm lucky that we have a "We'll dial into meetings slightly earlier, if you can dial in slightly later" entente and so it's rare for meetings with west coast to go past 18:00 GMT.
If you were to pick where would you choose to live? It’s very much a trade off, salaries are higher in the US, but the quality of life is piss poor compared to anywhere in Europe. Healthcare is terrible and expensive, Education is lousy and expensive, housing is expensive and city life, outside of a couple of cities, is mediocre (car centric, no culture, segregated). Oh and you are at-will employed, which means you are one phone call away from getting fired on the spot.
For context, I’m a European in a US city. I’m not sure for how long I’ll be able to stay here.
Same for us in Bay Area with 7 AM calls to talk to our euro brethren. It is not all rosy.
And with the on call shift (when on call, not every week) going till 6:30 pM, sometimes it is 12 hour work days by design.
on the other hand, they don't bug us much during the day with micro management so it is not all bad.
Hehe. 12 hours!
In India it’s routine (in fact standard) for US companies to have the Indian on-call person for 24x7 on-call. Rarely companies have follow the sun policy. Very few! Definitely not Ubers and Amazons.
And Indian managers are the enforcers of this - it’s probably one of the only significant USP these managers have “I’ll get it done by same engineers at the lower Indian rates“.
US HR and leadership wash their hands off the problem - “oh, we give you full ownership, you should decide and own this” :)
>Joining meetings at Seattle time (like 7-8pm CET),
In which country are you? We Europoors usually have labor laws to protect us from having to work so late. Where I live we have core working hours in our contract, 10:00 to 16:00, any work requests after that are voluntary for the employees. Is that not something you can use to push back on this?
Yeah, but good luck enforcing that with no trade union, nevermind if you're aiming for a promotion, etc.
Like real worker power comes from having good economic conditions and strong trade unions - the American engineers have far more bargaining power, because they can easily get competing $150k-250k offers which are unimaginable in Europe.
Labour laws do not apply if you're freelancing, which you have to do most of the time for US companies.
Dozens of my Indian friends who work in WITCH companies in overseas locations are actually quite happy with their salaries. They are dying to work in overseas projects.
Guess they are more than happy being a part of captive, exploitable force.
You can be happy working at a lower salary, doesn't mean that its not exploitative or that it distorts the labor market. Especially with the knowledge that the company holds your residency in their hand.
What does WITCH stand for here? Haven't seen that acronym before
The first company that came to mind was Wipro, which led me to this:
W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India.
Out of that list, working horrible hours at Amazon looks preferable.
I bet they’d be even happier if they were paid the same as American workers, seeing as they’re doing the same job.
If a minimum wage worker happens to enjoy what they do, that doesn’t mean that we should all settle for minimum wage. Your argument is toothless and blatantly anti-worker.
Same with Walmart
Reminds me of a memorable quote from "halt and catch fire" that changed my workplace-attitude forever: “I’m so sick of hearing about the future” “What is that?” “The future is just another crappy version of the present. It’s some … it’s some bribe people offer you to make you do what they want instead of what you want.”
It stopped working (mostly overtime) on promises that were impossible to keep. In return I got more sleep, social life and very recently a different job.
Great show!!
> It’s just a sweat shop.
Amazon engineer salaries are in the 90th+ percentile in the tech industry -- let's not bother comparing them to the typical American's income. They have almost unlimited mobility in their industry: They can find a job elsewhere anytime they want.
I remember you mentioning elsewhere that in 10 years of working at Amazon you're now financially independent. This isn't the outcome you usually see in a sweat shop.
I don't disagree that they have a culture of treating employees as expendable and are a harder place to work for than some other big tech companies but at some point a little perspective on your own privilege is healthy.
The dollars per hour worked ratio is trash at Amazon though.
All amazonians would jump to Google if they could. The reverse is quite rare.
Trash compared to google. Compared to the average american wage it's not the same ballpark.
> Amazon engineer salaries are in the 90th+ percentile in the tech industry
FANG engineers are typically in the 99th percentile of tech excellence. Amazon engineers are not well paid when compared to professionals of the same league. Amazon SDE1s in Austin, Texas have a salary of around $120k/year and new hires have a total compensation package of around $160k/year. In Europe salary ranges for the same role go from €80k/year in northern countries and €40k/year in southern European countries. Check Glassdoor.
We're discussing positions and professionals which compete in a global stage.
Amazon is far from well paid for this sort of position. It's one of the key factors why Amazon SDEs tend to bail out after 2 or 3 years. They are smart enough to not bother with high stress, low-paying jobs .
Amazon almost certainly isn't targeting the 99th percentile in their recruiting. The bulk of their software positions are interchangeable, likely by design.
They still offer pretty much the highest total comp and the best job prospects for 80th to 90th percentile graduates out of anywhere that I know of.
> Amazon is far from well paid for this sort of position. It's one of the key factors why Amazon SDEs tend to bail out after 2 or 3 years. They are smart enough to not bother with high stress, low-paying jobs .
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
Amazon is middle of the pack for big tech in total compensation. We don't need to speculate or speak in hyperbole. They certainly are not a "low-paying" job. The OP didn't stay in a low-paying job for 10 years and certainly didn't gain financial independence selling their Amazon stock because it was a low-paying job.
> We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers
"Amazon" is named after the rainforest, and like the rainforest, developers are an infinite resource that you can burn down forever and there will never be any consequences .. until somehow you run out.
Really the only solution to this is for people to withdraw their labour - not just unionization but refusing to work for them in the first place.
I straight up refuse to do phone interviews with them and force them to move me directly to an onsite (which I won't study for) just so that I can waste their engineers time and maybe have a tiny chance of stroking my ego by getting a FAANG offer.
No FAANG offer yet, but by my calculations, Amazon has wasted 5 digit sums on assesing me.
Bezos made it personal with how he treated my partner while they worked for him, so I'll have my petty revenge one way or another...
I sympathise, but wasting 5 digits of Bezos' paper net worth, is like someone trying to take revenge on most people here by a dime.
"But for me, it was Tuesday", as the trope is called.
What an incredibly stupid way to run a company.
It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius. If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation, you’ve won the lottery.
You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4.
Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase.
Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”
> If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation
Everyone I know who’s worked for Amazon has said the money was great but everything else absolutely sucked. And they all held out doing whatever they had to in order to get by until they vested, and we’re instantly out.
I don’t think Amazon has a good reputation.
Amazon has millions of employees. At this point, if you burn out too many you start running out of people to burn out.
1.4 million, and the vast majority of those are low-skill, low-wage employees who are in no way related to the situations being discussed in this thread.
When I was at the halfway house out of prison, not 1 person went to work at Amazon's warehouse. We went to less pay sorting human waste at the recycling plant in 120 heat before that job, because everyone knows how bad it is. Good luck keeping your labour requirements met Amazon.
> It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius.
It's genius if you don't have a shred of ethics left in your bones.
It’s actually really stupid.
Not having ethics/empathy is actually _really dumb_ way to run a company.
They end up making a lot of people miserable. Eventually, all of the technology, market advantage yadda yadda catches up. IBM, Yahoo, heck even Meta/Facebook. Amazon won’t last.
But in their wake, they leave behind very different testimonials.
Working people to a grind has its obvious needs in times of crisis — I mean, that is literally what nations do via conscription in times of war. Everybody knows that.
But prop that culture up in a so-called attempt to stave off laziness, rest-and-vest or whatever and you’ll end up in state of perpetual war: a bleak, stupid world not even worth living in, let alone worth dying for.
To quote Keynes, in the long run we're all dead.
To quote Braveheart, "Every man dies. Not every man truly lives"
Or, as St Ignatius quoted to St Francis Xavier, "What does it profit a man of he gains the entire world, but suffers the loss of his own soul?"
That's a bit rich. Everyone on this forum will cry themselves hoarse about how they should only have to confirm to the minimum of their agreements. How is it any surprise that these same people, placed in a position of power, continue to act congruent to the belief that legality is morality.
It's ethical too, because the terms of the deal are given to the employee up front, and if they're the kind of person who can do SWE at Amazon, it's nowhere near their only job option. Nobody forces them to take it, and they're not hurting for jobs.
People opt in to this. They choose it over all of their other options because they believe it to be better than their other choices.
Hello Neoclassical Economics: Humans are rational actors in an ideal market, in which supply and demand is rationalizing out anything bad.
Is that really the world we live in? Have you met rational humans? Are we living in ideal markets?
Truth is, bad situations of all sorts are springing up and remaining in place long-term. A closer look at each individual issue (as done in this thread) reveals complex factors that need to be adressed. Using a simplistic model from economics to ignore any and all ethics (term used loosely for any attempt to do what's right) is not valid imo.
You seem to be confusing the definition for "moral" with the definition for "ethical".
Despite my A-level in philosophy, I have no idea what the difference between those might be. Every example sentence I just thought of, I can substitute "moral" for "ethical" or vice versa without changing the meaning.
I then googled just in case I might have missed something, but it says "ethical" is "relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these", so again…
But it’s not. You can see here now that everyone is aware of these bad practices by amazon. This means less people apply and even lesser accept the position. This leads to more time and resources taken for hiring and giving higher wages eventually to compete.
You can see that even though amazon mass hires candidates, they still have to shell out more salaries than say Google and Microsoft. It’s easier to fix bad salary+good wlb reputation (by increasing salary) than fixing good salary + bad wlb reputation (idk how they can even do it).
> It's actually not stupid. It’s genius.
Not if the secret's out, one would imagine?
The secret has been out for over a decade. Yet Amazon still get new hires.
It’s pretty well known in tech. I never respond to amazon HR. Been doing that for 5 years now.
They are running out of ppl to hire. Now, to figure out how to short amazon… maybe they last another 5 years… before they just implode.
Plenty of new grads every year
You will eventually run out of people to screw over.
Further, about a quarter of workers are annotated in Ivy as "Do Not Promote." They don't know who they are. I don't know why they get put on that list.
> according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President.
That isn't a nobody. He was a major HR guy for Amazon for over 15 years. I knew his name in passing when I was working there, and met his daughter who was a rising star at the warehouse in Phoenix.
Wild to hear him speaking out against Amazon when he honestly built a lot of the system.
This sounds so sad.
The levels stuff is so silly. Like Jeff Bezos (or Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Page, or Steve Jobs, or…) give a shit.
lol this is hilarious. We are talking about the highest paid people in the world here.. "sweat shop"
Just because it's well paid doesn't mean it's not greuling work.
There is a difference between working hard and getting paid exceptionally well for it verses borderline slave labor.
Comparing one of the most sought out, well paid, safe, in demand jobs in THE WORLD to being in a sweatshop is asinine and extremely arrogant.
Same shit happening at UK based finance firms. More than half of the employees are visa slaves.
Funny, I find that PIP makes me work my ass off and not the other way around.
I stopped using Amazon for shopping about two years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff.
I never thought to work at Amazon, because I heard from multiple colleagues, former employees, that Amazon is profoundly metric based; then the stories such as this, about burning out staff, and about the fake PIP process, began surfacing.
Not shopping at Amazon because the company is big enough to get media attention is a bit silly.
Do you know what the working conditions are like at any of the million non-Amazon warehouses?
Of course not, there’s no media attention for Bob’s fulfillment in Wichita, Kansas.
Here’s the truth: your friendly neighborhood warehouse down the street likely pays its employees far less, with far worse benefits, less safe facilities, and similar turnover.
It shouldn’t be the job of consumers to police labor practices—we’re really bad at it and only care if the company is big enough to get NYT coverage.
This is the role of government and law. If we really care about conditions for workers, we need to focus our attention there.
The injury rate at walmart warehouses are apparently much lower than amazon so no, amazon alternatives are not worse in regards to worker injuries. Amazon's algorithmic management is just that harmful. Not sure about the small time logistics companies, but if you want to make a claim put up some proof.
One could (without data) come up with some explanation about reporting rates, and while that should be investigated it would be weird to assume something like that without actual proof.
>According to their findings, Amazon workers are twice as likely to be injured on the job as e-commerce workers for Walmart, Amazon's closest retail competitor. The injury rate for Amazon's delivery drivers — who are classified as contractors rather than full company employees — also have an injury rate that is 50% higher than drivers for UPS, the groups found.
>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-injury-rate-highest-amon...
The difference is that Bob's fulfillment isn't a billion dollar company with a CEO skimming billions of the top for himself. Bob probably pays himself a few times what his lowest paid employee makes. Bezos makes more money in a day than his lowest paid worker will earn in a lifetime.
So? Basically Bezos is able to make money while treating his employees better than competition and paying them more than competition... and I should be mad because he could pay them more if he wanted?
The issue is that short sighted people only focus on the here and now. They pay a touch more than their competitors and burn through employees like a gasoline fire through a paper house, sure, but the longer they can sustain this system the more competitors will stumble and fail along the way until they are the only option.
It worked for Walmart, and now Walmart is a trash company with trash products that treats their employees like trash while paying them such a low amount that many of them are on food stamps and government support and then keeping their schedules so screwed up that they can't better themselves out of the horrible situation without herculean efforts.
Amazon is following this pattern and will continue following it until market forces make them stop. And those forces do not exist and probably will not ever exist as long as there is money available for the desperate.
Where do they pay more than the competition for the same physicality of the job, and same injury risk, same pushing workers past what is safe? Show me a single business that has the same STATISTICALLY accurate (not your current 'seat of the pants' assessment) work (that means includes physicality of the job, you know, like resulting in workers peeing in soda bottles because they can't get a bathroom break without it impacting their job) for less wages. As someone who's been on the bottom labour run due to prison, NO ONE, NO ONE wants to go work at Amazon. We all took less pay for BETTER WORK QUALITY. No where did we take less pay for the same job.
I don't have stats, but the parent was arguing that even if you assume what I said is true, he still wouldn't use Amazon because somebody who makes more money should pay more, but their competitor doesn't have to because they're poor.
Right. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and "voting with your wallet" is capitalist bullshit. They love to trot that one out, to make real change impossible.
Likewise, and the extra reason of amazon being filled with low quality products. Now if only i could get people to move away from aws…
Me too and now i have better & cheaper alternatives where i live.
Can you list some?
I try to avoid it where possible, but for international shopping the options are sadly bit limited. It's pretty hard getting Japanese literature (in Japanese) shipped into tiny country in the east Europe. amazon.co.jp works reasonably well.
I've been pretty dismayed that sometimes when I buy products elsewhere the seller often just buys them off amazon and then ships them to me, basically defeating my whole effort.
> "only one out of three new hires in 2021" stay with the company for 90 or more days.
This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000 [1]
It sounds amazing, but it's not original. It says something about where we're at, as a country,
[1] https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-t...
Its the R in 'HR'.
I knew two people who quit after two weeks. One after being called to find out why he wasn’t at work. On a Sunday.
I ended up on a short contract and think I understand why. I also understand why Amazon employees are notorious for taking up the entire sidewalk like nobody else is there. Trauma.
I recently did a contract with a company in the logistics (warehouse/delivery) business for a product you've heard of. Their turnover rate is over 100% every year. The industry is crazy.
Warehouse work is rough with tight deadlines and rough hours (night shifts are the norm, since deliveries happen in businesses hours)
>This is truly amazing.
Amazing in a bad way... but I believe it.
The person who told me "autistic people can't work for RAND" was hired by Amazon. I'd blacklisted them by that point -- I don't like when folks treat a good faith interview like a free consulting session.
The company culture reminds me of some kind of suicide cult - treating a job interview like a free consulting session might work if you're looking for warehouse workers with teachable and replaceable skills, but when you apply that goldfish galaxy brain mentality to interacting with folks who have a buck twenty five plus IQ and more esoteric knowledge, it is unsurprising that mistakes will happen, those mistakes will be costly... and that those mistakes may increase in frequency.
>I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
I don't know off the top of my head, they sell a lot of servers.
(I was thinking the other day about how in my attempts to avoid Google I often involuntarily use their stuff -- it's why my old VPN was hosted on Digital Ocean, because I have no warm feelings for either.)
> Amazing in a bad way...
The word you folks are looking for is “appalling”.
That is an eye–watering figure.
I'm so glad I screwed a ski trip out of Amazon. Took me 3 hours of my life to pass the coding test, then the remote live coding interview. Then they paid the flight and hotel to meet and grill me in person. I asked for an extra hotel night "to look for houses". That day, I actually took a bus to $BIG_MOUNTAIN nearby and had the some of the best snowboard of my life. The interviews were shit, clearly designed not to know if I knew software but rather if was compliant and thick skinned enough to survive and perform in their shit culture. Fuck you Amazon. Thank you Amazon.
I'm always amazed how little people know about how companies operate. Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. People are shocked that they are profit seeking, that they do barely legal but legal things, that they don't actively knowingly pay their workers more than they have to etc.
Yeah. My brother worked at a Husqvarna warehouse for a few months. It was the most depressed I’ve ever seen him.
I’ve chatted with my dad about Amazon working conditions, and he retorted with tales of his own days in un-conditioned factories and warehouses in Oklahoma in the 1980s.
There are a lot of crappy jobs out there. Those of us who have found enjoyment and balance are fortunate.
> The rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses in the United States is more than twice as high as those at other, non-Amazon warehouses, according to a new study that examines injury data supplied to the federal agency that oversees workplace safety.
> Amazon employed 33% of all US warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for 49% of all injuries in the industry, according to a report published Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of four labor unions.
(Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study...)
No, they are not "the same", they are worse. They are at the absolute fucking forefront of treating their workers badly. You don't hear about postal workers having to piss in bottles and shit in plastic bags to make their deliveries. You don't hear about warehouse workers at other companies having their bathroom breaks timed, probably because damn near no other company's leadership is sociopathic enough to build an automated system to time fucking bathroom breaks.
> Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news.
Yes, and that's because of its scale and size.
If you can fire people faster than they can quit, it doesn't count as attrition. Retention metrics are UP! Promotion is on deck!
I absolutely wouldnt mind waiting an extra day or two for my package if it means better working conditions for warehouse and software workers at amazon. I wouldnt mind if bezos earned a little less either. For now tho i stopped using it all together.
Already happening without better conditions. Amazon prime delivery is so unreliable now. I live 1/2 mile from the distribution center. And 1 out of 3 packages are always late. Sometimes a week late.
Quality and reliability are declining rapidly.
I think you hold the minority opinion amongst Amazon customers.
TBH I think perhaps the (opt-in) suffering endured by the Amazon staff (both blue and white collar) is outweighed by the massive benefits to an entire society enabled by same-day shipping of approximately everything. It's an extremely powerful and valuable service, that serves as a force multiplier for every personal and business project that has it available.
Facebook can and should be destroyed. I think if you were to destroy Amazon, the world would be a worse place.
Anyone has a link to the actual leaked documents?
How is the US - as a society - okay with companies like Amazon abusing their employees, deny them union representation while paying them a starvation wage?
These companies abuse the total breakdown of the US's social security network; the US made it so bad that people are actually forced to work in such conditions. Together with the almost total dismantling of the unions in the US, this leaves low skilled workers no way to fight back.
It's not as bad in jobs were you need to have even a little training and need to invest in your workers. But in Amazon's case the brutality of this system is laid bare.
It’s the work culture. In the uk it’s more or less known that when a us company acquires a local company it will go downhill in terms of working conditions.
It's not just Amazon that does this.
And there are only two ways to hurt them back for it.
One is people refusing to work there, which is obviously easier to do for engineers than for warehouse workers.
The second is refusing to make business with them. Just don't order your stuff from there, don't subscribe to Prime and so on, but I guess this is just too much to ask for the average guy whose whole personality revolves around the shows they are currently watching.
There are a few more than two...
The third is organizing a union and striking until demands are met. The fourth is regulating them with laws. The fifth is borrowing enough money to gain enough stock to force some allies onto board seats and implementing change from the top down.
I'm sure there are more.
Oh, doesn't that go against the Amazon leadership principle of... frugality?
The PIPs will continue until profitability improves